Pope Pius XII and World War II. Historian Filip Mazurczak replies

 

“Pius XII’s Complicated Wartime Legacy: A Response to Danusha Goska”

This is my response to Danusha V. Goska’s review of David Kertzer's book The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler. I have not read the work under review; I have, however, read many books on the papacy and World War II, so here are my two cents.

Arguably no other pope from the last 150 years has been as controversial as Pius XII. Books on him are either apologetic or damning. A year after Kertzer's book came out, Belgian historian Johan Ickx published The Pope's Cabinet: Pius XII's Secret War for Saving Jews, published in English by Sophia Institute Press. Ickx used the same recently opened archives as Kertzer, yet he arrived at radically different conclusions and claims that new evidence casts Pius in a positive light.

It is not entirely accurate that the pontiff was totally silent on the atrocities of Nazi Germany. In his first encyclical, Summi pontificatus, published in 1939, just a month after the Soviet-German dismemberment of Poland, he writes: “The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace.” Meanwhile, in his Christmas message of 1942 broadcast on Vatican Radio, Pius XII said: “Likewise to be banned is the theory which claims for a particular nation, or race, or class, a juridical instinct against whose law and command there is no appeal.”

It is true, however, that such statements were few, and they tended to be vague. By contrast, Pius XII denounced Stalinism in Eastern Europe after World War II rather explicitly. He elevated many archbishops who would be fearless, outspoken anti-communists to the College of Cardinals: József Mindszenty in Hungary, Stefan Wyszyński in Poland, Josef Beran in Czechoslovakia, and the Croat Alojzije Stepinac in Yugoslavia. All these men would suffer greatly for their outspokenness. When the Stalinist regime in Poland arrested Cardinal Wyszyński, Pius XII excommunicated those involved.

Could Pius have excommunicated Hitler? Raised in traditionally arch-Catholic Austria, Adolf Hitler was a neo-pagan whose religion was German nationalism; he stopped practicing his faith as a teenager and hated the Pfaffe (insulting German term for priests). (For an informative study of Hitler’s religious worldview, I recommend Richard Weikert’s book.) He and Eva Braun were married in a civil wedding. Would Hitler have cared if he were excommunicated? Probably not, but then most likely Bolesław Bierut, the Stalinist leader of Poland and an atheist, wasn’t terribly upset either when the Holy See excommunicated him in 1953.

This is, in my opinion, the most problematic aspect of Pius XII’s legacy: that he condemned Stalinism much more openly than he did Nazism. If I were to guess the reason for this, it would probably be what you mention in your review of Kertzer’s book: this pope was a cultural Germanophile, and he considered communism to be a bigger threat to the Church than Nazism.

A few months ago, I watched the film Nuremberg with a couple friends, both historians like me; you reviewed it here. My friends and I had several issues with it, including the depiction of Pius XII. In the film, he is portrayed as a craven hypocrite who opposes the Nuremberg trials. First of all, his cinematic meeting with American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson depicted in the film never took place; it’s pure fantasy. In the scene, Pius is depicted as defending his concordat with Nazi Germany by claiming that he signed when he was a papal diplomat in Bavaria as meant to protect the rights of German Catholics. The viewer is supposed to sneer and say, “Riiiight.”

In fact, the concordat was an attempt at protecting the rights of German Catholics, as Hitler dissolved the Catholic Center Party and harassed outspoken Catholics. You mention the many Polish priests interned at Dachau and other camps. While less numerous than the Polish martyrs, German Catholic priests opposed to Hitler were also imprisoned and killed; they include the Jesuit martyr Alfred Delp; Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg, the heroic and outspoken martyred rector of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin; or the future Pope Benedict XVI's seminary rector.

You mention the Netherlands. I do think this case presents a legitimate reason why other churchmen were prudent. The Archbishop of Utrecht Cardinal Jan de Jong wrote a pastoral letter protesting the deportations of Dutch Jews; the Protestant churches also read his letter during services. While history has rightly remembered Cardinal de Jong as a hero, his bold words had the opposite consequences than those intended; I can imagine other bishops being frightened and prudent after the Germans then deported Jewish converts (including St. Edith Stein) from the Netherlands to Auschwitz.

I also wanted to discuss a tangential issue from your book review: you mention Andrey Sheptytsky in a positive way. I would argue that he was instead a very complex figure. Indeed, Sheptytysky did send Pius XII reports on German atrocities against Jews, and he also helped place many Jewish children in Greek-Catholic monasteries run by the Basilian order, thus saving their lives; they included Adam Daniel Rotfeld, Poland's foreign minister in 2005. In occupied Poland/Western Ukraine, helping Jews, like Sheptytsky did, was punishable by death, and his defense of the Jews merits praise.

At the same time, Sheptytsky was born Andrzej Szeptycki, to a Ruthenian noble family that had become Polonized centuries ago. He changed his identity and became a Ukrainian nationalist. During the interbellum, he protested against the Second Polish Republic's chauvinistic policies towards the Ukrainian minority. However, while Volhynia has become synonymous with the genocide of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists, the OUN-UPA slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in Eastern Galicia (now western Ukraine) as well. This was right under Sheptytsky's windows, and most of the perpetrators were his very own faithful; Stepan Bandera himself was the son of a Greek-Catholic priest.

