What Pius XII Did Or Did Not Do
One Of The World’s Great Experts On The Activity During The Second World War, The Late Father Robert Graham, S.J., Left This Clear, Unpublished Account To Us
This excerpt is from an unpublished essay by the late Father Robert Graham which this magazine feels needs to be published at this time. For decades Fr. Graham was the Vatican's top expert on Pope Pius XII's response to the Nazis. The present piece discusses the Pope's complex aims during the war: to keep the teachings of Christ before a world caught up in the madness of total war, to keep alive the hope for peace, to keep Hitler at bay, to protect and help millions of victims. This essay is part of a longer report on "The Church, Shoah and Anti-Semitism," which Graham prepared for the Vatican Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews.
Graham makes it clear that Pius was not "silent," nor "even neutral." He notes the many times Pius spoke out against the Nazi regime, indicting violations of God's laws and humanitarian principles, condemning sins while leaving the sinners to God. Generally the Allies welcomed what the Pope said, while the Nazis were enraged. But even when the Allies wanted the Pope to speak like an angry prophet or warring belligerent, they understood why he spoke as a sorrowing, distressed man of God, pleading for an end to all bloodshed.
In fact, the world of the late 1930's and early 40's was more understanding of Pius's papal "style" of address and accepting of his conviction that negotiated settlements were the Christ-like way to resolve conflicts than his critics are today. As Graham makes clear, although Pius despised the Nazis, he could not become a propagandist for the Allies. He felt he could only help to end the bloodshed by being a voice of truth, impartial to all warring parties. He could not, for example, accept the demand for "unconditional surrender."
For him, the opportunity for negotiations must always be left open. At the same time he had to act in a way that would never give the diabolical Nazis any excuse for expanding their killing. Graham died in 1997 while in retirement in California.
His entire report will be published in Sr. Margherita Marchione's forthcoming book, Pius XII: Architect for Peace, which is now in press.
From the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939 (the invasion of Poland) Pius XII set as his goal to alleviate as much as possible the sufferings brought on by the war he had tried by every means to prevent. There followed a multiplicity of demarches, initiatives, projects, and the like, directed to keep to a minimum, if not to prevent, the moral and material destruction that accompanies the state of war. In this striving the Pope had in mind his own personal experiences in the First World War, as the representative of Pope Benedict XV, caring for the wounded and the prisoners of war. Pius XII prided himself that his work went forward without distinction of religion, race, nationality, or politics. This was, after all, the model proposed by Jesus Christ to his followers in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The Holy See left an impressive record of humanitarian work during the war. Four volumes of the 11-volume official documentary Actes et Documents du Saint Siege relatifs la Seconde Guerre Mondiale carry the diplomatic and other correspondence of the Vatican on the theme "War victims." These papers demonstrate the wide scope, the disinterestedness, the persistence and perseverance of the Pontiff in the pursuit of his goal. The efforts were often not crowned with success, the effects often far short of the need. But as an expression of the concern of Pius XII for stricken humanity during World War II even the failures remain a striking witness.
Throughout the above-mentioned four volumes, the concern of the Holy See for the special predicament of the Jews of Europe stands out in increasing degree. Both individual Jews in jeopardy and the local or world leadership addressed themselves to the Pope with hope and confidence. In the course of the war, as the situation became more and more desperate, these appeals multiplied, particularly on the part of the world rescue agencies outside the danger zone and in a position to know and to act. And the Holy See did not have to wait for outside signals before moving on its own initiative to intervene where intervention stood some chance of success.
The degree of communication between the Holy See and the Jewish community in these years can be said to have no parallel in history. On the local scene community leaders approached the papal representatives for their support. These reported to Rome for instructions and in many cases did not wait before making the needed demarches to the authorities for the thousands who stood at their mercy. In their turn, the major world rescue organizations repeatedly made their needs known to the Vatican and encountered, as is evident in the record, immediate corresponding action. In the latter years of the war, the U.S. Refugee Board, amalgamating Jewish efforts hitherto dispersed among sometimes competing agencies, kept up the existing tradition of confident relationships with the Holy See.
The greatest setbacks and disappointment were in the Nazi Reich itself Should this be surprising? Hitler built his power on disregard for world opinion, on intransigence, in the face of fierce political, economic, and moral pressure from abroad. Relations between the Holy See and Germany were at a standstill since Pius XI's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge of March 1937. The encyclical of Pius XII in the first month of the war, Summi Pontificatus, repeated the strictures of the earlier encyclical against racism. It was read in the churches but copies were seized and the printers had their presses confiscated. The French Air Force dropped thousands of miniature copies over Germany, a significant gesture but of limited effect.
