PIUS DEFENDERS

Three long-out-of-print books by respected scholars address the Pope's actions to save the Jews during World War II. The evidence is incontrovertible.

by Thomas J. Craughwell

Thomas J. Craughwell, a freelance writer, consults for Book of the Month Club and is the author of the forthcoming book, The Wisdom of the Popes.

The research and composition of papal history have been taking it on the chin lately. In an April 8, 1997 article in The New Yorker, James Carroll accepts as a given that everyone knows Pope Pius XII did and said nothing to rescue the Jews during World War II. In Richard P. McBrien's new book from HarperCollins, Lives of the Popes, while the author concedes that there is some controversy over what Pius might actually have said or might actually have done during the war, he says that "the judgment of history on this matter seems to have tilted against Pius XII."

It's enough to make anyone who ever had to write a footnote cringe. Where are the editors at HarperCollins? Where are the once-celebrated fact-checkers at The New Yorker? Any high-school history teacher will tell you that assessing common knowledge or making grandiose statements about "the judgment of history" is no substitute for a trip to the library to track down the facts.

For anyone who loves history, it is a relief to learn that there is a surprising number of scholarly books that go to the trouble of weighing the evidence regarding Pius XII's conduct during the war.

Among Pius' most determined defenders is Pinchas E. Lapide, author of Three Popes and the Jews. Lapide was born in Canada and served during World War II with the 178th Transport Company of the 8th British Army. Later he emigrated to Israel, where he entered government service. He was deputy editor of the Government Press Bureau in the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem, and was later appointed Israel's consul to Milan. Lapide's book grew out of two events: his own wartime experiences, and the outrage he felt over Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play, The Deputy—a work which depicts Pius XII as callous, cynical and more concerned about the Church's investments than about the victims of genocide.

Lapide begins with an honest assessment of the policy of the Church toward the Jews over the past 2,000 years—and it is not always edifying reading. But once he brings his story up to the twentieth century, Lapide is equally candid, even fervent, in his defense of the extraordinary efforts of Pius XII and the host of Catholic bishops, priests, monks, nuns and laity throughout Europe who risked their lives to save the Jewish victims of the Nazis.

Lapide first became aware of the rescue efforts in southern Italy in December 1943 when he and the other men of the 178th Transport Company came upon two settlement camps sheltering 3,700 Jewish refugees. Since summer 1940, these men, women and children had been fed, clothed, housed and protected from the Nazis by the Vatican. When Lapide and the other liberators got to Rome, he met Jews who attributed their survival to the direct intervention of Pius XII, and he saw hundreds of grateful Jews of all nations flock to papal audiences to express their gratitude to the Pope in person.

To offset any accusation of relying upon hearsay, Lapide supplies the names of the rescuers, the numbers of people they saved, and the dates of the rescue operations. Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, Bishop of Campagna, with two members of his family, hid 961 Jews. The effort cost the life of the Bishop's relative, Dr. Giovanni Palatucci, who was arrested by the Nazis and murdered in Dachau. The Franciscan Sisters in Budapest, Hungary, hid 150 Jews—120 children and 30 adults—in their convent. In addition, the nuns, under their tireless Mother Superior Maria-Etela, produced thousands of pontifical passports and letters of protection which the Papal Nuncio, Msgr. Angelo Rotta, distributed among the Jews of Hungary. In the last days of the war, Mother Maria-Etela was killed by an exploding hand grenade. Between 1942 and December 1943, the number of the Pope's Palatine Guard rose from 300 members to 4,000—all of them carrying the invaluable Vatican City passport. Of these 4,000 "guards," at least 400 were Jews, 240 of whom were hidden in the Vatican itself. Another 3,000 Jews were kept safe in the papal summer residence, Castel Gandolfo.

A dramatic moment in this book is Pius' successful program to save the Jews of Rome from deportation. When the Nazis occupied the city, there were 9,500 Jews in Rome. Yet when the order was given to round up all the Jews of Rome, Nazi police squads could find only 1,259. All the rest had found safety, at Pius' orders, in 155 churches, convents and monasteries throughout Rome, as well as in the Vatican. By Lapide's count, 40,000 Jews were saved in Italy thanks to the intervention of Pius XII and the Catholic clergy, religious and laity.

