A Question of Judgment: Pius XII & the Jews
By Dr. Joseph L. Lichten
Dr. Joseph L. Lichten, who died in Rome, in
December, 1987, was a long-time proponent of mutual understanding and
cooperation between the Catholic and Jewish communities in both the
United States and Europe. He was born in Poland, received his Doctor of
Law degree from the University of Warsaw, and engaged in international
diplomacy with the Polish government. In 1963, shortly after the initial
production of Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy, and while serving as
director of the International Affairs Department for the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai B'rith, he wrote this monograph. It was published by the
National Catholic Welfare Conference, forerunner of the United States
Catholic Conference. It is reproduced here in its entirety.
In any human organization, the actions and attitudes
of its leader color the image the organization has of itself and
projects to those outside its membership. The stronger the leader, in
his vested authority and in his person, the more firmly will this image
be molded in his form.
This truism is particularly applicable to the Roman
Catholic Church. Men speak of "good" popes and "bad", and of "good" and
"bad" ages in the history of the Church. The judgments used to define
these nebulous value words vary according to the judge's own culture,
standards, faith or lack of it, and other equally subtle abstractions;
Terence said it succinctly in Phormio (II, 4, 14): Quot
homines, tot sententiae.
Recently an indictment has been brought down on
Pope Pius XII, and by extension on the Catholic Church, of criminal
implication in the
extermination of some six million Jews during
World War II. The principal accuser, in terms of publicity at least,
does not present very convincing credentials, though he states his case
persuasively. More important, it is Vatican practice not to open its
archives on any period in history until several decades have passed.
Therefore, the richest single source of information on Pope Pius XII's
actions during his reign cannot be tapped.
Nonetheless, the question that has been raised has
enormous significance; and it demands examination. One personal comment:
many times, while searching through the appropriate documentation, I was
also searching my soul. In view of my personal tragedy, I have a special
obligation to scrutinize every detail related to the Jewish tragedy of
the last war.
What is the case against Pius XII? In brief, that as
head of one of the most powerful moral forces on earth he committed an
unspeakable sin of omission by not issuing a formal statement condemning
the Nazis' genocidal slaughter of the Jews, and that his silence was
motivated by reasons considered in modern times as base: political
exigency, economic interests, and personal ambition.
What is the case for him? That in relation to the
insane behavior of the Nazis, from overlords to self-styled cogs like
Eichmann, he did everything humanly possible to save lives and
alleviate suffering among the Jews; that a formal statement would have
provoked the Nazis to brutal retaliation, and would substantially have
thwarted further Catholic action on behalf of Jews. To the Sacred
College of Cardinals Pius XII wrote on June 2, 1943: "Every word that We
addressed to the responsible authorities and every one of Our public
declarations had to be seriously weighed and considered in the interest
of the persecuted themselves in order not to make their situation
unwittingly even more difficult and unbearable."1
The defense and the prosecution, to extend the
metaphor, have both stated their positions strongly and publicly, taking
the material for their arguments from as much of the record of Pius
XII's activities as is now known, from knowledge of the Pope's
character, and from personal recollections.
There is considerable documentation in support of
Pope Pius' fear that a formal statement would worsen, not improve,
conditions for the persecuted.
Ernst von Weizsacker, the German ambassador to the Vatican during
World War II, wrote in his memoirs:
Not even institutions of worldwide importance, such
as the International Red Cross or the Roman Catholic Church saw fit to
appeal to
Hitler in a general way on behalf of the Jews or to call openly on
the sympathies of the world. It was precisely because they wanted to
help the Jews that these organizations refrained from making any
general and public appeals; for they were afraid that they would
injure rather than help the Jews thereby.2
Pius XII's silence, let us remember, extended to
persecutions of Catholics as well. Despite his intervention, 3000
Catholic priests were murdered by the Nazis in Germany, Austria, Poland,
France, and other countries; Catholic schools were shut down, Catholic
publications were forced out of print or strictly censored, and Catholic
churches closed. The possibility of a public statement from the Vatican
moved German Foreign Secretary Joachim von Ribbentrop to wire von
Weizsacker on January 24, 1943:
Should the Vatican either politically or
propagandistically oppose Germany, it should be made unmistakably
clear that worsening of relations between Germany and the Vatican
would not at all have an adverse effect on Germany alone. On the
contrary, the German government would have sufficient effective
propaganda material as well as retaliatory measures at its disposal to
counteract each attempted move by the Vatican.3
Pius learned precisely how firm this German threat
was from the protest of the Dutch bishops against seizures of the Jews,
for immediately following that protest and, as later confirmed by an
SS officer, in direct answer to it, the Nazis stepped up their
anti-Jewish activities in the
Netherlands; a week after the pastoral letter was read at all the
masses in Holland, the SS rounded up every priest and monk and nun who
had any Jewish blood whatever, and deported them to concentration camps.4
Pius and his bishops and nuncios in Nazi-occupied or -dominated
countries knew that, like a sane man faced with a gun-carrier
threatening to shoot, Hitler and his cohorts could not be considered
civilized human beings. As Archbishop Andrea Cassulo, papal nuncio in
Romania, said in June, 1942, I must proceed cautiously because [my
actions] could ruin, instead of being useful to, so many wretched
persons whom I must often listen to and help.5
The Pope's decision to refrain from a formal
condemnation of the
Nazi's treatment of Jews was approved by many Jews. One
Berlin couple, Mr. and Mrs. Wolfsson, came to
Rome
after having been in prison and concentration camps. They took shelter
in a convent of German nuns while Pius himself, whom they had seen
during an audience, arranged for them to escape to
Spain. Recalling those terrible days, the Wolfssons recently
declared:
None of us wanted the Pope to take an open stand.
We were all fugitives, and fugitives do not wish to be pointed at. The
Gestapo would have become more excited and would have intensified
its inquisitions. If the Pope had protested, Rome would have become
the center of attention. It was better that the Pope said nothing. We
all shared this opinion at the time, and this is still our conviction
today.6
In a letter in the London Times of May 15, 1963, Sir
Alec Randall, a former British representative at the Vatican, comments:
Others besides Pius XII had to face a similar
agonizing dilemma. The Polish cardinal, Prince Sapieha, begged Pius
XII not to make public protests, as they only increased the
persecution of his people. The International Red Cross refrained from
protest because they feared that their work in German-controlled
countries would be stopped. The British and American Governments were
accused of callous indifference to the fate of the Jews because they
failed to take them out of Nazi clutches before it was too late. To
have done what was asked of them would have prolonged the war.
Pius XII's defenders in print — among others Sir
D'Arcy Osborne, Msgr. Alberto Giovanetti, Father Robert Leiber, and
Harry Greenstein,7 who represent three faiths and four
nationalities — point to two elements of the Pope's personal philosophy
in addition to the pragmatic reason for his decision to refrain from an
explicit condemnation of the Nazis. First he considered it his paramount
duty to be pastor of the Universal Church, and in his eyes this position
required the strictest impartiality. Second, as an experienced diplomat,
he knew full well that the days when a Vatican sanction carried weight
were long since past, as Sir Alec Randall points out:8 we
have already seen just how correct this appraisal was. The era of
renewed spiritual and moral leadership introduced by the pontificate of
John XXIII had not yet dawned.
The undercurrent of all the Pope did was embodied in
his words to Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, later to become Pope John, when
the papal nuncio came from Istanbul to visit Pius XII: above all else
comes the saving of human lives.9
One of the strongest testimonials to Pius' great
feeling for Jews comes from an unpublished interview I had with Dr.
Herman Datyner, a distinguished urologist. In 1940 Dr. Datyner, helped
by his numerous international contacts, escaped from Warsaw into Italy,
where, like all Jews and foreigners, he was arrested. He was sent from
one camp to another and spent a total of four years interned. Orders
were sent to these camps, but each instruction was sabotaged or
thwarted, and it was known among the internees that the intervention on
their behalf had come directly from the Vatican.
