A revealing account of how German Protestant leaders embraced democratic ideals after WWII, while firmly and consequentially refusing to account for their earlier complicity with Nazism. Germany’s Protestant churches, longtime strongholds of nationalism and militarism, largely backed the Nazi dictatorship that took power in 1933. For many Protestant leaders, pastors, and activists, national and religious revival were one and the same. Even those who opposed the regime tended toward antidemocratic attitudes. By the 1950s, however, Church leaders in West Germany had repositioned themselves as prominent advocates for constitutional democracy and human rights. Brandon Bloch reveals how this remarkable ideological shift came to pass, following the cohort of theologians, pastors, and lay intellectuals who spearheaded the postwar transformation of their church. Born around the turn of the twentieth century, these individuals came of age amid the turbulence of the Weimar Republic and were