Tag Archives: Vatican Archives

Public Lecture: “‘The Church is not Afraid of History’: The Opening of the Vatican Archives, 1939-1958”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Public Lecture: “‘The Church is not Afraid of History’: The Opening of the Vatican Archives, 1939-1958”

By: Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This lecture, the Hal Israel Endowed Online Lecture in Jewish-Catholic Relations, was delivered for Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization on November 5, 2020.

Before we begin, I would like to note for the record that the views expressed in this lecture are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization. It is such an honor and pleasure to be invited by the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University to deliver the Hal Israel Endowed Lecture in Jewish-Catholic Relations. I especially want to thank Dr. Anna Sommer Schneider, Associate Director for the Center for Jewish Civilization. I have had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Schneider since we met at an important conference on antisemitism held at Indiana University over a decade ago and I know a kindred spirit when I see one!

I am going to start my comments today in the summer of 1996. As a blissfully naïve late-twenty-something Ph.D. candidate in modern German History at the University of Maryland, I had finally landed on a dissertation topic and had arrived at the Catholic University’s Archives in Washington, D.C. I had learned that Catholic University housed the personal papers of Cardinal Aloisius Muench. American-born Cardinal Muench was the most powerful American Catholic figure and influential Vatican representative in occupied Germany and subsequent West Germany between 1946 and 1959. Cardinal Muench held the diplomatic positions of apostolic visitor, then regent, and finally Pope Pius XII’s nuncio, or papal diplomat to Germany. I was delighted to have access to his personal papers, for the personal papers of papal diplomats are typically held in the Vatican’s own archives in Rome. In one of those accidents of history, Cardinal Muench had shipped the bulk of his papers to the United States so that a young American priest could utilize them to write a biography of the cardinal. Happily for me, his papers stayed in America, and so I arrived on my first day, put on my white gloves, and requested the collection. I came across 1957 correspondence between Cardinal Muench and Monsignor Joseph Adams of Chicago. Muench was describing his most recent audience with Pope Pius XII on a spring day in Rome. Muench and Pius were close, bonded by their ties to and love of Germany and its people. They were at ease with one another and, by the time of this audience, had worked together for over 11 years. In this particular May 1957 audience, the pope – and I’m quoting now – told Muench […a] “story…with a great deal of delight.” I continue to quote here: “Hitler died and somehow got into heaven. There, he met the Old Testament prophet Moses.  Hitler apologized to Moses for his treatment of the European Jews.  Moses replied that such things were forgiven and forgotten here in heaven. Hitler [was] relieved,” continued the pope, and “said to Moses that he [Hitler] always wished to meet [Moses] in order to ask him an important question. Did Moses set fire to the burning bush?”  Let me stop here and explain the two references in the “joke.” The pope was making an equivalency between two historical events. The first: the Jewish prophet Moses’ arbitration of the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people after an angel of God appeared to him in a burning bush. The second: Hitler’s rumored involvement in the 1933 Reichstag (parliament) fire, an event that facilitated consolidation of Hitler’s dictatorial powers. Muench closed his letter to Monsignor Adams with this line: “Our Holy Father told me the story with a big laugh.”

So here I was, feeling dumbfounded among other things. The “delight” and “laughter” described by Cardinal Muench indicated to me that neither he nor the pope appeared to understand the inappropriateness of telling a joke relating to the murder of six million European Jews.  To my eyes, this exchange between them – one a prince of the church and the other in the chair of Saint Peter as God’s representative on earth for faithful Catholics like myself – demonstrated that neither placed much importance on the Jewish experience under National Socialism.  Some might say it captures the failure of the institutional Roman Catholic Church to undertake a strong and public position of sensitivity, respect, and positive action vis-à-vis Jews and Judaism during the papacy of Pius XII.

But what could be carefully researched was limited by the fact that at that time (the late 1990’s), the full archives of Pius XII were still closed. No longer. On March 2, 2020, these archives fully opened. Announced by Pope Francis on March 4, 2019, on the 80th anniversary of the election of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) to the office of pope, these new archives consist of an estimated 16 million pages in dozens of languages, spread across multiple archives in Rome and Vatican City. In an ironic twist of history, the much-anticipated archives had to close after four days due to the COVID 19 pandemic. They reopened in early June, and, considering normally scheduled summer closures in July and August, researchers have so far had less than 90 days in the archives. Today I will reflect on their early research findings and the meaning of the archives for Christian-Jewish relations.

The church is complex and so are its archives. Nor are the archives that opened this year completely new. Important but incomplete documentation has been available beginning in 1965 as part of the published series Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War. Also already available are archives from the pontificate of Pius XI, available in full since 2006, and those of the Vatican Office of Information for Prisoners of War, available since 2004.

For scholars of the churches during World War II, the Holocaust, and the postwar period, we are witnessing an exciting moment. I’m going to first talk about findings in the archives from the perspective of what we learned this last decade from the archives covering the years 1922 to 1939. I will then move to preliminary early findings that have begun to appear since last March.

