The Papacy: Pius XII & The Jews

THE PAPACY

The drama is called Der Stellvertreter, a title that has been translated as The Representative or The Deputy, hut is perhaps best rendered as The Vicar—in echo of the title Vicar of Christ on Earth, which is one of the official designations of Roman Catholic Popes. The first play of Germany’s Rolf Hochhuth, 32, it ran for five months last season in West Berlin’s Free People’s Theater, is now showing in Stockholm, Basel and at London’s Royal Shakespeare Theater.

Everywhere, Der Stellvertreter has caused a storm of comment and quarrel. For in it, Hochhuth argues that Pope Pius XII refused to condemn openly the Nazi murder of European Jews because he saw Hitler as a necessary barrier between Soviet Communism and the Christian West, and hoped to negotiate a cease-fire between Germany and the Western Allies. Hochhuth believes that the Pope, as the Supreme Pontiff of the world’s most powerful Christian church, was the only man whose formal protest might have deterred Hitler. But the Pope was silent, and in a 45-page historical appendix to the text of his play, Hochhuth charges: “Never perhaps in the whole of history have so many paid with their lives for the passive attitude of one politician.”

This proposition has won praise from Albert Schweitzer and Evangelical Pastor Martin Niemoller, and bitter attacks from Pope Paul VI and Evangelical Bishop Otto Dibelius. Police had to break up a fist-swinging riot at the Basel premiere. Hochhuth, a Protestant who once belonged to Hitler’s youth corps, has been denounced as a pro-Communist and an anti-Semite. U.S. Catholic journals—including the respected Jesuit weekly America—have editorially attacked the play, apparently in hopes of forestalling a Broadway production planned for next February by Producer Herman F. Shumlin, whose last play, Inherit the Wind, was about the trial of a freethinker.

Two Martyrs. The hero of what Hochhuth calls “a Christian tragedy” is a saintly, selfless Jesuit, Father Riccardo Fontana—a fictional character modeled on the two Catholic priests martyred by the Nazis to whom Hochhuth dedicated his play. Fontana, who comes from an aristocratic Roman family with impeccable Vatican connections, is assigned to the office of the papal nuncio in Berlin. There, in a scene derived from an actual incident of 1943, a secretly anti-Nazi storm trooper named Rudolf Gerstein breaks in to tell the nuncio that Jews are being systematically exterminated at death camps in Eastern Europe. The horrified nuncio refuses to take any action because the Vatican has a concordat with Germany—which Pius XII, then Vatican Secretary of State, negotiated in 1933. Riccardo, however, promises Gerstein that Pius will speak out when he hears of the atrocities, and undertakes a personal mission to Rome.

At the climax of the play, Riccardo confronts Pius and pleads for a papal denunciation. “A diplomat must see a great deal—and say nothing,” the Pope answers. “Hitler alone is now defending the whole of Europe, and he will fight until he dies because a murderer can expect no pardon. Nevertheless, the West must let him have a pardon so long as he is useful in the East. Come what may: reasons of state forbid us to denounce Herr Hitler as a bandit. We have no choice.” Yet to satisfy Riccardo, the Pope dictates a statement—which Hochhuth took from the Pope’s Christmas message of 1943—expressing in general terms his anguish at war time tragedy that “knows no frontiers, neither of nationality, nor of religion, nor of race.”

To Riccardo, so imprecise a protest simply gives Hitler “power of attorney” to keep on killing the Jews. “God will not forsake his church simply because a Pope forsakes his office,” the Jesuit tells Pius, pinning a Star of David on his cassock and going off to accept, as the Pope’s surrogate, arrest and ultimate death at Auschwitz. There, in the final act, his faith is challenged by a satanic prison doctor, but Riccardo stops short of condemning the Pope. “Let us not be his judges,” he says.

“False, a Slander.” Riccardo Fontana may not judge Pius XII, but Rolf Hochhuth does, and the savagery of his appraisal has drawn a justifiable measure of wrath. To Hochhuth, Pius was a “cold skeptic,” and “an inverted mystic” whose 22 volumes of learned encyclicals and allocutions are dismissed as “trivialities.” In Der Stellvertreter, the Pope appears as an unfeeling schemer, concerned only with his subtle diplomacy and the Vatican’s investments.