On the one hand, Sheptytsky was old and had suffered a stroke, but on the other the Latin Archbishop of Lwów at the time, Bolesław Twardowski, informed him about the slaughter of Poles. Yet Sheptytsky said nothing, at least not publicly. If we want to condemn Pius XII for silence, Sheptytsky also should be criticized.

Equally problematic is the fact that, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Sheptytsky sent a letter to Hitler himself, thanking the Führer for “liberating” Ukraine from those pesky Poles and Russians; ordered the celebration of a thanksgiving Mass for Hitler in the Lwów Greek-Catholic cathedral; and assigned Greek-Catholic military chaplains to SS-Galizien units. Could such an erudite, well-educated man as Andrey Sheptytsky, who learned Hebrew to read the Bible and corresponded with rabbis on sophisticated theological problems in the language, been totally unaware of Hitler’s crimes? Just two years earlier, Hitler had destroyed Poland; Sheptytsky was, his ethnic identity notwithstanding, a Polish citizen, and so after Operation Barbarossa he acted disloyally. This is why Yad Vashem has refused to title Sheptytsky as Righteous Among the Nations, despite the numerous testimonies of Jews like Rotfeld who owe their lives to him. While historians like Timothy Snyder claim that the SS-Galizien was not involved in atrocities, only fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front, that is untrue. The SS-Galizien murdered approximately 1,000 Poles and the Jews they were hiding in the village of Huta Pieniacka near Brody; in Huta Pieniacka, many more people were killed than in Lidice or Oradour-sur-Glan.

            But back to Pius XII. We also should remember that Pius XII did directly save many Jews, something neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, as you quote me as saying, did. The UK and US had the capacity to help the Jews by increasing quotas for Jewish refugees, bombing the railway tracks to death camps, or bombing German cities in retaliation (Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, and others were bombed at the end of the war, when most camp inmates had been already killed and most camps had been liberated). Despite knowing perfectly well what Hitler was doing, they did nothing.

In Italy, about 80% of the nation's Jewish population survived the Holocaust. With the exceptions of Denmark and Albania, that’s probably the highest proportion of any country occupied by the Third Reich. There are numerous reasons for this. One is that the deportations of Italian Jews – by both Germans and Italian Fascist gendarmes, soldiers, and police – began late compared to the rest of Europe, in the second half of 1943, more than a year after the Jews in most other European countries had been sent to death camps and two years after two million Soviet Jews were shot in the “Holocaust by bullets.”

While Mussolini implemented antisemitic legislation depriving Italian Jews of basic human rights and liberties, employment, and the right to marry non-Jews, he was not interested in deporting them to Auschwitz until Hitler invaded Italy and brought Mussolini back to power in the fascist puppet state based in Salò (earlier in 1943, the Italian marshal Pietro Badoglio had deposed Mussolini and joined the Allies). Another reason for the high survival rate of Italian Jews was the fact that Italy bordered neutral Switzerland, a nearby haven. Furthermore, Italy’s Jewish population was small (about 35,000 people in a nation of 44 million) and well-assimilated, which made hiding it easier.

And there is the role of the Church. A great many Italian nunneries and monasteries rescued Jews. In Assisi, the town of St. Francis, Italian Franciscans saved hundreds of Jews in what one Polish-Jewish writer has dubbed the “Assisi Underground.” In Rome, about one in ten Jews were deported to Auschwitz, less than the Italian and European average. If you've been to Rome, you know that there as hundreds of churches in the Eternal City. Pius XII appealed to convents, including cloistered ones, to hide them. In Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence, Pius XII hid thousands of people: Jews, Allied POWs, and local Italians whose homes were bombed by the Allies. The famous film The Scarlet and the Black stars Gregory Peck as Father Hugh O'Flaherty, the real-life Irish priest and Vatican official, a close confidante of Pius XII, who rescued many Jews and Allied POWs. O’Flaherty acted with Pius' approval. Many Jews were hidden in the Vatican, some dressed up as Swiss Guards. About half of the Roman Jews who survived the war owed their lives to Church institutions. The Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome was also another haven for many Roman Jews.

Pius XII was a career diplomat. He did use the Holy See's diplomatic corps to save Jews. One example is Giuseppe Burzio, the Vatican's representative to Slovakia, at this time a Fascist puppet state run by Mons. Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist. Tiso signed decrees sending tens of thousands of Slovak Jews to Auschwitz; he even paid the Germans 500 Reichsmarks for every Jew they murdered. Mons. Burzio lodged numerous protests to Tiso, imploring him to spare the Jews; at the end of the war, Tiso finally stopped deporting them to death camps (he was nevertheless an ignoble figure who also sent 50,000 Slovak troops to help the Germans invade Poland from the south). Meanwhile, the Vatican's representative to Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria, Mons. Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, issued many baptismal certificates that saved Jews, as did Mons. Angelo Rotta in Budapest, who has been named a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. These were all Pius' men, much like Father O’Flaherty.

            In sum, Pius XII’s wartime record is not perfect, but he doesn’t deserve the opprobrium he has received over the past decades.