In 1945, as a member of the Inter-Allied Conference
for Refugees and a special representative of all Jewish refugee groups
and organizations in Italy, Dr. Datyner asked for and received an
audience with Pius XII in order to thank the Supreme Pontiff for his
help and care during the war years. He memorized a part of Pius'
conversation, and repeats it with emotion today:
Yes, I know, my son, all the sufferings of you
Jews. I am sorry, truly sorry, about the loss of your family. I
suffered a great deal, . . . knowing about Jewish sufferings, and I
tried to do whatever was in my power in order to make your fate
easier. . . I will pray to God that happiness will return to you, to
your people. Tell them this.
The prosecution has rallied behind a young German
playwright named Rolf Hochhuth, whose play, Der Stellvertreter (The
Representative*), first performed in Berlin on February 20, 1963,
and in London September 25, carries a message summed up in the words of
its main protagonist, the young Jesuit Riccardo Fontana: "A Vicar of
Christ who sees these things before his eyes and still remains silent
because of state policies, who delays even one day . . . such a pope . .
. is a criminal?"
To substantiate his accusation, Mr. Hochhuth adds 46
pages of documentation to the printed play,10 and excerpts
quotations from the writings of two well-known contemporary thinkers,
among others: the Catholic Francois Mauriac and the Jew Leon Poliakov.
The documentation which the playwright presents has
impressed a good many people, especially reviewers, most of whom mention
this factual substantiation in their treatment of the play. Hochhuth's
efforts are indeed commendable, though a student of the history of the
period will notice — obviously — the bias created by lacunae (the
playwright is only interested, of course, in supporting his thesis) and
— more subtly — unjustified conclusions. An example is found on page 312
of the English edition of the play, where Hochhuth writes:
But what Donati reported to the Centre de
Documentation Juive Contemporaine (Documents CC XVII-78) about the
official attitude of the diplomats of the Holy See, should be quoted.
In the autumn of 1942, Donati had a note referring to the situation of
the Jews in Southern France delivered to the Pope through the agency
of the Father General of the Capuchins, in which he asked for Papal
assistance. It was not forthcoming.
The Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in
Paris contains abundant and thoroughly validated material on the
relations between Angelo Donati, an Italian Jew to whom (as Hochhuth
points out) many of his co-religionists owe their lives, and the
Capuchin Father Marie-Benoit, as well as on the Vatican's actual
response to pleas from Donati and others; I will summarize that material
later in this article. Hochhuth's conclusion, [Papal assistance] was not
forthcoming, cannot be other than a deliberate distortion.
One of the several quotations which appear in the
front of both the German and the English published versions of The
Representative suffers from similar distortion. To Hochhuth's
credit, when he was called to account on this matter, he promised to
correct the English edition, which he has done. In the German printing,
M. Mauriac is quoted as follows: "We have not yet had the consolation of
hearing the successor to the Galilean Simon Peter condemn, unequivocally
and clearly and not with diplomatic allusions, the crucifixion of these
countless `brothers of the Lord.' ... a crime of such magnitude falls in
no small measure to the responsibility of those witnesses who never
cried out against it whatever the reason for their silence." However,
the missing middle sentence — which Hochhuth reinstates in the English
edition of the play — reads: "No doubt the occupying forces were able to
bring irresistible pressure to bear, no doubt the silence of the Pope
and his cardinals was a most terrible duty; the important thing was to
avoid even worse misfortunes."11 Mauriac, like Poliakov, as
we shall see, was obviously not blind to the incredible dilemma Pope
Pius found himself in, Hochhuth's selective quotation notwithstanding.
Dr. Poliakov's emphasis, in his book The Jews
under the Italian Occupation and elsewhere, has been the same;
granted, Pius XII did extend help and comfort to the Jews the record is
quite clear on this score — but he did not do enough. This "enough"
would have been a firm protest, a formal statement, from the Vatican
against the German "solution of the Jewish problem." Yet Poliakov says
also that during the Hitler terror, the clergy acted untiringly and
unceasingly to give humane help, with the approval and on the prompting
of the Vatican. Furthermore:
This direct aid given the persecuted Jews by the
Pope in his capacity as bishop of Rome was the symbolic expression of
an activity that was extended throughout the whole of Europe,
encouraging and promoting the efforts put forth by the Catholic
churches in the majority of countries. It is certain that secret
instructions were sent out by the Vatican, urging the national
churches to intervene in behalf of the Jews.12
These instructions, Poliakov adds, rendered special
papal instructions or statements unnecessary. It is known that in 1940
Pius XII sent out a secret instruction to the Catholic bishops of Europe
entitled Opere et caritate (By Work and Love). The letter
began with a quotation from Pius XI's encyclical excoriating Nazi
doctrines, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Sorrow), and
ordered that all people suffering from racial discrimination at the
hands of the Nazis be given adequate help. The letter was to be read in
churches with the comment that racism was incompatible with the
teachings of the Catholic faith.
Poliakov's position, then, is essentially negative,
though with noteworthy qualifications:
The humanitarian activities of the Vatican were
necessarily circumscribed with prudence and caution. The immense
responsibilities on the Pope's shoulders and the powerful weapons the
Nazis could use against the Holy See undoubtedly combined to prevent
him from making a formal public protest, though the persecuted keenly
hoped to hear one. It is sad to have to say that during the entire
war, while the laboratories of death worked to capacity, the Pope kept
his silence.13
It is a matter of record, of course, that Pope Pius
XII did not launch a verbal attack directly against the Third Reich; the
statements he did make during World War II, with rare exceptions, were
general expressions of sorrow and sympathy for all victims of oppression
of any kind, and did not name names. As Von Weizsacker wrote in a report
to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Berlin on October 28, 1943:
Regardless of the advice of many, the Pope has not
yet let himself be persuaded to make an official condemnation of the
deportation of the Roman Jews. Despite the fact that he must expect
his attitude to be criticized by our enemies and attacked by the
Protestants in Anglo-Saxon countries, who will use it in their
anti-Catholic propaganda, he has thus far achieved the impossible in
these delicate circumstances in order not to put his relations with
the German government and with its representatives at Rome to the
test. Since it is currently thought that the Germans will take no
further steps against the Jews in Rome, the question of our relations
with the Vatican may be considered closed.
In any case, it appears that such is the viewpoint of
the Vatican. L'Osservatore Romano of October 25-26, however,
published an official statement on the Pope's charitable activities. The
statement, which was couched in the usual abstract and vague Vatican
terminology, said that the Pope expressed his paternal solicitude for
all men without regard to race, nationality, or religion. The many
activities of the Pope would be increased because so many were suffering
so much misfortune.
One could not raise any objection to this statement
because few will recognize a direct reference to the Jewish problem in
it.14
According to the March, 1961, article "Pius XII and
the Jews, 1943-1944" in the Jesuit publication Civilta Cattolica,
by Father Robert Leiber, Pius XII's personal assistant from 1924 to
1959, the Pope directly denounced an illegal procedure only once during
the entire war; the German invasion of Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg
on May 10, 1940, prompted the now famous telegrams to the heads of the
three invaded states. These messages aside, Pius XII followed the policy
of Benedict XV during World War I, and protested in general terms
against injustices and violence wherever these might be found.
But is it correct to say that Pius XII was otherwise
silent on the subject of Nazi atrocities? Had he utterly ignored the
plight of the Jews, the term would be appropriate; had he spoken
directly in their cause, he might today be called foolhardy — if we are
to carry even his accusers' admissions to their logical conclusion. In
effect, he chose a third course, one dictated by his long experience as
a Vatican statesman and his great desire to save lives.
Many persons have already taken up the dispute, and
some of their comments will be quoted in the present article. Rolf
Hochhuth was a child during the period in question; further, his primary
motivation was to write a good play and not an accurate record, and his
historic perspective – like that of us all — is insufficient for a just
critique of Pius' actions. If he were the only accuser, we could dismiss
the issue; too much noise has been made about Hochhuth's drama qua drama
as it is. But the controversy, coming on the heels of Dr. Hannah
Arendt's question of why the Jews did not defend themselves better, has
drawn more thoughtful minds into its wake. Some Jewish leaders who had
none but words of praise for Pius' efforts on behalf of the Jews now
point fingers of blame at him, effectively reversing their position of
fifteen and twenty years' standing.