Hochhuth’s Pope has been almost universally denounced as an unbelievable caricature of the Eugenic Pacelli who ruled Roman Catholicism from 1939 to 1958. German Jesuit Robert Leiber, Pius XII’s secretary, says simply: “Hochhuth’s picture of the Pope’s character is false, a slander.” In a letter to London’s Catholic magazine the Tablet, written shortly before he was elevated to the papacy, Pope Paul declared that the play “bears no relation whatever to the personality or work of Pope Pius XII. The frail and gentle exterior of Pius XII concealed a noble and virile character capable of taking very firm decisions and of adopting, fearlessly, positions that entailed considerable risk.”

Burning Anxiety. Such legitimate attacks on Hochhuth’s portrayal of the Pope sidestep the key question raised by his play: Why did Pius XII, who condemned the aerial bombing of civilian centers and the postwar aggressions of Communism, not explicitly attack the liquidation of Europe’s Jews? The issue has intrigued many modern historians, since Pius clearly detested Hitler’s totalitarianism as much as he loved the German people. He helped draft Pius XI’s encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Sorrow), which condemned Nazi racism in 1937. When the Germans organized a roundup of Roman Jews in 1943 and 1944, the Pope made no formal protest, but allowed convents and monasteries to take in refugees, and offered 50 kilograms of gold to ransom the lives of 200 Jewish leaders. In Hungary and Slovakia, both predominantly Catholic countries governed by Catholic Nazi puppets, his papal nuncios had some success in halting the deportation of Jews to Polish death camps.

Yet Pius ignored Allied pressure to speak out against Nazi genocide. In the autumn of 1942, Myron C. Taylor, Franklin Roosevelt’s personal representative to the Vatican, gave the Holy See evidence of the anti-Jewish campaign, and the U.S. Minister to Switzerland warned the Vatican that failure to condemn these atrocities “is undermining faith both in the church and in the Holy Father himself.” Baron Ernst von Weizsaecker, who claimed that he tried to protect the Pope from Hitler’s wrath while serving as German envoy to the Holy See, cabled his Foreign Ministry superiors: “The Pope has not allowed himself to be forced into any demonstrative utterances against the deportation of the Jews.”

Jesuit Leiber admits that Pius “found it difficult” to speak out clearly against the murders, but adds, “This was providential. Otherwise, I fear greater harm would have been the result.” Catholics point out that after the Dutch bishops issued a joint pastoral letter attacking the deportation of Jews, the Nazis retaliated by arresting Catholic converts from Judaism. In 1942 Cracow’s Archbishop Adam Sapieha pleaded with the Vatican not to broadcast accounts of German atrocities since it would only make things harder for his people.

The best evidence of Pius’ own judgment is his 1943 letter to Berlin’s Bishop Konrad von Preysing: “We leave it to the pastoral leaders on the spot to weigh whether and to what degree the danger of retaliation and pressure in case of remonstration by bishops make it appear advisable to exercise restraint to prevent greater evil, despite the listed grievances. Here lies one of the reasons why we ourselves impose limitations on ourselves in our public utterances.”

Silence & Courage. Hochhuth’s answer is that calculated prudence is appropriate for a diplomat, but not for a man with the awesome responsibility of being Christ’s earthly representative. In Der Stellvertreter, Hochhuth contrasts papal silence with the action of Denmark’s King Christian, who helped forestall Nazi persecution by vowing to wear the Star of David if his country’s Jews had to, and with Munster’s Bishop Clemens August von Galen, whose fiery sermons ended the Nazi euthanasia campaign in his city.

Pope Pius’ dilemma was of tragic dimensions: to protest in God’s name against an unspeakable crime, or to keep silence lest an even greater crime be acted out. Whether the Pope made the right choice is an unanswerable question, and Playwright Hochhuth ineptly poses it in a way that is calculated to offend many Catholics. For not only is his portrayal of Pius a caricature, but the play itself appears at a time when the Catholic bishops of the U.S. are taking an active part in the battle against racism, and when the Vatican Council is about to consider a decree that strongly attacks antiSemitism.

It may be tragic that such steps were not taken in 1943, but Catholicism then was almost another church—in an entirely different historical situation from that of 1963. It was a church of and for Catholics, and to its leaders the problems of Protestants or Jews often were of only peripheral concern. His horizons widened in later years, but during World War II Pope Pius helped shape this attitude, and in turn was shaped by it. It was inevitable that his response to the tragedies of the war had to be primarily that of a religious leader with millions of followers on both sides.