Content area
Full text
The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938–1945. By Guillaume Zeller. Translated by Michael J. Miller. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2017. 274 pp. $16.95 paper.
Michael Miller's fine translation of Guillaume Zeller's 2015 work, La Baraque des prȇtres: Dachau, 1938–1945 (Tallandier), is the first study of Catholic clergy interned in Dachau concentration camp under National Socialism to appear in English. Zeller, a journalist and, for a brief time, editor-in-chief of i-Télé, a French national news network, offers an accessible but, at times, hagiographical account of the sufferings endured by the imprisoned priests. According to Zeller, “Never in the course of history, even in the worst hours of the French Reign of Terror or Communist persecution, have so many priests, monks, and seminarians been murdered in such a small area” (13). For Zeller, the Catholic Church was the entity under persecution by the Nazis. In his contextualizing, initial chapters, Zeller spends little to no ink to deliberate upon the church's initial appeasement of National Socialism or its enfeebled response to the persecution of Jews and other undesirables. Rather, Zeller's focus is myopic on the persecution of the European Catholic Church and its priests. Still, this limited examination is informative, especially through the book's clear organization into three parts: “A Camp for Priests,” (seven chapters) examining the origins and structure of the Dachau concentration camp; “O Land of Distress,” (six...