No modern pope has been as scrutinized as Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. Soft spoken, aristocratic, and trained in law and diplomacy, scholars have only been able to study Pius XII through Vatican documents up to 1939 (the date of the end of Pius XI’s reign). Sometimes called “Il Papa Tedesco” (the German Pope) Pius XII was enormously popular with the German people during his time as papal diplomat to Germany from 1917-1929. From 1930 to 1939, he served Achille Ratti, Pope Pius XI, as Secretary of State, the second most powerful position in the Vatican hierarchy. When he became pope in 1939, he controlled the worldwide Catholic Church and the tens of millions of Catholics in a Europe on the brink of war.

Portions of the Vatican’s archival record for the 1922-1939 period are available at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With thousands of archival pages at my disposal in the Museum’s reading room, three growing children and a full-time job, I decided to approach the material by looking at two key events in Holocaust history: the response of the Vatican and the German Catholic church to the first anti-Jewish laws in 1933 and to the Night of Broken Glass pogrom in 1938. My detailed findings are published elsewhere. Here, let me try to capture some highlights. Let us go back to March 1933. On March 23, 1933, the German parliament passed the so-called “Enabling Law,” abolishing democracy and the constitutional state in Germany. For our purposes, of especial interest is the statement German Chancellor Adolf Hitler made, promising to “respect all treaties between the Churches and the states” and that the “rights” of the Churches would “not be infringed upon.” In response, on March 28, the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference seated in the city of Fulda removed the current ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party. On the same day that the Fulda Bishops’ Conference reversed the ban on Nazi Party membership for German Catholics, the Nazi party leadership ordered a boycott, to begin on April 1, at 10 a.m., directed against Jewish businesses and department stores, lawyers, and physicians. A second discriminatory law swiftly followed. On April 7, the passage of the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service contained the so-called Arierparagraph, stipulating that only those of Aryan descent could be employed in public service. State-sponsored Nazi persecution of its Jewish population had begun.

I was curious about the correspondence going to and coming back from the Vatican around these two extremely sensitive issues. Most surprising to me were letters to German bishops, the nuncio, or to the pope himself from German Catholics, including priests, who hoped to find some way to be both true to their bishops and to Hitler. I will give just one example. Princess Georg von Sachsen-Meiningen, who had joined the Nazi party already in May 1931 on her thirty-sixth birthday, tried to explain her distress in a letter to the Holy Father. She was responding to the fact that in the fall of 1930, the pastor of Kirchenhausen bei Heppenheim in the Diocese of Mainz declared in a sermon that no Roman Catholic could be a member of the Nazi Party, and, further, any active member of the Nazi party could be refused the sacraments. Countess Klara-Maria wrote to her pope, “as a good Catholic, I fear to end up in a conflict of conscience and to be in danger of punishment by the Church. If these measures and rules of the Mainz diocese are taken up by other dioceses, I will not be the only one to find myself in this conflict, but joined by hundreds and thousands of men and women who have decided to heroically fight for any culture or world opinion that will destroy Marxism and Bolshevism.”

While letters like this must be weighed against a population of nearly thirty million German Catholics, what they tell us is that fear of losing their flock to the growing Nazi movement was a factor for the Vatican and the German Catholic Church when making decisions. In lifting their ban on Nazi membership for Catholics, a decision was made to compromise, especially if, as Hitler stated in his March 23 address, the Church would be left alone.

This thinking was at play – alongside prejudiced views of Jews buttressed by 2,000 years of Church teachings – when the next test came: the April laws of 1933. Pope Pius XI himself was asked to intervene in a letter from unnamed – I am quoting here – “high-ranking Jewish notables.” In an internal memorandum, the pope transmitted this request to Secretary of State Pacelli. The precise language Pacelli, the future pope, used is as follows: “It is in the tradition of the Holy See to fulfill its universal mission of peace and love for all human beings, regardless of their social status or the religion to which they belong […].” The memorandum then asked for the advice of the papal nuncio in Germany, Cesare Orsenigo, and of the German bishops in formulating a response. The answer sent back from Berlin was clear: the Church should not intervene beyond conveying “the will of Catholicism for universal charity.”

Why this response? Fear of alienating Catholics attracted to Nazism; fear of losing the independence of Church practices in the new Nazi state, and, finally the mentality best captured by the response of Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich. In a letter dated April 10, Cardinal Faulhaber, like Orsenigo, discouraged the Holy See from intervening. He wrote to Pacelli: “Our bishops are also being asked why the Catholic Church, as often before in history, has not come out in defense of Jews. This, at present, is impossible, because the war against the Jews would also become the war against the Catholics; also, the Jews can defend themselves, as the quick end to the boycott has shown.”

Five years later, after the devastating Night of the Broken Glass pogrom, Secretary of State Pacelli would again receive a missive asking the Vatican to denounce what many consider to be the opening act of the Holocaust – total destruction of every Jewish man, woman and child.  This time, the missive was from one of his own. Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, 5th archbishop of Westminster, wrote to Pacelli requesting papal condemnation of the pogrom. Pacelli refused on behalf of the pope, who had recently suffered a heart attack. The official Vatican response read as follows: “The Holy Father Pius XI’s thoughts and feelings will be correctly interpreted by declaring that he looks with humane and Christian approval on every effort to show charity and to give effective assistance to all those who are innocent victims in these sad times of distress. [Signed] Cardinal Pacelli, Secretary of State to His Holiness.