I think it would be well to examine more closely the
record, as far as we now know it, of what Pope Pius actually said and
did, how his words and actions were received by both Catholics and
non-Catholics, and — perhaps most important — what motives are
attributed to him; for in our Western culture, motivation is an
essential factor in any discussion of a man's probity.
That the Pope was deeply antagonistic to the racism
the National-Socialists advocated is evident from his work prior to his
election to the papacy. The famous Mit Brennender Sorge shows the
hand of Pacelli, then Vatican Secretary of State; more directly, as
papal legate, Pacelli spoke these scathing words to 250,000 pilgrims at
Lourdes on April 28, 1935:
They [The Nazis] are in reality only miserable
plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make
any difference whether they flock to the banners of the social
revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world
and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a
race and blood cult.15
Pacelli had obviously established his position
clearly, for the Fascist governments of both
Italy and
Germany spoke out vigorously against the possibility of his election
to succeed Pius XI in March of 1939, though the cardinal secretary of
state had served as papal nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929 and had
been instrumental in the signing of a concordat between Germany and the
Vatican. The day after his election, the Berlin Morgenpost said:
"The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany
because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the
policies of the Vatican under his predecessor."
As I wrote in the Anti-Defamation League Bulletin
for October, 1958, the new Vicar of Christ showed no softening after his
election toward Hitler's brutal policies; Pius the Pope was the same man
as Pacelli the priest.
Von Ribbentrop, granted a formal audience on March 11, 1940, went
into a lengthy harangue on the invincibility of the Third Reich, the
inevitability of a Nazi victory, and the futility of papal alignment
with the enemies of the Fuhrer. Pius XII heard Von Ribbentrop out
politely and impassively. Then he opened an enormous ledger on his desk
and, in his perfect German, began to recite a catalogue of the
persecutions inflicted by the Third Reich in Poland, listing the date,
place, and precise details of each crime. The audience was terminated;
the Pope's position was clearly unshakable.
Summi Pontificatus, the first encyclical of
his pontificate, issued October 20, 1939, had strongly attacked the
doctrines of totalitarianism, racism, and materialism. The encyclical
read in part: "The first of these pernicious errors, today so
widespread, is the disregard for that law of human solidarity and
charity dictated and imposed . . . by the common origin and equality in
their rational nature of all men, regardless of the people to which they
belong.16 In his Christmas Message of 1942 and in similar
terms on June 2, 1943, he deplored the treatment of:
...hundreds of thousands of persons who, through no
fault of their own and by the single fact of their nationality or
race, have been condemned to death or to progressive extinction...."
It is a consolation for Us that, through the moral and spiritual
assistance of Our representatives and through Our financial
assistance, We have been able to comfort a great many of the refugees,
homeless, and emigrants, including non-Aryans.17
That assistance was of inestimable value. It can be
divided roughly into the two categories Pius XII names in the above
broadcast; the work of the Vatican's representatives — the nuncios,
bishops, clergy and religious, and laymen — and the financial assistance
and other material services rendered the persecuted either directly by
the Vatican or through appeals from the Holy See.
On behalf of the Jews of Slovakia, Pius XII
intervened directly and — contrary to the allegations of his accusers —
in unambiguous terms. A government ordinance, called simply the Jewish
Code, was passed on September 9, 1941, parroting the anti-Semitic
regulations of the Third Reich. A lengthy note was prepared by the
Vatican Secretariat of State and transmitted on November 12 to the
Slovak minister to the Holy See, Karl Sidor. It read in part:
...With the deepest sorrow the Holy See has learned
that also in Slovakia, a country whose population almost totally
honors the best Catholic tradition, a "Government Ordinance" was
issued on September 9 establishing special "racial legislation" and
containing various regulations in open contrast with Catholic
principles.
"In fact the Church, universal by the will of her
divine Founder, welcomes to her bosom people of all races, and views
all mankind with a maternal solicitude for the purpose of creating and
developing among all men feelings of brotherhood and love, in
accordance with the explicit and categoric teaching of the Gospel ....18
Five weeks earlier, the Slovak bishops had sent a
protest note to Jozef Tiso, the President of the puppet state:
...It does not escape the attention of the careful
examiner that the philosophical conception on the basis of which the
present ordinance has been drawn up is the racist ideology.... We do
not intend to enumerate here all the dangerous errors that this
doctrine conceals in itself. . . . We wish only to recall that the
materialistic theory of racism is in direct contradiction with the
teaching of the Catholic Church on the common origin of all men from a
single Creator and Father, on the substantial equality of men before
God stressed especially by the Apostle of the peoples, on the Common
supernatural destiny of men in consequence of the universal redemption
work of Christ. . . . The so-called Jewish Code violates natural law
and the freedom of individual conscience.19
This was but one of many protests directly from Pius
XII or from the bishops against the persecution and deportation of
Slovakian Jews. These provoked Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka to write on
Mar 3, 1943:
"It is incomprehensible to the government that
ecclesiastic circles and especially the Catholic clergy should today
adduce so many protests against the elimination of the Jews, who in
the past were most responsible for the misery of the Slovak people . .
. . The Slovak clergy save for a few honorable exceptions has rarely
showed such zeal for the interests of its own people as it does now
for the interests of the Jews, and in many cases even for those who
are not baptized . . .20
Despite this and other verbal rejections of the
protests from the Catholic hierarchy, Pius' pleas were finally heeded;
although 70,000 Jews had been deported from the new pro-Nazi republic,
the papal nuncio in Bratislava succeeded in obtaining a promise from the
puppet government that further deportation plans would largely be
discarded. But when the Germans occupied Slovakia in early fall of 1944,
the semblance of independence which that country had maintained for five
years vanished, and with it the hard-won reprieves for the remaining
Jewish population. Under the urging of the Vatican, the Slovak
government protested the Nazis' familiar brutality toward the Jews, but
to no avail. All the Pope could now do was continue to express his
concern. A telegram sent in October to Archbishop Roncalli in Istanbul
read that the Holy See, "despite the increasing difficulties, including
those of communications, is still following with great attention the
fate of the Jews in Slovakia and Hungary, and will leave nothing undone
to help them.21
The papal nuncio in Romania, Monsignor Andrea
Cassulo, exercised his considerable diplomatic and spiritual authority
in behalf of the Jews throughout the war; he made his first formal
efforts as early as February 16, 1941. He worked untiringly to win the
government's permission to send Jewish orphans to Palestine, and with
some success. On October 20 he registered an official protest with
Mihail Antonescu, Minister of Foreign Affairs, against the government's
admitted plans to regulate the Jewish question, and came, through his
repeated intercessions, to be known to the Jewish population of Romania
as an ever-willing source of assistance.22
Because of his close contact with Romania's Chief
Rabbi Safran throughout the war, Archbishop Cassulo kept himself and the
Vatican informed about the condition of Romanian Jews, especially those
interned in concentration camps beyond the Dnieper. In 1942 and 1943,
prompted by Pope Pius XII, the nuncio visited numbers of camps, taking
with him considerable sums of money sent by the Pope for distribution
among the prisoners. Following the 1943 visit, the Archbishop presented
a ten-point request to Rado Lecca, the government official in charge of
Jewish affairs, to alleviate the misery in the camps; by June, 1943,
Rabbi Safran was able to report to him that conditions had improved
noticeably as a result.23
The Holy See's interest in the plight of the Romanian
Jews is attested to by Archbishop Cassulo's own official messages and
memoranda as well as the testimony of Rabbi Safran. On November 24,
1942, the apostolic nuncio sent Mihail Antonescu a note which read in
part:
"Ever since the Romanian government has come to
believe itself bound to examine the diverse aspects of the Jewish
question in Romania and to solve it in accordance with the country's
interests, the Holy See has been concerned, above all other
considerations, with . . . the respect that must be assured to every
innocent person who is abandoned and without support . . . .24
The note, written immediately after Archbishop
Cassulo's return from a visit to Rome, came at a particularly dangerous
time for Romania's Jews. The Third Reich was exerting heavy pressure for
mass deportations of Jews eastward, to beyond the Bug River where German
police were in command. In the opinion of many members of the diplomatic
corps in Bucharest, the nuncio's applications were responsible for first
the suspension of the deportation plans and then their postponement
until the following year.25 The Jewish community in Romania
asked Archbishop Cassulo on February 14, 1943, to write their gratitude
to Pius XII for the help of the Vatican and its nunciature.26
A Dr. Frederic, a young German Foreign Office agent,
was sent on a tour through various Nazi-occupied and satellite countries
to feel out their reaction to the Germans. As Frederic wrote in his
confidential report to the German Foreign Office datelined Berlin,
September 19, 1943, his meeting in Lwow with the Ukrainian leaders and
Metropolitan Sheptytsky was far from heartening; the Metropolitan
remained adamant in saying that the killing of Jews was an inadmissible
act, and Frederic comments, In this issue the Metropolitan made the same
statements and even used the same phrasing as the French, Belgian, and
Dutch bishops, as if all of them were receiving the same instructions
from the Vatican.27
The action taken to help the Jews in
Hungary was manifold. In the spring of 1944, the papal nuncio, Msgr.
