Opening the wartime records of Pius XII to historical inquiry The Pope at War – The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler
by David I. Kertzer (Oxford University Press, €29.00/£25.99)
Dermot Keogh
The decision in 2019 of Pope Francis to open the Vatican archives for World War II and beyond, becoming operational on March 2, 2020, is a significant milestone on the long road of aggiornamento.
Had this decision been taken decades earlier, it would have helped scholars frame their arguments about the pontificate of Pope Pius XII based on 1,300,000 documents (the figure given by a Vatican archivist in 2020) instead of having to rely upon the 11 worthy volumes of documents selected by Fr Pierre Blet and his Jesuit team published between 1970 and 1981(see Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifsà la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, available on line at www.vatican.va/archive/actes/documents/Volume-1.pdf).
Having to rely on that series of documents was anomalous for historians as the diplomatic archives of most countries for World War II and the Cold War had been open under a 30 and 20-year rule.
David Kertzer’s latest book is among the first scholarly studies to appear using those newly-opened Vatican archives. His industry and scholarship are to be congratulated as, no sooner had the Pius XII files opened in 2020 than Covid hit and the Vatican reading room closed as did also international travel. In spite of that setback, his 41 chapters and 90 pages of footnotes, together with maps, photos, biographical cast of characters and very helpful index, totals 621 pages illustrate his industry and skills as a researcher.
Characteristic
Prof. Kertzer’s style in this volume, characteristic of his other monographs, is accessible, and his thesis is clearly framed and cogently argued.
However critical this text is of Pius XII, the author’s argument does not support the thesis in John Cornwell’s book that Pope Pius XII was ‘Hitler’s Pope’. The new evidence reinforces the view that a Germanophile Pius XII was no supporter of Hitler or Nazism.
Thanks to Pope Francis, we are now at a new phase in historical scholarship – a documents-based analysis of the pontificate of Pius XII with access to Vatican archives. Prof. Kertzer has presented a thesis critical of Pius XII and the Roman Curia. The final paragraph in his study reads:
“If Pius XII is to be judged for his action in protecting the institutional interests of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of war, there is a good case to make that his papacy was a success. Vatican City was never violated, and amid the ashes of Italy’s Fascist regime the Church came out of the war with all the privileges it had won under Fascism intact. “However, as a moral leader, Pius XII, must be judged a failure. He had no love for Hitler, but he was intimidated by him, as he was by Italy’s dictator as well. At a time of great uncertainty, Pius XII clung firmly to his determination to do nothing to antagonise either man. In fulfilling this aim, the Pope was remarkably successful.”
Support
In support of his thesis, Prof. Kertzer describes back channel contacts Pope Pius XII had with Hitler through an intermediary, Prince Philipp von Hessen. They began as Berlin was finalising plans for the invasion of Poland. So secret were those contacts that the information was not shared with the German ambassador to the Holy See.
This has been reported as being one of the most dramatic discoveries in this book. Let me give a few examples from the text which the author cites to support the thesis of the silent pope: one, his refusal to condemn Hitler’s invasion of Poland as requested by the country’s bishops; two, his refusal to condemn the spread of the German war of aggression in the West of Europe and the occupation that followed; and three, for his remaining silent despite well-grounded reports on the Holocaust reaching the Holy See.
Prof. Kertzer’s chapter, entitled ‘The Pope’s Jews’, analyses the events in Rome on October 16, 1943. It was the Sabbath and the third day of the holiday of Sukkot, when 100 SS officers marched in a double line on a cold, wet morning into Rome’s old ghetto while another 265 SS, with lists of Jews, fanned out through different parts of the city. Some 1,259 Jews were caught in the dragnet.
Taken to a military college compound “a few hundred metres from the Vatican”, 363 men were separated from their families, leaving 207 children and 689 women alone together. The shock was so great that one woman went into labour and gave birth – making 1,260 Jews captured and detained. Prof. Kertzer argues that Vatican officials confined their interventions to securing the release of not only former Jews who had been baptised, but also those Jews married to Christians: “This was Rome, not Poland or Russia, and the Germans did not want to unduly provoke the Vatican,” writes Prof. Kertzer.
Tiburtina
On October 18, 1,007 Jews were loaded into trucks and taken to Tiburtina train station. Locked in sealed wagons, they journeyed through Italy and arrived in Auschwitz on October 23. There, they were met by the camp’s doctor, Josef Mengele. The young, the old and the sick were sent directly to the gas chambers. Of those who survived the Mengele selection, only 16 were alive when the camp was liberated.
This most compelling and sad chapter – based in part on the newly released archives – will help reframe the scholarly debate on the Holy See’s reaction to the round-up of Roman Jews. In that context, a monograph on the wartime relationship between the Pope and his Cardinal Secretary of State, Luigi Maglione, together with others in that dicastery [Giovanni Battista Montini and Angelo Dell’Acqua] would be most welcome.
Pierre Blet, the Jesuit scholar mentioned above, is described by the author as being “one of the best-informed and most sophisticated defenders of Pius XII”. I find it hard to accept that when he and his team edited the 11 volumes of documents that they wilfully omitted mention of the file on Pius XII’s back channel ‘negotiations’ with Hitler. I would start from the premise that they were never made aware of the relevant file.
(The history of the writing of that project would be a worthy subject in itself of historical analysis. Was there conflict over documents they wanted to publish but were prevented from doing so?)
Explanation
Fr Blet’s explanation in 1997, according to Dr Kertzer, for the Pope’s silence was that he had “given thought to the possibility of public statements” but decided not to speak out in the end. This was based on the Pope’s conclusion that, one, “protests gain nothing, and they can harm those whom one hopes to assist”; and two, any public papal statement would furnish ammunition to Nazi propaganda to claim Pius XII as being an enemy of Germany.
Prof. Kertzer counters by stating that “nearly half of the citizens of the enlarged German Reich were Catholic, and millions of them were avid supporters of Hitler”. Denouncing Hitler up to 1942 would “risk losing their [Catholic] allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church”. He argues further that while that stance made sense in the early part of the war when Hitler was conquering France and threatening to invade Britain, the Nazi invasion of Russia changed the course of the war and, with the US a belligerent since December 1941, the Third Reich’s days were numbered.
Why, then, did Pius XII not speak out about the Holocaust? Why did he not denounce the extermination of the Jews even at the risk of a backlash against Catholics and even the occupation of the Vatican state?
Dr Kertzer puts forward the argument that the Pope “realised that many of the loyal Nazi citizens in the Reich had been raised in the Church and indeed continued to see themselves as Catholics.… [the absence of a denunciation] was motivated as well by his fears that denouncing the Nazis would silence millions of Catholics and risk producing a schism in the Church.”
While many readers of this paper will take issue with Prof. Kertzer’s thesis outlined in this book, few will doubt his industry and commitment to scholarship spread over a lifetime of investigation. I repeatedly asked myself when reading this challenging monograph what would have happened had Pius XI been pope during the war years?
It is a question to which we will never know the answer but I would like nonetheless to hear Prof.
Dr Dermot Keogh is Emeritus Professor of the established Chair of History, University College Cork, and author of Ireland and the Vatican (Cork University Press, 1995)