We have here another unambiguous example that Pacelli, despite being informed about the horrendous details of the pogrom in Germany, was not encouraging of a public statement by the Holy See condemning Nazi Germany specifically, or the November pogrom specifically, or singling out suffering Jews specifically by name—even when asked to do so by a prince of his own church.  He was comfortable only with a statement broad enough to apply to all “innocent victims.”

To wrap up on the topic of the 1922-1939 archives, these millions of documents still have so much potential. Open since 2006, fourteen years have not nearly exhausted the possibilities. For me, I learned the lesson that the response of the Catholic Church to Nazi treatment of Jews cannot be separated from the Church’s response to Nazi treatment of Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s. What do I mean? The last weeks of March and first weeks of April 1933 make painfully clear that the Catholic Church’s decisions and responses to persecution of their own co-religionists influenced and even dictated their tepid response to the mistreatment of Jews. Another lesson: the role that 2,000 years of Catholic prejudice against Jews played from the lowest to highest levels of the Church during these fraught years should and must be studied beyond the person of the pope himself. The 1922-1939 archives are rich with material from ordinary Catholics, their priests, nuns, bishops, cardinals and from their Jewish neighbors, grasping for any help they might find and typically not finding it.

Fast-forward to March 2020. Since their opening on March 2, the fascination with the 1939-1958 materials has only grown. A documentary by award-winning director Steven Pressman, titled Holy Silence, premiered in January of this year. It garnered over 3,000 views when shown as part of a recent joint program between the Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Film Institute of San Francisco.  An interview with Hubert Wolf, a historian at the University of Münster whose team was among those in the archives that first week in March went viral. More recently, Brown University historian David Kertzer’s article in The Atlantic on his and his research collaborators’ findings resulted in a counter-article in none other than L’Osservatore Romano. This is the daily newspaper of the Vatican City State which reports on the activities of the Holy See and events taking place in the Church and the world.

Earlier this month, I stood in the Vatican Apostolic Archive for the first time in my life. Where does one begin with the many questions that I have been accumulating since that first day in the Catholic University archives? With limited time to work in the archive, I decided to follow up on an old question that has nagged at me since those early days at the Catholic University Archives – that of Pius XII’s thought process as he pleaded for clemency for Germans indicted and convicted for war crimes by Allied courts in occupied Germany. Scholars have already established that Pius XII and his key advisors involved themselves in clemency efforts for convicted German war criminals, most especially Catholic ones. I recalled that even Muench had questioned this practice, telling U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy in 1950 that some championed by the Vatican “were up to their elbows in blood.”

Selecting a folder labeled “Prisoners of War, 1950-1959” from the papers of the Vatican’s diplomatic headquarters in Germany, I started to turn the fragile pages in the beautifully appointed “Pius XI Study Room.” Midway through the folder, the subject heading “Case Oswald Pohl” caught my eye. Oswald Pohl joined the Nazi party in 1926 and the SS in 1929.  The SS, or Schutzstaffel, was an elite quasi-military unit of the Nazi party that served as Hitler’s personal guard and as a special security force in Germany and the occupied countries. Pohl became chief of administration at SS headquarters in February 1934, responsible for the armed SS units and the concentration camps.  Ultimately, he headed a sprawling organization that was responsible for recruiting millions of concentration camp inmates for forced labor units, and also responsible for selling Jewish possessions—jewelry, gold fillings, hair, and clothing—to provide funds to Nazi Germany.  On November 3, 1947, in the “U.S. versus Oswald Pohl et al,” the U.S. Army sentenced Pohl to death.  During the three-year confinement in Landsberg prison that followed the trial, Pohl converted to Catholicism.  This, however, did not prevent his execution by hanging on June 8, 1951.

The dates in the folder sitting in front of me also caught my eye – April 1951, less than 8 weeks before Pohl’s execution date. There are three memos written (in Italian) from Muench, headquartered in Kronberg, Germany, to the Vatican’s Substitute Secretary of State Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Saint Pope Paul VI and at that time, Pius XII’s closest advisor and friend. On April 2, Muench wrote to Montini, “I consider it my duty to remit to Your Excellency […] newspaper articles which report news of the Holy Father sending a Papal Blessing to Mr. Oswald Pohl, former General of the SS., sentenced to death in Landsberg.” Muench’s 2nd memorandum to Montini got even more interesting and confirmed that indeed, Pohl had received a Papal Blessing via telegram. Let me pause to briefly explain that The Apostolic Blessing or Pardon at the Hour of Death is part of the Last Rites in the Catholic tradition. The Christian News Service in Munich issued a clarification that, according to Landsberg prison chaplain Carl Morgenschweis, the telegram conferring the Papal Blessing was “purely private, and not a diplomatic step or a Vatican stance.”

Specifically, a Father “Costatino Pohlmann” sent an urgent request to Pius XII with a request that a Papal Blessing be sent to Pohl on the eve of his death, in keeping with Catholic practice, and the pope did so. In Muench’s view, this was “not at all a matter of a telegram from the Vatican, much less a position taken by the Pope on the Pohl case.”

In the third and final memo from Muench to Montini on the matter, Muench took the time to send to Montini – second only to the pope in terms of power and position – a copy of an essay Pohl had written while imprisoned. The essay was titled “My Way to God.” Muench ensured Montini that the essay had come from the heart. Father Morgenschweis “closely followed the radical change of Pohl,” and wrote the preface, confirming that in Father Morgenschweis’ eyes, Pohl converted “only for the beneficial influence of God’s grace” and marked “the sincere return to the Lord of a misguided soul.”

