The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965

Michael Phayer was a historian, and this Indiana University Press book is his widely cited academic study of the Vatican's record during the Nazi era and the Holocaust, covering the years 1930 to 1965. Its strength is thorough archival research into a genuinely contested historical question, the extent and limits of Vatican and Catholic institutional response to Nazi persecution and genocide. Its limit is one this atlas notes directly, Phayer's study is representative of the more critical strand within a historiography that includes other scholars reaching more sympathetic assessments of the same record, so a claim drawn from Phayer should be read as one substantial position within an active historical debate rather than the field's single settled verdict.