Churches and Religion in the Second World War

Abstract

Jan Bank with Lieve Gevers, translated by Brian Doyle, Churches and Religion in the Second World War, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Pages: xv+603 (paperback). ISBN: 978-1-84520-822-6.

This book is extraordinarily interesting as well as disturbing. Innumerable are the publications on military and political aspects of World War II, plentiful those on religious aspects. The originality of this publication is that religious aspects are covered for all the main Christian churches in all the European countries involved in the war: this restriction to Europe might have been made clearer in the book’s title. “Religion” in the title allows Judaism to be covered extensively but other religions besides Christianity are treated only occasionally — for example, Muslims in Bosnia and Croatia (pp. 203-6). The research and organization involved is outlined in the Acknowledgements (pp. viii-ix): a seminar group meeting for over a decade, the cooperation of staff in many archives and libraries, most notably those in the Netherlands and Rome, the financial generosity of benefactors. Altogether this is a collective work resulting from enormous labours, with Jan Bank the principal editor pre-eminent.