In 2014, in an interview with Israeli journalist Henrique Cymerman, Francis lamented what had happened since 1963 with “the Pope who led the Church during World War II.” The Pontiff explained it like this: «Poor Pius XII has been thrown on top of everything. But we must remember that before he was seen as the great defender of the Jews. In fact, he hid many of them in the convents of Rome and other Italian cities and also in the summer residence of Castel Gandolfo. There, in her own bed, 42 children were born, children of Jews and other persecuted people. I do not want to say that Pius XII did not make mistakes, but his role must be read in the context of the time. “Was it better for him not to speak so that more Jews would not be killed, or for him to do so?”
That is precisely the question that the American historian David I. Kertzer tries to clarify in his latest essay, ‘The Pope at war’ (Ático de los Libros, 2024), as he told us last week in an interview with ABC. «The controversy over his conduct during World War II and the Holocaust has been ongoing 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 Pope Francis’ authorization was very exciting for me,” he acknowledged.
Kertzer was referring to the 16 million private and confidential documents of Pius XII that were sealed and deposited in the Vatican Secret Archive when he died in 1958. At that time, thousands of questions about his relationship with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy remained. unanswered. As time went by, the unknowns increased, generating a tense and extensive debate among researchers, which ended up making him one of the most controversial pontiffs in the history of Rome.
In 2020, after more than sixty years kept under lock and key, they were finally declassified by Pope Francis. With all the new information, it was possible to begin to contextualize and clarify, with much greater precision, the true role of Pius XII in the most devastating conflict in history and the reason why he never denounced the extermination of millions of Jews. Four years earlier, however, there was another researcher, Mark Riebling, who published a series of even more surprising episodes from World War II about the person responsible for the Church.
«Pius XII was not Hitler’s Pope!»
This expert in intelligence and counterterrorism advanced it, in 2016, in a long interview with ABC’s correspondent in the Vatican, Juan Vicente Boo, on the occasion of the publication of his essay ‘Church of Spies. The Pope’s secret war against Hitler’ (Stella Maris, 2016). «Working on previous books I discovered that, in 1945, American espionage was trying to infiltrate the Holy See, and I found ten important documents that demonstrated that Pius XII had tried to overthrow Hitler. They were smoking guns: Pius XII was not Hitler’s Pope!
According to the author – to the surprise of Pope Francis during the meeting they held – Pius XII maintained intense clandestine activity since 1939, in support of the German resistance, and even served as a liaison between some high military leaders opposed to Hitler. A secret activity that he developed while remaining silent in public about the atrocities committed by the Third Reich. Something he did, according to Riebling, at the request of the same groups of Jews, anti-Nazis and allies, so that the Catholic Church would not suffer damage during World War II.
Kertzer said something similar a week ago on ABC: «Pius XII did not feel any affection for Hitler, since he considered him a man eager to limit the influence of the Catholic Church and, furthermore, the defender of a pagan ideology. However, he felt intimidated by him and never wanted to anger him. “These new documents from the Vatican Secret Archive provide a much better understanding of why he acted as he did, especially in the first years of the conflict, when there were reasons to think that Europe would fall under the control of the Nazis.”
The Pope’s meetings
Of all this clandestine activity revealed by Riebling, the most surprising thing is that Pius XII participated in three attempts to assassinate Hitler. As the historian explained, the Pope ordered a tape recording system installed in his office in 1939, to record all the conversations he had with political leaders in those turbulent months, especially with those of the Third Reich. The researcher said that he found references to those recordings, although he was not sure if they had existed. It was just an implausible rumor.
“However,” he explained, “one day I asked Father Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit historian, and he told me it was true. The Vatican did them as a precaution in case someone later falsified the content of sensitive conversations with the Pope. Later, Riebling found the transcripts and was surprised. The first belonged to a meeting of Pius XII with the cardinals of the great cities of the Reich who had come to the Conclave held four days after being elected Pope, on March 6, 1939.
