The question of whether Pope Pius XII knew of the Holocaust while it was taking place took an interesting turn when a letter dated the 14th of December, 1942, was unearthed and recently published in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. In the letter, addressed to Pius’s secretary, a German Jesuit writes that up to 6,000 Jews are being gassed daily in Belzec death camp inside pre-war Poland. There is no proof that Pius ever saw this letter, and, indeed, the German priest who wrote it asked that it be kept confidential as he feared for his life and the lives of many others. Needless to say, the letter has become the latest smoking gun in a decades-old attempt to besmirch Pius’s reputation, presenting him as an antisemite who refused to speak out against Nazi atrocities. As someone who has steadfastly defended Israel and the Jewish people throughout my career, I would be the first person to condemn Pius XII if such an accusation were true. However, as someone who has also regularly written in defence of the wartime pope, I can say with some certainty that those accusations are not only false but a calumny against a good and saintly man.
Indeed, even if Pius did know something of what was going on, his actions in response should surely speak louder than his words. And those actions were not only morally valiant but won him the acclaim of many in the global Jewish community. For example, Rabbi Israel Zolli was Chief Rabbi of Rome during the Nazi occupation of the ‘Eternal City’ from 1943-44. In 1943, Zolli and his family witnessed the mass deportation of his fellow Jews to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. He, however, was secreted to the Vatican and given sanctuary by Pope Pius XII. Rabbi Zolli was acutely aware of the Catholic Church’s role in protecting those Jews who had managed to evade deportation or death. He knew that Pope Pius had ordered monasteries and convents to be used as sanctuaries, that he had given his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo to be used as a refuge, and that within the Vatican itself there were dining halls and rest rooms for the homeless and refugees, amongst them countless Jews.
In 1944, Rabbi Zolli gave an interview to The American Hebrew magazine in which he stated: “The Vatican has always helped the Jews and the Jews are very grateful for the charitable work of the Vatican, all done without distinction of race.” Moreover, in his book Antisemitismo, Zolli declared: “World Jewry owes a great debt of gratitude to Pius XII for his repeated and pressing appeals for justice on behalf of the Jews and, when these did not prevail, for his strong protests against evil laws and procedures.” Following an audience with Pius in July 1944, and after having publicly thanked the Pope for all he did to save Rome’s Jews during the war, Zolli changed his name to “Eugenio” in honour of Pius, whose birth name was Eugenio Pacelli. A year later he and his family were baptised into the Christian faith.
Like Albert Einstein who, in 1944, wrote in Time magazine: “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth,” Rabbi Zolli understood that, as he put it, “no hero in all of history was more militant, more fought against, none more heroic that Pius XII in pursuing the work of true charity!” However, he also perceived that the Pope’s reputation as someone who displayed “great compassionate goodness and magnanimity … during the unhappy years of the persecution and terror,” would not survive. Prophetically, he confided in his daughter that Pius’s heroic reputation among the Jewish people would one day be dramatically tarnished. “You will see,” he exclaimed, “they will blame Pope Pius XII for the world’s silence in the face of the Nazis’ crimes!”
How Rabbi Zolli could have anticipated this at a time when Pius XII was regarded as a hero by the world’s leading Jewish figures, is beyond historical analysis. That his prophesy was proven correct is, however, one of great curiosities of modern history, especially when, in 1967, a book by former Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide, entitled Three Popes and the Jews, concluded that Pius XII “was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.”
The first move towards the deconstruction of Pius’s reputation was the emergence of a seven-hour long play in 1963, entitled The Deputy: A Christian tragedy. Written by Rolf Hochhuth, a former member of the Hitler Youth, it suggested that Pius—who reigned as pope from 1939-1958—was obsessed with Vatican wealth at the expense of concern for Europe’s persecuted Jews. While it would be easy to discount Hochhuth’s play on the basis that it was a purely fictional portrait of the wartime pope, the subsequent attacks on Pius for his putative ‘silence’ on the Holocaust are less easy to dismiss.
