The revelations from the Vatican Secret Archive about the true relationship between Pius XII and Hitler

In 2020, these archives were finally declassified at the will of Pope Francis. Almost 16 million documents on which forty Secret Archive officials were working for 17 years, with the aim of organizing and classifying their valuable content. With this previously unknown information, it has been possible to better contextualize and clarify the true role of Pius XII in the most devastating conflict that has occurred so far, his true relationship with Hitler and Mussolini and, among other issues, the reason why he never denounced the extermination. of millions of Jews.

Following Pope Francis’ announcement, more than 200 researchers from around the world quickly registered to consult the mountain of documents referring to Pius XII. One of the first to access was the American historian David I. Kertzer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for an essay that analyzed, precisely, the relations between this Pontiff and Benito Mussolini. «The controversy over his behavior has been going on for more than half a century. During this time, a lot of pressure was put on the Vatican to allow the consultation of these archives, so the authorization was very exciting for me, as was being there on the first day, March 2, 2020,” he told ABC. .

For the past four years, the Brown University professor has reviewed and analyzed crucial new sources. For example, the notes written by seventy ambassadors of the Holy See, the eyes of the Pontiff abroad; the messages exchanged with the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the transcription of the interviews he held with some Nazi leaders to achieve a rapprochement between their positions; his personal correspondence and, among others, the calls for help from Jewish organizations in the countries invaded by Hitler.

Criticisms against Hitler

He also went to other archives in Italy, Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States, all in order to prepare what for many is one of the most exhaustive and complete accounts, published to date, of the Vatican’s relations with the regimes. Nazi and Fascist: ‘The Pope at war’ (Attic of Books, 2024). «In the book, for example –Kertzer notes–, I reveal for the first time a secret that the Vatican has hidden for eight decades. When Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope, Hitler saw the opportunity to put an end to the criticism he received from his predecessor, Pius XI. Through the declassified documents I not only discovered that, to achieve this, the ‘Führer’ chose a Nazi aristocrat, Philipp von Hessen, married to the daughter of the King of Italy, to enter into secret negotiations with the Pontiff, but also the transcripts “exact accounts of the conversations they had in German and that Pius XIII preserved.”

In one of his previous books, ‘The popes against the Jews’ (Plaza & Janés, 2002), the Pulitzer Prize winner noted that Catholic anti-Semitism had contributed to the legitimization of the Holocaust. Now, in light of this new information, he recognizes that it is “unfair and misleading to refer to Pius XII as Hitler’s Pope”, as has happened in recent decades: “The truth is that he did not feel any affection for the dictator.” Nazi, since he considered him a man eager to limit the influence of the Catholic Church and, furthermore, a defender of a pagan ideology. However, he felt intimidated by him and never wanted to anger him. “These new files provide a much better understanding of why he acted as he did, especially in the early years of the war, when there were reasons to think that Europe would fall under Hitler’s control.”

In any case, as one of the most illustrious representatives of the critical line against Pius XII, Kertzer also does not believe that the Pope can be declared innocent, since he never condemned the massacres of Jews while they were taking place. He was made aware of these “thanks not only to the bishops of the German-occupied territories, but also to a Roman priest who served as a Catholic chaplain to the Italian Army and who traveled regularly on a hospital train to the Eastern Front.” All of them sent him reports frequently, which can be consulted now.

The invasion of Poland

The Pope did not even raise his voice against the invasion, in 1939, of a Catholic country like Poland, whose ecclesiastical representatives asked him for help on numerous occasions without him paying attention. During the conflict he was concerned only with defending the Church as an institution and, in that sense, he was successful. However, according to the author, what he did not do was defend the Christian values ​​that would have required him to confront the oppression and genocide perpetrated by the Third Reich. This attitude was perfectly reflected in one detail: before his death in February 1939, Pius XI continually denounced Nazi Germany, through ‘L’Osservatore Romano’, for persecuting the Catholic Church; Pius XII, for his part, prohibited the Vatican newspaper from publishing articles critical of Hitler’s government as soon as he was elected Pope.

Kertzer relates that, at the beginning of the war, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, apostolic delegate of Istanbul and future Pope John XXIII, went to meet Pius XII on one occasion. Suddenly, the Pontiff asked him how he thought people would judge him for his silence while the Nazis “continued their depredations.” At that moment, he observed that the Pontiff’s eyes were filling with tears. This is one of the few testimonies known about the reaction that the information he received about the extermination caused him in private. Still, he maintained his neutral and ethically dubious stance until the end of the conflict and in the following years until his death in 1958.

“That is one of the most striking failures in this history,” Pulitzer emphasizes. Pius XII’s inability to carry out a critical examination at the end of the war. Nor did he want to examine the role of Catholics in the mass murder of Jews in Europe, much less ask for forgiveness. It is striking that, however, the German Catholic episcopate has apologized for having encouraged German Catholics to serve as loyal soldiers in the conflict and for never expressing criticism for the murders they committed. We must not forget that many of these Hitler soldiers considered themselves good Catholics.