What are we to make of Pius XII granting the Apostolic Blessing or Pardon at the Hour of Death to Oswald Pohl, a recently converted Catholic condemned to death as one of the greatest Nazi overlords of the slave labor system? A week in the new archives cannot answer such a question of moral, ethical and theological significance. It did provide, at least for me, a sense that more historical evidence exists in other parts of this or another of the newly opened archives. I believe the core story we tell now about the Vatican, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust will be fundamentally altered after historians have done their work. But it will take time.

To conclude, why all the intense interest in these archives, 75 years after the end of World War II? And what might they mean for Christian-Jewish relations, which have been on a steady and positive path since the Church’s rejection of antisemitism as a sin with the Nostra Aetate declaration of 1965? There is no doubt that some documents will bring to the fore very tough conversations. Other documents will bring cause for celebration. The vast majority will engender elements of both. It is an overdue conversation, and one that must be approached with humility before our Jewish brothers and sisters – for our Church (my Church) has much to answer for that the Nostra Aetate declaration does not erase. When announcing the opening of these archives, His Holiness Pope Francis said, “the Church is not afraid of history; rather, she loves it … I open and entrust to researchers this documentary heritage.”  This is our moment to study the past in a clear, responsible, precise way. This is our moment to accept we will find stories across the full spectrum of the human condition, from the most depraved to great acts of kindness. This is our moment to be equally honest about both the failings and triumphs we are already finding, from top to bottom. Thank you.

 

 

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Public Lecture: “November 1938: Perspectives from the Vatican Archives”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Public Lecture: “November 1938: Perspectives from the Vatican Archives,” The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide, 23 October 2013.

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

For more information or documentation relating to this lecture at the Wiener Library, please contact Dr. Brown-Fleming at sbrown-fleming [at] ushmm.org. The views as expressed are the author’s alone and no not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization. 

In March 1943, in his final public statement before his death and speaking to the World Jewish Congress in New York, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster and as such, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales (1935-1943) said the following: “I denounce with utmost vigor the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi oppressors.” Even the Holy Father, Pope Pius XII, nor Pope Pius XI before him, had ever, or would ever, publicly voice objection to persecution of Jews specifically by the Nazis specifically by name.  Tonight I will discuss the concerns and preoccupations that shaped the Holy See’s muted response to the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.  My talk today is based on the records of the Vatican nunciatures (diplomatic headquarters) in Munich and Berlin during the 1930s. In February 2003, in an unprecedented break with Vatican Secret Archives policy, the Holy See opened those records pertaining to the Munich and Berlin nunciatures (Vatican diplomatic headquarters) for the period 1922 to 1939. During these years, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), served as nuncio to Bavaria (1917), nuncio to Germany (1920), and Secretary of State to Pope Pius XI (1930–1939). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s archives now hold microfilm copies of this subset of critical new primary source material.

*

Discussions about the plight of European Jewry swirled in the offices of the Secretary of State in the months before the November pogrom. Secretary of State and future Pope Eugenio Pacelli and his lieutenants received many, many requests for help. Internal exchanges reveal a certain level of sympathy, tinged still by anti-Jewish sentiment. In February 1938, Apostolic Inter-Nuncio to the Netherlands Father Paul Giobbe wrote to Undersecretary for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs Domenico Tardini to softly encourage a petition from president of the Dutch Zionist Committee H.B. van Leeuwen, asking for the Holy See’s support in favor of Jewish emigration to Palestine. “Under the current difficult political and social circumstances, the Jews, declared undesirables in some European countries and in the face of… blood and violence that currently dissuade the pursuit of systematic emigration to Palestine, [yet] obstinately imbued…with the utopia of the reconstruction of the Jewish Kingdom, now want to find territories that are safe and easily accessible…the Holy See should at least support them by smoothing the way,” he wrote. Apostolic nuncio to Switzerland Fillippo Bernardini sent a detailed report concerning the persecution of Austrian Jewry and a proposal for the emigration of 10,000 Viennese Jews to Lebanon in May 1938. The September 1938 Italian racial laws were discussed in great detail in the Secretariat of State before their passage, to the point where the Vatican’s emissary to Benito Mussolini, Father Tacci Venturi, brokered a deal between Pope Pius XI and the Duce that the pope would agree to decline any public condemnation of the Italian racial laws as long as the Duce would give his word to stop persecution of the Italian Catholic youth group Catholic Action, and to agree not to subject the Jews to “bad treatment of the kind that was customary for centuries”—a promise, needless to say, Mussolini did not keep.

The Reichskristallnacht folio is small, containing only 15 documents: 10 letters from private individuals, some addressed to Secretary of State Pacelli and some to Pope Pius XI and all written in August 1938, and 5 pieces of official correspondence. Small in number, letters from private individuals illuminate the atmosphere in Europe and the United States in the months before the November pogrom. On August 12, 1938, German American Catholic Dr. Gotthold Steinführer of Chicago, Illinois wrote a brief and impassioned letter to Pope Pius XI in Rome. “Permit me to make Your Eminence aware of the words of our Lord Jesus Christ regarding the Jewish question, for example in Matthew 8:11[1] and Revelation 2:9.[2]  Your Eminence should not defend the Jews, who [belong to] the Synagogue of Satan. Referring to the above words of Christ, those who defend the Jews defend for Satan. The entire Gospel of John shows the fight of the Jews against Christ. The greatest enemies of all Christendom are the Jews, from Paul until today. Yours Faithfully, Dr. Gotthold Steinführer,” he wrote.