The most prominent of these is undoubtedly the 1999 volume Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by British writer John Cornwell. Cornwell’s principal thesis is that when, as Papal Nuncio to Germany in 1933, the then Cardinal Pacelli signed a concordat with Hitler to guarantee the independence of the Catholic Church under the Third Reich, he did so at the expense of all moral conscience. In exchange for signing the concordat, Hitler insisted that the Church withdraw completely from politics. This, argues Cornwall, was a disaster because it “thwarted potential Catholic protest in defence of Jews, whether they were converts to Christianity or not, as a matter of ‘outside’ interference. The potential in the Reich Concordat for sanctioning the destruction of the Jews was acknowledged by Hitler himself in his cabinet meeting on July 14, 1933.”
Cornwell goes much further than most in his assessment of Pius XII’s alleged silence during the Holocaust, by claiming that he was, in fact, personally antisemitic—something that was obvious, Cornwell claims, when Pius was papal nuncio in Germany from 1920-30, and in the years prior to his becoming pope in 1939. He writes:
While publicly repudiating racist theories through the mid- to late-1930s, Pacelli failed to sanction protest by the German Catholic episcopate against anti-Semitism. Nor did he attempt to intervene in the process by which Catholic clergy collaborated in racial certification to identify Jews, providing the essential information that aided Nazi persecutions.
In 1946, Pius told the Supreme Council of Arab People of Palestine: “It is superfluous for me to tell you that we disapprove of all recourse to force and violence, from whosoever it comes, just as we condemned on various occasions in the past the persecutions that a fanatical antisemitism inflicted on the Hebrew people.” This, according to Cornwell, was simply a “retrospective attempt to portray himself as an outspoken defender of the Jewish people,” thereby seeking to mitigate his “complicity in the Final Solution through a failure to register appropriate condemnation.” If anything, Cornwell concludes, this shows Pius as “not only an ideal Pope for the Nazis’ Final Solution, but a hypocrite.”
This damning verdict is tempered by papal historian Eamon Duffy, who argues that Pius was certainly not antisemitic but “a diplomat,” one who believed that “prophetic denunciations closed doors, [and] narrowed room for manoeuvre.” What Pius opted for instead was, as we have seen, a policy of actually saving Jews from the persecution that a formal denunciation would have otherwise inflamed. As Duffy states: “Vatican funds were poured into rescue measures for Jews, and he [Pius XII] did everything in his power to protect the Jews of Rome, offering to supply fifteen of the fifty kilos of gold demanded as a ransom for the safety of the Roman Jews by the German head of police there in 1943.”
Duffy makes clear, however, that by the end of 1942, Pius gave into “mounting pressure” from the Allied countries to offer a “clear and unequivocal condemnation of the genocide against the Jews.” Duffy continues: “We must, the Pope declared, ‘bring society back under the rule of God,’ for this is something we owe to ‘the hundreds of thousands of innocent people put to death or doomed to slow extinction, sometimes merely because of their race or their descent.’” Benito Mussolini was infuriated by this speech, believing, as Duffy reports, “that the Pope had abandoned any pretence at neutrality.” He and the German ambassador to Italy, Joachim von Ribbentrob, believed that “Pius has unequivocally condemned Nazi action against the Jews.”
Cornwell’s assessment of Pius was met with incredulity by many reputable sources, not least that by American rabbi and historian David Dalin. In 2005, he published The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis, which was based on his highly publicised article from 2001, “Pius XII and the Jews.” Indeed, Cornwell subsequently responded to Dalin’s book, and the general debate which surrounded Hitler’s Pope, by stating: “I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler’s Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by Germany.”
Dalin observes that “nearly everyone” that subscribes to the “Hitler’s pope” thesis, “from the ex-seminarians John Cornwell and Garry Wills to the ex-priest James Carroll—is a lapsed or angry Catholic,” whereas for “Jewish leaders of a previous generation, the campaign against Pius XII would have been a source of shock.” As such, Dalin has said, Jews, “whatever their feelings about the Catholic Church, have a duty to reject any attempt to usurp the Holocaust and use it for partisan purposes in such a debate—particularly when the attempt disparages the testimony of Holocaust survivors and spreads to inappropriate figures the condemnation that belongs to Hitler and the Nazis.”