With the fall of France in 1940 and the resulting absolute hegemony of the European continent by the Axis, thousands were trapped. But there remained the possibility of diplomatic intervention, that is, through the Berlin ministry of Foreign Affairs. But repeated Vatican appeals were returned — if returned at all — with the notation that nothing could be done for the persons concerned, "on police grounds."
This meant that the fate of these Jews was in the hands of the Gestapo and the SS. On these papal interventions, the archives of the foreign ministry are not reliable or representative. The State Secretary, Ernst von Weizsacker, solved his personal dilemma by choosing to meet the nunciature representative — the nuncio himself, Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, or his aide — outside the ministry. In this way the papal initiative could be downgraded to a "private" or "unofficial" demarche, of which he did not have to leave a written record. The nunciature then turned directly to the police, to Himmler. Of these encounters with the Gestapo and the Jewish bureau headed by Adolf Eichmann there is also no record, except by implication. Nothing was ever accomplished, except to exemplify to the Gestapo that the Vatican was interfering in things that were none of its business. Contributing to the Vatican's lack of success in Berlin was the fact that Marshall Goering's famous interception service regularly deciphered the Vatican's telegrams to Orsenigo. The appropriate Nazi officers were thus informed in advance of the papal demand about to reach them. In 1942 there were still 40,000 Jews left in Berlin, judged indispensable for the war effort in munitions works. But in May a bomb attack on a Goebbels-sponsored anti-Bolshevik exhibit in the Lustgarten provoked a fearful reprisal. Five Jews were implicated and the order went out for executions at the rate of 100 for each of the 5 Jews. On the same day 250 Jews were shot, and the other 250 deported. Nothing was published in the press but Adolf Eichmann summoned Jewish leaders to inform them, and to warn them. At such a time what effect could an appeal from the Vatican for a single family in distress have on those who, even in normal days, had long since learned to ignore the Pope?
In the initial years of the war, when emigration was still possible, the appeals took the form of requests for Vatican influence in favor of those needing exit or transit visas, whether for individuals or for groups. Spain and Portugal were key countries in this respect, for instance, and it was thought that Vatican pressure or recommendations could have some effect. After 1940 and with 1942, the possibilities of emigration evaporated and instead the specter of deportation loomed. Though the ultimate destination, or fate, of the deportees could not be ascertained, the circumstances of the transportation-violent, inhumane, with pitiless disregard for the sick, the aged, women and children already gave the operation a macabre, grim significance in the Vatican.
At the first major indication, the deportation of 80,000 Slovak Jews in March 1942, the reaction of the Vatican was immediate. The warning came simultaneously from the papal representative in Bratislava and from Jewish officials in the Swiss Agudat Israel.
Soon after came another anguished appeal from the Papal Nuncio in Hungary. The Vatican official in Slovakia, reporting on March 9, described the deportation as "an atrocious plan." He wrote: "The deportation of 80,000 persons to Poland, at the mercy of the Germans, is equivalent to condemn them to certain death."
In reply to the protests of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Maglione, the Slovak official explanation was that these Jews were going to "work." Their treatment, it was said, would be "humane." A year later the government in Slovakia announced a new wave of deportations against which, as before, the Vatican protested.
In the years from 1942 onwards, there was hardly a country or a point in Europe where the papal intervention was not solicited, and acted upon. The papal involvement necessarily took various forms according to the circumstances and the Vatican's real possibilities of action. The 1942 deportation of Jews from France was the subject of exchanges by the papal nunciature of Vichy, with Pierre Laval. In Italy the interventions took, first, the form of recommendations for exemptions from the antiseptic laws and, in particular, for the foreign Jews, in the sense of dissuading the Fascist government from handing over refugee Jews to the Germans. In the end, no foreign Jews were ever handed over to the Germans at this time by the Fascist government. It is not necessary to claim that this perhaps surprising denouement was attributed solely to Vatican efforts. But it remains true that the Holy See was constantly present in the unfolding drama. With the fall of fascism and the German occupation of the country, the danger reappeared.
On October 16, 1943, in a rapidly executed raid, special SS squads acting on Hitler's orders, seized over a thousand Roman Jews for dispatch to "Poland," from which few ever returned. The same morning, on the Pope's orders, Cardinal Maglione, Secretary of State, summoned the Reich ambassador Ernst von Weizsacker to protest. "It is painful, painful beyond telling," said Maglione to the embarrassed German ambassador, "that precisely in Rome, under the eyes of the Common Father, so many persons are being made to suffer solely because they belong to a certain race.... In the aftermath, those Jews who had escaped the Nazi fury in Rome found secret shelter by the hundreds in the convents and religious houses of the Eternal City for the agonizing nine months of the German occupation.
In the several Balkan states there were different possibilities of intervention. In Croatia, the papal representative, who was in fact only an "Apostolic Visitator" and hence without any diplomatic status before the newborn Croatian state, made frequent demarches, both with the government and with the local hierarchy, naturally on instructions from the Holy See.
