Did Pius XII abandon the Jews during World War II?

In Holland, when the bishops denounced the Nazis in a pastoral letter read in churches in July 1942, decrying the "unjust and merciless treatment meted out to Jews," the Nazis answered by arresting some 200 Jewish converts to Catholicism, including Edith Stein, the future St. Benedicta of the Cross.

The author of "Three Popes and the Jews," the diplomat Pinchas Lapide (who served as Israeli consul in Milan and interviewed Italian Holocaust survivors) notes: "The saddest and most thought-provoking conclusion is that whilst the Catholic clergy in Holland protested more loudly, expressly, and frequently against Jewish persecutions than the religious hierarchy of any other Nazi-occupied country, more Jews -- some 110,000 or 79% of the total [Jewish community there] -- were deported from Holland to death camps."

In Poland, Archbishop Sapieha of Krakow and two other bishops asked the Pope to refrain from publishing a letter about what was happening in Poland, given the ferocity of the reprisals.

The German bishops also dissuaded the Pope from speaking out clearly since Hitler was so closely watching over the Church.
The Pope sent people to travel through Europe to get information on the persecutions. Tell them that the Pope suffers with them, was the message he sent with his envoys, he suffers with the persecuted. ...

If in these moments he doesn't raise his voice more, it is so as to avoid worse evils (cf. Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War: 20 volumes collected by three Jesuits over the course of 15 years).

Robert Kempner, the German-born lawyer of Jewish origin who was the assistant U.S. chief counsel during the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, wrote this in 1964: "Every propaganda move of the Catholic Church against Hitler's Reich would have been not only 'provoking suicide,' ... but would have hastened the execution of still more Jews and priests."

Marcus Melchior, the chief rabbi of Denmark, argued that "if the Pope had spoken out, Hitler would probably have massacred more than six million Jews and perhaps ten times ten million Catholics, if he had the power to do so."

Those public statements that he did make were carefully worded, but were in any case, clearly understood to be condemnations of Hitler and the Nazi regime.

One of the close friends of the young future pope was Guido Mendez, a Jew who taught him Hebrew, and with whom he celebrated Shabbat. Pius XII helped him to escape to Palestine at the beginning of the War.

Before his election to the papacy, Eugenio Pacelli served as the apostolic nuncio in Germany (the representative of Pope Benedict XV and then Pope Pius XI), from 1917-1929, first in Munich and then in Berlin. Of the 44 speeches Archbishop Pacelli gave in Germany as papal nuncio in his 12 years there, 40 denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology.

As well, in 1917, Pacelli intervened to protect the Jews of Palestine against the Ottoman Turks. And in 1926, he helped the director of the World Zionist Organization to meet with the Pope to speak about the Jewish homeland in Palestine.

On Feb. 9, 1930, the then Cardinal Pacelli was named Pius XI's secretary of state. With his new role, his denunciations of the Nazis continued.

In July 1933, he was one of the main negotiators in a treaty with Hitler's Reich that aimed to secure at least a minimum of liberties for Catholic Germans, and to give a juridical foundation for possible protests. He signed it despite his disgust with the evils of the German government. A British diplomat asked the cardinal whether he expected Hitler to respect the concordat. Cardinal Pacelli replied: "Absolutely not. We can only hope that he will not violate all the clauses at the same time."

In March 1935, Cardinal Pacelli wrote an open letter to the bishops of Cologne calling the Nazis "false prophets with the pride of Lucifer." Before crowds at Lourdes that same year, he decried ideologies "possessed by the superstition of race and blood." At Notre Dame two years later, he called Germany "that noble and powerful nation whom bad shepherds would lead astray into an ideology of race."

"Mit brennender Sorge" (With burning concern), was Pope Pius XI's strong condemnation of Nazism, published March 12, 1937. As the Pope's closest assistant, Cardinal Pacelli, soon to become his successor, was instrumental in drafting the document, which was written in German, not customary Latin. There are drafts of the document with Pacelli's handwriting.

