Eugenio Pacelli was Pope Pius XII from 2 March 1939 to 9 October 1958. He occupied the papacy throughout the Holocaust. He had detailed information about the killings as they were happening. He chose, with one important exception, not to use the public moral authority of the Roman See to denounce them by name. The decision has been argued about for eighty years and is not a closed question. The Vatican Secret Archives covering his pontificate were fully opened to researchers on 2 March 2020. The work of historians on the new material is ongoing. What is established beyond dispute is that the wartime Pope had the information, had the moral authority, and chose not to use it as some at the time, and many since, have argued he should have.
What he knew, and when
The Vatican intelligence apparatus during the war was substantial. The Holy See maintained nuncios across Europe, including in Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, France and Switzerland. Reports from these nuncios on the persecution of Jews began arriving regularly from 1940. Detailed reports of the deportations to killing camps reached the Vatican from autumn 1941 onwards. The Riegner telegram of August 1942, which informed the World Jewish Congress and Allied governments of the systematic killing programme, was passed to the Vatican by US diplomatic representatives within weeks. Direct reports from Polish bishops, including Cardinal Adam Sapieha of Krakow, reached the Vatican through 1942 and 1943. The 2020 archive opening confirmed what historians had already concluded: Pius XII was kept extensively informed.
The 1942 Christmas message
The single occasion on which Pius XII spoke publicly about the killings was his Christmas radio address of 24 December 1942. He referred, in a long speech, to the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction
. The phrase did not name Jews. It did not name Germany. It did not name any specific operation. It was, however, sufficient for the German Foreign Ministry, which received the speech and analysed it, to conclude that the Pope had broken neutrality and was now making himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals
. The German analysis is in the captured Foreign Ministry files. It establishes that the Christmas message was, in 1942, understood to be about the Jews, even though the word did not appear.
After 1942 Pius XII did not return to the topic in public. The 1943 and 1944 Christmas messages did not repeat even the carefully indirect 1942 formulation. He spoke privately to many on the subject, but did not speak publicly again.
The Rome round-up
On 16 October 1943 the Germans rounded up the Jews of Rome, around 1,259 men, women and children, in the streets immediately around the Vatican itself. The arrests took place within sight of the Apostolic Palace. The detainees were held at the Italian Military College on the Via Lungara, two miles from the Pope, for two days. The Pope was informed. He did not protest publicly. He instructed Cardinal Maglione, his secretary of state, to make a private representation to the German ambassador, Ernst von Weizsäcker. Weizsäcker, sympathetic himself, advised against making the protest public on the grounds it would worsen the situation. The detainees were deported to Auschwitz on 18 October 1943. Around 1,007 of them were murdered on arrival. Sixteen survived.
What the Pope did do, in October 1943, was open the Vatican’s extraterritorial properties and the network of Roman convents and monasteries to fugitive Jews. Around 4,000 to 4,500 Jews were sheltered in Catholic religious houses across Rome over the eight months of German occupation, including in the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, in the Convent of Our Lady of Sion, and in many parish institutions. The shelterings were sometimes formally authorised by the Pope and sometimes informally permitted with his knowledge. Most of those sheltered survived. The actions of individual Roman clergy and the institutional Catholic Church in Rome saved a significant number of lives. The Pope’s role in those actions has been debated; the broad pattern is that he permitted and quietly encouraged the shelter operations while declining to denounce the deportations publicly.
The Slovakian and Hungarian interventions
Two cases stand out where Vatican diplomatic intervention had measurable effect. In Slovakia in spring 1942 the papal nuncio, Giuseppe Burzio, made repeated and increasingly explicit protests to the Slovak government over the deportations of Slovak Jews to Auschwitz, then in progress. The protests, made on instructions from the Vatican, contributed to the temporary suspension of the deportations in October 1942. They resumed in 1944. In Hungary in summer 1944 the Pope sent a personal telegram on 25 June 1944 to Regent Horthy urging the halt of the deportations of Hungarian Jews. Horthy received the telegram, along with similar messages from the King of Sweden and President Roosevelt. He halted the deportations on 7 July 1944. The papal intervention was one of several that contributed to the halt and was understood by Horthy to have done so. It saved most of the Jewish population of Budapest.
The case for the silence
The defenders of Pius XII’s wartime conduct argue that an explicit public denunciation of the killings by the Pope would have provoked Hitler to extend the persecution to the Catholic Church across occupied Europe and would have prevented the quieter rescue work that the Church was doing in many countries. Pius XII himself made this argument in private at the time. The case has substance. The German occupation authorities had detailed plans for the suppression of the institutional Catholic Church in occupied Poland and elsewhere. A direct papal denunciation would have triggered a response.
The case against
The case against the silence is that the moral authority of the wartime papacy was, at the time, considerable, and Pius XII chose not to deploy it on behalf of the Jews of Europe at the moment of their greatest need. The dissident voice of his predecessor Pius XI, who had been preparing a denunciatory encyclical Humani Generis Unitas at the time of his death in February 1939, was suppressed by Pacelli on his accession; the encyclical was never issued. Pius XII’s 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, written when he was Cardinal Secretary of State to Pius XI, had condemned aspects of Nazi ideology and had been smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits. He had known how to make a public moral intervention. He chose not to make one of comparable weight on the Holocaust.
The 2020 archives
Pope Francis ordered the full opening of the wartime Vatican archives on 2 March 2020. The archives had been progressively released over the post-war decades but the full Pius XII correspondence had been held back. Researchers including David Kertzer, Hubert Wolf, and a German team led by Johan Ickx have been working through the new material since. The early findings have not produced a single decisive document either way. They have produced a more detailed picture of a Pope who was extensively informed, who spoke privately to many about his concerns, who permitted the rescue operations in Rome, who intervened in Slovakia and Hungary at moments when intervention seemed likely to be effective, and who chose silence in public throughout.
The beatification
Pius XII’s cause for beatification has been opened and is in progress. He was declared Venerable by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009. Further progress has been delayed pending the completion of the historical work on the 2020 archives. The cause has been opposed by some Jewish groups and supported by others. The Vatican position is that beatification is a judgment about personal sanctity, not a historical verdict on wartime decisions.
What it adds up to
The wartime Pope is the case of the figure whose moral authority was real, whose information was good, and whose choice was silence. The choice may have been the correct one in the circumstances; many at the time, including Jewish leaders who later defended him, thought so. Many at the time and many since have thought it was wrong. Both views are honourable. What is not contestable is that the choice was made, deliberately and with knowledge, by a Pope who had the means to speak and chose not to.
See also
Sources
- David Kertzer, The Pope at War, Random House, 2022
- Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, Yale University Press, 2000
- John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, Viking, 1999
- Pierre Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, Paulist Press, 1999
- Vatican Secret Archives, Pius XII files, opened to researchers from 2 March 2020
- USHMM: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust