During World War II, Pius XII, feared that if he spoke out his German flock would turn against him. For most Germans were anti-Semitic and strongly supported the Fuhrer-especially because most church leaders backed him, an attitude partly inherited from history but re­inforced by fear and imposition. Indeed, the loyalty of some clerics to Hitler did not abate until his death. As Gordon Zahn, a Catholic professor, wrote: Even in the midst of total military collapse, with the Third Reich tottering to its death, [German] bishops were raising their voices to inspire men to offer their last drop of blood. Hitler, who was himself a nomi­nal Catholic in turn, feared that the pope might speak out about the Jewish genocide and turn German Catholics against him, even though their intimidated bishops constantly lauded Hitler's military triumphs. Since German Catholics comprised some 40 percent of the popula­tion, and more importantly of the army, the papal voice could ad­versely affect battlefield morale. The Fuhrer knew that almost a fourth of the SS Catholic membership would not leave the Church even though pressured by Himmler to do so.

That in short is the thesis presented by Dan Kurzman in a lecture titled Hitler's Plot to Kidnap the Pope. As seen here, he was however criticized for the simplicity of the above, and the fact that he appears to apologetic, or as one listener added in fact “After the War, ten percent of the Italian Jewish population were left in Italy. The community has been rebuilt by the influx of Iranian Jews and others from the mid-east.

See also our non-apologetic case study of the same subject:

The pope, in fact deplored the Allied demand for "uncon­ditional surrender," having hopes of arranging a peace based on compromise that would, as he wrote to Cardinal Faulhaber in 1944, let Germany keep Austria and the Sudetenland-presumably without Hitler at the helm. An accord must be powerful enough to keep the Soviets out of Europe. The cardinal, like almost all his priestly German colleagues, followed the papal example and remained publicly silent about the mass killing of Jews "out of fear of men."The reason as Kurzman agrees is Pius feared Stalin more than Hitler. And that Pius “ understood that Hitler, Bormann, Himmler, and other Nazi leaders had the same goal in mind as Stalin-to ban not only the Church but also Christianity as a religion. Pius felt, however, that eventually the Nazi chiefs would be overthrown by German military officers who, he hoped, would reach a negotiated peace with the Allies that would unite both sides in a joint crusade against the Soviets-ex­actly what the anti-Hitler German diplomats wanted. And the pope, with his diplomatic experience, they all agreed, would be just the person to mediate such a deal.” (Kurzman, 2007, p. 104.)

Thus, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Vatican displayed no sign of glee, to Berlin's chagrin. Ac­cording to Fritz Menshausen, the counselor at the German Embassy, in contrast, the Vatican's concern about the communist threat grew even as the Allies urged the pope to stop demonizing Rus­nereby weaken the Allied side. Thus, Sir Francis D'Arcy Godolphin Osborne, the British minister to the Holy See and originally an admirer of Pope Pius, cabled the foreign office in London; that the Vatican had "shown some signs of becoming more alarmed about Russian victories than German behavior. In fact the progress of the war, far from the Vatican more pro-Allied, may, on the contrary, make Ire inclined to make allowances for the Germans."

In fact, most Romans-bureaucrats, clerks, shopkeepers with little revolutionary bent-were passive toward the Resistance, an attitude that had permitted the Germans to occupy Rome so easily in the first place. The Romans were traditionally skeptics and trusted more to fate than themselves; and their skepticism had only grown when, after celebrating the ouster of Mussolini, they found themselves under the Nazi as well as the fascist boot-left in the lurch by their king and premier, who had fled to safety. To the Romans, their city was eternal, as the Church had taught. Armies could come and go; dictators could rule and perish; revolutionaries could revolt and retreat; but Rome would remain Rome, changeless in its grandeur and its ability to survive in a changing world. With the coming of fascism, most other Romans had also shrugged their shoul­ders and hoped for the best. In the golden days after Italy's conquest of Ethiopia in 1936, the Romans took pride in their new imperial status, acquired so cheaply. However, when the cost began rising during the Spanish Civil War, with long casualty lists, the gold began to tarnish. And as the Duce bowed ever lower before Hitler, finally flinging the nation into World War II, the Romans, mainly fascist-cultivated bureaucrats indifferent toward the leftist-domi­ated Resistance, shrugged again and waited for destiny to save them-just as it always had. When the Nazis occupied Rome, it was easy for them to set up a "social police department" in Braschi Palace, Fascist Party headquarters on Via Tasso. A torture house they often arrested people on false charges so that they could steal their possessions and obtain ransoms for their release.

And just  in case Hitler’s plan to kidnap the Pope was real meanwhile, the governments of both Spain and Portugal had invited the pope to "vacation" in their countries; despite the pope's protestations that he would remain in Rome, persons close to him had arranged for his escape, if necessary, according to a papal assistant. The ambassador was apparently referring to this plan, which was drawn up by Count Enrico Galeazzi, architect of the Apostolic, Monsignor Eduardo Prettner Cippico, and Milo di Villagrazia, an attorney. They met secretly with Sister Pasqualina Lehnert, Galeazzi's sister-in-law, and plotted to have the pontiff driven to San Felice Circeo, north of Naples, where he would hide in a villa on a cliff overlooking the sea, accessible only over a steep, narrow, easily defended path. After remaining there for about forty-eight hours, he would sail to Spain, where General Francisco Franco would place him under his protection. Sister Pasqualina, according to this account, went in advance to San Felice Circeo and arranged for the pope's planned brief stay there, injuring her foot when she slipped on the precarious rocky path.