I should note that letters to the Holy See filed in other folios also require systematic examination, as they offer interesting insights into popular Catholic thinking, such as the one from Maria Theresa Bauer of Paris to Pope Pius XI noting that a gesture of protection from the Holy Father “would make many [Jews] inclined to convert to Catholicism in these painful hours.” As to those who had done so already, decades earlier, they, too, wrote to their pope. These were Catholics whose families were affected by the 15 September 1935 Nuremberg Laws (Law to Protect German Blood and Honor and the Reich Citizenship Law) and other Nazi legal restrictions.

Mrs. George Marse described herself as “a German Catholic wife to a Jewish German doctor.”  Their four children, baptized as Catholics and raised in Catholic schools, were now defined by the Nazi state as “half Aryans.” Mrs. Marse wrote to Pope Pius XI as a last measure following years of unsuccessful attempts to find financial support for emigration. “I have found no help. The Jewish committees are only responsible for purely Jewish cases! Our family consists of but one Jew and five Catholics!  How can my husband expect help from the Jews with his Catholic wife and his [four] Catholic children!?” she wrote in her impassioned letter.  Another letter, addressed to Pope Pius XI and received by the Holy See in August 1938, made the same argument: “I am one of the many thousands of my comrades in fate… so-called “Half-Jews” [Halbjuden]…our coreligionists leave us in the lurch—no one cares about us!! One wants to shout to all the world, Christians, where are you?”  Such letters reflect the general need for further research on discussions and concrete aid efforts within the Holy See regarding those Catholics who were defined as Jews by the Nazi state. Currently, no monograph treats this important subject.

Of greatest interest are 2 official reports from Vatican nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, to the Secretary of State in Rome, Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII). They are dated 15 and 19 November 1938, respectively. A brief word Cesare Orsenigo, author of the reports, is in order. An Italian national who was Pacelli’s successor as nuncio to Germany in 1930, 56 years of age when he was appointed to Berlin, Archbishop Orsenigo has thus far not fared well in the historiography for the 1933-1945 period. His contemporary, George Shuster, described Orsenigo as “frankly, jubilant” about Hitler’s election to the chancellorship on January 30, 1933.  Other documents across the Vatican archives demonstrate Orsenigo’s admiration for many aspects of the Nazi regime. This is why the tone of these two reports, decidedly sympathetic to beleaguered Jewry, is surprising. Let us begin with Orsenigo’s first report about Reichskristallnacht, dated 15 November 1938. His description of the events themselves openly acknowledged the reality of anti-Semitic vandalism (as he titled the report), and, the Nazi and German popular role therein:

The destructions have been initiated, as if by a single order… The blind popular revenge followed one identical method everywhere: in the night, all display windows were shattered and the synagogues were set on fire; the day after, shops that did not have any defense were looted. Doing this, [the looters] destroyed all the goods, even the most expensive ones. Only towards the afternoon of the 10th, when the masses, having vented their wildest feelings, and not being restrained by any policeman, did Minister Goebbels give the order to stop, characterizing what happened as venting by “the German people…” All of this easily leaves the impression that the order or permission to act came from a higher authority… The hour is to follow of ministerial laws and dispositions in order to isolate Jews more and more, prohibiting them every commerce, every [ability to frequent] the public schools, every partaking in places of public diversion (theaters, cinemas, concerts, cultural meetings), with a fine totaling one billion [Reichsmarks] to be paid [by Jews themselves].

In the remainder of the report, Orsenigo noted the strong temptation of German Jewry to commit suicide in the wake of these terrible events, noted the positive if limited efforts by the embassies of Columbia, England, and Holland to document these events and protect the assets of Jewish nationals, and openly criticized Poland, writing, “it was… Poland that provoked the violent action of Germany” by refusing to extend the expired passports of Polish Jews from Germany, prompting Germany to “suddenly sen[d] back to Poland tens of thousands of Jews, and among these and also the parents the young exasperated boy [Polish Jewish student Herszel Grynszpan], that then assassinated the German ambassador in Paris [Ernst vom Rath].” In reading the report as a whole, Orsenigo is critical of the events of Kristallnacht, critical of the Nazi state, and critical of the German population.

The second report, dated 19 November 1938, concerned impending legislation declaring “null and void all marriages already conducted” between “Aryans” and Jews, including those marriages in which the Jewish spouse had converted to Catholicism after the marriage. Not surprisingly, Orsenigo objected to the legislation, due to its disregard for Canon Law, but he also added critical commentary about the increasingly radical nature of the Nazi state, noting that “serenity and competence” were “more and more lacking in high places of command” and that there existed a “state of mood that [Orsenigo thought] greased the anti-Semitic events[, a state of mood that] reveals always more and more turbulence and agitation, and is increasingly less able to be controlled,” he wrote.