Like a good scholar, Lapide has assembled an impressive array of documents that attest to Pius XII's work, including an especially moving request from 20,000 rescued Jews of central Europe who petitioned Pius XII, "Allow us to ask the great honor of being able to thank personally His Holiness for the generosity he has shown us when we were persecuted during the terrible period of Nazi Fascism."

Clearly, Lapide's research overwhelms the slurs which accuse Pius XII of inaction, or worse, in the Holocaust.

In The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators (1922-1945), Anthony Rhodes examines the war the Nazis waged against the Catholic Church.

For his book, Rhodes mined an incredibly rich treasury of original materials, including the documents of the German Foreign Office, captured intact by the Allies in 1945; the private papers of Baron Diego von Bergen, Nazi Germany's ambassador to the Holy See; and the monumental Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to World War II. Any of these sources alone would have produced an informative book about the conflict between the Church and the Nazis. Taken together they must render Pius XII's detractors speechless.

Rhodes demonstrates that the Nazis always recognized in the Church an implacable enemy. He quotes Hitler, Goebbels and Heydrich, howling with rage every time Pius XI and Pius XII spoke out against fascism, gave refuge to Jews or condemned the mythology of the Aryan superman. One of the most fascinating portions of the book is a transcript of the Reich Central Security Office's careful analysis of Pius XII's Christmas message of 1942:

It is true, the Pope does not refer to the National Socialists in Germany by name, but his speech is one long attack on everything we stand for…. God, he says, regards all peoples and races as worthy of the same consideration. Here he is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews.... That this speech is directed exclusively against the New Order in Europe as seen in National Socialism is clear in the Papal statement that mankind owes a debt to "all who during the war have lost their Fatherland and who, although personally blameless have, simply on account of their nationality and origin, been killed or reduced to utter destitution." Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice towards the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.

Yet the Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis, and Rhodes provides evidence that the Church was truly catholic in its rescue efforts. When the Nazis were pursuing Palmiro Togliatti, Pietro Nenni and Giuseppe Saragat, all leaders of the Italian Communist and Socialist parties, Pius XII hid these men in the basement of the Basilica of St. John Lateran—the Pope's own cathedral.

Rhodes' evenhanded approach makes his book a joy to read. He states unequivocally that Pius XI and Pius XII never blessed Fascism in Italy nor the invasion of Abyssinia, and that the enthusiasm of individual Italian bishops for Mussolini and the Abyssinian war cannot be taken as a reflection of the views of the Holy See. "The Vatican," Rhodes says, "although in theory the most absolutist of States, often has less control over its hierarchy than the most constitutional monarch has over his Ministers."

In the same spirit of fairness, Rhodes examines Pius XI's decision to sign concordats with the fascist powers. The Pope's mistake, Rhodes says, was to have shared the delusion of Neville Chamberlain, who also believed that Hitler would become more moderate once he was secure in his office. Of course, both the Pope and Chamberlain learned too late the uselessness of drawing up formal agreements with thugs. (Interestingly, after extensive analysis, Lapide concludes that Pius made the correct decision in signing the concordat with Germany.)

Finally, we come to The Conspiracy against Hitler in the Twilight War by the late Harold C. Deutsch, a brilliant historian and one of the foremost experts on the Nazi era. For his history, Deutsch interviewed the survivors of the German Opposition and interrogated Nazi war criminals including Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Another of Deutsch's sources, whom he describes as "my friend, 'Father Bob,'" was the late Rev. Robert A. Graham, S.J., a renowned expert on Pius XII's activities during World War II on behalf of the Jews.

Deutsch's book holds the greatest surprise. He shows that from September 1939 to May 1940, Pius XII acted as the intermediary between the German Opposition and the British government in a plot to overthrow Hitler. It is an extraordinary story worth telling in some detail.

The Opposition in Germany—which included many high-ranking men in the military—believed Hitler would bring about the ruination of their country. They felt the only solution was to remove Hitler and make peace with the Allies. Three men—Hans Oster, Colonel General Ludwig Beck and Hans von Dohnanyi—identified Pius XII as their most promising intermediary to the British. All three men were Protestant. Oster was the son of clergyman, and Dohnanyi was married to Christine Bonhoeffer, sister of the Lutheran pastor and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They put their confidence in the new Pope because no pontiff in recent history knew Germany and the Germans so well. Eugenio Pacelli had been nuncio to Germany from 1917 to 1929. As Secretary of State under Pius XI he demonstrated his understanding of Germany's problems and the threat Nazism posed to the German people as a whole, as well as to the Catholic Church in Germany in particular.

