Hitler and the Holocaust (21 page)

The Vatican had protested against the planned deportations of Jews on 14 March 1942, expressing some astonishment that a nation supposedly committed to Catholic principles could act in this manner. The papal chargé d’affaires (who
had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Slovak bishops to take a unified position against the codex of September 1941) now warned Tiso of serious consequences if he ignored the Vatican protest. On 23 May 1942, the Slovak government sent a chilling communication to the Vatican proudly defending its anti-Semitic policy: the mass deportation was “part of a much larger general plan” put into operation in agreement with the German government. “Half a million Jews would be transported to Eastern Europe. Slovakia will be the first State whose inhabitants of Jewish origin would be accepted by Germany.”
⁷²
The very detailed elaboration of government policy that followed (transmitted by the Slovak representative to the Holy See, Karol Sidor) spoke of the imminent deportations of Jews from France, Holland, Belgium, Bohemia, Moravia, and the German Reich. The Slovak report announced that they would be settled in areas near Lublin, where they would be “under the protection of the Reich [
sotto la protezione del Reich/Schutzbefohlene]”
This communication observed that Hungary, too, would be requested to deliver its eight hundred thousand Jews. While washing its hands of its own Jewish citizens, the Slovak government told the Vatican that the Germans had promised “that the Jews will be treated humanely.”

Vatican Secretary of State Maglione seemed taken aback at the brutality of Slovak government policy and the continuing deportations, especially since Slovakia was a self-proclaimed Catholic nation and Tiso was an ordained priest, whose involvement in such massive crimes could after all compromise the honor of the Vatican and the church. On 13 July 1942, Maglione’s top assistant, Tardini, pointedly noted: “It is a real misfortune that the President of Slovakia is a priest [
un sacerdote
]. That the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to heel, everyone knows. But who will understand that we cannot even control a priest.”
⁷³

The Vatican record in Croatia was particularly open to condemnation and much worse than in Slovakia because of
the monstrous crimes committed by a piously Catholic regime, headed by Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Ustashe movement, which had come to power on 10 April 1941. Ustashe violence directed against the “schismatics” (i.e., the Orthodox Serbs), resembled a “religious crusade.” The Vatican deplored preaching the gospel out of the barrel of a gun, but it also knew how proud the new regime was of its thirteen-hundred-year-old links with the Holy See. The Croatian state had wasted no time in passing racial laws against the Jews—accomplishing in a matter of weeks what it had taken the Nazi regime years to achieve in Germany.
⁷⁴
As early as May 1941, Jews were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The Croatian archbishop, Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb, watched these events with anxiety and perhaps ambivalence. He approved of certain Ustashe actions, for example those against abortion and indecent advertisements, and he welcomed the intense public Catholicism of the new regime. At the same time he felt bound to protest the forced conversions of Serbs and the “brutal treatment of non-Aryans during the deportations and at the camps.”
⁷⁵
Yet while he appealed to Pavelić for measures against Serbs and Jews to be “carried out in a more humane and considerate way,” he did not challenge the racist policy as such. In this respect, Stepinac was acting consistently with the line adopted by Vatican officials during the Holocaust.

By October 1942, the Vatican had received reliable information on the massacres of Jews collected by Father Pirro Scavizzi (an Italian hospital-train chaplain), who reported to the pope that two million deaths had occurred up to that point. From this and many other sources (Allied, Polish, Jewish, and others) including its own nuncios, the Vatican knew by the late autumn of 1942 that the systematic killing of Jews was taking place all over Nazi-occupied Europe.

Eventually, in his Christmas message of 1942, Pius XII did say something. In one single sentence he mentioned that “hundreds of thousands of people, through no fault of their
own and solely because of their nation or race [
stirpe
], have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.”
⁷⁶
As the British historian Owen Chadwick has observed, “the Pope was very careful to guard against exaggeration.” Rather like the high officials of the British Foreign Office, “he thought that the Poles and Jews exaggerated for the sake of helping the war effort.”
⁷⁷
Hence the numbers mentioned in his broadcast were far lower than the estimates in the reports which the Vatican had earlier received. Nor was there any mention of Nazis, Jews, Poles, or other particular victims.

