Only a month after Hitler’s speech, SS officer Kurt Gerstein walked into the Berlin office of the Nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo, wanting to confess his firsthand account of the killing of eight hundred Jews at the death camp Belżec.113 Because a diesel engine that produced the gas kept malfunctioning, it had taken a torturous stop-and-start three hours to kill the naked victims, packed into four tiny rooms of a crude gas chamber. Gerstein could not shake the gruesome images. But Orsenigo’s personal assistant, a priest who was a secret Nazi Party member, intercepted him.114 No one knows what the assistant told Orsenigo, but it was enough for him to turn away the SS officer. Gerstein went next to Berlin’s auxiliary bishop, Otto Dibelius. That bishop sent the first-ever confirmations of the mass murder by an SS officer in both coded cables and diplomatic pouches to the Vatican. It was buried in Rome. Nothing was shared with other countries.115 When Berlin’s Bishop Konrad von Preysing later tried mobilizing his fellow bishops to condemn the ongoing deportation of Jews and even warned they would be answerable before God for their silence, no one supported him. His colleagues argued that the deportation of non-Catholics was troubling but not their duty to address. They refused to tell German Catholics that it was a mortal sin to kill Jews. Preysing concluded that the moral deadlock could not be broken without the Pope’s forceful intervention. Pius did not get involved, allowing those who wanted to do nothing to prevail.116
The Pontiff summoned Croatia’s Archbishop Stepinac to the Vatican the month after the Gerstein report arrived.117 Soon after arranging the meeting the previous year between Pius and Pavelić, Stepinac had begun vocally turning against the bloodlust.118 He had even tried in vain to encourage his fellow Croatian clerics to distance themselves from the slaughter.119 By the time he met with Pius, Nazi mobile killing squads—the Einsatzgruppen—had murdered about 1.5 million Jews in Poland and Russia. Stepinac’s Croatia was on its way to eliminating 85 percent of its Jewish population.120
The archbishop returned to Croatia more outspoken than ever against the slaughter. But Pius declined even a Papal letter that Stepinac could share with other church officials.121
Pius seemed frozen, incapable of decisive action. It was the character weakness that those who had opposed his selection as Pope most feared. Compounding the problem, the Nazis misinterpreted his silence.122 The Third Reich had penetrated the Vatican with well-placed informants.123 The Germans had also managed to break the simple codes employed by the church’s diplomatic corps. It was possible Hitler inferred that Pius stayed quiet because he did not object to the killing of Jews so long as the perpetrators were Catholic.124
That summer, on the heels of Gerstein and Stepinac, the archbishop of Léopol in Ruthenia (southern Ukraine) reported to the Vatican “the number of Jews massacred in our small region has certainly exceeded 200,000.”125 Soon after, an Italian priest, an abbot, and a Latvian archbishop passed along separate accounts of the murder of Jews in Poland and Latvia.126 The Polish government in exile released a report estimating that 700,000 Jews had been killed since the Nazi invasion and even cited the existence of gas vans at the Chelmno death camp.127 This news, combined with the Pope’s inaction, prompted British Foreign Office officials to complain, “Papal timidity becomes ever more blatantly despicable.”128
Franklin Delano Roosevelt dispatched his personal envoy, Myron Taylor, to meet Pius that September.129 The goal was to convince the Pope that his moral duty as head of the world’s largest faith trumped the Vatican’s insistence on neutrality. On the day Taylor arrived, in a coordinated effort, Britain, Brazil, Poland, Belgium, and Uruguay appealed to the church, warning that its “policy of silence” likely meant “a renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and authority of the Vatican.”130 Two days after his arrival, Taylor received an urgent cable from Washington. The Geneva office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine had passed along an account of German war crimes from two surviving eyewitnesses: “Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto is taking place. Without any distinction all Jews, irrespective of age or sex, are being removed from the ghetto in groups and shot. Their corpses are utilized for making fats and their bones for the manufacture of fertilizer.” The report went on to detail mass executions in Lwów and Belżec.131