The German Opposition chose as their courier to the Vatican a 41-year-old Bavarian lawyer, Dr. Josef Müller, a devout Catholic and a leading figure in the Catholic resistance to the Nazis' harassment of the Church. Müller knew Pius XII personally. When Cardinal Pacelli was Secretary of State, he had asked Müller to visit the Catholic bishops of Austria to advise them on what complications and perils they might expect as they administered their dioceses under the Third Reich. (Müller's activities did not go unnoticed. In spring 1943 he was arrested by the SS. He endured 200 interrogations in Nazi prisons and concentration camps without ever betraying his comrades.)

In Rome, Müller approached his friend, Rev. Robert Leiber, S.J., a personal aide and confidant of Pius XII. Father Leiber agreed at once to go the Holy Father with the German Opposition's request.

After hearing Fr. Leiber out, the usually cautious Pius XII answered immediately, "The German Opposition must be heard in Britain," and consented to be their voice.

To protect all the parties involved, Pius arranged a complicated system for relaying information. The Pope always received Müller and Sir Francis D'Arcy Osborne, Britain's ambassador to the Holy See, separately so they would be able to say truthfully that they had not seen each other after the outbreak of the war. Müller submitted his questions to the Pope in writing regarding the basis for negotiations between Britain and the German Opposition. The Pope passed these questions on to Osborne. After consulting London, Osborne made his replies orally or in writing to the Pope. Pius then conveyed these answers orally to Fr. Leiber.

About February 1, 1940, Müller carried to Berlin a paper bearing the details of the peace Britain would conclude with Germany once Hitler was overthrown. The document was written in Fr. Leiber's hand, taken down as Pope Pius XII had dictated it.

To the grief of all the parties involved, nothing came of the coup d'état against Hitler. After the war, Pius received Josef Müller in a private audience, thanked God for Müller's miraculous survival, and reminded him, "We have contended with diabolical forces."

The Conspiracy against Hitler in the Twilight War reads beautifully. Deutsch has an absolute command of the details so that even the most complicated twists and turns of the plot against Hitler are clear and understandable.

It was Winston Churchill who quoted Stalin as saying, "The Pope! How many divisions has he got?" Obviously, in military terms, the answer is none. Yet as all three of these histories testify, during the darkest years of this century the Pope and the Church drew upon what forces it had to subvert the Third Reich and save lives. For anyone who has been raised on common knowledge and public opinion polls, the facts presented in these books are a revelation.

Three Popes and the Jews, Pinchas E. Lapide, Souvenir Press (London), 1967.

The Conspiracy Against Hitler in the Twilight War, Harold C. Deutsch, University of Minnesota Press, 1968.

The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators (1922-1945), Anthony Rhodes, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.

All three of these books are out of print. If your local library does not have them, you should be able to secure them through interlibrary loan. The Maryknoll Seminary Library in Maryknoll, New York, has all three books in its collection.

Box

Still in print

One book about Pius XII's efforts to save Jews from Nazi extermination is Pius XII: Greatness Dishonored, by Rev. Michael O'Carroll. It is available for $18.95 from Roman Catholic Books, P.O. Box 2286, Fort Collins, CO 80522. Include $2.95 for the first book and $0.75 for each additional book for shipping.

Captions:

1) Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) on the day of his election to the papacy, March 2, 1939. As Secretary of State under Pius XI, then-Cardinal Pacelli had helped Jews suffering from anti-Jewish laws in Germany and Italy, and had denounced the Nazis as "possessed by the superstition of race and blood." (marked photo 1 in yellow book)

2) The defensor civitatis. After Rome was bombed from the air in July 1943, Pius XII arrived to pray and offer aid and blessings to her desperate people (marked photo 2 in yellow book)

3) The Pope receives a group of Jewish refugees from the concentration camps (marked photo 3 in white book)

Posted by The Augustine Club at Columbia University, 1998
with permission