The encyclical decried an exaltation of "race, or the people, or the state" saying one who "divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds" (No. 8). Pius XI affirmed the impossibility of any "attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe" (No. 11).

The 1937 papal letter was distributed secretly and read in every church in Germany on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937.

During his time as secretary of state, Cardinal Pacelli wrote some 50 official letters of protest to the German government. Joachim von Ribbentrop and Gustav von Steengracht, the Reich's minister and secretary of foreign affairs, testified at Nuremberg that they had "drawers full of protests from the Vatican."

Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope, taking the name Pius XII, on March 2, 1939, six months before Germany invaded Poland, the act generally classified as the beginning of World War II.

His first encyclical, "Summi pontificatus" of 1939, was clearly anti-racist. Allied planes dropped thousands of copies of it over Germany.

For his radio message of Christmas 1942, the Pope stated: "Mankind owes that vow to the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline."

In September 1943, the Nazis invaded Rome and demanded from the Jews of the city 110 pounds of gold to avoid being deported. The Jewish community was only able to gather some 75 pounds. The rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli asked Pius XII for help and the Pope directed that chalices of Roman parishes be melted to provide the missing 35 pounds of gold.

Between 1939 and 1945, the Vatican chartered boats twice a year to evacuate the Jews, sending them to the Dominican Republic, Canada, Mexico and Cuba. Since many countries wouldn't accept Jews, they were given false baptism certificates.

The Pope personally stopped the deportation of thousands of Hungarians by appealing to the regent of Hungary.

And on Oct. 16, 1943, he personally detained the deportation of Roman Jews. The Vatican quickly was able to hide and provide for some 7,000 Jews. Nearly every basilica, church, seminary and convent took in and assisted the Jews. Sister Pascalina Reynart, Pius XII's secretary, got food for convents where Jews were being hidden, which included some cloisters (and that implied that a papal dispensation was given to allow persons from outside the community within the cloister walls).

In 1943, some 3,500 Jews were put up in Castel Gandolfo and 400 were enrolled in the pontifical guard -- nearly half the Jewish community of Rome. During the 1961 Eichmann trial, the Pope was mentioned by Gideon Hausner, the Israel attorney general who led the prosecution. Hausner spoke of the round-up of Oct. 16, 1943, saying: "The Italian clergy helped numerous Jews and hid them in monasteries, and the Pope intervened personally in support of those arrested by the Nazis."

When Cardinal Palazzani was honored as Righteous Among the Nations for having saved Jews in the seminary of Rome, he affirmed: "Pius XII deserves all the merit; he ordered that everything possible be done to save the Jews from the persecution."

It is also know that Pius XII was regularly informed of the attempts to assassinate Hitler between 1939 and 1940. Sir D'Arcy Osborne, Britain's representative to the Holy See, wrote in his memoirs that never in history has a Pope been so involved in a conspiracy to forcefully bring down a dictator.

It is thought the Church saved at least 3/4 of a million Jews, with Pius XII always spurring it on. He alone saved more Jews than every other religious leader of the world combined.

The Nazi leader explained his behavior in statements before he died, one of which can be found on the Pave the Way Foundation Web site. The general was concerned that kidnapping the Pope and bringing him to Lichtenstein would have a grave effect on the German military, running the risk that Catholic soldiers would desert. Hence, he spoke to Hitler of the Pontiff collaborating.

These reports, which imply that the Pope sometimes tended toward German positions, are the only documents that have brought some people to believe that there was some sort of compromise. But they should be read in the context in which they were written.

At the same time, it is documented that Pius XII suffered internal agony over the two alternatives he faced: to act in secret and save the greatest number possible, or to decry the Nazi horrors publicly, bur risk a terrible reprisal. In a conversation with Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI), he said, "We would like to utter words of fire against such actions; and the only thing restraining Us from speaking is the fear of making the plight of the victims worse" (Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators (1922-1945), p. 244).

