World War II Day by Day

Rome, Italy • March 2, 1939

On this date in 1939 in Vatican City, Roman Catholic Cardi­nal Eugenio Pacelli was elected pope on his sixty-third birth­day. His coro­nation took place ten days later. Son of a Vatican lawyer, Pacelli took the name Pius XII. Pius’ actions during the Holo­caust are contro­ver­sial. Critics have accused him of every­thing from anti-Semi­tism, to cozying up to or out­right col­luding with Fascists and Nazis, and to his failure to publicly con­demn the Nazis for the murder of Europe’s Jews.

A letter in the Vati­can archives written by a German Jesuit priest in Decem­ber 1942 recently came to light. The letter, care of the pope’s sec­re­tary and closest adviser, informed the pope of the mass murder of thou­sands of “Poles and Jews” at Bel­zec, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Said letter was found among the pope’s per­sonal papers, meaning Pius cer­tainly knew of the Bel­zec mur­ders. The pope’s fail­ure to issue a pro­test even using a back chan­nel was all the more gall­ing as thou­sands of Italy’s own Jews were on the thresh­old of being rounded up and deported to con­cen­tra­tion camps, where nearly all of them perished. Pius’s defend­ers, on the other hand, would argue that his mostly silent diplo­macy, such as it was, saved hun­dreds of thou­sands of inno­cent vic­tims and Jews from Nazi terror and Nazi geno­cide in Italy and the rest of Europe as he labored behind the scenes. To wit, in Septem­ber 2023 researchers un­covered docu­men­ta­tion listing 3,200 Jews who had been sheltered from the Nazis in Catho­lic con­vents and monas­teries following the Nazi takeover of Rome in 1943.

Before being elected to the Papacy six months before the out­break of World War II in Europe, Cardi­nal Pacelli had lived twelve years in Bavaria, the birth­place of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party, serving as Apos­tolic Nuncio for all Ger­many. He was well aware of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic prac­tices and their extraor­di­nary pen­chant for bru­talizing their enemies. Reacting to wide­spread criti­cism of the Vati­can’s con­cor­dat with Hitler’s govern­ment in July 1933—an agreement that he, as then-Vatican State Secre­tary, had been instru­men­tal in drafting—the future pope pri­vately told the Brit­ish ambas­sador in Rome that the Catho­lic Church deplored the actions of the Ger­man govern­ment at home, their per­se­cution of Jews, their pro­ceeding against poli­ti­cal oppo­nents, and the reign of terror to which they subjected Germany and Austria. Between 1933 and 1939 Pacelli issued fifty-five protests of vio­la­tions of the 1933 Reichs­konkordat. Put simply, tensions between the Holy See and the Nazis have a long history.

In his first encyclical letter as pontiff, issued a month and a half after the German inva­sion of Poland, Pius XII called for the restora­tion of that coun­try’s inde­pen­dence, denounced racism, and called for love, com­pas­sion, and cha­rity to pre­vail over war. For much of the war, Pius main­tained a public front of neu­tral­ity, indif­fer­ence, or silence while German atro­cities were com­mitted out­side Italy. Privately and occa­sion­ally publicly the pope inter­ceded to help Jews; for example, in July 1944 he pushed the Hunga­rian regent, Adm. Miklós Horthy, to cease his govern­ment’s depor­ta­tion of Jews to Nazi death camps. When the German SS (or Schutz­staffel, the elite mili­tary unit and special police force of the Nazi Party) began fer­reting out Jews from inside Italy in 1943 in places where the Wehr­macht (regular German armed forces) held sway, such as in Benito Mussolini’s so-called Republic of Salò in North­ern Italy, Pius XII directed the Catho­lic Church to make sub­stan­tial efforts to save Ital­ian Jews (see above). In the end, four-fifths of the Jewish pop­u­lation of Italy escaped slaughter. Maybe or maybe not, that sta­tistic is tes­ta­ment to the pontiff’s better-late-than-never moral courage.

Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli (Pope Pius XII), 1876–1958

Above: Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (seated, center) at the signing in Rome of the July 20, 1933, treaty that out­lined the respec­tive roles of the Catholic Church and state in the German Reich—the Reichs­kon­kordat. (The word “concordat” describes the Vati­can’s agree­ments with secular govern­ments.) Seated to Pacelli’s right is Hitler’s vice-chan­cel­lor, Franz von Papen. Between 1933 and 1939 Pacelli issued dozens of protest vio­lations of the Reichs­kon­kordat, which he had hoped would pro­tect the rights of Catho­lic lay people, Catho­lic clergy, and Church pro­perty during Hitler’s admin­is­tra­tion. Pacelli’s actions as sec­re­tary of state and later as Pius XII have gen­erated con­tro­versy, par­tic­u­larly on the sub­ject of the Holo­caust. An entire library of books has been built either defending his papacy or taking him to task. His detractors have accused him of every­thing from anti-Semi­tism to col­luding with the Nazis (“Hitler’s pope”). Others claim the Catho­lic Church did more than any other reli­gious body to save Jewish lives, occa­sion­ally through the pope’s per­sonal inter­ven­tion; e.g., when Pius XII instructed papal diplo­mats to aid per­se­cuted Jews in occu­pied nations, contri­buted money to aid des­per­ate Jews, opened Catho­lic facil­ities in the Vati­can and in other parts of Rome and Italy to shelter thou­sands of Jews from the Nazis (e.g., in con­vents), and gave direct face-to-face orders to protect Jews from the Nazis. In 2009 Bene­dict XVI (German-born pontiff from 2005 to 2013) approved a decree recog­nizing Pius’s “heroic virtues,” a first step toward saint­hood, a step that angered many Jews. The decades-long con­tro­versy over his war­time papacy is thought to have halted his ele­va­tion to saint­hood not­with­standing his “heroic virtues.” Bene­dict’s suc­ces­sor, Pope Francis, announced in early 2019 that the Vati­can’s Secret Archive on Pius XII would be opened in March 2020 after years of pres­sure from his­to­rians and Jewish cam­paigners like Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holo­caust memo­rial and museum. “The church isn’t afraid of history,” Francis told staff at the Vati­can archives. Yad Vashem wel­comed Pope Francis’ deci­sion to allow visitors to access sealed docu­ments about Pius XII, saying that it will “enable objec­tive and open research as well as com­pre­hen­sive dis­course on issues relating to the con­duct of the Vati­can in par­tic­u­lar, and the Catholic church in general, during the Holocaust.”

Left: Pacelli, Apostolic Nuncio (ambassador) to Bavaria (1917–1925), is seen paying a visit to a group of bishops in 1922. Pacelli was simultaneously Apostolic Nuncio to Germany (1920–1930).

Right: Pope Pius XII on his day of coronation, March 12, 1939. Pacelli (1876–1958) took the same papal name as his prede­cessor, a title used exclu­sively by Ital­ian popes. When Pacelli was elected pope, the Nazi regime registered strong pro­tests and called Pius XII the “Jewish Pope” because of his earlier condemnation of German race laws.

Coronation of Pope Pius XII (in Italian), March 12, 1939