The Pope and the innocent
Michael Ledeen The discussion of the Vatican's role in the destruction of the European Jews continues unabated. The most recent contribution to this important debate is the ninth volume in the Vatican series, Actes et documents du Saint Siege relatifs a la seconde guerre mondiak, dealing with the crucial year 1943. Edited by four Catholic experts, this long tome represents the most systematic effort to date to justify the lack of any public protest by the Church against Nazi anti-semitic activities, in particular during the round-up and deportation of more than a thousand Jews from Rome,ille October. A central theme of this hands°'-he and carefully prepared volume is, words of one of its editors, the distinguis":,,i Jesuit historian Robert A. Grahanl, 'something could have been and was d°11Pe for the Jews, as Vol IX documents, '0° t,t part of the Holy See itself in the diser`w silence which is characteristic of ec)rir passion.' Perhaps the most controversial elc''',1,c in Volume IX is that which concerns 'if, infamous round-up of the Jews of Rollie the early hours of the morning of 16 October, 1943. Critics of the Pope have long emphasised the silence of the Vatican during the arrest and deportation which took place, as the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Maglione put it, 'under the eyes of the Holy Father'. The editors of the Vatican documents have now responded with the contentions that Pius XII was convinced that public protest would have been counterproductive, that the Pope was committed to a policy of neutrality, and, moreover, that he did everything possible to ameliorate the condition of the Jews. Finally, there is a strong implication (borne °tit by Father Graham's reference) that the Church preferred to work in secret, shunning publicity. One had expected more convincing evidence for these claims than is to be found in Volume IX, and part of the trouble is that the editors oddly failed to consult the ample documentation in the Jewish archives in Rome. This failure (which one of the editors recently vowed to rectify in a future edition) has produced some confusions regarding Jewish actions and attitudes, particularly in the case of the Nazi extortion of fifty kilograms of gold from the Rome Jewish community in late September. The Vatican volume fails to Mention the visit of Renzo Levi to the Vatican to ask for a promise of assistance (duly granted by the Church) if their efforts to find the gold were unsuccessful. More seri°uslY, the editors credit the initiative to the extremely ambiguous figure of Rabbi halo Zolli, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Who hid during the entire period of Nazi Occupation and then mysteriously converted to Catholicism after the war. Zolli did indeed go to the Vatican, but a day after Levi. Not only is Zolli credited with establishing contact with the Vatican (during a period in which he had broken contact with the Jews), but the incredible claim is advanced that he was the only ading Jew in Rome who understood the I"" Portent of the Nazi occupation. „ The other leaders, we are told, believed that the Nazi menace had been eliminated With the Payment of the blackmail in September Undoubtedly the editors of the fvatican volume would have benefited rwn a close analysis of the numerous Jewish relief and refugee organisations Which had been functioning for several tars, the most important of which (the elasem) was headed by Roman Jewish leaders. Few people in Italy were as familiar with the Nazi menace as Dante A tansi, Renzo Levi, Raffaele Cantoni and *" the others who were actively engaged in • ese - • ese - h uing their co-religionaries from the ° °caust.
T
the he Volume is slightly more convincing in Matter of Pius XII. We are told that s-AgnIrdbinal
Maglione summoned the Nazi ornfettiaatseslayduor, Ernst von Weizsacker,
Pon learning of the round-up of German Jew's, and that Maglione spoke to the —an diplomat 'in the language of
violent emotion, a language which it is difficult to find in the other documents of the war years'. What is this violent language? It is, according to Maglione's notes, a simple request to Weizsacker that he should seek to save the innocent, and a statement that 'it is painful for the Holy Father, painful beyond all words that here in Rome, under the eyes of the Holy Father, so many people are made to suffer purely because they belong to a particular race'. When Weizsacker replied by asking MagHone what the Church would do if things continued unchanged, the Secretary of State said that the Vatican 'would not wish to find itself compelled to pronounce its word of disapproval'. The import of Maglione's words was crystal clear to Weizsacker: if the arrest of the Roman Jews continued, the Church would speak out for the first time. Weizsacker was concerned, and reminded Maglione that the consequences of such an action might be exceedingly grave. Moreover, he noted that the decisions came from Berlin, and asked Maglione if it was necessary to refer to their conversation when speaking with the Nazi leaders in Germany. Maglione's reply is of the utmost significance: 'Your Excellency has said that he will try to do something for the poorJews... .If you believe it is useful not to mention this conversation, so be it.' In other words, there was no formal protest from the Vatican to the Third Reich, even in private. Maglione left the matter to Weizsacker's discretion (as he had, successfully, in other matters in the past).
