US and British diplomats discussed exerting pressure on Pope Pius XII
to be silent about the Nazi deportations of Hungarian Jews, according
to newly discovered documentation.
The British feared that the
wartime pope might make a “radio appeal on behalf of the Jews in
Hungary” and that in the course of his broadcast would “also criticise
what the Russians are doing in occupied territory”.
Sir Francis
D’Arcy Osborne, the British ambassador to the Vatican, told an American
diplomat that “something should be done to prevail upon the pope not to
do this as it will have very serious political repercussions”.
Osborne’s comments were made to Franklin Gowen, an assistant to Myron Taylor, the US special representative to the Vatican.
Gowen
recorded the conversation in a letter to Taylor, saying he had promised
Osborne that he would bring his concerns to the “immediate attention”
of the US ambassador.
“It was understood that, pending your reaction, he would not take any steps vis-a-vis the Holy See,” Gowen told Taylor.
In
the letter, Gowen also said that Mgr Domenico Tardini, the Vatican
assistant secretary of state, had told him 10 days earlier that Pope
Pius would not “make any radio appeal because if he did so he would, in
fairness, to all have to criticise the Russians”, a member of the
Allies.
He said he withheld this information from Osborne in the
belief that it would be best for Taylor to impart it himself following a
meeting with Pope Pius scheduled the day after the letter was written.
The
letter was dated November 7, 1944, as the Nazis were organising mass
deportations of Jews from Budapest, the Hungarian capital, to death
camps in Poland, Austria and Germany.
Rome had been liberated by
the US Fifth Army the previous June and, with the Vatican behind Allied
lines, the pope had more freedom to speak out.
But as the head of a
neutral state, he understood that he could not condemn the war crimes
of one side without condemning those of the other.
However, on
November 19 – less than two weeks after Gowen wrote his letter – the
Vatican joined the neutral states of Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and
Sweden to appeal to the Hungarian government to end the deportations.
The
British Jewish historian Sir Martin Gilbert, an internationally
recognised expert on the Holocaust, said in his 2002 book, The
Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, that at that time the
Catholic Church in Budapest was hiding 25,000 Jews in homes and
religious institutions.
Simultaneously, the Red Army of the Soviet
Union was advancing westward across Europe and killing and raping many
innocent people as it was driving Adolf Hitler’s armies into retreat.
Gowen’s
letter was made public for the first time by the New York-based Pave
the Way Foundation, which is conducting research into the actions of
Pope Pius, assisted by a US Catholic lawyer, Ronald Rychlak; German
historian Michael Hesemann; and a journalist, Dimitri Cavalli.
Gary
Krupp, president of the foundation, told the American Catholic News
Service that the Allies feared any condemnation of Josef Stalin’s armies
“would work against the unified war effort of the Allies”.
He
said the letter was significant because it showed the pressures that
confronted Pope Pius, who has been criticised for his alleged silence in
the face of the Holocaust.
“The simple reality, which seems to be
ignored by many critics, is that the Vatican was a neutral government
that used its neutrality to save thousands of lives,” said Mr Krupp.
Gowen’s letter was found by Rychlak among Taylor’s documents and has been posted on the Pave the Way Foundation website.
Another
letter made public by the foundation discusses help for Jewish
fugitives, with Osborne telling Harold Tittman, another of Taylor’s
aides, that it must be destroyed because it might endanger the life an
Italian priest who was rescuing Jews if it fell into enemy hands.
It
was dated May 20, 1944, barely three weeks before Rome fell to the
Allies and, according to the Pave the Way Foundation, shows how the work
of rescuing Jews was conducted in secrecy, with most documentary
evidence of such activities destroyed almost instantly.