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A groundbreaking history that illuminates Catholic sisters at the center of the Catholic Church’s encounter with Nazism.
Faith under Fascism: Catholic Sisters in Nazi Germany reveals the vital role religious women played in confronting, navigating, and ultimately outlasting the Third Reich. Focusing on the School Sisters of Notre Dame, Martina Cucchiara restores nearly 92,000 Catholic sisters—long overshadowed by priests—to the history of Catholicism under Nazism.
As teachers, the sisters encountered the Nazi regime daily in classrooms that became contested sites where Catholic faith, Nazi ideology, and the futures of Catholic and Jewish children intersected. Far from passive victims, the sisters engaged Nazi ideas selectively, creating temporary sanctuaries for Jewish students while also easing Catholic girls’ participation in the Nazi state. Their experiences complicate simple narratives of resistance and collaboration, revealing a history marked by endurance, adaptation, and moral tension.
By tracing the regime’s sustained campaign within and against Catholic schools and religious communities, Cucchiara also intervenes in debates about Nazi intentions toward the churches. Drawing on rich archival sources and the sisters’ lived experience, Faith under Fascism demonstrates that the regime sought not coexistence but the gradual destruction of religious life. Highlighting the sisters’ tenacious perseverance and the ways their everyday actions frustrated the regime’s efforts to suppress Catholic institutions, the book reshapes our understanding of Catholicism and German society under Nazism.
"Underpinned by exemplary archival research, and guided by an original focus on female religious orders, Faith under Fascism represents a splendid addition to the historiography of Catholicism in Nazi Germany. This is an important and beautifully written work, which deserves a wide readership." —Thomas Brodie, author of German Catholicism at War, 1939–1945
Martina Cucchiara is a professor of history at Bluffton University. She is the author and co-editor of a number of publications on the topic of women, religion, and modern Germany, including The Evil That Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen and Women, Religion, and Emotions in Modern Germany and Beyond.
Acknowledgements
A Note on Names
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Athletes of God: The School Sisters in the Long Nineteenth Century
2. Between Accommodation and Conviction: Teaching in Nazi Germany
3. Under Siege: The Battle for Catholic Schools
4. Escalation: The Foreign Currency Trials Against the Catholic Church
5. Under Orders: The School Sisters at Work and at War
6. Sisters in Arms: The Last Years of the War and Collapse
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index