The Pope And der Fuhrer

The scene is the papal kitchen, 1942. Pope Pius XII is holding two closely written sheets. On them is his denunciation of the Nazi persecution of European Jews, to be published by evening. But word has just arrived that after Holland’s bishops issued a similar statement from the pulpit, the Germans deported 40,000 Catholics of Jewish origin. If the Dutch protest cost 40,000 lives, Pius says, “my own could cost the lives of perhaps 200,000 Jews. I cannot take such a great responsibility. It is better to remain silent before the public and do in private all that is possible.” He has the pages destroyed.

That gemlike story has long served as a key anecdotal exhibit in the defense of Pius for his public silence during the Nazi genocide. In his scathing new book, Hitler’s Pope, British author John Cornwell repeats it–but not to Pius’ benefit. The 40,000 figure, he reports, was impossible–twice the total of all Jews deported from Holland by that date. The likely number of deported Jewish-Catholic converts, Cornwell says, was “no more than 92.” Though undeniably tragic, 92 deaths seem a thin reed on which to base a continent-wide policy of discretion in the face of murder.

Such painstaking–and painful–revisionism suggests why, three weeks before its publication and a week before the appearance of a long excerpt in Vanity Fair, a Vatican theologian had already branded Hitler’s Pope a “shameful libel.” Cornwell, a practicing Catholic, says he originally enlisted “on the side of all these chaps in believing Pius had had a really bad deal” at his critics’ hands. But research into the lightly trod territory of Pius’ decades-long German involvement before his papacy left Cornwell in a state of “moral shock,” he says. “The material I had gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment.” In the end, Cornwell concluded Pius “was Hitler’s pawn.”

The apple in Cornwell’s tale of sin is papal power. Pius, born Eugenio Pacelli, hailed from a family of Vatican loyalists dedicated to tightening Rome’s rein on its semi-independent European churches. As a diplomat in Germany, he pursued the long-term goal of a church-state pact granting Rome near total control over its Teutonic flock. No German leader would sign–until Hitler.

The dictator set only a few conditions: the disbanding of the Catholic-dominated German Center Party and the defining of any Catholic criticism of Nazi political acts as “foreign interference.” The 1933 concordat, claims Cornwell, “imposed a moral duty on Catholics to obey the Nazi rulers” and so neutered Germany’s “last democratic focus.” (Catholics made up one-third of the German population.) Pacelli, meanwhile, commenced his long silence on Jewish persecution.

Cornwell also revives previously discounted charges of anti-Semitism. He produces two letters, the more disturbing of which purportedly offers Pius’ description of a revolutionary in 1919: “a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.” The “secret antipathy,” writes Cornwell, helped prevent Pius from finding “in the isolation of the Jews a parallel with Christ alone on Golgotha” and thus helped prevent him from finding a voice to defend them.

“It’s not much to base accusations of anti-Semitism on,” remarks historian Father Pierre Blet of the 1919 letter. A similar tendentiousness, he says, mars Cornwell’s whole work: “He ignores a great deal of material which doesn’t fit his theory and makes grave accusations without supplying the evidence.” Blet was one of four Jesuits who compiled the official 12-volume record of Pius’ war years from Vatican archives. He too has a new book: a useful summary titled Pius XII and the Second World War. Blet maintains that the 1933 pact was “practically imposed by Hitler.” And papal power was hardly its only carrot: “The Nazis offered such good conditions that it would have been crazy not to sign it.” Cornwell’s implication of Pacelli in the Center Party’s demise, he notes, rests heavily on uncorroborated memoirs by a former party head.

The feud over Pius is likely to intensify as he moves closer to sainthood; his beatification could occur by next year. Jewish groups are increasingly hostile to it, and the Vatican is increasingly resentful of their critiques. But debate should be welcome. It illuminates previously neglected episodes in the life of this prospective saint. And it alerts us to flaws in the received version, as when, defending Pius against Cornwell last week, at least one cleric reached again for the story of the Dutch reprisals.

–With reporting by Emily Mitchell/New York and Martin Penner/Rome