Pope Francis has ordered the publication on the Internet of thousands of files on the persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust, during the convulsive pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958), traditionally accused of being pusillanimous in the face of these crimes.
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The documents, confirmed today by the Holy See, will be “accessible to everyone” virtually on the Vatican portal itself as of this month and collect the requests for help sent by Jews from “all of Europe” to Pius XII, such as that of a German Held in the Francoist concentration camp of Miranda de Ebro (northern Spain).
In March 2020, Francis decided to open the archives of the pontificate of Pius XII to academicspart of which took place in the middle of World War II (1939-1945), but now it will allow the study of 170 volumes and almost 40,000 documents to any user of the network.
However, at first only 70% of the total material will be published, pending the digitization of the rest.
Restore the reputation of the Vatican
The series of archives, referred to as “Hebrews” in the Vatican repositories, preserved “the appeals for help addressed to the Pope by Jews from all over Europe at the beginning of the Nazi and fascist persecutions” in the 1930s.
Pius XII, Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, has traditionally been accused of not having raised his voice against Nazismthat the same year in which he began his pontificate, he began World War II and the Holocaust against the Jews of all of Europe.
The Vatican, in an attempt to defend his memory, made more than 1.3 million digitized documents available to historians in March 2020, who, however, had to go to Rome with prior permission, while now the consultation of a good part of This material will be through the internet.
As an example, the Holy See today published its intervention to free a 23-year-old German university student “of Jewish origin” imprisoned in the Francoist concentration camp of Miranda de Ebro (north) and who requested the pontiff’s intervention in 1942.
The boy, named Werner Barasch, implored his release so that he could reach the United States with his mother, who managed to escape in 1939, but although the Vatican Secretary of State intervened, through the nunciature in Madrid, the procedure was stopped and no his fate was known.
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Until in 2001 the Vatican learned that he had managed to survive the Spanish concentration camp, reach his mother, study and even write his memoirsaccording to the Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, Paul Richard Gallagher.
“Thousands of persecuted for their Jewish faith or for mere non-Aryan descent went to the Vatican knowing that others had obtained help, as Barasch himself writes. The petitions reached the Secretary of State, where diplomatic channels were activated to try to provide all possible assistance given the complexity of the political situation on a global scale,” Gallagher said.
public access
The material, including letters, instances, data on the inventory or the name and identity of the sender, “will allow the descendants of those who asked for help to search, from anywhere in the world, for the traces of their own loved ones,” he said.
The archives can now be consulted at the link: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/sezione-rapporti-stati/archivio-storico/serie-ebrei/serie-ebrei_it.html or by clicking here.
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