Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich

Doris L. Bergen's Twisted Cross, The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1996, is a scholarly history of the German Christian movement, the faction within German Protestantism that sought to align church teaching with Nazi racial ideology. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and Bergen's extensive archival research into the movement's own publications and internal church records. Its strength is documenting in detail how a professing Christian movement actually reconciled itself with Nazi ideology, an uncomfortable but well evidenced episode in church history. Its limit is scope: it is a study of this one faction specifically, not a comprehensive history of the German churches' full range of responses to Nazism, including the Confessing Church opposition, which a dedicated source on that resistance addresses separately.