Taylor and Pius met privately three times. The American envoy, the former head of U.S. Steel, was an adept negotiator. He knew it would not be easy to convince the Pontiff to take action. He had earlier failed to persuade him to excommunicate Hitler and Mussolini.132 Now Taylor suggested that if the Pope did not want to specifically condemn Hitler and the Nazis, he might issue, at a minimum, a more general denunciation of the atrocities themselves.133 He warned Pius that the Nazi crimes were part of a “vile and anti-Christian code of conduct” and should they prevail it “would destroy all semblance of a Christian Europe.”134 The Pope averred that he felt as though he had spoken out enough about “the aggressions of war” and the “sufferings of civilians,” but complained that his “appeal was little heeded.”135
Before leaving Rome, a frustrated Taylor met with other ranking clerics.136 Monsignor Domenico Tardini told him that Pius could not concentrate on the war on the Jews since his priority was to stop communist attacks in the East on Catholics.137 When Taylor met with Cardinal Maglione, he pleaded with the Secretary of State.138 People of all faiths, not just Catholics, said Taylor, were anxious for the Pope “to denounce the inhuman treatment of refugees, hostages, and above all the Jews in the occupied countries.”139
Maglione assured Taylor that the Pope at his first chance “would not fail to express anew his thought with clarity.”140 As for the report from the Geneva office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Maglione later scribbled in the margin: “I do not believe we have the information which can confirm—in particular—this terrible news. Is this not so?”141 Weeks after Taylor left, Maglione gave the Americans an unsigned statement that acknowledged the Vatican had received from other sources “reports of severe measures taken against non-Aryans,” but claimed the church could not “verify the[ir] accuracy . . . and [t]he Holy See is taking advantage of every opportunity offered in order to mitigate the sufferings of non-Aryans.”142
That was not true. By then, the Vatican had accumulated chilling evidence of the ongoing civilian carnage in nine countries. Because the church had hundreds of local parishes where the atrocities were taking place, it was uniquely situated to become a repository of eyewitness accounts long before the Allies could confirm the mass murder.143
It cannot be determined how much Pius fretted about the fate of Europe’s Jews during 1942. Pius’s personal secretary, Father Robert Leiber, a German Jesuit who met daily with the Pope and kept a diary of their meetings, burned all his papers after the war.144 What is indisputable is that a good portion of the Pope’s summer was consumed not by concerns about how to stop the civilian massacre but instead on a film he had commissioned about himself. Pastor Angelicus (Angelic Shepherd) was a narcissistic hour-long look at Pius’s life, from his birth to his reign at the Vatican.145,IV Part documentary, part reality show, it focused on the Pontiff’s daily routine. Among other scenes, Pius was filmed getting into his limousine as his driver dropped to his knees and crossed himself, greeting the Italian royal family, visiting a class of First Communion girls, and working late into the night in his grand office.147 Pastor Angelicus gave no hint that Europe was in the middle of its greatest war or that Pius was under siege to intervene to stop history’s largest civilian slaughter.148
Pius’s attention was also diverted from the grim war news by a secret project he had authorized soon after becoming Pope. Three years earlier he had appointed a former aide and chief of the German Catholic Party, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, to direct four members of the Papal Institute for Christian Archaeology to hunt in the underground Vatican Grottoes for the body of St. Peter, one of Jesus’s original twelve apostles and the founder of the Catholic Church.149 The small team was sworn to secrecy. The quest for St. Peter’s corpse had long
been a Catholic equivalent of the mythical hunt for the Holy Grail. Catholics based their claim to be the one and only true church in part on the belief that Peter had come to Rome from the Middle East, became the first Pope, and was then crucified for his faith. Emperor Constantine in 333 built the original St. Peter’s Basilica over what was thought to be Peter’s gravesite. All Popes descended in a straight line from Peter. Non-Catholics dismissed the story as a fairy tale. Protestant scholars contended that Peter never reached Rome. The Vatican had long sought to find Peter’s tomb to settle the matter. When Pius approved the dig, it was the first time in 350 years that one had been undertaken.150 To keep it secret, Pius paid for the archaeological hunt from his personal bank account.151
