Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust: a reply to Daniel Goldhagen

Another document that was recently found in the Vatican archives shows that Pius XII had always recognized the anti-Christian nature of Nazism. On November 14, 1923, Pacelli sent a report to Cardinal Gasparri on Hitler's failed attempt to seize power, which took place several days earlier in Munich. "I believe it is opportune to communicate to Your Eminence some further details, that is, regarding the demonstrations of an anti-Catholic character which accompanied the uprising itself, but which have not surprised those who have followed the publications of the papers of the right-wing radicals, like the Volkischer Beobachter and Heimatland," Pacelli wrote. "This character was revealed above all in the systematic attacks on the Catholic clergy with which the followers of Hitler and [General Erich von] Ludendorff, especially in street speeches, stirred up the population, thus exposing the ecclesiastics to insults and abuse."

Although Goldhagen, like other papal critics, sweeps the Lend-Lease issue under the rug, he reluctantly admits that Pius XII acted as an intermediary between a group of high-ranking German military officers who wanted to overthrow Adolf Hitler in early 1940 and the British government. This fact alone should be enough to exonerate the Pope of charges that he collaborated with the Nazis. Yet Goldhagen insists that the Pope was pro-Nazi. In fact, the Vatican's ties to the German Resistance went much deeper than originally thought. In 1944 the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) interviewed The Reverend Robert Leiber, S.J., the Pope's longtime personal secretary. The O.S.S. was looking for information on the July 20, 1944 bomb plot against Adolf Hitler. Leiber had no information about this plot, but informed the O.S.S. about three other conspiracies against Hitler, including one where the Pope played a key role. This report shows that the German Resistance trusted Leiber and the Pope to such an extent that they were kept informed about what was going on. The complete text of this O.S.S. report was published in American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler: A Documentary History (1996), a book co-edited by Jurgen Heideking and Christof Mauch.

Many critics frequently downplay or ignore the Vatican's role in publicizing Nazi atrocities during the early months of World War II. In December 1939 August Cardinal Hlond of Gniezno and Poznan, the exiled Roman Catholic Primate of Poland, submitted several reports to the Vatican describing Nazi atrocities against the Catholic Church in Poland and Catholic and Jewish civilians. After reading them, the Pope ordered Vatican Radio to broadcast Hlond's reports, which received substantial attention in the Allied and neutral countries. On January 21, 1940, the Vatican Radio described conditions in Nazi-occupied Poland: "A system of interior deportation and zoning is being organized, in the depth of one of Europe's severest winters, on principles and by methods that can be described only as brutal; and stark hunger stares 70 percent of Poland's population in the face, as its reserves of foodstuffs and tools are shipped to Germany to replenish the granaries of the metropole [sic]. Jews and Poles are being herded into separate 'ghettos,' hermetically sealed and pitifully inadequate for the economic subsistence of the millions destined to live there." As a neutral state, the Vatican provided the first independent and credible confirmation of media reports about Nazi atrocities, which Germany had previously dismissed as Allied propaganda. With the Pope's blessing, Hlond's reports and the Vatican Radio broadcasts were published in The Persecution of the Catholic Church in German-Occupied Poland (1941), which brought further attention to Nazi war crimes.