The British minister, Osborne, in an audience with the pope on January 5, 1943, "impressed upon him that Hitler's policy of extermination was a crime without precedent in history." Thus critics wonder why the pope made no distinction between the conventional atrocities of war, including that of captured partisans, and calculated genocidal murder nothing to do with the fighting. Wasn't this crime morally demanding of fiery protest than the battlefield kind?

At the same time however, convents, monasteries, and other Vatican institutions, not all of which would have volunteered to risk their own survival by sheltering Jews, took the risk either on receiving direct orders from the pope or simply knowing his desire. Actually, canon law forbids sheltering in cloistered places anyone outside the Church establishment without the pope's express approval. There­fore, according to Church legal authorities, all those clerics who hid Jews must have received papal approval through some means. They welcomed only females, but conceived, that an approval of the Pope was not essential in an emergency, and the Holocaust would certainly qualify as one. Even so, the pope, to make sure that the clergy understood his wish, spread the word in his oral communications with the clergy. Some, whether influenced or not by the Church's teachings, hid in the homes of lay Catholics-among them Israel Zolli, the chief rabbi of Rome who called a meeting of members of the Jewish Community Council, the most influential Jews in Rome, to decide how to meet the Nazis' demand for the delivery of gold. Thus Jewish leaders called on their people by word of mouth to come with their gold jewelry and trinkets to the great temple on the right bank of the Tiber River at 10:30 the next morning, September 27. They trickled in, and a half hour later the gold collection cam­paign began, with a jeweler and two goldsmiths, equipped with a scale, sitting behind a table in a hall of the temple. The desperation permeating the temple grew as the leaders waited for their Italian brethren to respond. Since most of the rich Jews had already fled the city, the task of saving the community would be left to the poor ones.

But, though the pope was wrong in this wishful appraisal of the Nazi’s , initially he wasn't the only world leader who can be accused of failing to exert a maximum effort to stop the genocide because a "greater cause" was at stake. Other leaders during that period of heinous inhumanity were blinded by long-term objectives they felt had to be pursued with greater priority. Thus President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill refused the gas chambers or the railroad tracks leading to them, arguing that "On further reflection we are not convinced that evidence regarding use of gas chambers is substantial enough to justify inclu­sion in a public declaration."Nor would the British, who controlled Palestine, permit Jews trapped in Europe to seek refuge there for fear of upsetting the Arabs.

But also later again, Osborne would make this entry in his diary: A policy of silence in regard to such offenses against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral lead­ership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and authority of the Vatican; and it is upon the maintenance and assertion of such authority that must depend any prospect of a papal contribution to the reestablishment of world peace. Osborne's revulsion according to Kurzman might have stemmed in part from a conver­sation his close friend, Harold Tittmann, had had with Pius: "[The pope] immediately brought up the subject of the bombing of Rome .... He made it clear [before the San Lorenzo bombing] that he would be obliged to make a solemn and public protest and added that he was certain that the combined effect of the bombing and protest on Catholics throughout the world could only be hurtful to the cause of the Allies."A public protest against an Allied military initiative but public silence when the Nazis were deliberately murdering millions of civilians?

When on July 26 1944, Mussolini was booted from office partly because it dramatically underscored the failure of his policy. The pope asked the Duce's successor, Marshal Badoglio, to demobilize the city as the Allies demanded, but before the new premier could act, allied planes struck on August 13. Nor did the raids stop when the Germans occupied Rome on September 10. The pain these attacks inflicted on the pope suggested to some Al­lied diplomats that in his fury he might refrain from making any moves harmful to German interests, especially denouncing the genocide.

Actually, was the Vatican selective in choosing who could take refuge in the Vatican itself? "Several times we asked the Vatican to grant asylum to refugees who came to us for help," Donald Pryce Jones, assistant for Italy to ass director Allen Dulles, told me, "but they refused." They did, however, "take in some people for money," he said, because "the Vatican hierarchy was filled with German priests" (not because of a papal decision). He did not criticize the outside Vatican institutions, which were packed with refugees. Vatican officials, however, vehemently deny there was discrimination of any kind in any of its places of refuge.

