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

What exactly did the Vatican do for the Jews? The 11 volumes of the Vatican's wartime documents, Actes et documents du Saint Siege relatifs a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, reveal that until his death in August 1944, Vatican Secretary of State Luigi Cardinal Maglione, the first person to see the Pope every morning, frequently instructed the Vatican's diplomatic representatives in many Nazi-occupied and Axis nations, including Japan, to intervene of behalf of endangered Jews. After Maglione's death, Monsignor Tardini continued to send out instructions until the end of the war. To cite a few of many examples, in Slovakia, which was headed by an anti-Semitic Catholic priest, the Vatican vigorously protested the anti-Semitic laws and the deportations of Jews. On September 4, 1941, a short time after Monsignor Joseph Marcone took his post as the Vatican's unofficial diplomatic representative in Croatia, Maglione instructed him to intervene on behalf of Serbs and Jews, who were being brutally persecuted by the Nazi-installed puppet regime. On October 31, 1941, Maglione encouraged the papal nuncio in France and Pierre Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon to intervene with the Vichy regime in order to soften the practical application of the anti-Semitic laws. The nuncio's subsequent protest against the deportations of Jews in August 1942 received international attention. In February 1943, the Vatican sent money to Romania to help the Jews who were languishing in concentration camps there.

In Italy the Vatican protected foreign Jews who were being detained at the Ferramonti concentration camp in the southern part of the country. When the roundups of Roman Jews began in October 1943, Pius XII took prompt action. He ordered Cardinal Maglione to make a strong protest with the German ambassador and had an Austrian bishop living in Rome protest the arrests with the German military governor of Rome. Additionally, thousands of Jews were given shelter in convents, monasteries, and the Vatican itself. On June 25, 1944, Pius XII sent an open telegram to Nicholas Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, urging him to stop the deportations of Jews. The Pope's intervention, along with those of President Roosevelt, King Gustav of Sweden, and the Red Cross, brought a temporary halt to the deportations.

Goldhagen is wrong when he asserts that the Pope "never privately instructed all European cardinals, bishops, priests, and nuns to do whatever they could to save Jews." Scores of witnesses have testified that they received instructions from the Pope and his top aides to help and to protect Jews. The witnesses include Pietro Cardinal Palazzini and Tibor Baranski, who were both honored as "Righteous Gentiles" by the State of Israel; Paolo Cardinal Dezza, S. J.; the aforementioned Cardinal Gerlier, who was quoted in the Australian Jewish News (April 16, 1943) that he was obeying Pius XII by opposing the Vichy regime's anti-Semitic policies; and Monsignor J. Patrick Carroll-Abbing, who died recently. In his books, Nascosti in Conventi ("Hidden in Convents," 1999) and Gli Ebrei Salvati da Pio XII ("The Jews Saved by Pius XII," 2001), the Italian journalist Antonio Gaspari interviewed priests and nuns and many others who said they were encouraged by the Vatican to shelter Jews in Rome. Recently, two Vatican letters were discovered in the archives of the diocese of Campagna in Italy. In October and November 1940, Cardinal Maglione and Monsignor Giovanni Montini, the Substitute Secretary of State and future Pope Paul VI, sent sums of money to Bishop Giuseppe Palatucci of Campagna, informing him that the Pope wanted it spent on behalf of Jews detained in Italian concentration camps and other persons who were being persecuted because of their race.