Angelo Rotta, warned that country on the first day of the deportation of
Jews that the whole world knew what they really signified; on June 25,
1944, he delivered Miklos Horthy a letter which was a strong protest
from the Pope.28 Prior to the onslaught on Hungarian Jews by
the Fascists, Hungary responded to promptings from the Vatican and gave
asylum to Jewish refugees from
Poland and
Slovakia. As the bloodbath swept Hungary, the Vatican notified its
nuncios in Budapest and Bratislava to watch the situation and do all
they could for the welfare of Jewish refugees.29 At about the
same time, the Pope had the following message sent to the World Jewish
Congress, with which he was in communication during the war:
"Whenever reports reached the Holy See that the
situation of the Jews in Hungary was becoming worse, steps were
immediately taken to assist these people and to alleviate their
condition. The Holy See gives assurance that it will continue to act
in behalf of these Jews. Following instructions from the Holy See, the
Apostolic Nunciature in Budapest has repeatedly intervened with the
Hungarian authorities so that violent and unjust measures would not be
taken against the Jews in that country. The bishops of Hungary have
engaged in an intense activity in favor of persecuted Jews. The action
on the part of the Nunciature and the bishops will continue as long as
necessary...The Holy Father...[sent] a personal open telegram to the
Cardinal [Archbishop of Strigonium (Esztergom)], and in this
communication His Holiness again manifested his heartfelt interest in
promoting the welfare of all those exposed to violence and persecution
because of their race or religion or on account of political motives.
The Holy Father gives assurance that he will, in the future as in the
past, do everything in favor of these people in Hungary or in any
other European country.30
The Pope's words, discreet as they are, give little
indication of how intense the clergy's activity was. The nuncio spoke
out sharply, as did the Hungarian bishops, and simultaneously undertook
as widespread rescue measures as possible. Helped by priests and nuns,
he and the bishops sheltered several thousand Jews, distributed false
papers, and provided information, clothing, and food; Laszlo Endre, the
Undersecretary of the Interior in the Nazi government, said testily that
as far as aid to the Jews is concerned, priests and clergy men . . .
unfortunately are in the first rank. Protection and intervention have
never been on such a large scale as today.31
The Catholic bishops of Holland published a pastoral
letter read in all the Catholic churches throughout the country on April
19, 1942, condemning the unmerciful and unjust treatment meted out to
Jews by those in power in our country.32 And in a telegram
dated July 11, 1942, the bishops demanded the suspension of coercive
measures against unchristened as well as christened Jews. But the
deportations continued. On July 26, the bishops joined with
representatives of almost all other religious communities to denounce
the Nazis' lawless measures, but the response, as we have seen, was mass
arrests of Catholics and Jews, among them Dr. Edith Stein, a convert to
Catholicism and a nun, who was sent to Auschwitz.33
In France, as everywhere else that humans were being
victimized by the Nazis, Pius XII's aim was to utilize the Vatican's
spiritual and material resources as completely as possible to help the
oppressed in their misery. His means were deliberately quiet; we know
how strongly he felt that any direct attack by the Vatican on Axis
policies would spell at least interference with and at worst complete
contravention of the Church's activities. Yet his exhortations to
Catholics to cleave to the humane principles of their religion, like his
messages to his bishops to do all they could to help, within the
limitations of local conditions, were quite clear in their implications.
Late in June, 1943, the Vatican radio warned the French people, He who
makes a distinction between Jews and other men is unfaithful to God and
is in conflict with God's commands.34 Catholic bishops and
priests had long since been following these promptings, as two 1942
pastoral letters attest. The first, from Archbishop (later Cardinal)
Jules Gerard Saliege of Toulouse and read on August 23, strongly echoed
the principles stressed over and over by Pius:
"There is a Christian morality . . . that confers
rights and imposes duties. These duties and these rights come from
God. One can violate them. But no mortal has the power to suppress
them. Alas, it has been our destiny to witness the dreadful spectacle
of children, women, and old men being treated like vile beasts; of
families being torn apart and deported to unknown destinations. . . .
In our diocese, frightful things are taking place in Noe and Recebedou
[camps]. . . . The Jews are our brethren. They belong to mankind. No
Christian dares forget that!35
A week later the priests of the diocese of Montauban
read to their congregations a letter from their bishop, Pierre-Marie
Theas:
"On behalf of my outraged Christian conscience, I
raise my voice in protest [against the treatment of Jews], and I
assert that all men, Aryans and non-Aryans, are brothers because they
have been created by the same God; that all men, whatever their race
or religion, have the right to be respected by individuals and states.
The present anti-Semitic pressures flout human dignity and violate the
most sacred rights of the human person and family. . . .36
That Pius' exhortations were effective, and that
local officials charged with "the Jewish question" recognized this,
there is no doubt. Witness a communication to SS Standard-Leader Dr.
Knochen in early summer of 1943 concerning south-eastern France, then
occupied by Italian forces:
"A treasonable propaganda is exploiting this
difference between the conceptions of the German and the Italian
governments in the matter of solving the Jewish question. Its theme is
the following: in the first place, the worthiness of the measures
applied; and in the second place, their Christian and Catholic
conception, as it is inspired by the Vatican.37
How receptive the Vatican was to proposals for
helping the Jews is illustrated by the story of the now legendary Father
Marie-Benoit of Marseilles. Conditions in France had become acutely
dangerous for Jews by late 1942; the Vichy government had promised to
deliver 50,000 Jews of foreign origin to the Germans, and had begun a
ruthless manhunt that summer, especially in the large cities on the
Mediterranean coast. Vichy had been allowing Jews to slip into
Southeastern France, a free zone, for several years, so that the normal
Jewish population of some 15,000 had increased by many ten thousands
when Italian forces entered the area on November 11, 1942. Father
Marie-Benoit, a Capuchin priest, not only persuaded the Italian
inspector-general of police in Nice, Guido Lospinoso, not to comply with
the deportation orders, but proceeded — under the perhaps deliberately
blind eye of the Italian occupation forces — to turn his monastery in
Marseilles into a veritable rescue factory manufacturing passports,
identification cards, certificates of baptism, and employers'
recommendation letters for Jews, and to smuggle numbers of Jews into
Spain and Switzerland. But the priest was not satisfied with these
enterprises, and took advantage of a trip to Rome — he had been summoned
by the Italian government to be censured for his suspected activities —
to present a larger plan to Pius XII on July 16, 1943. In essence, the
plan would include gathering information on the whereabouts of Jews
deported from France eastward, particularly to Upper Silesia, the
location of Auschwitz; obtaining more humane treatment of Jews in French
concentration camps; working for the repatriation of Spanish Jews who
were residing in France; and transferring some 50,000 French Jews to
North Africa where, in view of Allied military successes, they would be
safe. The Pope agreed heartily with Father Marie-Benoit's plan, and
helped him obtain pledges of support from Britain and the United States
as well as from Jewish organization sources in the Allied countries. But
the project was destined to fail; with the surrender of the Badoglio
government to the Allies, German troops swept into the Italian zone of
France, and thousands of Jews fled in panic across the Alps into Italy
and Switzerland.
