Pope Pius XII, who presided over the Catholic Church during the Second World War, has always divided opinion: was he a Nazi sympathiser who did little to save the Jews? Or has he been wrongly vilified? Only the documentation hidden away in the Vatican archives could provide a definite answer.
It looked as if the truth would remain buried forever until the Church decided to open up the archives to scrutiny in 2020 — files that this week have been made available online. David Kertzer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning US historian who specialises in books that explore the fraught relationship between the Vatican and Jews, was there when the doors first opened.
His latest book, the result of two years of intensive work, The Pope at War shows how the Pope did nothing to stop the Holocaust. Instead he pandered to the Nazis and their allies and secretly met Hitler’s emissary, Prince Phillipp von Hessen.
The Pope’s sole concern, the archives revealed, was to protect the German Catholic Church, which had been targeted by the Nazis. Another powerful motivator was the direction of the war: in the first few years the Axis powers were storming from victory to victory so the Pope — for the good of the Church, as he saw it — decided to side with the likely winners.
In Italy, the ecclesiastical hierarchy had a cosy relationship with the ruling Fascists and had enthusiastically backed entering the war on the side of the Nazis. The Pope had remained silent but, says Kertzer, this was a double game, a balancing act in order not to upset America, an important source of financial support.
Another thing the Vatican archive findings confirmed was the negative views of Jews held by those closest to the Pope and how these views affected the advice they were giving him. Not that there was anything new to that: negative attitudes about Jews had permeated the Holy See for centuries, says Kertzer, who first detailed the role of the Vatican in the rise of modern antisemitism in his book The Popes Against the Jews two decades ago.
Pius XII has been called “Hitler’s pope” but Kertzer prefers to call him “Mussolini’s pope” as he saw the Italian dictator as “his most powerful intercessor with Hitler”. Pius also believed there were “good Nazis” and “bad Nazis” and what distinguished them was their attitude towards Catholics. While for the Nazis it was all to do with race, for the Italians it was to do with religion.
Many Pius XII supporters have maintained that had he spoken out about the Holocaust, he would have made the situation worse but Kertzer finds that hard to imagine. He points out that the pope’s timid attitude towards the Nazi-fascists is in stark contrast with that of his predecessor, Pius XI, who towards the end of his tenure (he died in February 1939) had fallen out with Mussolini and couldn’t stand Hitler.
Does he think Pius XI would have let himself been cowed by those two master intimidators? Kertzer is unequivocal: “There is no question that had Pius XI lived longer he would have spoken out against Hitler and against Mussolini’s embrace of Hitler, something Pius XII never did.
“I find it hard to imagine that Pius XI would do what Pius XII did, which was to countenance the full-scale support by the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in Italy and by the major organisation of Italian Catholic laity of the war at Hitler’s side”.
Yet, even after 1943, when victory was slipping away from the Axis, the Pope was working overtime — not to save the Jews — but “to stay on the good side of Germany”, urging Romans not to resist the occupying Germans. The Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s newspaper, even went as far as criticising the partisans for acts of resistance.
When in October 1943 1,200 Roman Jews were rounded up and held at the Collegio Militare, a short distance from the Vatican, documents again showed that Pius XII considered complaining to the German ambassador. But he didn’t. The Church obtained the release of about 200 but only because they had converted to Catholicism or were married to Catholics. So they were no longer Jews. The files released just a few days ago revealing 2,700 such pleas for help (mainly from converted Jews) goes some way to acknowledge what happened.
If the Vatican’s early support for the Axis was a craven alliance with the likely winner, when an Allied victory started becoming a reality, the Church’s reluctance to switch sides was, says Kertzer, again due to fear. This time it was fear of Communism, fear that the Red Army would spread the godless Communist doctrine throughout Europe.
Given what the Vatican archives have revealed, Pius XII lacked the moral leadership expected from a religious leader. Yet, he may be one day hailed as a Catholic saint. “As I am not a Catholic I have never felt comfortable offering advice to the Church on whom they should canonise as a saint,” says Kertzer. “That said, as a historian I do find it objectionable when proponents of making Pius XII a saint claim that he showed great heroism and courage during World War II and the Shoah. This runs directly contrary to the historical evidence.”
The Pope at War is just the latest of Kertzer’s books detailing the Vatican‘s affairs. Why this interest in the Vatican from a Jewish American academic? “I have long had a major focus of my research on questions of the relations of politics and religion in Italy, and in Italy this necessarily involves studying the Vatican,” he explains. “I only began researching Jewish-related issues when, back in the 1990s, I became intrigued by the 19th-century case of Edgardo Mortara, [Edgardo Mortara was a Jewish boy kidnapped, it is said, on the orders of the Inquisitor and brought up as a Catholic].”
But what triggered his Shoah research was the Vatican’s official statement issued in 1998, We Remember. In it the Church condemns the murderous Nazi antisemitism which, it says, had “roots outside Christianity”.
Kertzer could hardly believe it: “It so far contradicted what I knew to be the history of Church involvement in promulgating the demonisation of Jews that helped make the Holocaust possible that I thought it important to set out that actual history.”
The son of a Jewish chaplain with the US Army in Italy during the Second World War, Kertzer grew up hearing stories of his father’s experience with the Allied troops liberating Rome, along with his experience conducting the first Shabbat service in the Grand Synagogue of Rome following liberation.
Yet, much as he loves the country, he points out that Italy, unlike Germany and France, has yet to come to terms with its war past. Will it ever?

The Pope At War is published by Random House