Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Pages 28-31

Two Views

The Vatican Statement on the Holocaust, “We Remember: a Reflection on the Shoah”

A Jewish Anti-Zionist Writer

The Truth at Last About Pope Pius and The Holocaust

By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal

In its March 18, 1998 editorial “The Vatican’s Holocaust Report,” The New York Times hails Pope John Paul’s repudiation of anti-Semitism, but calls on him to take the next step by pointing to the failure of Pope Pius XII to speak out against Nazi atrocities. The Times concludes that a “full exploration of Pope Pius’ conduct is needed.” At the same time Jewish organizations and the chief rabbi of Israel blasted the Vatican apology as “too little, too late.”

The full and complete story of Pius XII’s activities brings to mind Gilbert and Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore”: “Things are seldom what they seem. Skimmed milk masquerades as cream.”

The media, particularly the printed, have persistently and consistently gone out of its way to bring to its readers any and all references to Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe. The incredible and incessant number of references, often on the front page, to the Swiss withholding of deposits of Holocaust victims is but the latest “looking back” with guilt to the European tragedy.

The tempo of the Holocaustomania has most recently been stepped up in order to induce deep feelings of guilt, particularly on the part of Christians, at a time when Israelis and Palestinians are very much deadlocked in their negotiations and Tel Aviv could use renewed public sympathy.

Accusations in the New York Times ’ editorials and in its letters to the editor, also appearing elsewhere in the media, that Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) did nothing during World War II to help Jews prove factually to be a total perversion of the truth. This aged canard has been advanced in support of the demand that the Vatican now issue a further and fuller apology to the Jewish people as the bishops of France have already done.

A close examination of the historical record reveals the very many positive actions of the wartime pope on behalf of endangered Jews. In 1934, as papal secretary of state, Pacelli had urged Pope Pius XI to open the doors of Vatican City to Italian and German dissidents. Shortly before his election, the pope-to-be demonstrated his concern for Jewish intellectuals by sending a letter (dated Jan. 12, 1939) to the four cardinals of the U.S. and Canada, begging them to try to remedy the “deplorable reluctance” of Catholic universities in those countries to accept more German Jewish professors and Jewish thinkers on their faculties.

As pope the following year, he founded the Catholic Refugee Committee in Rome and put in charge of this activity his own secretary, Father Robert Leiber, and his housekeeper, Mother Pasqualina. According to Monsignor G. Roche’s well-documented study Pie XII Avant l’Histoire, this committee paved the way for tens of thousands of German Jews to enter America as Catholics, providing them with a regular and efficient service documentation, baptismal certificates, financial aid, and arrangements abroad. This French historian estimated that by 1942 over one million Jews, on Vatican directives, were being housed in convents and monasteries throughout Europe.

The Holy Father himself set an example by taking care of some 15,000 Jews at Castel Gandolfo, as well as several thousand in Vatican City, where the refugees of all faiths included such famed diplomats as the future Christian Democratic Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi and Socialist leader Pietro Nenni. By 1943 these refugees were overflowing into the papal apartments themselves. Chief Rabbi of Rome Israel Zolli subsequently became a Catholic convert, reportedly in gratitude for Pius’s wartime protection, and took as his given name, Eugenio, Pius XII’s given name.

Meanwhile, under the personal authorization of Pope Pius, Monsignor Angello Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, was working assiduously at his Istanbul post to help many hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews on their way to Palestine. In France the pope’s deputy, Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, and his Joint Distribution Committee were doing everything in their power to facilitate Jewish emigration under the very nose of the government of Marshal Henri Philippe Pþtain.

An underground printing press at Nice, protected by the archbishop and the mayor of the city, produced 1,895 identity cards, 1,360 work permits, 1,230 birth certificates, 428 demobilization letters and 950 baptismal certificates before it was discovered. And as far as Hungary was concerned, the Holy Father, through personal correspondence with Regent Miklos Horthy, won guarantees that the country’s 800,000 Jews would not be deported if they submitted to mass baptism.

Because of his show of concern for the Jewish plight, often in a spectacular way, Eugenio Pacelli might rather have been accused of pro-Zionist sympathies. As a cardinal coming into New York harbor in October 1937 aboard the Conte di Sa voia, he asked the ship’s captain to fly, alongside the papal flag, the six-pointed star of the future state of Israel in honor of the 600 Jewish refugees then on board. And just prior to the entrance of the German army into Rome in 1943, the pope ordered the Papal seal to be prominently engraved on the main Roman synagogue for its protection.

The famed, highly successful play “The Deputy,” by Rolf Hochhuth, which ran on Broadway in 1964, nevertheless was an exposition of the theme that Pope Pius lacked compassion and could have saved many Jewish lives. The main condemnatory evidence against the pope was his reluctance to go along with President Roosevelt’s suggestion that the pope publicly condemn the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz. The pope always had to face the possibility that such an open condemnation of the Nazis could lead to the seizure of Vatican City.

