Pope Pius XII is a towering figure in the history of the Church, as well as global politics, in the twentieth century.
His papacy lasted from 1939 to 1958, so he was pope during the Second World War, its aftermath, and in the lead-up to the Second Vatican Council.
And before his papacy, then-Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli served in the Secretariat of State, and was a prominent player in the tumultuous events in the first decades of the century.
Michael Hesemann is the author of forty-four books, which have been published in sixteen languages. His most recent from Ignatius Press is The Pope and the Holocaust: Pius XII and the Vatican Secret Archives (Ignatius Press, 2022).
The culmination of many years of research, this book is a tremendously significant contribution to the scholarly debate over the role that Pope Pius XII played during the calamitous events preceding, during, and after the Second World War.
Is Pius XII’s reputation as “Hitler’s Pope” an accurate representation? If not, where did this misconception originate, and how did it propagate so widely? What did he do to help Jews during the war? How did he become vilified?
Hesemann recently spoke with Catholic World Report about his new book, the myths about Pope Pius XII, and the truth of the pope’s efforts to fight Nazism wherever possible.
Catholic World Report: How did the book come about?
Michael Hesemann: In 2003, my publisher commissioned me to write a book on “Hitler’s Religion”. During my research it became obvious that Hitler, who followed a neo-gnostic blood-mysticism, was nearly as fanatic against the Catholic Church as he was anti-semitic. His plan was to exterminate the Church after his “final victory”, the end of the War; until then, he still needed the German Catholics to fight for the Reich.
More and more I realized that his antipode was Pius XII, the man who, providentially, was in Munich as nuncio right when Hitler’s rise to power began and became Pope just on the eve of World War II. I wrote a biography of Pius XII, which was translated into six languages, and I got permission to do research in the Vatican Secret Archives in 2008. From this moment on I was able to go through his files, tens of thousands of documents, to learn more about his attitude towards the Jews, towards Hitler, and his activities to counter the Nazis and help the Jews during the persecution and the holocaust.
The result of a dozen years of research is my book The Pope and the Holocaust, the first book that tells the whole story, based on newly-released Vatican documents.
CWR: Where did the myth of “Hitler’s Pope” get started?
Hesemann: When Pius XII died in 1958, everybody knew and recognized what he did for the Jews during the years of the persecution and the holocaust. Representatives of the State of Israel including Golda Meir and Jewish organizations from all over the world hailed him with words of gratitude and appreciation.
Only five years later, the public opinion turned 180 degrees. The reason was the play “The Deputy” by Rolf Hochhuth, a former Hitler Youth and long-term friend of the British holocaust denier David Irving, about the alleged “silence” of Pius XII in the face of the holocaust. Only a few years ago, through the testimony of the former Chief of Romanian Intelligence, General Mihai Pacepa, we know that this was the result of a disinformation campaign of the Soviet KGB to discredit the Catholic Church and prevent the election of Pius XII’s former “right hand”, Cardinal Montini, as Pope; this was without success – Montini was elected and became Pope Paul VI. One of his first deeds was to open the beatification process for Pius XII and order the release of all relevant documents on Pius XII, the War and the Holocaust in an 11-volume scientific edition.
But still, the “black legend” was out and parroted by the usual anticlerical suspects ad nauseam and so you still find people who believe in it or promote it, just because anti-Catholicism sells well on the book market.
CWR: Did Cardinal Pacelli have much experience of Judaism and the Jewish people prior to the Second World War?
Hesemann: More than most Churchmen at his time! Already in school, his best friend, Guido Mendes, was a Jew. When he started to work in the Secretariat of State of the Holy See, he supported Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow and arranged a Papal audience for him. As Nuncio in Germany, he not only helped the local Jewish community but even intervened with the Government of the Reich to stop a massacre of Jewish settlers in Palestine by the Turks, Germany’s allies in World War 1. He supported Zionist organizations and was known to be a friend of the Jews when he was Secretary of State under Pope Pius XI, his immediate predecessor, as several Jewish newspapers and magazines of that time reported.
For the Jewish community, his election as Pope was the best news of the year, since they knew they had a friend in the Petrine office.
CWR: In the book, you identify many examples where newspapers and others publicly acknowledged the efforts of Cardinal Pacelli to fight against the insane racial theories proposed by National Socialism. What were some ways he fought against the insanity of National Socialism before he was pope?
Hesemann: Already in 1933, after the first atrocities against Jews in Hitler’s Reich, he proposed countermeasures, when both the nuncio in Germany and the head of the German bishops’ conference warned him that the Nazis would react with severe retaliations. In 1937, he coordinated the draft of the Papal Encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (“With burning concern”), the condemnation of the Nazi ideology by Pius XI.
In late 1938 and early 1939, just after the pogrom night in Germany (Nov 9, 1938), he planned to evacuate all 200,000+ Jews who still lived in Germany and wrote to all governments of the free world, requesting Visas for Jewish immigrants. Unfortunately, he received only about 20,000, but at least for 20,000 Jews he financed and organized their emigration to the new world. This all happened before he was elected Pope on March 2, 1939.
CWR: Many critics say that Pius XII should have spoken out, should have loudly condemned Hitler and his genocide. Others refer to Pius’ “prudent silence”, claiming he could accomplish more good if he laid low and did not draw the ire of the Nazis. What is your assessment of this question?
Hesemann: First of all, he did speak out on three occasions, which is three times more than the Allies who told the world what was going on only once in vague terms, since nothing was certain or confirmed yet; until mid-1944, only rumors were known.
So the critics can only say that he should have spoken out in more details, calling the victims and their killers by name. But this was risky, very risky. Doing this, he would have earned the applause of the free world but, at the same time, ended all possibilities to help and save the victims of the holocaust. When Pius XII learned that the Nazis only reacted with gruesome retaliations on any public condemnation of their crimes, he decided that it must have priority to save human lives, as many human lives as possible. He did so by both using his Church to smuggle tens of thousands of Jews out of the danger zone, giving them false documents or hiding them in monasteries and other Church institutions and, at the same time, using Vatican diplomacy to stop or at least delay deportations from Hitler’s vassal countries like Vichy France, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. With success: Bulgaria refused to hand over its Jews to the Nazis, Romania kept them in Transnistria, Hungary stopped the deportations mid-way after a Papal protest.
Altogether, he managed to save the lives of about 970,000 Jews by those means, nearly a million! We justly celebrate Oskar Schindler for saving 1,200 Jews – but at the same time we question or discredit Pius XII who saved so many more.
CWR: Why do you think it is that the calumny against Pius XII persists, in spite of all the evidence in support of him?
Hesemann: Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the liberals. Those who try to discredit Pius XII want to discredit the Catholic Church and everything it stands for. And of course it is a cheap way to create a bestseller. Whatever is directed against the Church, even the trash novels by Dan Brown, sells millions.
The latest example is David Kertzer’s The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler [Random House, 2022]. I was sitting just a few yards away from him in the very same room of the very same Archive in the Vatican, so I know what documents he deliberately censored, covered up, or ignored just to sell the dear old lie of a Pope who did not care. And in his opinion, he might be right: His book became a national bestseller, not mine!
CWR: What do you hope readers will get from this book?
Hesemann: Just the plain truth. All the facts others, like Kertzer, withheld. The other side of the holocaust. Yes, there were those powers of evil trying everything to exterminate God’s chosen people. But on the other side, there was a power of good, of love and care and charity, which did not rest to bring light into the darkest hours of human history and to save as many as possible from Hitler’s bloodhounds.