Determined to salvage what he could of his plan,
Father Marie-Benoit again approached the Vatican, which helped him
prevail upon the Spanish government to authorize its consuls in France
to issue entry permits to all Jews who could prove Spanish nationality.
In case of doubt, the final decision rested in the hands of that
impartial arbiter, Father Marie- Benoit.38
In Belgium, the Catholics of Liege observed February
28, 1943, as a day of prayer for the persecuted Jews throughout Europe.
Said the Catholic newspaper Appel des Cloches, In communing and
praying this Sunday for the persecuted Jewish people who were once
Christ's chosen people, we shall be acting in accordance with the
directives issued by His Eminence the Bishop.39
Pius XII's record in relation to the Jews of Germany,
which the Pope knew well from his 12 years there as papal nuncio, is
very significant, for from Germany has come the defamatory picture of
the wartime pope as a criminal. Numbers of German Christians and Jews
have published vehement denials of Hochhuth's charge. They support their
position by citing Pius' actions to help the Jews through his
representatives in Germany. Msgr. Walter Adolph, Vicar-General of the
diocese of Berlin, has written a particularly cogent account. He says
that Pius XII, in previously unpublished correspondence with Bishop
(later Cardinal) von Preysing of Berlin, encouraged him and his clergy
in their protests against every sort of inhumanity. Typical of Pius'
letters is this one:
"We are grateful to you, dear Brother, for the
clear and open words you have spoken on different occasions to your
faithful community and thus to the public; We think hereby of your
statement on June 28, 1942, among others, about the Christian
conception of right and justice; of your speech on Totensonntag
[Sunday of the Dead] last November about the fundamental human right
to life and love; We think also especially of your Pastoral, issued on
Advent, 1942, and which was also directed to the West German Church
Provinces, on God's sovereign rights of the individual and the rights
of the family.40
We know from Goebbel's diary that the many pastoral
letters issued in Germany during the war aroused the Nazis' contempt and
hatred.
One of the Pope's letters to Bishop von Preysing
treats the central dilemma that faced Pius XII all during the war:
"We leave it to the [local] bishops to weigh the
circumstances in deciding whether or not to exercise restraint, ad
maiora mala vitanda [to avoid greater evil]. This would be
advisable if the danger of retaliatory and coercive measures would be
imminent in cases of public statements by the bishop. Here lies one of
the reasons We Ourselves restrict Our public statements. The
experience We had in 1942 with documents which We released for
distribution to the faithful gives justification, as far as We can
see, for Our attitude.41
The history of Vatican intervention in Nazi cruelties
to the Jews dates back to April, 1933, when Pope Pius XI sent an urgent
request to the then new Hitler government not to let itself be
influenced by anti-Semitic aims. From 1939 onward, the public record
shows countless Vatican intercessions on behalf of Jews, both prompted
by pleas from Jewish and other sources and owing to the personal
initiative of Pius XII. Many German Catholic prelates met their death as
a result of their criticism of the Reich for its treatment of Jews. One,
Msgr. Bernhard Lichtenberg, dean of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin,
called on his congregation to pray for Jews and inmates of concentration
camps after the pograms of November, 1938, and his many similar protests
led to his arrest in October, 1942. We have been comforted to hear . . .
that the Catholics, especially the Catholics in Berlin, have extended
much love to the so-called non-Aryans, and in this connection We want to
say a special word of fatherly appreciation and heartfelt sympathy for
Father Lichtenberg, who is imprisoned.42 Father Lichtenberg
voluntarily applied for transfer to the ghetto in Lodz, but was sent to
Dachau instead; he died on the way to the camp in November, 1943.43
What were Pius XII's actions in Italy, his native
land and the country surrounding his own Vatican City? What was his
response to the evils being committed almost literally under his
windows, since the Jewish ghetto in Rome was so near the Vatican?
Early in the German occupation of Italy, the SS began
their persecution of the Jews. On September 27, 1943, one of the
commanders demanded of the Jewish community in Rome payment of 100
pounds of gold in 36 hours, failing which 300 Jews would be taken
prisoner. The Jewish Community Council worked desperately, but was able
to gather together only 70 pounds of the precious metal. In his memoirs,
the then Chief Rabbi Zolli of Rome writes that he was sent to the
Vatican, where arrangements had already been made to receive him as an
engineer called to survey a construction problem so that the Gestapo on
watch at the Vatican would not bar his entry. He was met by the Vatican
treasurer and secretary of state, who told him that the Holy Father
himself had given orders for the deficit to be filled with gold vessels
taken from the Treasury.44 There is some disagreement today
among some of the principals involved — Zolli, other prominent Jews of
Rome, and Father Robert Leiber — over the amount of gold demanded as
ransom and whether the Community Council actually borrowed the gold; but
there is no question that the Vatican did make the offer.
From the first days of the war, Pope Pius distributed
untold sums to aid Jews all over Europe. The Vatican's own refugee
agencies and the St. Raphael Verein gave financial and other material
help in amounts we cannot begin to guess until the Vatican archives are
opened, but the sums which passed through the hands of the Pallottine
Fathers, who administered the St. Raphael Verein and who kindly gave me
material from their own records, were very large. In addition, Pope Pius
supervised the receipt and disposition of funds sent in his care by
various sympathetic individuals and groups in Europe and the Americas,
notably the Catholic Refugee Committee of the United States. American
Jews put large sums into the hands of the Pope, who distributed them
according to the wishes of the donors; Father Leiber estimates that Pius
received some 2 billion lire from Jews in the United States by the end
of 1945.45
Pius XII was as sensitive to the spiritual needs of
the Jews during World War II as he was to their material wants. None of
the many Vatican services for refugees worked harder at its tasks than
the Uffizio Informazioni Vaticano, to which Pius XII assigned the
difficult job of seeking news for Jews in Italy of relatives who had
been interned or left in other countries. The German Division of the
Office of Information received a total of 102,026 appeals for
information concerning Jews still in Germany between 1941 and 1945, and
was able to furnish 36,877 replies, despite the fact that as the war
wore on it could use few standard channels of investigation because of
the danger that direct inquiry would have involved for the subjects.
When the Nazis forbade ritual slaughter to the Jews,
the Pope sent shohetim into Vatican City to perform the ritual slaughter
and store food for the Jews sheltered there. Many Jewish citizens,
expelled from government, scientific, and teaching positions, were
invited to the Vatican; the president and two professors from the
University of Rome and a famous geographer, all Jews ousted by the
Fascists, received important positions in Vatican City. Bernard
Berenson, who preferred to remain in Italy during the war, was given
asylum in a villa near Florence, which belonged to the Holy See's
minister to the Republic of San Marino, so that he could continue to
work and live unmolested; he and his family stayed there, under the flag
of the Vatican's diplomatic immunity, until British and American troops
arrived in the late summer of 1944.
A Jewish organization, the Delegation for Assistance
to Jewish Emigrants (DELASEM), established in Genoa in September, 1939,
was forced underground when the Germans occupied the city. Its treasure
of 5 million lire was entrusted to Father Giuseppe Repetto, secretary to
the archbishop of Genoa; a fifth of this sum was put in the hands of one
Padre Benedetto, newly appointed president of DELASEM, who took the
money to Rome on April 20, 1944. DELASEM continued its operations from
its new headquarters in Father Benedetto's residence, the International
College of Capuchins in Rome, and through the indefatigable prelate kept
in touch with the International Red Cross, the Pontifical Relief
Commission, the Italian police and other civil authorities, and even the
German occupation forces. The priest set his coreligionists and DELASEM
to work manufacturing false documents and establishing contact with
sympathetic Italian, Swiss, Hungarian, French, and Romanian officials.47
If these details seem familiar, it should come as no surprise; Father
Benedetto was the French Father Marie-Benoit, who had gone to Italy when
his grand plan to help the Jews in southeastern France collapsed under
the German Occupation of the region.
Among the thousands of personal histories of Vatican
assistance, moral and material, is that of Dr. Meier Mendes, who
recently recalled in a Catholic newspaper the efforts made on behalf of
his family in 1939. When Dr. Mendes' father lost his professorship at
the University of Rome as a result of the Fascist anti-Semitic
campaigns, the Vatican offered him an important post at a Catholic
university in South America. Professor Mendes asked in return whether
the Church could help him and his family reach Palestine; the British
government, said Dr. Mendes, had restricted immigration severely. Acting
on instructions from Pius XII, the then Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini,
pro-secretary of state, intervened vigorously with the British
authorities and succeeded in obtaining an immigration certificate for
the Mendes family outside the regular immigration quotas.48
In the realm of material help for refugees, Pius
XII's program under the direction of Father Anton Weber was perhaps the
broadest in scope of any of the Pope's special aid operations.
Father Weber, today procurator-general of the Order
of the Pallotines in Rome, operated a rescue mission during the war for
Nazi victims that was the direct outgrowth of the work Eugenio Cardinal
Pacelli, when Vatican secretary of state, had begun on behalf of Jews in
1936. That year the German bishops had requested Cardinal Pacelli to ask
the Vatican to found an International Emigrant Organization; Pius XI had
agreed, and the Cardinal himself had written to all the American bishops
asking for their support.49
Prior to Italy's entry into the war, masses of Jews
fled to Italy from Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and
other Balkan states. St. Raphael Verein, an organization long active in
helping emigrants leaving Europe for the New World, received
instructions from Pope Pius to give the refugees care, without regard to
their religion or nationality. Father Weber shortly had a well-run
organization working for the protection and help of refugees in every
imaginable direction. He first established contact with Jews scattered
all over Italy to prepare for possible emigration, and then, with the
uninterrupted assistance of the Vatican, tackled the mountain of
practical problems facing his enterprise. Passports, visas, medical
certificates — valid and otherwise — had to be procured; the papal
Ministry of State made innumerable requests of foreign governments for
exit and entry papers, with more than fair success. The government of
Brazil, for instance, supplied 3000 entry visas at first intended for
Jewish converts to Catholicism, but that they were used by practicing
Jews is undisputed. Transit visas, many of them for Portuguese ports,
were difficult to procure from that country because its government
required each emigrant to present a paid steamer ticket first; Father
Weber established a special office in Lisbon, which was supported by
Vatican funds, to handle that process. The operating costs of the rescue
group were enormous; the price for each emigrant — transportation, food,
and shelter — could run upward of $800; and the first source for this
money was the Vatican itself. By 1945 Father Weber's organization had
given assistance to some 25,000 Jews, 4000 of whom were able to travel
to safety overseas.50
I used the phrase valid and otherwise regarding the
official papers Father Weber's organization procured for Jews. The
cloak-and-dagger story of the false documents supplied to Jews by the
Church all over Europe and the Near East is not yet fully known; nor, if
it were, could it be told, for there are countless numbers of Jews whose
peaceful enjoyment of their new citizenship today still depends on the
apparent validity of these papers. The Vatican both initiated and lent
its support to a remarkable variety of secret manufacturing enterprises
— like that of Father Marie-Benoit in France and later in Italy — as
well as exerted pressure on Allied and neutral governments to grant
entry or at least transit to Jews in danger of their lives. Jewish
refugees in France holding Paraguayan passports in 1943 and 1944
approached the Vatican for help, fearing that recognition of their
papers would be withdrawn by that South American government; through the
apostolic delegate in Paraguay, the Pope obtained assurances that the
passports would continue to be valid. The Vatican interceded with the
Germans to allow Jews in Bergen Belsen who held South American passports
to receive packages of food and clothing. Endless other examples could
be cited, but perhaps the most extraordinary part of this particular
rescue mission is what Ira Hirschmann has called Operation Baptism.
Archbishop Cassulo's 1941 protest in Romania was in
answer to a state ruling that a change of religious status by a Jew did
not alter his legal status as a member of that persecuted "race". For
the authorities had become suspicious, as did those in the Balkans,
Hungary, and elsewhere later, of the number of Jewish "converts" to
Catholicism. Until such a ruling was made in a Nazi-controlled country,
however, a Jew who could prove himself a member of the Catholic Church
could usually use the evidence of that membership-a baptismal
certificate as a safe-conduct paper to leave the country. No records
have been published regarding who conceived the idea or how it was
implemented, but the existence of the false baptismal certificates, and
they number in the thousands, is a fact. It is also a fact that the
Vatican was well aware of the plan, and that members of resistance
groups, apostolic nuncios, nuns, representatives of Jewish aid groups
based in the Allied countries, and untold numbers of ordinary citizens
risked their welfare if not their lives to promote the ingenious scheme.
By mid-1944, when only the Jews of Budapest had been temporarily spared
in blood-soaked Hungary, another beloved Catholic figure had thrown his
weight to the wheel, increasing the distribution of the baptismal
certificates many times over; this was Pius XII's close friend and
successor, Archbishop Roncalli, the late Pope John XXIII.51
With the arrival of the Germans in Italy, the Jewish
population was threatened by the same sword that had ruthlessly cut down
so many of their coreligionists in other parts of Europe. The Pope spoke
out strongly in their defense with the first mass arrests of Jews in
1943, and L'Osservatore Romano carried an article protesting the
internment of Jews and the confiscation of their property. The Fascist
press came to call the Vatican paper a mouthpiece of the Jews, echoing
the April, 1941 denunciation of the publication by Roberto Farinacci,
Italy's leading promoter of racist doctrines.52 In keeping
with Pius' conviction that direct attack on Fascist policies would cause
more harm than good, the Vatican paper had curbed its criticism of the
regime after Italy's entry into the war, but it continued to carry
statements like that made in March, 1943, that no social order could be
based on racial privilege and force.53
The emigration operations in Italy necessarily came
to a halt, with the last plane carrying Jewish refugees leaving Rome on
September 8, 1943, and Father Weber's St. Raphael Verein turned to the
dangerous task of assigning the Jews left behind to hiding places. The
Pope sent out the order that religious buildings were to give refuge to
Jews, even at the price of great personal sacrifice on the part of their
occupants; he released monasteries and convents from the cloister rule
forbidding entry into these religious houses to all but a few specified
outsiders, so that they could be used as hiding places. Thousands of
Jews — the figures run from 4000 to 7000 — were hidden, fed, clothed,
and bedded in the 180 known places of refuge in Vatican City, churches
and basilicas, Church administrative buildings, and parish houses.
Unknown numbers of Jews were sheltered in Castel Gandolfo, the site of
the Pope's summer residence, private homes, hospitals, and nursing
institutions; and the Pope took personal responsibility for the care of
the children of Jews deported from Italy.
During the whole period of mass hiding of Jews, the
Germans made only two raids and captured only a handful of people. The
Pope protested strongly, and no further raids occurred; further, though
the sheltered groups included many non-Jewish refugees, there was not a
single case of betrayal.54
One hiding place for Jews was a Jesuit church with a
false ceiling. Each man given refuge in the church was assigned to a
space over a side altar and referred to by the name of the saint which
the altar carried. The priests of the church delighted in chatting about
"Zavier" and "Robert Bellarmine" and "Gonzaga" in the presence of Nazi
officers, who never caught on to the game.55
The mass media have filled us with the sickening
count of the lives sacrificed by the Nazis to their theory of racial
purity; what we do not know is how many lives were saved by the humane
work of such men as Pius XII. Official figures, cold as they are, may
give us an inkling. In 1939 there were some 50,000 Jews in Italy; in
1946, there 46,000, of whom 30,000 were Italians and 16,000 refugees
from Germany, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, France, and other countries.