Thus Princess Enza Pignatelli Aragona was sound asleep in her modest home in Rome when the telephone rang at about five that rainy morning. She lifted the receiver, she told me, and heard an excited voice: "Princess, the Germans are arresting the Jews and taking them away in trucks!" "What can I do?" she asked the caller, a Christian friend who lived at the edge of the ghetto. "You know the pope," was the answer. "Go and see him. Only he can save the Jews." Of a noble Neapolitan family, she had been his student at a convent and her father had been a close friend. But even if the pope agreed to receive her at this hour, she could not get to the Vatican, for she did not have a car and there was no public transportation Then she remembered her friend, Gustav Wollenweber, a diplo­mat in the German embassy, who, she knew, opposed his government's anti-Semitic policies. She telephoned him. "Please come and pick me up immediately," the princess urged. "I must go to the Vatican. I'll explain later." While they sped to the Vatican, Princess Pignatelli reflected on the irony of her desperate undertaking; a German diplomat was helping her to frustrate official German policy. On arriving at the Vatican, she pleaded with an official: "Please take me immediately to His Holiness!" The startled official glanced at his watch and wondered if she was mad coming at this hour to demand an audience with the pope! But after she explained her mission, he guided her to the door of the papal chapel where the pope was attending Mass.

When Pius XII emerged, he greeted the princess with a surprised smile, remarking on the hour, and suggested that they walk together to his study. "Your Holiness," the princess urged, "you must act immediately, the Germans are arresting the Jews and taking them away. Only you can stop them." After a pause, Pius escorted the princess to his study, picked up the telephone, and called Cardinal Maglione. Ger­man troops are rounding up the Jews, he said. Call German Ambassador ...Weizsacker urgently and protest the action! The ambas­sador responded carefully: "For more than four years I have followed and admired the atti­tude of the Holy See. It has succeeded in steering the boat amid all shapes and sizes of rocks without running aground and, even though it has had greater faith in the Allies, it has kept a perfect equilibrium. Now, just as the boat is about to reach port, is it worth it, I ask myself, to put it all at risk? I think of the consequences that a protest by the Holy See might precipitate."

The attitude of the Italian population was unequivocally one of passive resistance, which in a large number of individual cases has developed into active assistance. In one case, for example, the po­lice were met at a house door by a fascist with an identity docu­ment and in a black shirt, who [claimed to have] taken over the Jewish home only an hour before and alleged it to be his own ... [and some] even attempted to keep single policemen back from the Jews.

After two days of incarceration in a military college near the Vat­ican, the victims were taken to the city's main railroad station and herded into boxcars. On October 18, these cars pulled out of the Tiburtina suburban railway station packed with more than one thousand Jews, about 90 percent of them women and children. They were calm, resigned, unsuspecting, even as they were deprivedof food, water, and toilet facilities. Five days later, on October 23, the boxcars ground to a halt in Auschwitz and dumped their human cargo into the gas chamber.

But not only Weizsacker was uncertain now; so was the pope. Yes, he had remained publicly silent. But how Hitler, with his mer­curial temperament, might act at any moment was unpredictable. And the ambassador's concern grew when, on October 23, the" envoy read in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano: Persistent and pitiful echoes of calamities ... continue more than ever to reach the Holy Father. The august pontiff ... has not de­sisted for one moment in employing all the means in his power to alleviate the suffering, which, whatever form it may take, is the consequence of universal and paternal charity ... that knows nei­ther boundaries nor nationality ... neither religion nor race.

Weizsacker viewed this complaint about the deportations, however veiled, as jeopardizing the Vatican--no objections need be raised against this statement, inasmuch as its text ... will be understood by only a very few as alluding in any par­ticular way to the Jewish question. And thus  additional one thousand Roman Jews were deported in the next several months. The pope was more trusted now in Nazi circles and less likely to be abducted. On October 28, with almost all the captured Jews dead, Weizsiicker cabled Berlin that the danger of a papal protest was over. Blackmail, it seemed, had saved the pope and perhaps Ger­many as well. Only the captured Jews, it seemed, were losers.

Then on June 8, one month after the Pope was still entertaining SS Wolf (See our case study above) allied forces had taken Rome and General Clark and his staff, wearing battle dress, drove in jeeps to the Vatican and were escorted to the pope's chambers by Swiss guards in their colorful uniforms. Pius had only reluctantly granted Clark an audience, fearing that the invitation would disqualify him as a potential peacemaker in German eyes. Pius invited Clark to talk with him in private before meeting with his other guests. It was not a particularly happy moment for either.

The controversy barely simmered within diplomatic and ecclesi­astic circles after the war until 1963, five years after the death of Pius XII, when Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy, which showed the pope in an almost evil light, created a sensation around the world. And the controversy has continued ever since, but before this book little notice had been given to the importance of Hitler's plot against the Vatican and the related roundup of Roman Jews in shap­ing the pope's wartime attitudes and policies.

Largely due to Allen Dulles's influence, General Wolff would avoid war criminal charges at Nuremberg. But just as an American general ignored Dulles's wish and, after the surrender, whisked Wolff from a prisoner's paradise at war's end to a prison cell, so did other brass also see little reason to go easy on a Nazi general, even without knowing at the time that he had been an intimate of the "monster" Himmler or why Dulles wanted him treated more like an ally than as a war criminal. Several years later after Wolf managed to settle down in Munich he stated when asked by whether he would join the SS again if he could relive his life. He replied wistfully: "I lived a very good life. I had everything I wanted."

 

 

For updates click homepage here