The pope’s general appeal to the world’s conscience, while angering some and pleasing others, was well understood by at least one of the German bishops. On 6 March 1943, Konrad von Preysing evoked the message when writing to Pius XII, asking him to try to save the Jews still in the Reich capital, who were facing imminent deportation, which would lead to certain death. “Even more bitterly, the new wave of deportations of the Jews which just began in the days before 1 March, particularly affects us here in Berlin. Several thousands are involved: Your Holiness has alluded to their probable fate in your Christmas Radio Broadcast. Among the deportees are also many Catholics. Is it not possible that Your Holiness tries once again to intervene for the many unfortunate innocents [
die vielen Unglücklichen Unschuldigen]?
It is the last hope for many and the profound wish of all right-thinking people.”
⁷⁸

Pius XII’s lengthy reply (dated 30 April 1943) covered many themes that had preoccupied him all through his wartime correspondence with the German bishops. He expressed his pain at the fierce Allied aerial bombardments of German cities and reported on Vatican efforts to secure information about German soldiers captured or missing in Russia. Pius XII did not directly respond to Preysing’s appeal to speak out about the Jews. But he did articulate his satisfaction at the fact that it was specifically Berlin Catholics who had shown such fraternal love toward “the so-called non-Aryans” (
Nichtariern
) in their distress. He also wrote of the “charitable
action” of the Holy See on behalf of both “Catholic Non-Aryans” and those “of Jewish confession [
Glaubensjuden]”
emphasizing that the Vatican had spent considerable sums “for the transportation of emigrants overseas” (much of this money had come from American Jewish sources, which was not mentioned).
⁷⁹

The pope also noted that while the Holy See expected neither heavenly nor earthly rewards for its humanitarian gestures, it had received “the warmest recognition for its relief work” from Jewish organizations. Pius XII even found a word of “fatherly recognition” for Father Bernhard Lichtenberg, a Catholic bishop who had been imprisoned by the Nazis for his courageous sermons (in solidarity with the deported Jews) and who was to die on his way to Dachau shortly afterward. No less significantly, Pius XII told Preysing that he gave to his pastors at the local level “the duty of determining if and to what degree the danger of reprisals and diverse forms of repression … seem to advise caution, to avoid the greater evil [
ad maiora mala vitanda
] despite alleged reasons to the contrary.”
⁸⁰
The pope felt that under wartime conditions he had to exercise great care in order not “to impose useless sacrifices on German Catholics, who are already so oppressed for the sake of their faith.”
⁸¹

Perhaps in a delayed response to Preysing’s appeal, Pius XII did allusively refer to the subject in an allocution to the cardinals on 2 June 1943. This was the second and last time that he would touch in public on what we now call “the Holocaust.” “Do not be astonished,” he said, “if we lend our ear with particularly profound sympathy to the voices of those who turn to us imploringly, their hearts full of fear. They are those who, because of their nationality or their descent, are pursued by mounting misfortune and increasing suffering. Sometimes, through no fault of theirs, they are subjected to measures which threaten them with extermination.”
⁸²
This short section was suppressed by the Axis powers in their reports on the pope’s speech, but Vatican radio did
broadcast it to Germany, adding that those who make “a distinction between Jews and other men” were unfaithful to God and the divine commandments.

Only on 2 June 1945, before the Sacred College of Cardinals, did the pope feel free to fully unburden himself and call things by their proper names. The pope now claimed to have foreseen the disaster of National Socialism “when it was still in the distant future, and few, We believe, have followed with greater anxiety the process leading to the inevitable crash.”
⁸³
He pointed out that “the Church did everything possible to set up a formidable barrier to the spread of ideas at once subversive and violent.” In no way had the concordat implied “any formal approval to the teachings or tendencies of National Socialism.”
⁸⁴
He recalled how the 1937 encyclical had boldly exposed Nazism as “an arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of His Doctrine and of His work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the overthrow of human liberty and dignity.”
⁸⁵
This sharp drawing of the lines in 1937 had opened the eyes of many, though regrettably not of all, Catholics. There were some, he admitted, who had been “too blinded by their prejudices or tempted by political advantage” to oppose National Socialist ideology with sufficient vigor.

