The Holocaust Pope |
Eugenio Pacelli Pius XII Those of us who studied history with the late Professor Selig Adler were repeatedly warned not to write “instant history”. Dr. Adler meant that the media and others sit in judgment on current or recent events and adjudicate these occurrences on the basis of insufficient knowledge and the emotions of the moment. This
failure to consider the circumstances and conditions under which actions were
taken in the past, together with a failure to understand the culture of the time
and place in which events progressed, leads to misunderstandings and false
interpretations of historical events. Furthermore, it needs to be recognized
that many major historical upheavals have been analyzed again and again by
historians living later and later; an event like the French revolution is given
quite a different meaning now than was true in the days of its actual occurrence
(1789) or in 1889 or in 1909 or in 1989. Therefore
the current dispute concerning the role of Pius XII with reference to the
Holocaust and the persecution and murder of our six million martyrs can probably
not be understood until many years from now, when historians can gain insight
into these events in the light of unemotional analysis. Nevertheless, we need to
give this matter some attention now because the Pope, Benedict XVI, is going to
visit Israel in May. That proposed visit has led to an investigation of the role
of Pius XII with reference to the murder of the Jews of that time, particularly
as Benedict XVI has announced that he will not visit an exhibit at Yad Vashem
relative to Pius XII which claims he did nothing or not enough to help the Jews
brutalized by the Nazi killers. A
considerable literature has developed around the position of Pius XII concerning
the Jews of his day. This began when the German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth,
produced a play called Der Stellvertreter - Eine Christliche Tradgödie
or The Deputy - A Christian Tragedy. Here Hochhuth denounced Pius XII as
a Nazi collaborator who did nothing to help the Jews rounded up “under his
window” in the Vatican. This play became suspect almost at once, not only
because Hochhuth sought to blame the Pope and Catholics in general for the
Holocaust because he sought to relieve his Protestant coreligionists and his
relatives of responsibility, but also because he was evidently influenced by the
East German Communist regime, who wanted to blame the West German democracy as
inheritors of the Nazi mentality. In
addition, it is noteworthy that Hochhuth defended the Holocaust denier David
Irving, who had been convicted in a British court of defaming Jews and Jewish
authors and who became the literal “poster boy” for other Holocaust deniers
in Europe and among the Arabs. After
the attack of Hochhuth on Pius XII, it became popular to denounce Pius XII with
such labels as “Hitler’s Pope”, so that the heat of the excitement made it
difficult to deal with the facts. Therefore I present these facts and leave it
to your judgment to decide what we can say about Pope Pius XII so far. I am
convinced that in future years the picture of Pius XII will change, alone
because it takes so long to gather all the evidence. Moreover, it is absolutely
impossible to really understand the circumstance of that time and place. No
one who has not lived in Nazi land can really comprehend that utter abandonment
of all human decency in Germany at that time. Hate, force, cruelty and murder
were the conditions of daily life and so much brutality was experienced by
Germans and later all of Europe that every action at that time needs to be seen
in the light of these truly abnormal circumstances. Here
are some facts concerning the actions of Pius XII on behalf of the Jews.
Contrary to the argument that the Pope remained silent in view of the
persecutions, we find that he wrote an “Encyclical” in 1937 called “Mit
brennender Sorge” or “With burning anxiety”. This was read in all German
Catholic Churches on Palm Sunday, 1937. The letter condemned racism and the
idolatry practiced by followers of Hitler. He also told Catholics that
“anti-Semitism” is incompatible with Christianity (read it yourself). The
encyclical called Hitler “insane and arrogant”. No other church had at that
time said one word against Hitler. This letter led the Nazis to send thousands
of priests to concentration camps and resulted in the murder of 2,500 Catholic
priests in Poland. In the Dachau camp, a Priester Block was established,
including 2,600 priest prisoners. The letter also led Dutch Catholic bishops to
protest the deportation of Jews, leading to additional attacks on Dutch bishops
and murders. In
1939, the Pope appointed two Jews to the Vatican Academy of Science. Both had
been dismissed from teaching at the University of Rome by Mussolini's
anti-Jewish legislation. The
pope also gave numerous public speeches condemning National Socialism (Nazism)
so that the Nazi government called him ”the mouthpiece of the Jewish war
criminals.” When
Germany occupied Italy and then Rome, the pope ordered Catholic institutions
such as monasteries, convents, churches, and others, to hide Jews within their
walls, and thereby saved the lives of 4,715 Jews in Rome. In fact, 80% of Roman
Jews were saved from deportation. In addition, Israeli scholars report that
850,000 Jews were saved throughout Europe by Catholic clergy through fake
baptismal certificates and other methods. In
sum, the argument that Pius XII did nothing to help the persecuted Jews is
patently false. This
brings us to the question of whether the Pope did enough to help the persecuted.
There is no doubt that the pope remained silent in view of numerous Nazi
banalities, including the persecution and murder of Christian Poles. It is of
course possible that had someone else been pope, more might have been done to
save Jews and others. Perhaps Hitler should have been excommunicated, as Hitler
was himself a Catholic, at least by birth and education. The problem here is
that we cannot know what others might have done or how more aggressive actions
might have saved more Jews from these horrors. Indeed, Hitler needed the
Catholic community in Germany to fight in his armies. If the pope had threatened
to excommunicate any Catholic who fought in the invasion of Poland, things might
have had a different outcome. There
is a book by John Cornwall called Hitler’s Pope in which he blamed the
pope for all kinds of sins of omission if not commission. Yet today Cornwall
says that he cannot really judge the pope’s motives. There
is one more issue to be presented here. We who teach criminology insist that the
crime is the fault and responsibility of the criminal. The killers of Jews are
the criminals. The murderers are the criminals. The responsibility for six
million murdered Jews and five million murdered non-Jews lies with those who did
the killing and not Pope Pius XII or anyone else. The trouble with the effort to
blame the Pope or others is that it detracts from the fact that the inhuman
monsters who murdered so many innocent people are overlooked in the dispute
about Pius XII. However one may look at the pope’s career and conduct, ask
yourself this question: “What would I have done had I been pope?” Shalom u’vracha. Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including Women & Social Change in America (2009). |