Approximately 8000 Jews in all were taken by the Gestapo56 —
a horrifying cipher, like all such, but far smaller than those that
follow the names of most Nazi- occupied or -controlled countries in the
roll call of genocidal slaughter.
Ten years after his address to the pilgrims at
Lourdes, Pope Pius returned full circle to the theme of brotherhood
which, contrary to playwright Hochhuth's allegations, inspired his
unflagging help to persecuted Jews. After the liberation of Rome, while
there was apprehension over the fate of Jewish prisoners in the hands of
the Axis powers in northern Italy and Germany, he said: "For centuries
the Jews have been most unjustly treated and despised. It is time they
were treated with justice and humanity. God wills it and the Church
wills it. St. Paul tells us that the Jews are our brothers. Instead of
being treated as strangers, they should be welcomed as friends."57
The tangible evidence of Pius' real character — his
love for all men, and his particular concern for "justice and humanity"
toward Jews — lies in the fact that throughout the war Jewish leaders
from all over the globe approached him for help. One of the foremost of
these was Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog of Jerusalem, to whom the Pope gave
the message that he would do everything in his power to help the
persecuted Jews. Rabbi Herzog traveled to Constantinople to seek
financial and other assistance for his Jewish Aid Fund, and, true to the
Pope's word, found in the apostolic delegate in Istanbul, Archbishop
Angelo Roncalli, an uncommonly dynamic collaborator in the rescue
operations carried out for the Balkan Jews.58 A letter dated
February 28, 1944, which the future John XXIII wrote the Vatican to
transmit a plea from Rabbi Herzog for help for the Jews of Romania,
began: "Chief Rabbi Herzog of Jerusalem . . . came to the Apostolic
Delegation personally in order to thank the Holy Father and the Holy See
officially for the many forms of charity extended to Jews in these last
years . . . ." 59
After the war Rabbi Herzog sent "a special blessing"
to the Pope for "his lifesaving efforts on behalf of the Jews during the
Nazi occupation of Italy," through the intermediary of Harry Greenstein,
now executive director of the Associated Jewish Charities of Baltimore.
Mr. Greenstein said in a recent interview, "I still remember quite
vividly the glow in his eyes. He replied that his only regret was that
he was not able to save many more Jews."60
This is but one of the thousands of voices that have
praised Pope Pius XII's great work on behalf of the Jewish people. Let
me pick a few more at random.
On June 4, 1944, when the Allies entered Rome, the
Jewish News Bulletin of the British 8th Army said: "To the everlasting
credit of the people of Rome, and the Roman Catholic Church, the lot of
the Jews has been made easier by their truly Christian offers of
assistance and shelter. Even now, many still remain in places which
opened their doors to hide them from the fate of deportation to certain
death . . . . The full story of the help given to our people by the
Church cannot be told, for obvious reasons, until after the war." At a
meeting of the National Committee of Liberation, a Jewish speaker said:
"It was in the name of the frankest feeling of brotherhood that the
Church did its utmost to rescue our threatened people from destruction.
The supreme ecclesiastical authorities and all those priests who
suffered for us in imprisonment and in concentration camps have our
eternal gratitude."61 A prominent Jewish citizen of Rome
declared: "Our Catholic brothers have done more for us than we can ever
do to repay." Rabbi Elio Toaff, now Chief Rabbi of Rome, said after the
death of the Pope: "More than anyone else, we have had the opportunity
to appreciate the great kindness, filled with compassion and
magnanimity, that the Pope displayed during the terrible years of
persecution and terror, when it seemed that there was no hope left for
us."62 And Rabbi Zolli wrote: "What the Vatican did will be
indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts . . . . Priests and even
high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism."63
No less grateful were the words uttered on Pius' death by the chief
rabbis of Egypt, London, and France. At the United Nations, Israel's
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mrs. Golda Meir, said:
"We share the grief of the world over the death of
His Holiness Pius XII. During a generation of wars and dissensions, he
affirmed the high ideals of peace and compassion. During the ten years
of Nazi terror, when our people went through the horrors of martyrdom,
the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and to
commiserate with their victims. The life of our time has been enriched
by a voice which expressed the great moral truths above the tumults of
daily conflicts. We grieve over the loss of a great defender of peace.64
Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish
Congress, wrote in his letter of condolence on Pope Pius' death: "With
special gratitude we remember all he has done for the persecuted Jews
during one of the darkest periods in their entire history." In 1945, the
Congress had made a gift of $20,000 to Vatican charities in recognition
of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist persecution;
and an interoffice memorandum, written a year earlier by a WJC official
closely involved in the Congress' pleas to Pius XII for help for the
Jews of Poland, reads: "The Catholic Church in Europe has been
extraordinarily helpful to us in a multitude of ways. From Hinsley in
London to Pacelli in Rome, to say nothing of the anonymous priests in
Holland, France, and elsewhere, they have done very notable things for
us . . . ."65
On April 7, 1944, Rabbi Safran of Bucharest paid
tribute to the Catholic Church's activities on behalf of Romanian Jews
in a letter to the papal nuncio:
Excellency:
In these harsh times our thoughts turn more than
ever with respectful gratitude to what has been accomplished by the
Sovereign Pontiff on behalf of Jews in general and by Your Excellency
on behalf of the Jews of Romania and Transnistria.
In the most difficult hours which we Jews of
Romania have passed through, the generous assistance of the Holy See,
carried out by the intermediary of your high person, was decisive and
salutary. It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the
warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the
supreme Pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of
deported Jews, sufferings which had been pointed out to him by you
after your visit to Transnistria. The Jews of Romania will never
forget these facts of historic importance . . . 66
Some of the voices which eulogized Pius XII five or
twenty years ago remain silent in the face of Rolf Hochhuth's
allegations; a few have agreed with him. Why is this? Were men wrong
then, or are they wrong now? Are some of the Catholics of Europe, who
should be forever grateful to Pope Pius for not putting them to the
agonizing choice between country and church, perhaps relieved to see
blame heaped on another head?
No one who reads the record of Pius XII's actions on
behalf of Jews can subscribe to Hochhuth's accusation. However, though
the evidence moves against the hypothesis that a formal condemnation
from Pius would have curtailed the mass murder of Jews, this is still a
question of judgment. Two men present the complexities of that question
very succinctly., One, Leon Poliakov, wrote the following sentence in
Commentary in November, 1950:
It is painful to have to state that at a time when
gas chambers and crematoria were operating day and night, the high
spiritual authority of the Vatican did not find it necessary to make a
clear and solemn protest that would have echoed through the world; and
yet one cannot say that there may not have been pertinent and valid
reasons for this silence.
The second speaker is the new Holy Father, Pope Paul
VI, whose letter, quoted in part below, reached the offices of The
Tablet in London an hour after his election to the papacy, and was
published in the issue of June 29:
It is not my intention here to examine the question
raised . . . [in] the play Der Stellvertreter: namely, whether it was
Pius XII's duty to condemn in some public and spectacular way the
massacres of the Jews during the last war....
For my part I conceive it my duty to contribute to
the task of clarifying and unifying men's judgment on the historical
reality in question — so distorted in the representational
pseudo-reality of Hochhuth's play . . . .
[Pius XII] wished to enter fully into the history
of his own afflicted time; with a deep sense that he himself was a
part of that history, he wished to participate fully in it, to share
its sufferings in his own heart and soul. Let me cite, in this
connection, the words of a well-qualified witness, Sir D'Arcy Osborne,
the British Minister to the Holy See who, when the Germans occupied
Rome, was obliged to live confined in the Vatican City. Writing to
The Times on May 20th, Sir D'Arcy said: "Pius XII was the most
warmly humane, kindly, generous, sympathetic (and, incidentally,
saintly) character that it has been my privilege to meet in the course
of a long life....
Let some men say what they will, Pius XII's
reputation as a true Vicar of Christ, as one who tried, so far as he
could, fully and courageously to carry out the mission entrusted to
him, will not be affected . . . ."