In my assessment, Dalin correctly argues that “to make Pius XII a target of our moral outrage against the Nazis, and to count Catholicism among the institutions delegitimized by the horror of the Holocaust, reveals a failure of historical understanding.” As the American writer and Catholic nun Margherita Marchione remarks in her exhaustively researched book Consensus & Controversy: Defending Pope Pius XII: “The accusation is not that the Pope did nothing, but that he didn’t do enough. As six million Jews perished at the hands of Hitler, it is not hard to make the case that not enough was done. The question is, did the Pope do as much as he could do? The answer is, ‘Yes, he did!’” For example, Dalin documents that throughout the 1930s, Cardinal Pacelli “was widely lampooned in the Nazi press as Pius XI’s ‘Jew-loving’ cardinal, because of the more than fifty-five protests he sent the Germans as Vatican Secretary of State.”
When Pius received German Ambassador Ribbentrop in an audience in 1940, the ambassador upbraided the Pope for standing with the Allies. Pius responded by listing a litany of German atrocities, thereby sending a message to the world that the papacy stood with the Jewish people in their greatest torment. As the New York Times stated on the 14th of March of that same year: “In the burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop, [the Pope] came to the defence of Jews in Germany and Poland.” Moreover, when, in 1942, Pius protested to the Vichy government in France against “inhuman arrests and deportations of Jews,” Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels authorised the publication of ten million copies of a pamphlet declaring Pius a “pro-Jewish pope.”
One of the most persuasive interventions in support of Pius comes from his long-time housekeeper (1923-1958), Sister Pascalina Lehnert. In her contribution to the depositions for Pius XII’s beatification (Pius was declared “Venerable” by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009), she writes that Pius did not issue a general condemnation of Nazism because:
The German and Austrian bishops dissuaded him from making additional protests that would undoubtedly irritate Hitler. Jews and Christians had suffered in the past because of Vatican pronouncements and they feared retaliation … The accusation that Pius XII was indifferent to the needs of the victims is without foundation. He ordered me to spend his inheritance and personal funds to provide for those who wished to leave Italy and go to Canada, Brazil or elsewhere … Many times the Pope would ask me to deliver a sealed envelope, containing $1,000 or more, to Jewish families.
In January of 2022, Pope Francis ordered that the secret Vatican archives pertaining to the pontificate of Pius XII be opened for public scrutiny. Significantly, chief archivist of the Bundestag, Michael Feldkamp, revealed that the archives contain evidence that Pius personally saved at least 15,000 Jews from Nazi extermination. They also show that “Pope Pacelli’s support for the Jews went so far that the Papal Palatine Guard, a kind of bodyguard for the Pope … was involved in fights with the Waffen-SS, with Wehrmacht soldiers, to hide Jews in the Roman Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.”
Despite all this, the debate continues to swirl around the issue of what Pius knew and why he did not speak out against the Nazis. Rarely, if ever, will you hear those who consistently ask these questions speak favourably about the immense contribution by the Pope to the relief of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Indeed, the type of assessment I have presented here is usually consigned to silence by those most insistent that Pius was an antisemite who cared more about his church than about the monstrous fate of Europe’s Jews. In response, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that the observable obsessive impulse to destroy Pius’ reputation is driven more by ideology than by any objective historical inquiry.
Either way, it is surely the Jewish people themselves who should judge whether Pius did enough to defend them in their hour of greatest peril. Rabbi David Dalin speaks for most when he says: “No other pope had been so widely praised by Jews—and they were not mistaken. Their gratitude, as well as that of an entire generation of Holocaust survivors, testifies that Pius XII was, genuinely and profoundly, a righteous gentile.”