Did that reluctance to take up the Roosevelt suggestion spell out anti-Semitism? As Jesuit Father Robert Leiber, his secretary, wrote, “The Pope sided very unequivocally with the Jews at that time. He spent the entire fortune he inherited from his family as a Pacelli on their behalf.”

The Holy Father had similarly been silent on any condemnation of the multifold illegal actions and cruelties of the Communist regime, which was fighting the Hitler horde. That silence, however, had been in accordance with a specific promise extracted from him by the U.S. and Britain, who had, meanwhile, be come allied with the Soviet Union.

The necessity for the utmost secrecy in the relations between the Vatican and the Allied Powers as the Nazis spread their hold on Europe was further emphasized in British documents. The 1972 release of British Foreign Office papers showed that Pope Pius XII had learned of the Nazi plans for invading France and the Low Countries in May 1940, and had then tipped off the British. According to Jesuit historian Reverend Robert Graham, the pope’s information about the impending assault had come from a German spy, who was in fact a double agent. The invaluable information was forwarded to 10 Downing Street in a coded cable from the British minister at the Holy See. The Holy Father was at the same time involved in negotiations with certain anti-Hitler officers seeking a British guarantee for non-humiliating peace terms in the event that their planned coup d’état should be successfully staged. After the fall of France, the pope asked the British to destroy any record of the Vatican’s involvement in abortive negotiations with the anti-Hitler resistance.

It is true that the release by the Vatican of its own documents for 1943 showed that Rome had been deeply disturbed by the growing possibility of a Jewish state in the Middle East. But opposition to statehood did not vitiate the quiet diplomacy carried on in behalf of the European Jews, as these papers revealed. The Catholic leadership had long insisted that refugeeism be distinguished from statehood. Cardinal Luigi Maglione, then secretary of state, suggested “other territories which would be more suitable” for a Jewish entity, while Pope John, even when as papal nuncio in Istanbul he was helping Jewish refugees reach Palestine, was expressing fears that his efforts might lead to the “realization of the Messianic dream.”

Monsignor Domenico Tardini, deputy secretary of state, wrote to the papal legate in London, Monsignor William God frey, that “the Holy See had never approved the plan to make Palestine a Jewish homeland.” This followed in a clear line the traditional Vatican opposition to the objectives of Zionism, expressed guardedly by Benedict XV in 1921 and forthrightly by Pius X to Herzl himself in 1904. This was only changed with the Vatican’s full recognition of the Israeli state and exchange of diplomatic representations in December 1993 in the wake of continued, enormous Zionist pressures exerted particularly on Cardinal O’Connor in New York.

But this same 688-page volume contained documents that the Vatican protested strongly the mass arrest of 1,027 Jews in the Rome ghetto and their transportation to death camps north of Italy. Cardinal Maglione summoned the German ambassador to the Holy See, Baron Ernst von Weizaecker, and in the strongest language (according to the introduction to the volume) indicated that the raid on the Jewish quarter “was painful for the Holy Father, painful beyond words, that in Rome itself, under the very eyes of a common Father, so many persons are made to suffer simply because they belong to another race.”

“What would the Holy See do if things were to continue like this?” asked the German envoy.

“The Holy See would not like to be faced with the necessity of voicing its disapproval,” the cardinal replied, indicating that the pope might make a public protest, the first of the war. “For now the Holy See hopes not to say anything that the German people might consider an act of hostility during a terrible war, but there are limits.”

The ambassador indicated that the raid in Rome had been made on orders from Berlin and Hitler. He asked whether he could keep the protest to himself and not report it to Berlin, and the cardinal agreed.

“Your Excellency has told me that you will do something for the poor Jews,” the cardinal said. “I thank you. I leave the rest to your judgment. If you think it more opportune not to make any mention of our conversation, so be it.”

Secretiveness was maintained because mention of the conversation was deemed to be “dangerous and counterproductive.” Of the 1,027 Jews arrested on Oct. 6, 1943, only about 15 returned alive. But, as British Minister to the Holy See Sir Francis Godolphin D’Arcy Osborne noted in the British Foreign Office documents, the Vatican’s intervention “seems to have saved a certain number of Jews,” and, as importantly, there were no further mass arrests after the Vatican’s move. The 22,000 Jews who remained in Rome went into hiding as of that day, often helped by local Catholic clergymen, including the famous Reverend Marie Benoit, a Cappucine, who be came a legendary figure in rescuing Roman Jews.

Perhaps the best summation of Pius XII’s efforts on behalf of the Jews was contained in the book Three Popes and the Jews, by the Israeli journalist and diplomat Pinchas E. Lapide:

“The Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000, Jews from certain death at Nazi hands...these figures exceed by far those saved by all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined.”

This history of most constructive efforts by Pius XII certainly should not be shrouded by the prevailing Holocaustomania spun by The New York Times and other segments of the media.

1 Lapide, Pinchas E., Three Popes and the Jews, (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1967), pp. 214-15.