Notes
Editor's Note: These notes are reproduced
exactly as given in the original 1963 edition. There have been some
changes in Note style and usage in the intervening years, but we did not
feel that these changes warranted a reworking of these notes.
Note 1 Quoted in Sir Alec Randall,
"The Pope, the Jews, and the Nazis" (pamphlet), London, Catholic Truth
Society, 1963,p. 18; see also in Peter White, An Attack on Pope Pius
XII, Jubilee, June, 1963.
Note 2 Quoted in White, op. cit.; see
also Paul Duclos, Le Vatican et la seconde guerre mondial, Paris,
Pedone,1955, pp. 221-223.
Note 3 Quoted by Dr. Robert M. W.
Kempner in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 23, 1963.
Note 4 Angelo Martini, S.J., "Il
Vacario: Unatragedia cristiana?" (reprint) Civilta Cattolica,1963,
II (2710), 324.
Note 5 Angelo Martini, S.J., "La Santa
Sede e gli ebreidella Romania durante la seconda guerra mondiale"
(reprint), Civilta Cattolica, 1951, III (2669), 459.
Note 6 Quoted in Martini, Il
Vicario..., p. 317.
Note 7 Sir D'Arcy Osborne, a
Protestant, was the British Minister to the Vatican during World War II;
Msgr. Giovannettiand Father Leiber, both Catholics, are respectively a
member of the Vatican's Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical
Affairs and the former Secretary to Pope Pius; Harry Greenstein,a Jew,
is the executive director of the Associated Jewish Charities of
Baltimore.
Note 8 Randall, op. cit., p.
19.
Note 9 Quoted in Robert Leiber, S.J.,
"Pio XII e gli ebreidi Roma, 1943-1944" (reprint), Civilta Cattolica,1961,
I (2675), 455.
Note 10 In the German edition; in the
English edition (tr. Robert David Macdonald, London, Methuen, 1963), the
"Historical Sidelights" run 63 pages.
Note 11 The Representative (English
ed.), p. viii. The source for the Mauriac quotation is the preface he
wrote for Poliakov's Breviaire de la haine, Paris, Calmann-Levy,1951.
Note 12 Leon Poliakov, "Le Vatican et
la question juive," Monde juif, December, 1950; quoted in Duclos,
op. cit., pp. 191-192.
Note 13 Poliakov, Breviare de la
haine; quoted in Leiber,op. cit., p. 457.
Note 14 Published in Monde juif,
June, 1949; quoted in Duclos, op. cit., p. 222, and in Leiber,
op. cit., pp.449-450.
Note 15 Quoted in Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, March 4,1963.
Note 16 Quoted in Duclos, op. cit.,
p. 185.
Note 17 Quoted in Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, March 4,1963.
Note 18 Quoted in Fiorello Cavalli,
S.J., "La Santa Sede contro le deportazioni degli ebrei dalla Slovacchia
durante la seconda guerra mondiale" (reprint), Civilta Cattolica,1961,
III (2665), 7; and in Jozef Lettrich, History of Modern Slovakia, New
York, Praeger, 1955, p. 187.
Note 19 Quoted in Cavalli, op. cit.,
p. 8n.
Note 20 Quoted in Ibid., p. 13.
Note 21 Quoted in Ibid., p. 17.
Note 22 Martini, "La Santa Sede...,"
p. 454. The February 16 intervention was on behalf of Jewish converts to
Catholicism; thereafter, the Archbishop worked for all Jews.
Note 23 Deposition of Rabbi Safran
introduced by Gabriel Bach into the record of the Eichmann trial, at
Decision No. 46; and Martini, "La Santa Sede...," p. 460.
Note 24 Quoted in Martini, "La Santa
Sede...," p. 449.
Note 25 Poliakov, "Le Vatican. . .;
quoted in Duclos, op. cit., p. 192.
Note 26 Martini, "La Santa Sede...,"
p. 459.
Note 27 Document No. CXLV, a-60,
Archives of the Centre de Documentation juive, Paris; quoted in Philip
Friedman, Their Brothers' Keepers, New York, Crown, 1957, p. 212.
Note 28 Gerhard Reitlinger, The
Final Solution, New York, Beechhurst Press, 1953, p. 431.
Note 29 World Jewish Congress
memorandum, "The Vatican and the Jews," dated March 24, 1959
(photostat).
Note 30 Ibid.
Note 31 Quoted in Friedman, op. cit.,
p. 87; see also pp.84-86.
Note 32 Quoted in American Jewish
Yearbook, 1942-1943, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, p.
215.
Note 33 Friedman, op. cit., p.
194.
Note 34 Quoted in American Jewish
Yearbook, 1943-1944,Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, p.
292.
Note 35 Quoted in John M.
Oesterreicher, Racisme-- Antisemitisme--Antichristianisme, New
York, Maison Francaise, 1943, pp. 239-240; see New York Times,September
9, 1942.
Note 36 Quoted in American Jewish
Yearbook, 1945-1946, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, p.
117.
Note 37 Quoted in Leon Poliakov and
Jacques Sabile, Jews Under the Italian Occupation, Paris,
Editions du Centre, 1955,p. 96.
Note 38 See, among many other sources,
ibid., pp. 40n, 21-23; Friedman, op cit., pp. 55-58; Duclos,
op.cit., p. 189.
Note 39 Quoted in American Jewish
Yearbook, 1943-1944, p.263.
Note 40 Quoted in Father Walter
Adolph, "Hochhuths fanatisches Voruteil," Deutsche Tagespost,
March 12,1963.
Note 41 Quoted in Tablet
(London), March 16, 1963.
Note 42 Quoted in Adolph, op. cit.
Note 43 See, e.g., Friedman. op.
cit., pp. 94-95.The Representative is dedicated to Father
Lichtenberg and Father Maximilian Kolbe, the latter an internee at
Auschwitz.
Note 44 Eugenio Maria Zolli (Israele
Anton Zoller). Before the Dawn: Autobiographical Reflections, New
York, Sheed &Ward, 1954, pp. 159- 161.
Note 45 Leiber, op. cit., p.
452.
Note 46 Ibid., p. 453.
Note 47 See, ibid., p. 452;
Jewish Advocate (Boston), May 4, 1963; Poliakov and Sabille, op.
cit., p.j 40n.
Note 48 Catholic News, July 11,
1963, sec. C.5, p. 2.
Note 49 Rheinische Post,
September 9, 1961.
Note 50 Ibid.; and Boston
Globe, January 27, 1963.
Note 51 On false Catholic papers, see,
e.g., Ira Hirschmann, Caution to the Winds, New York, McKay,
1962. pp. 179-185.
Note 52 American Jewish Yearbook,
1940-1941, Philadelphia,Jewish Publication Society, pp. 384-385;
Osservatore Romano, January 29, 1961.
Note 53 American Jewish Yearbook,
1943-1944, p. 292.
Note 54 The Tidings, June 9,
1961; World Jewish Congress memorandum dated March 24, 1959; Leiber,
op. cit., p. 451; American Jewish Yearbook, 1944-1945,
Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1944, pp. 233-234; Zolli,
op. cit., 187-188.
Note 55 Evening Union Leader,
June 29, 1963.
Note 56 Leiber, op. cit., p.
450.
Note 57 See Joseph L. Lichten, Pope
Pius XII and the Jews (reprint), ADL Bulletin, October, 1958.
Note 58 Tablet (Brooklyn),
March 21, 1963.
Note 59 Quoted in Martini, "La Santa
Sede...," p. 461.
Note 60 Tablet (Brooklyn),
March 21, 1963.
Note 61 See Lichten, op. cit.
Note 62 Quoted in Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, March 4,1963.
Note 63 Quoted in American Jewish
Yearbook, 1944-1945, p.233.
Note 64 Quoted in Civilta Cattolica,
1958, III, 323.
Note 65 World Jewish Congress
memorandum dated March 24, 1959.
Note 66 Quoted in Martini, "La Santa
Sede...," p. 462.
Source: The
Catholic League
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