The Vatican has always defended that Pius XII did everything in his power to save the lives of thousands of Jews. Some researchers and part of the Jewish community, on the other hand, have accused him of looking the other way while Adolf Hitler exterminated six million people. The publication of a book by the American historian David Kertzer and, later, of a part of the secret archives of the Vatican, has reopened the debate on the lights and shadows of the pontiff.
Kertzer – winner of a Pulitzer for the book The Pope and Mussolini, on Pius XI – had the intuition that Pope Francis was going to decree the opening of the secret archives of Pius XII, something that ended up happening in 2020. So much Before that, he began to investigate the archives of other countries involved – Italy, the United States, France and Germany – to be ready when that happened. When the Vatican archives were finally opened, he sent a collaborator to digitize nearly 8,000 pages of documents. The result is A Pope at War, which is already a best seller in the US and should be published in Spain before the end of the year.
The book exhaustively documents Pius XII’s thought and the reasoning he used to reach the conclusion that the best way to protect the Church was to remain silent in the face of Hitler’s crimes. Eugenio Pacelli does not come off well. Kertzer describes him as a pope more concerned about the position of the Catholic Church in Germany – he was nuncio (ambassador) there for 12 years – who did not intervene in the face of the persecution of the Jews because “he had good reason to think that Hitler would win the war and I feared for the future of the Church under Nazi rule,” he explains in a video call with this newspaper.
Pacelli, Hertzer recalls, was the secretary of state of Pius XI, a pope that was uncomfortable for Nazism for having raised his voice against Catholic persecution in Germany. But when Pius XI died and Pacelli was elected Pius XII, in the conclave of 1939, Hitler himself sent him a congratulatory telegram. Pacelli then ordered a series of critical articles in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, to be completed. “If he criticized the Nazis and then Germany lost the war, German Catholics would blame him. They were also the ones who killed Jews. To criticize the war was to criticize the Christians”, maintains the researcher.
Kertzer introduces an interesting figure, Prince Philipp von Hessen, who was the appointed mediator between Hitler and Pope Pacelli. Von Hessen was a descendant of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, but above all a grandson of Emperor Frederick III and a son-in-law of King Victor Emmanuel III. “He was a man very close to Hitler and when he saw that there were signs of rapprochement with the Vatican he used him as a negotiator,” he relates. “His great fear of him was losing the influence of the German Church. For example, in Bavaria the number of young people who wanted to go to Catholic school had dropped a lot”, recalls the also professor of anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University.
Unsurprisingly, Kertzer’s book has not gone down well with the Holy See. L’Osservatore Romano published an entire page to defend that the news presented by Kertzer about this secret negotiation was already known. “It is shameful that they deny it. No one had seen these documents before”, defends the researcher. But also, shortly after the book came out, the Vatican published secret files to show that Pacelli saved thousands of Jews.
These are almost 2,700 requests for help from Jewish families and groups, many of them baptized Catholics, that Pope Francis has ordered to be published on the internet as part of the 170 volumes within the reserved archives of the pontificate of Pius XII. According to the Foreign Minister of the Holy See, Paul Richard Gallagher, the new documents show that “between the corridors of the institution at the service of the pontiff, they worked nonstop to help the Jews in a concrete way.”
The documentary series Ebrei (Jews, in Italian) unites all these requests for help from the pope from 1939 to 1948, available on the Vatican Archive website. Among the letters is one from Werner Barasch, a baptized German university student of Jewish origin, who had been imprisoned in the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp like so many others who escaped Nazism through the Pyrenees. Barasch, in a letter to an Italian acquaintance signed on January 17, 1943, needed Vatican intervention so that the authorities would allow his release and take a boat in Lisbon to join his mother in the United States. He did it and wrote his memoirs of survivor. In a long interview with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, he recounted that he was released from the Miranda camp and was able to reunite with his family in 1945. He studied at Berkeley, MIT and the University of Colorado and worked as a chemist in California.
Gallagher explained that the then Secretary of State assigned the diplomat Angelo Dell’Acqua as the person in charge of managing all these requests from all over Europe to obtain visas, refuge, transfers from one camp to another or family reunifications. Kertzer, who claims to have read hundreds of these cases, expresses his skepticism. “In 90% of the cases they have to do with baptized Jews or similar situations. In general, if a Jew wrote, they couldn’t do anything. There were thousands and thousands of Jews who were baptized in those days hoping to escape murder”, he denounces.
Pius XII was widely criticized for the raid on the Rome ghetto in October 1943, where more than 1,259 people were captured, taken to a military college a stone’s throw from the Vatican, and deported to Auschwitz. Only 16 returned, without Pacelli raising his voice. Kertzer believes that this episode demonstrates the Vatican’s priorities, because the Secretary of State prepared a list of people they considered Catholics because they had been baptized or married in the Church and prevented 250 from being deported.
However, Kertzer does not portray Pius XII as a pro-Nazi or as “Hitler’s pope”, the title of the controversial book by the British John Cornwell. Nor as a staunch defender of the Jewish cause. Rather like a pontiff whose timidity and prudence made him opt for caution to prevent the interests of the Catholic Church from being tainted by war. Over the years, his figure has sparked public debate. The process to beatify him began in the sixties, but has not yet produced results due to the great amount of information that remains to be studied. Pope Francis has taken a big step for transparency with the long-awaited opening of the Vatican Archives. Now it’s the researchers’ turn.