The Pope was also aware of the personal danger threatening him. He formed a government in exile and had guidelines for a conclave to elect a new pontiff in a free country should he be arrested.

In 1963, the play "The Deputy" was written by two communists, drawing from KGB documents, in order to harm the Church. From this, a legend sprang forth, depicting Pius XII as indifferent and even hostile to the Jewish cause.

From then on, a series of slanders have been published: John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope," the film "Amen" by Costa-Gavras, a placard in the Yad Vashem criticizing the Pope, etc.. And despite efforts by historians -- many of them Jewish -- public opinion continues to be swayed against Pius XII.

Still, if one considers testimonies and statements from before 1963 or shortly after, the opposite is true.
According to the Israeli historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, Pius XII "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands" (Three Popes and the Jews – New York, Hawthorn Books Inc., 1967).

Israëli Zolli, who had been Rome’s Chief Rabbi during the war, became a Christian and took the name Eugenio – the Pope’s name – as his own baptismal name . He wrote that: "World Jewry owes a great debt of gratitude to Pius XII for his repeated and pressing appeals for justice on behalf of the Jews, and, when these did not prevail, for his strong protests against evil laws and procedures" (Zolli, Antisemitismo Rome: AVE 1946).

In a letter of condolence for the Pope’s death in 1958, Golda Meïr, the Israeli minister of foreign affairs, wrote: "When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace."

On Dec. 23, 1940, Albert Einstein told Time Magazine: "Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly."

In 1944, the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, stated as follows: "The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion, which form the very foundation of true civilization, are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of Divine Providence in this world."

The Secretary-General of the World Jewish Congress personally expressed his gratitude to the Pope, in September 1945, for his interventions, also donating $20,000 to Vatican Charities "in recognition of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist and Nazi persecutions."

A letter from the Italian front, written Aug. 4, 1944, by Eliyahu Lubisky, a member of the socialist kibbutz "Beth Alpha," published in the weekly "Hashavua," states: "All of the refugees are talking about how helpful the Vatican was. Priests put their lives in danger to conceal and save Jews. The Pontiff himself participated in the work to rescue the Jews."

Another document dating Oct. 15, 1944, reports the account given by Silvio Ottolenghi, extraordinary commissioner of the Jewish community in Rome: "Thousands of our brothers were saved in the convents, in the churches, in the extraterritorial buildings. On July 23, I was summoned to meet with His Holiness, to whom I communicated the thanks of the community of Rome for the heroic and affectionate assistance extended to us by the clergy through the convents and colleges […]."

Benedict XVI stated in "Light of the World": "Pius XII saved thousands of Jewish lives. […] Of course one can still always ask 'Why didn’t he protest more clearly?' I believe it was because he saw what consequences would follow from an open protest. We know that personally he suffered greatly because of it. He knew he actually ought to speak out, and that the situation made it impossible for him. […]

"At the present time, we have new clever people who say that, while he did save many lives, he had old-fashioned ideas about the Jews that fall short of the teaching of Vatican II. But that is not the question. The decisive thing is what he did and what he tried to do, and on that score we really must acknowledge. I believe that he was one of the great righteous men and that he saved more Jews than anyone else" (Chapter 10).

Rabbi Dalin has proposed that Pope Pius XII be proclaimed "Righteous Among the Nations": "Pius XII was not Hitler's Pope, but the closest Jews had come to having a papal supporter, and at the moment when it mattered most. The Talmud teaches that 'whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved a whole world.'

"More than any other twentieth century leader, Pius fulfilled this Talmudic dictum, when the fate of European Jewry was at stake. No other Pope had been so widely praised by Jews—and they were not mistaken. Their gratitude, as well as that of the entire generation of Holocaust survivors, testifies that Pius II was, genuinely and profoundly, a Righteous Gentile."