There were still a few months left before Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II, but at that meeting they already addressed a clandestine strategy to contain the Nazi dictator, whose growth and threat seemed unstoppable. In reality, at that meeting Pius XII did not seem very explicit, because one of the cardinals, the one from Vienna, Theodor Innitzer, had said the previous year, when the Nazis invaded his country, that the Church supported the conquerors. Before becoming Pius XII, when he was Secretary of State of the Holy See, Eugenio Pacelli had him come to sign a retraction of his words.
assassination attempts
The pillar of that resistance against Hitler was the cardinal of Munich, Michael von Faulhaber, while the key character in the plots was a burly lawyer from that same city, Josef Müller, a friend of Pacelli since his time as nuncio in Bavaria, Germany. and Prussia. Müller, in fact, was part of the military conspiracies that were launched to assassinate Hitler and, in addition, he acted as a liaison with the Pope, whom he visited on the clandestine flights that he made in his small plane and that he organized with the support of the German Jesuits.
Riebling also found the interrogations that an agent of the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, did to Müller and other German generals who were prisoners just after the end of the war. When the conflict ended and he became a history professor at the University of Minnesota, this same agent continued to have conversations with Müller for 15 years, which he recorded and saved. These talks also reached Riebling, which he used as a basis to write his book, along with the help provided by Ray Rocca, an American agent who worked with the legendary James Jesus Angleton in the task of spying on the Holy See.
With all this information he collected, the author was able to document three assassination attempts on Hitler in which the Pope was involved. The first was planned from October 1939 to May 1940, the second from 1942 to the spring of 1943 and the third, perhaps the best known of all, on July 20, 1944: Operation Valkyrie. This day a bomb planted by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg exploded in the conference room where the ‘Führer’ was meeting with his main military collaborators, located in the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair), his headquarters in East Prussia.
Operation Valkyrie
Hitler made it clear from the beginning that he hated Catholicism, believing that its tenets were incompatible with Nazi ideology. In fact, the dictator tried to create his own religion and even published a ‘Bible of Nazism’. Furthermore, he did not hesitate to try to wipe out the Polish clergy when he invaded the country, which shocked many of his generals. So much so that some of these came to take sides against him, as is the case of the famous Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, director of the Abwehr, German military intelligence.
Canaris had known Pius XII since the 1920s, when Pacelli was a Vatican diplomat in Germany. The admiral believed that the Pontiff was the ideal person to lead a plot against Hitler, since he was discreet, realistic and, above all, deeply hated the ‘Führer’. It was then that he signed Müller as a liaison between the Pope and British Intelligence, after he had refused to join the SS, and to organize a wide network of spies in areas as diverse as the Army, the university or the media. communication.
From the outside, Müller would be a German agent assigned to Rome with the mission of contacting Mussolini’s opponents and unmasking them, but in reality he was a double spy in charge of organizing the assassination and telling the Pope about the atrocities that were happening in Poland so that will tell the world. In one of these meetings he managed to convince Pius XII to try to convince the Third Reich and Great Britain to agree to a negotiated peace, although it was soon confirmed that it would be impossible. It was at that moment when, according to Riebling, he would have agreed to collaborate in the conspiracy against Hitler.
The Pope even appears in the plot documents as “The Boss.” The historian says that he only set two conditions: that Great Britain accept a “just peace” for the Germans after eliminating the Nazi dictator and that the entire operation be kept secret, since if any details came to light, the lives of the rebels would be in danger. The agreement was even agreed upon with the English Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and put into writing.
Although the Nazi dictator only suffered minor burns in the famous attack in July 1944, the conspirators believed him dead and launched their plan to seize power in Germany. It was the plan that came closest to ending Hitler of the 42 attempts recorded throughout his life. The plot ended with the arrest and execution of all the conspirators, among whom were several German Jesuits and the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Pope’s participation was not known until seventy years later.
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