Let us turn to Eugenio Pacelli’s (the future wartime pope’s) response.  We know that he received both of Orsenigo’s reports of 15 and 19 November, and, hence, received direct and detailed information about the pogrom. While no documentation of Pacelli’s response to the two Orsenigo reports has yet been discovered, we do have available Pacelli’s response to a request from Cardinal Hinsley that Pope Pius XI make a statement about the pogrom. The story was this: in late November, Cardinal Hinsley sent to Pacelli a request from Lord Rothschild, whom Hinsley described as “the most famous and highly esteemed amongst Jews in England.” On 26 November 1938, Cardinal Hinsley wrote to Pacelli the following:

…There will be a public gathering in London in order to ask [for] aid and attendance to all those who suffer from persecution [for reasons of] religion or race… If [in] principle [it] were possible to have an authentic word of the Holy Father being declared that in Christ discrimination of race does not exist and that the great human family must be joined in peace [by] means of respect of the personality of the individual, such message would [be] sure [to] have in England and America, [and] nevertheless through the entire world, the [effect of] leading to good will towards the [Catholic] Religion and the Holy See.”

Cardinal Hinsley was, as far as I have found, the only head of a bishops’ conference to ask Pope Pius XI to protest Kristallnacht. Perhaps we can attribute this to his particularly British world view? University of Chichester scholar Andrew Chandler recounts a conversation between Cardinal Hinsley and Winston Churchill after the fall of France in 1940: “I’m glad we’re alone [in this fight],” he was said to have remarked. When Churchill asked why, Hinsley responded that “Englishmen fight best when they have got their backs to the wall.”

It is worth recounting Pacelli’s response to Hinsley’s letter, dated December 3, 1938, in full. Pacelli’s notes on the matter read as follows:

If the [matter] were of substantially private character, it would be easier. On the other hand, it is necessary to remove the appearance of fearing that which does not need to be feared. Cardinal Hinsley could speak [if] saying he is surely interpreting the thought of the Sovereign Pontiff saying that the [matter] not only finds the Pope in a moment of much worry for his health, but also overwhelmed by the amount of matters before him. It is therefore not possible for [the Holy Father] to [respond] personally. He [Cardinal Hinsley] can say that he is interpreting the thoughts of the Holy Father which view all aid to those who are unhappy and unjustly (unworthily or dishonorably) suffering with a humane and Christian eye.

This response was telegraphed to Cardinal Hinsley on December 3rd.  Were Pacelli’s comments about the health of Pope Pius XI accurate? David Kertzer’s soon-to-be-published book reveals that the pope suffered a heart attack on November 25th. We will return to this point—the pope’s health and the impact it had on the ability of Secretary of State Pacelli to maneuver—later in this lecture.

On December 10th, illustrious figures that included Cardinal Hinsley; William Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury; Lord Rothschild; Clement R. Attlee, leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons; Sir Alan Anderson, Conservative MP; and General Evangeline Booth, representative of the Salvation Army, gathered at the invitation of Sir Frank Bowater, Lord Mayor of London, at the Mansion House.  A resolution “offering whole-hearted support” for the Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees was “unanimously adopted.”  The Baldwin refugee fund for victims of religious and racial persecution, first announced by former prime minister, Lord Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Baldwin, during a radio address on the evening of December 8th, was expressly meant to provide financial aid to both Jews and “non-Aryan Christians:”

Tonight, I plead for the victims who turn to England for help, the first time in their long and troubled history that they have asked us in this way for financial aid…the number of these so-called non-Aryan Christians, who, according to German law, are regarded as Jews, certainly exceeds 100,000; in addition there are some half a million professing Jews, and no words can describe the pitiable plight of these 600,000 human souls. What can be done to help?

A brief article in the New York Times, entitled, it is interesting to note, Pope Backs Britons on Aid to Refugees, appeared that same day.  According to the article, “one of Pope Pius [XI]’s rare messages to an interdisciplinary body was read at a meeting representing all faiths and political parties, called by the Lord Mayor of London, at the Mansion House today to support the Earl Baldwin Fund for the victims of religious and racial persecution.”

It was Lord Rothschild who read the Vatican telegram to the assembled.  Before reading the telegram, Lord Rothschild remarked that “Cardinal Hinsley had written to Rome on his behalf,” and that “everyone respected the Pope for his courage and unswerving adherence to the principles which the whole civilized world knew must be maintained if civilization was to persist.” The Vatican telegram, as reproduced in the London Times, read as follows:

The Holy Father Pius XI’s thoughts and feelings will be correctly interpreted by declaring that he looks with humane and Christian approval on every effort to show charity and to give effective assistance to all those who are innocent victims in these sad times of distress. [Signed] Cardinal Pacelli, Secretary of State to His Holiness.

Cardinal Hinsley’s presence at the Mansion House meeting made headlines, as did the fact that Pacelli’s message was read at a high-level public meeting with the specific purpose of support for Jews—I remind us that Lord Baldwin’s December 8th radio appeal was quite clear as to the need for funds for approximately 500,000 Jews and 100,000 “non-Aryan Christians.”  Yet, here we have an unambiguous example that Pacelli, despite being informed about the horrendous details of the pogrom in Germany, was not encouraging of a public statement by the Holy See condemning Nazi Germany specifically, or the November pogrom specifically, or singling out suffering Jews specifically by name—even when asked to do so by a prince of his own church.  He was comfortable only with a statement broad enough to apply to all “innocent victims.”