But the pope’s own record after the German military occupation of Rome in September 1943 also left something to be desired. More than one thousand Roman Jews (out of a population of eight thousand) were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from under the windows of the Vatican, so to speak. True, there were also Roman Jews who were hidden in monasteries, convents, and even in the Vatican itself. But it is not clear how much Pius XII had to do with the rescue actions or whether he directly approved them.
⁸⁶

On 16 October 1943, the SS and German military police surrounded the Roman ghetto, rounding up and transporting Jews to the Italian Military College—less than half a mile from the Vatican. The same morning, the pope ordered
Maglione to summon the German ambassador, Ernst von Weizsäcker. The cardinal told Weizsäcker how “painful beyond words it is for the Holy Father that here in Rome itself, under the eyes of the Common Father [
sotto gli occhi del Padre Commune
], so many people should be made to suffer uniquely because they belong to a certain race [
appartengono ad una stirpa determinata]”
Maglione appealed to the ambassador’s “tender and good heart—to try to save these many innocent people” invoking his sentiments of humanity and “Christian charity.”
⁸⁷
He also suggested that “the Holy See did not want to be put in a position that forced it to protest [
non deve essere messa nella necessità di protestare]”
if the German deportations continued. In such a case, “it would have to trust for the consequences in the Divine Providence.” Most remarkable of all was Maglione’s admission that “the Holy See had been prudent enough not to give to the German people any impression of having done or wanting to do anything against Germany during this terrible war [
per non dare al popolo germanico l’impressione di aver fatto o voler fare contro la Germania la minima cosa durante una guerra terribile
].”
⁸⁸
Neither Pius XII, Maglione, nor any other high Vatican officials wanted a rupture with Nazi Germany.

Pius XII’s refusal to make a public denunciation of the Roman
razzia
(roundup) was no different from the position he had adopted when vast numbers of Jews had been deported from across Europe in 1942 or murdered in Russia, the Ukraine, and Poland. Had such a protest been made, it is quite possible that more Catholics might have helped to rescue Jews in occupied countries or that more Jews might have fled in time from their Nazi hunters. Nor did the Vatican oppose discriminatory laws against Jews or the social segregation that resulted, even as the Holocaust was raging in the heart of Europe. In the autumn of 1941, a report by the French ambassador to the Holy See, Leon Bérard, confirmed to Marshal Henri Pétain that the Vatican had no objection to Vichy’s draconian anti-Jewish statutes, provided that the French government
acted with “justice and charity.”
⁸⁹
The pattern in Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and other countries that passed anti-Semitic legislation was almost always the same. Vatican objections were rarely directed against the principle of discrimination per se, though it did object to violence, murder, and racist assumptions about baptized Jews that conflicted with Catholic doctrine or church prerogatives. As late as August 1943, the Jesuit Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi observed that according to the principles and traditions of the Catholic Church the Italian anti-Jewish laws had “dispositions that should be abrogated but contain others worthy of confirmation.”
⁹⁰

Such hesitations and ambivalence cannot be divorced from the deep suspicion in which the church still held the Jews, a distrust that the unfolding Holocaust was unable to significantly dent. They were still identified theologically as a “deicide” people in most Catholic minds; they were seen as being linked with the forces of liberation, Freemasonry, rationalism, and secularism in the democratic west and with a dictatorial and ruthless Bolshevism in the east. The Jews embodied in Catholic tradition a secular “modernity” that was considered inimical to the ideals of Christian society and its vision of redemption. The churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were unable—with a few honorable exceptions—to shake off the age-old “teaching of contempt” toward the Jews, though they neither conceived, collaborated in, nor approved of the Holocaust. To quote Emil Fackenheim, the “Final Solution” was the result of “a bi-millennial disease within Christianity
itself
, transmuted when Nazism turned against the Christian substance.”
⁹¹