Despite Maglione's willingness to let Weizsacker ignore their conversation, the Vatican's message had been delivered to the Nazis, and it was reinforced by a letter on the same day from Mgr Alois Hudal, a priest well known to the Nazis for his pro-German sympathies, to General Stahel, the military governor of Rome. Hudal urged that the actions against the Jews should be brought to a swift halt, in order to avoid a rupture between the Holy See and the Third Reich, and a public protest from the Pope. There was then a tacit understanding between the Vatican and the Nazis that the Pope. was about to speak, and would do so unless all actions against the Jews ceased. As we know, neither the one nor the other ever took place. The Pope remained silent, and the Nazi round-ups continued: from October 1943 to 5 June 1944 (the liberation of Rome) another thousand Roman Jews were arrested and deported under the eyes of the Pope. The editors of the Vatican documents refer to some of the protests which the Holy See received about the Papal silence, and comment that 'paradoxically, the menace of a protest could be more effective in the long run than the protest itself.' This may well be true, but here again one wonders what a more complete examination of the available documentation might have produced.. There is, for example, an excellent article in a recent number of Storia Contemporanea by Professor Elena Aga Rossi on Vatican policies during the Second World War. Based on largely unpublished documents, the article refers to a significant exchange between American representatives in the Vatican and church officials in the autumn of 1942. On this occasion, the Americans asked if the Vatican knew of the atrocities which had been reported from Poland, and the reply was positive. However, as Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles wrote to Myron Taylor in October, 'the Vatican had no practical suggestions to make'. Ile observed that most officials in the Vatican felt that it was impossible to restrain the Nazis 'except through sheer physical force coming from without'.
This, if true, would be a peculiar position for the spokesmen of organised religion, and it is in conflict with a letter to Taylor from the Vatican Secretariat of State in 1940, also dealing with the Polish question. Here one finds the Vatican saying that 'the Holy See is convinced that [relief efforts in Poland] will be greatly facilitated . . . if the widest possible publicity is given, both in America and in Poland, to the fact that the Holy See is contributing largely to the Commission's work of relief'. The Vatican was not in the least reluctant to publicise its humanitarian efforts in the case of Polish Catholics, but it invoked (and invokes) 'the silence which is characteristic of compassion' in the case of the Jews. One must ask, therefore, why it was believed that publicity was advantageous in the first case, but detrimental in the second.
The answer to this question is complex, and requires the abandonment of the very limited points of view which have traditionally been imposed on the subject. The fact of the matter is that the Vatican behaved no differently from (and in many ways far better than) the other Western governments. No Western leader undertook to speak out on behalf of the Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust until the concentration camps were liberated by the advancing armies of the Allies and the Soviet Union. There were other matters which the West considered far more important, and Roosevelt and Churchill— like Pius X11—kept their attention focused on the conduct of the war and the pursuit of their national interests. It would be little short of miraculous to find a Pope willing to risk everything for the European Jews, even those under his windows in Rome. It must not be forgotten that the Nazis were quite prepared to kidnap the Pope and imprison him far from St Peter's if he obstructed their policies, and in such circumstances Pius adopted a careful policy calculated to protect his own interests and those of his Church. If it was possible to aid the Jews within that framework, he was prepared to do so, but his priorities were those of the leader of millions of Catholics threatened by Nazi occupation.
Previous page