Let us return for a moment to the issue of the pope’s health and one major implication of it: Pacelli’s personal response could dictate the Holy See’s official institutional response in the months before Pius XI’s death on February 10, 1939. On December 6, four days before the Mansion House gathering, Pacelli received Italian ambassador to the Holy See Bonfiacio Pignatti, who implored him, on behalf of Mussolini, “to instruct all of Italy’s bishops not to criticize the anti-Semitic campaign.” Of that meeting, Pignatti wrote, “Cardinal [Pacelli] observed that it would be very easy to give the advice I was suggesting orally, but that having to put it in writing would be more difficult.” In the end, Pacelli agreed to do so in the case of the diocese of Rome and to “study the best way to take care of Italy’s other dioceses.” In this context, it should come as no surprise that Pacelli was not willing to aggressively and specifically condemn the 9-10 November Nazi pogrom against Jews. Pacelli was only willing to authorize (on behalf of the pope) a reminder of the church’s broad commandment and mission to aid the suffering and the persecuted. It is quite the understatement to say that in these troubled times, such a response was not enough.

*

The Vatican archives also offer us glimpses into the broader popular response to the plight of European Jewry. In the interest of time, I have chosen only a few. On December 7, 1938, Berlin Protestant Gerda Erdmann took it upon herself to write to Pope Pius XI. “Please permit me, as a non-Catholic Christian, to address you regarding a matter that has called much attention: the question of the Jews (Es handelt sich um die Judenfrage). With this letter, I want to make a suggestion which seems to me could be a solution to this [and one] coming from Christianity,” she wrote, satisfaction and eagerness dripping from her pen. “It is basically God’s hand that weighs so heavily on the Jews; God’s judgment has reached them as has already occurred several times before, during history since the time of Christ. Since that time, God’s message through his son is: Jews are guilty.” Erdmann took many more lines to explain why, in her perception, “Jews [were] guilty.” Her solution: “…huge empty territories are available (for instance in South America…) where:

“if the Jewish immigrants were baptized in their new homeland…the local population would in every way show their acceptance and open their doors. There would be no closed gates. The children of the baptized would be raised since childhood in the Christian faith; they would grow up within the church and the nation, end up in mixed marriages and create a new population. Among the colorful racial mixture overseas, the entire European Jewish people would be absorbed without danger. The refreshing influence of European intelligence could be a gain in many places.”

Erdmann understood herself as a faithful Christian and understood her solution as a Christian one:  “What a great and beautiful task opens up for world Christianity! What a bright future! United, Christianity can achieve a colossal purpose of love for they fellow man…A task achieved, which will go down in history as a shining example of selfless Christian love performed for the Honor and Glory of God,” she concluded. When I first came across this letter in the Vatican archives, I could not resist sending it to several close colleagues under the heading: “with friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Most letters came from Jews begging for help, and left wanting. In December 1938, German Jew Franz Knüppel wrote to the Secretariat of State on the eve of his forced expulsion from his current residence in France. The recipient of many such letters daily, Secretary of State Pacelli directed his undersecretary to contact the nunciature in France, for, as his undersecretary put it, “the abovementioned gentleman is not known by the Secretary of State;” and thus his undersecretary would “therefore leave it up to [the nuncio] to judge whether it is opportune to deal with Mr. Franz Knüppel’s request in the way that he wishes.” In short-hand, the process was as follows: when a letter requesting aid arrived in the Secretariat of State, if Secretary of State Pacelli did not know the individual personally, he asked his undersecretary to forward it to the appropriate nuncio, to handle as he saw fit. This in and of itself is a revelation about how the Vatican bureaucracy and communications between Catholic countries and the Vatican worked at this juncture.

In the interest of allowing for time for questions, I will conclude. I fear I have thoroughly depressed this audience; as a Catholic, I certainly depress myself when I see, document after document, diplomacy and self-interest and even anti-Semitism chosen over the basic value of charity and love of neighbor. A tiny handful of Catholics—unfortunately neither Pope Pius XI nor Pope Pius XII among them—did see the light. With regard to Nazi and Axis crimes against Jews, Cardinal Hinsley is one of them. “Words are weak and cold; deeds and speedy deeds are needed to put a stop to this brutal campaign for the extermination of a whole race,” Cardinal Hinsley told his audience at the World Jewish Congress. His words were not weak and his heart was not cold. Thank you.



[1] Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 8, Verse 11: “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their place at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” Kenneth Barker, General Editor. The NIV [New International Version] Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 1450.

 

[2] Book of Revelation, Chapter 2, Verse 9: “I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” Kenneth Barker, General Editor. The NIV [New International Version] Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 1927.

 

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Review of Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 325 pp.  ISBN: 978-0-674-05081-5.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

In this English translation of Papst und Teufel (first published in 2008), Hubert Wolf successfully challenges the conspiracy theories and sensationalism of a number of playwrights, novelists, journalists, and historians who have assessed the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazi state.  Remarkably, he does so without letting Catholic leaders off the hook or covering up their very real moral failures.  Making use of recently released materials from the Vatican Secret Archives, he has produced a provocative and highly readable account of the “view from Rome” during the turbulent decades between the two world wars, as well as new insights into the way Pope Pius XI and Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) understood, interpreted, and responded to the early stages of a catastrophe that culminated in world war and genocide after 1939.