In Rumania (predominantly Orthodox Christians), already in 1941 thousands of Jews were deported by the Rumanians themselves, not to Poland but into the newly occupied former Russian zones of Moldavia (Transistria, beyond the Bug River) where many died. In this period the Nuncio Cassulo, on Vatican instructions, was in close touch with Rabbi Alexander Safran and with the famous lay leader William Fildermann. In Bulgaria, also predominantly Orthodox Christian, the papal representative had only the status of an Apostolic Delegate, that is, without diplomatic standing. But some influence could be exercised, despite the small number of Catholics. As is well known, the papal Delegate in Turkey, Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XIII, addressed a personal letter to King Boris (June 30, 1943) imploring him to spare the Jews from deportation. In far-off Salonika, a Greek city, where there was a notable concentration of Jews long resident, an easy target for the Nazis, the interest of the Holy See was also manifest. The appeals from the Jewish leadership came to the Pope through the papal representative in Athens, Giacomo Testa, Apostolic Delegate. The region was partially occupied by Italian troops and the Holy See could in this instance address itself to the drama through this channel.
In Hungary prior to the German takeover the Jewish community enjoyed some measure of toleration, despite anti-Semitic laws. In March 1944 they came into immediate mortal danger. Pius XII, warned by his own Nuncio Angelo Rotta in Budapest, on June 25, sent a famous "open telegram" to the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, on behalf of those suffering, "because of their nationality or their race."
An allusion whose meaning could not be misunderstood. There followed a rain of telegrams from the Jewish organizations and a succession of diplomatic protests of the Nuncio to the anti-Semitic, German-supported successors of Horthy.
In Slovakia at this time, the situation became almost identical. The papal representative at Bratislava reported that the chase after Jews was continuing and, in general, the government and the President (Dr. Josef Tiso, a priest) were servile executors of the orders of the occupation. The telegram of reply was signed by Msgr. Domenico Tardini of the Secretariat of State (Cardinal Maglione had died in August) on date of October 29, 1944 (the original draft bearing the handwritten corrections of Pius XII): "Your Excellency shall go at once to President Tiso and, informing him of the profound distress of His Holiness for the sufferings to which so many persons are subjected—against the laws of humanity and justice—because of their nationality or race, summon him, in the name of the August Pontiff, to sentiments and resolutions conformable to his dignity and conscience as a priest. Let him know also that these injustices committed under his Government damage the prestige of his country and that the adversary exploit them to discredit the clergy and the Church in the whole world."
The case of the Latin American passports, in the spring of 1944, illustrates in a particularly graphic way how Vatican diplomatic intervention could serve the Jewish organizations in their relentless struggle to save what could be saved. Some several hundred refugees were still in France, under German control, but spared deportation because they had passports of a number of Latin American countries. In fact, many of these passports were manifestly illegal. Under pressure from Berlin some of these countries formally denounced them as invalid, thus leaving the holders liable to deportation. There followed desperate appeals representing that lives were in danger if the passports were repudiated. On the prayers of, for instance, among others, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, the Vatican sent instructions, in a circular telegram, to its representatives in half a dozen of the Latin American republics in this sense. The D-Day landing on June 6 put an end to this crisis but not before many of the persons concerned had already been transferred.
This is only a skeleton outline of the interventions on behalf of the beleaguered Jews in World War II, on the part of the Holy See. The action of the Holy See stemmed from its conception of its own humanitarian mission in time of war. But it was also in harmony with the needs and prayers of the Jewish organizations dedicated to the saving of their own people. The concerns of the Holy See, on the humanitarian level, coincided with those of the Jewish community. The Holy See and the world organizations were united at the same points of crisis in the unfolding tragedy.
On June 2, 1943, Pius XII lifted the veil momentarily on activities for the Jews pursued so fanatically and murderously by the National Socialists. He first said that he regarded all peoples with equal good will. He continued: "But don't be surprised, Venerable Brothers and beloved sons, if our soul reacts with particular emotion and pressing concern, to the prayers of those who turn to us with anxious eyes of pleading, in travail because of their nationality or their race, before greater catastrophes and ever more acute and serious sorrows, and destined sometimes, even without any fault of their own, to exterminating harassments."
A year later, June 2, 1944, on the same occasion of his nameday, St. Eugenio, Pius XII alluded in similar terms to his continuing preoccupation for the safety of the Jews under Nazism. "To one sole goal. Our thoughts are turned day and night: how it may be possible to abolish such acute suffering, coming to the relief of all, without distinction of nationality or race" More, the Pope could not say and few understood what these words implied at the time. There is no excuse, however, for not understanding them today.
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