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This article reassesses the foreign exchange trials and concurrent propaganda campaign in 1935-36 against the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. Scholars have had difficulties situating the foreign exchange trials within the church struggle because most have viewed the proceedings as legitimate and the impact on the church and the laity as negligible. The argument of an untainted justice system under National Socialism can of course no longer be sustained, and the Nazis routinely used specific crimes to persecute their enemies. The violation of Germany's complex foreign exchange laws became a signature crime favoured by the Security Service in the persecution of Jews. In 1935, the regime attempted to use accusations of foreign exchange violations in pursuit of the church. New evidence from the Vatican Archives reveals that the foreign exchange trials against the church were anything but legitimate proceedings on the margins of the church struggle. Instead, the regime pursued immediate and specific political goals with the trials at a crucial point in the conflict. In particular, the regime attempted to force the church to publicly capitulate on unresolved issues over Catholic lay associations. Hitler routinely interfered in the proceedings and lower-ranking officials soon joined in and used the trials to discipline bishops and religious orders within their respective spheres of influence. The bishops' often ill-considered response to the trials only escalated the crisis within the church, and evidence indicates that the regime delayed settlements for as long as possible to press church leaders to make further concessions to the regime.

had allegedly constrained earlier church historians, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is easy to see that they brought to their own work a new set of biases that may have been just as erroneous as the religious prejudices that constrained an earlier generation of scholars. Yet, regardless of their faults, the critical historical scholars of the early twentieth century revolutionized the study of early Christianity. Their insistence that ancient Christianity was very different from any forms of Christianity that followed it-and that it must be studied on its own terms, without any attempt to make the primary sources of Christianity's earliest centuries match the theological concerns of a later era-continues to guide most historians of early Christianity today. Their insistence that historical study should be separated from theological influences also permanently changed the field of church history. McGiffert, LaPiana, and Case may not have been perfect exemplars of the scholarly objectivity they championed, but their commitment to the modern historical method left a lasting legacy.

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Lambarene to the front of its own self-imagination. He was the saint in the jungle that reminded Europe of its greater heritages despite its recent demons. He was the savior which mediated a sense of deplorable guilt. No one was more famous in Europe nor throughout the world from after the war up until the late 1950s. The world was his stage, and dignitaries and world leaders were in awe of him. This image might have set the stage for Schweitzer's inevitable infamy in many circles in the wake of African decolonialization. The world had moved on from Schweitzer and his backward views of colonialism and the African. He had become Europe's scapegoat. The assessment of Schweitzer and Africa and the legacy of his hospital still merit further investigation. Oermann, for his part, ably situates the well-intended vision of Schweitzer's hospital within the sweeping currents of cultural sea change. And, despite its clumsy incongruities, Oermann judges that the ideal of Schweitzer's ethical vision is more relevant today than it was in Schweitzer's days. Schweitzer, in many ways, was a man who was both locked in his Enlightenment heritage and out of the pressing realities of his moment. He also stood isolated before an inscrutable Africa. Despite the publication of his Nachlaß, he also remains locked out from our current moment. Oermann's biography, however, ably and admirably wrests the greatness and tragedy of Schweitzer in attractive and tidy compass. His influence remains in some academic realms and in the several hospitals and fellowships devoted to his ethical vision. And now, thanks to Oermann, the life behind that vision may make a bit more sense, too.