Wolf begins with an analysis of Pacelli as nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929.  The failure of Benedict XV’s peace appeal in 1917 seems to have convinced Pacelli that direct papal intervention in the Great War (and future conflicts) was ill-advised.   Pacelli’s reports from this period also reveal his preoccupation with the ills of modernism (ranging from liberalism and socialism to contraceptives and coeducational sports) and his desire to make state-oriented German Catholic bishops more responsive to Vatican directives.   Although Pacelli was anti-democratic and anti-socialist, he was pragmatic enough to recognize the need for the Catholic Center Party to work with the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic, and although he displayed a level of anti-Semitism that was typical among European Catholics in this era, he strongly condemned the virulent racism of völkisch groups he encountered in Germany during the 1920s.

Wolf follows up with an assessment of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in the Vatican during the 1920s.  Unlike Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who posits a uniform and essentialist Catholic anti-Semitism, Wolf finds evidence of diverse views ranging from the philo-Semitism of Amici Israel, a Catholic organization promoting Jewish-Christian reconciliation, to the vehemently anti-Jewish orientation of Raffaele Merry del Val, head of the Holy Office under Pius XI.   Unfortunately, Pius XI took the side of the Holy Office in a controversy over reform of the Good Friday liturgy, leading to the censure of philo-Semites in the Congregation of Rites and the dissolution of Amici Israel.  Pius XI’s famous condemnation of anti-Semitism in 1928 was an attempt to deflect accusations that might emerge when he dissolved a pro-Jewish Catholic organization, as well as a way to distinguish between an “acceptable” Catholic anti-Judaism and racist anti-Semitism.   The back story Wolf reveals to Pius XI’s decree is a more nuanced story of moral failure than the one Goldhagen tells, but it still seriously undermines simplistic representations of Pius XI as a courageous opponent of anti-Semitism.

Wolf’s chapter on the Concordat of 1933 challenges the “package-deal thesis” promoted by Klaus Scholder, who suggested that Pacelli, as Papal Secretary of State, pressured German bishops to lift the ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party and encouraged the Center Party to support the Enabling Act—both in order to secure passage of a Concordat with the German government.   Nuncial reports as well as Pacelli’s notes on meetings with Pius XI and various ambassadors to the Holy See reveal that Pacelli was caught off guard by the German bishops when they announced they were lifting the ban.  Wolf argues persuasively that if Pacelli had been pulling the strings, he would have demanded something in return for this concession.  Instead, he had to negotiate the Concordat without some of his key bargaining chips.

In the end, both Pius XI and Pacelli made unpalatable compromises in order to preserve the Church’s ability to provide pastoral care under hostile regimes.   It was easy for them, as well as the German episcopate, to condemn Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg, but much harder to openly condemn a head of state—even Adolf Hitler.  In such cases, they preferred indirect approaches, refuting ideas that were contrary to Catholic teaching without naming the authors of those ideas.  Even in the context of race war and genocide after 1939, Pacelli (by then Pope Pius XII) indicated that he preferred public action by German bishops to direct intervention by the Vatican.   When such action was insufficient, Pius XII still considered his own hands tied.

Pope and Devil, by revealing the decision-making processes in the Vatican in such rich detail, presents us with a nuanced story that includes moral successes and failures as well as a large gray zone in between.   Wolf’s theological training, ordination, and prior years of experience in the Vatican Archives work to his advantage as he assesses the interplay of individual personalities and institutional dynamics in the Catholic hierarchy.  His ability to transmit his scholarship to specialists and non-specialists alike earned him the Communicator Award from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2004, and it continues to play out in his leadership of a critical online edition of Pacelli’s reports to Rome during the latter’s years as nuncio in Germany.  Some American readers will be disappointed that Wolf does not do more to engage credible scholarship on this side of the Atlantic, but perhaps his priority was to address readers who are more likely to have heard of figures like Goldhagen, John Cornwell, and Dan Brown—even though such authors make relatively easy targets.  In any case, the book is a refreshing contribution to a longstanding but still unresolved debate about the Vatican’s responses to National Socialism, particularly where Pacelli was involved.  It will not end the “Pius war,” but by demolishing the most egregious misrepresentations on both sides, it points the way toward more productive discussions in the future.

 

 

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Article Note: “Holy See Documents From World War II Go Online. Researchers Welcome Availability of Pius XII Information”

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Article Note: “Holy See Documents From World War II Go Online. Researchers Welcome Availability of Pius XII Information” Zenit, March 25, 2010.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Scholars have long desired greater access to the Vatican Archives, not least for the era of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. This article, in the March 25 issue of Zenit, explains that the Vatican has now made material from the Actae Sanctae Sedis and the Acta Apostolica (the official acts of the Holy See) available online in pdf format. While some of this material had already been published in the Actes et documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Acts and Documents of the Holy See Related to the Second World War) between 1965 and 1981, it is a hopeful sign that theseVatican holdings are now appearing digitally.

To view the entire article in Zenit, go to: http://www.zenit.org/article-28755?l=english.

To view the document collection online, go to: www.vatican.va/archive/atti-ufficiali-santa-sede/index_en.htm.

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