You probably know of the Black Legend constructed for Pius XII, Pope from 1939 to 1958, claiming that he was indifferent to the Holocaust. Below is my review, to be published soon in
The Catholic World Report, of an important new book which drives the final nail into the coffin of this legend.
A BLACK LEGEND REFUTED
Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler, by Mark Riebling; Basic Books, New York, 2015; 375
pages, $29.99.
Of
the eight Popes who shepherded the Church from 1903 to century’s end, none is so
hotly disputed as Pius XII, who reigned from March 2nd, 1939 until
his death on October 9th, 1958. At issue is the Pope’s alleged
“silence” in the face of the Holocaust. His defenders point out that in reality
he was not silent. At the start of World War II Pius authorized Vatican radio
to broadcast reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland. These ceased only at the
urgent plea of victims reporting that the broadcasts intensified their
sufferings.
In 1942 the Pope’s Christmas message
spoke of “the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, and
solely because of their nationality and race, have been condemned to death or
progressive extinction.” Dismissed by his latter day critics as too vague to be
understood, the Pope’s words were well understood by the Nazis, who called them
“one long attack on everything we stand for. Here
he is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews ... and makes himself the
mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminal.” The
New York Times also understood,
commenting: “This Christmas more than ever [Pope Pius XII] is a lonely voice
crying out of the silence of a continent.”
At the war’s
end Golda Meier (later Israel’s Prime Minister), Albert Einstein, the World
Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee and many other Jewish voices
applauded Pius for doing what he could to rescue Jews: by providing life saving
travel documents, religious disguises, and safekeeping in cloistered
monasteries and convents, including the Pope’s own summer residence at Castel
Gandolfo, where Jewish babies were born in the Pope’s own bedroom. The Israeli
diplomat and scholar Pinchas Lapide commented: “No Pope in history has been
thanked more heartily by Jews.” At the Pope’s death in October 1958 the New York Times took three days to print
tributes to Pius from New York City
rabbis alone.
The chorus of praise fell silent
overnight in 1963 with the publication of a pseudo-historical stage play, The Deputy, by a former junior member of
the Hitler Youth, Rolf Hochhuth. The play’s scathing indictment portrayed Pius XII as a cold-hearted
cynic, more interested in the Vatican’s
investment portfolio than in Hitler’s slaughter of European Jews, including
those rounded up in Rome
under the Pope’s own windows. The play’s message is well conveyed by its final
line, in which the German ambassador to the Holy See, Ernst von Weisäcker,
telegraphs his superiors in Berlin: "Since further action on the Jewish
problem is probably not to be expected here in Rome, it may be assumed that this question,
so troublesome to German-Vatican relations, has been disposed of.”
Seldom can a
work of fiction have appeared at a time more favorable to its message. The
1960s saw publications by liberal theologians proclaiming “the death of God.”
It was also the age of the Youth Revolution, with the slogan, “Don’t trust
anyone over 30.” A play which purported to unmask one of the world’s leading
moral authorities was a godsend to the propagators of
these new and exciting ideas.
The
bureaucratically organized slaughter of six million Jews was an event so
horrible that many people found it difficult to believe that ultimate
responsibility belonged to a single individual, Adolf Hitler. Hochhuth helped them
come to terms with the inconceivable by assigning co-responsibility to the one
man who (Hochhuth’s Black Legend alleged) could have stopped the machinery of
death, had he wished to do so: the Pope of Rome. Millions who had never
experienced the reign of terror imposed on Europe by the Nazis during World War
II, with a totally controlled press and media, and people sent to concentration
camps (which often meant death) simply for listening to news reports on British
radio, welcomed Hochhuth’s indictment as an aid to understanding an event
beyond the limits of what was previously considered possible.
From 1963
onward Hochhuth’s Black Legend has reigned supreme. Accepted by all but a
minority of historical scholars, and propagated without reserve by the media,
it is still alive and well today. A book published in May of this year, The Pope’s Dilemma by the retired Toronto professor,
Jacques Kornberg, accuses Pius XII of “moral failure” for concentrating
exclusively during World War II on Church interests, without regard for
extra-ecclesial events and concerns.
Comes now this
blockbuster of a book which not only defends Pius XII (which others have undertaken
with varying success) but utterly demolishes the Black Legend by showing in
intricate and meticulously documented detail (107 pages of end notes and sources)
that from the very start of the war the Pope cooperated secretly with anti-Nazi
forces in Hitler’s thousand year Reich who sought, first, to remove the Führer
from power; and when that failed, to kill him.
