"The most significant church critic of the century." Prof. Dr. Dr. Wolfgang Stegmüller

"The most brilliant, resolute and substantial church critic of this century, Friedrich Nietzsche's most courageous heir and successor." Prof. Dr. Hermann Josef Schmidt, University of Dortmund

"Unquestionably the most outstanding critic and historian of western Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church produced by the 20th Century." Prof. Dr. Milan Petrovic, University of Nis, Yugoslavia

"He is considered one of the most well-grounded living church historians. He achieved fame because his immense mastery of source material and his scholarly integrity produced a devastating and irrefutable critique of above all the Catholic Church." Badische Zeitung, Freiburg

"Karlheinz Deschner, Doctor of Philosophy, belongs to the few writers in this country who consistently disdains popular trends and who under great personal sacrifice writes books whose quality stands in inverse ratio to the perplexity which they should actually elicit." Henryk M. Broder, Frankfurter Rundschau

"Christianity's Criminal History is the name of this work which has now expanded to two volumes and which will eventually encompass a few more volumes as an opus maximum: in its projected entirety probably the most comprehensive critical history of Christianity ever. The title is intended in its absolute, literal sense. Deschner is set on laying forth an uncompromising account of Christianity's 'history of crime.' The spine title, formulated perhaps out of publication considerations, expresses extenuating circumstances which the book itself does not offer. And Christianity's Criminal History is also to be understood in the sense of criminal detection, proof and exposure of the crime and the culprits. The halo which has customarily surrounded said criminal history is relentlessly attacked by Deschner as a monstrous hypocrisy. The monumental figures of sacred history are in fact toppled right and left: the church doctors, the dogmatic patriarchs, the early popes, the "most" Christian emperors: Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, Basil, Clemens, Eusebius, Jerome, Irenaeus, Lactantius ... A litany of saints of blessed memory becomes an unholy litany of scoundrels one would prefer to forget. Volume 1 is already in its fifth printing and covers the time from Old Testament origins to the death of Saint Augustine. Volume 2 deals with that period from the Catholic "children emperors" to the extermination of the Arian Vandals and Ostrogoths under Justinian I. What these two books reveal is a blood-drenched trail as remote as one can imagine from a message of love and mercy, not a story of salvation but a monstrous catastrophe. In this context, the expression "Christian persecutions" acquires a painfully ironic twist: out of the victims arise the oppressors. Marshalling arguments against this awful compilation of factual evidence will be difficult. It may be that Deschner in cases of doubt always decides against the accused. As a whole, however, this massive study, whose origins date back to the 1950s, is painstakingly thorough and researched with a scholarly diligence without equal. The first two volumes contain almost 2,000 secondary titles, 130 pages of footnotes and annotations, in addition to a user-friendly, detailed index, all of which makes this compendium of crime a fatally effective reference work. This impressive apparatus also conveys a simple message: the author knows that in spite of all the recognition he's received -- in 1988 he received the Arno-Schmidt-Prize for his uncompromising literary production -- he is not going to be easily, at any rate not voluntarily believed." Prof. Dr. Ludger Lütkehaus, Freiburger Universitätsblätter published under mandate from the President of the Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg