The Shocking Vatican Document That Changes History

Pope Pius XII took his place upon the papal throne mere months before the Second World War erupted. Under his watch, Europe and the world was plunged into the greatest conflict in history, and with it came crimes and atrocities beyond anything seen before. The Pope has been accused of silence, cowardice, even sympathy with the Nazis. His critics say he abdicated his moral duty and stood silent as millions were marched to their graves. His actions allowed the Nazis to get away with the Holocaust and he chose not to use his power to save those who needed it. But Pius XII has many defenders who insist that he was as staunch a protector of the persecuted as anyone could be. Behind the seemingly neutral facade, they claim that the Pope did more than anyone else to save Europe’s Jews and that hundreds of thousands of survivors owe their lives to his actions. Today on A Day In History, we’ll try to find the truth. Was Pius XII Hitler’s Pope? Or was he really one the Nazis’ most formidable opponents? Eugenio Pacelli Our story of Pius XII must begin before he ascended to the papacy. His real name was Eugenio Pacelli and he had a long career in the church as a diplomat. From 1917 to 1929 he served as the Papal nuncio, or ambassador, to Germany where he saw the rise of the Nazis first hand. Pacelli had been in Munich during Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and criticised them for their violent methods and extreme views in letters to colleagues. Pacelli had no reason to expect what they would become. In 1929, he was recalled to Rome to act as Secretary of State to Pope Pius XI. In this role, Pacelli was the second most powerful man in the Vatican. He paid close attention to the rise of the Nazis and did not lose his scepticism of them. On April 4th 1933, mere weeks after Hitler took power, Pacelli wrote to the papal nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, to, quote, “ask for his intervention against the danger of anti-semitic excesses in Germany.” He was one of the first, if not the very first, foreign diplomats to make such interventions against Nazi anti-semitism. Soon after, it was Pacelli who negotiated the 1933 Concordat between Germany and the Vatican. Concordats were a standard piece of Vatican diplomacy - they’d signed 38 of them with different countries between 1919 and 1933 - and it was by no means a special alliance or sign of special favour as critics have charged. In the Concordat, Hitler promised not to persecute the church and allowed its organisations to continue, but in exchange the church would not become involved in political affairs. Naturally, Hitler broke his promises immediately, banning Catholic youth groups, putting vocal clergy on trial, and cutting off funding to Catholic private schools. In 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, several leading German Catholics were wiped out in the SS purge. The Vatican privately protested these offences but they did not openly condemn the regime. This often seems confusing to people, but the Vatican had long sworn out of political affairs. These were not the Middle Ages. Neither the Vatican nor the other nations of Europe believed the Pope had the authority to take sides in political events. There was also the issue of Germany’s 30 million Catholics, who could be targeted if the Pope made an enemy of the Nazis, while the Catholics who sympathised with the Nazis might break away from the Vatican if forced to choose between them. There was also the obvious fact that the Vatican sat in the heart of Rome, surrounded by the forces of Mussolini’s fascist Italy. History offered a long list of Popes who had been deposed or even killed by their enemies. Uncover the truth about Pope Pius XII and Adolf Hitler in these Vatican documents. Learn about the relationship between the Catholic Church and Nazi Germany during World War II. Sources: David I. Kertzer, ‘The Pope’s Secret Back Channel to Hitler’, The Atlantic, 31st May 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, (1999) Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1936, (2000) Rabbi David G. Dalin, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis, (2005) Ronald J. Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, (2000)