Appalled by
reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland during the first month of occupation
– hundreds of priests shot, systematic
extermination of Jews forced to dig their own burial trenches, then stripped
naked and machine-gunned like sardines in a can; “and in one photo, a police
officer shooting a child clamped between his knees” – Pius made up his mind.
“He would engage the German military resistance and encourage a military
counterrevolution. He would serve as secret foreign agent for the resistance –
presenting and guaranteeing its plans to the British. He would partner with the
[German] generals not just to stop the war, but to eliminate Nazism by removing
Hitler.”
The Pope’s
aides were stunned. The highly respected British historian, Owen Chadwick wrote
later: “Never before had a Pope engaged so delicately in a conspiracy to
overthrow a tyrant by force.” The Pope, his co-workers thought, was going too
far. Were Hitler to learn of the pontiff’s role, Hitler would take terrible
revenge on Catholics, invade the Vatican, and kidnap the Pope. Later
in the war Hitler actually ordered both the invasion and kidnapping, only to be
frustrated by his generals’ foot-dragging.
Central in this complicated and
ever shifting story is the devout and heroically courageous German Catholic
layman, Josef Müller, described by Riebling as “a big-eared Bavarian book
publisher, who puffed a pipe and collected stamps.” We first encounter him on
page 2 of the book, standing on April 8th, 1945, beneath a Nazi
gallows, just minutes from execution. Only on the book’s final page do we learn
how he was saved from this gruesome fate (he died in 1979): through an
eleventh-hour phone call from the SS officer Walter Huppenkothen, commander of
Hitler’s security guard, yet another secret anti-Nazi, whom Müller had
befriended years previously. Müller worked throughout the war with Admiral
Canaris, Chief of Hitler’s counter-intelligence network, and his cavalry
officer assistant, Colonel Hans Oster. Like a number of those who served
Hitler, both men were secret but determined anti-Nazis. All but Müller were
executed by the Nazis just before the war’s end.
Müller was
also an airplane pilot. He is estimated to have flown a tiny light plane over
the Alps to Merano in northern Italy some 150 times during war with permission
of the government he was trying to destroy, carrying communications for the Pope
from Hitler’s clandestine enemies. Müller also accompanied the well known
German Protestant Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Rome, where the latter met with papal aides
in the crypt of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Another Protestant who worked with
Hitler’s secret enemies was Count Helmut Moltke, called by the American
diplomat George Kennan, “the greatest person, morally,
and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts that I met on either side
of the battle-lines in the Second World War.” Like Canaris and Oster, Moltke
held a strategic governmental position in Hitler’s Third Reich, blocking the
worst when he could, and paying with his life at the end of the war for his
efforts. On the Pentecost weekend of May 22-25, 1942 Moltke hosted a meeting of
some twenty people at his east German estate “Kreisau” (the “Kreisau Circle”) to discuss the building
of a new “Decent Germany” after the war. Pius XII had helped plan the agenda,
and was told about the discussion afterwards.
Riebling’s book is beautifully written, and reads like a novel. It
makes severe demands on the reader nonetheless – due to the large cast of
characters, and the fact that almost all of them are engaged in secret
deception. Most had code names. Pius XII was “the Chief.”
Especially moving
is Riebling’s account of Josef Müller’s private meeting with Pius XII, at the
Pope’s request, on June 1st, 1945, just three weeks after the war’s
end in Europe. “I had hardly crossed the threshold of his
study,” Müller wrote, “when the Holy Father approached me, and embraced me.” He
could hardly grasp how Müller had escaped. He felt as if his own son had
returned from terrible danger.
The Pope put
his arm around Müller’s shoulder and seated his guest next to him at a long
table, but close, so that they could hold hands. “Pius XII has often been
accused of being a proud and detached Roman” Müller wrote afterward, “I saw
nothing of that during my audience. … I told Pius of my plans to fashion a new
bloc [in Germany]
from strong Christians, regardless of denomination, in order to confront
collectivism [i.e. Communism]. That he agreed with this idea brought me great
joy.”
It
remains to pay tribute to Riebling’s publisher. The book’s dust jacket, and the
volume itself, are both completely black, save for a silvery partial sketch on
the jacket of a cynical looking figure in an over-sized miter, his right hand
raised in blessing. It is impossible to overlook this visual reminder of the
long flourishing Black Legend which Riebling so successfully demolishes in these
riveting pages.
John Jay Hughes is a St. Louis priest and Church historian with a
special interest in the Church’s confrontation with Hitler. His most recent
book is the memoir: No Ordinary Fool: a Testimony to Grace.