In late May, Kaas reported excitedly to Pius that they had reached a promising spot—almost directly underground from the high altar in St. Peter’s—precisely where an ancient map had plotted the burial monument. With Pius often sitting in a chair just above the opening to the underground pit, the team spent weeks retrieving 250 bone fragments that filled three small lead boxes.152 Some nights, long after the workers had left, Monsignor Giovanni Montini joined Pius, and the two stood at the opening to the pit and prayed that the bones belonged to Peter.153 When the excavation was done, the Pope directed the remains be locked, sealed, and stored in his private apartment.154 The only person allowed access to what had been found was Pius’s personal physician, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi. The general practitioner, with no training in anthropology or forensics, told the Pope that the bones appeared to belong to a single person, probably a man somewhere between sixty and seventy years old. It was a broad-enough description to include Peter.155,V
By the fall of 1942, Pius refocused on the war. In October the United States created the investigatory War Crimes Commission. On December 17, the Allies for the first time condemned the Nazi extermination of the Jews.157 On December 21, Kazimierz Papée, the Polish ambassador in exile to the Holy See, handed Monsignor Tardini the most detailed report to date about atrocities.158 It was the first confirmation of the existence of gas chambers and “as for the number of Polish Jews exterminated by the Germans, it is estimated it has passed a million.”159
Pius’s reaction was to ask the Allies to agree to a unilateral two-day truce for Christmas Eve and Day so Christians could celebrate the holiday in peace. The United States and Britain said no. To Washington and London, Pius seemed even more detached from the realities on the ground.160
The Allies had begun a bombing campaign against Italy’s industrial north with major air raids against Genoa and Turin. The month prior, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s decisive victories at El Alamein over Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had put the Germans in full retreat and marked a turning point in the battle for North Africa. And although the Nazis had boasted they would take Stalingrad in days, it had held firm for five months. The Germans showed signs of buckling under the severe Russian winter. If the Pope had been banking on a quick Axis victory, it was far from assured.
On December 17, the Allies approved a declaration condemning German-led genocide in Europe.161 It was blunt, citing “numerous reports” of “this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.” From the occupied countries, “Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe.” Poland was “the principal Nazi slaughterhouse” and Jews were either being “slowly worked to death in labour camps” or “deliberately massacred in mass executions.” The Allies promised “that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution.”
That resolution finally fired up Pius to say something about the civilian slaughter. The Pope worried that if he did not, the Vatican might become irrelevant and not play any postwar peace-making role. Pius, who had been trained during his diplomatic service to never confront a matter directly, hesitantly touched on the Holocaust in his 1942 Christmas radio address. In a five-thousand-word, twenty-six-page prepared statement, the Pope devoted several dozen words to it. He condemned “arbitrary attacks” and said that no nation had the right to “herd people around as if they were a lifeless thing.” Near the end, he talked about “hundreds of thousands, who without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction.”162 Pius never uttered the words “Jew” or “German” or “Nazi.”163 He had reduced the number of victims from the million cited in the report delivered from the Polish ambassador to “hundreds of thousands.”
The Allied envoys at the Vatican thought that Pius had squandered his chance to make a substantive difference. A Papal aide defended the ambiguous statement to the British envoy: “The Pope could not take sides.”164 When the French ambassador asked Pius why he omitted the Nazis, the Pope said that would have required him to talk about the communists.165 Mussolini mocked the address to his colleagues, saying it’s “a speech of platitudes” and that any parish priest could have done a better job.166 Even some of the Pope’s strong defenders, such as American Jesuit Vincent McCormick, admitted the talk was “much too heavy, ideas not clean-cut, and obscurely expressed.”167 Berlin’s Bishop von Preysing thought it was too abstract to have any impact.168
A week after the Christmas talk, the Pope met with Myron Taylor’s assistant, chargé d’affaires Harold Tittmann. Pius declined to sign an Allied declaration expressly condemning the Nazi crimes.169 Tittmann reported to Washington that Pius sincerely believed he had spoken “clearly enough to satisfy all those who had been insisting in the past that he utter some word of condemnation of the Nazi atrocities.” The Pope seemed surprised when Tittmann told him he did not agree.170 Tittmann thought Pius’s reluctance to be more direct was because he feared that German Catholics, “in the bitterness of their defeat, will reproach him later for having contributed, if only indirectly to its defeat.”171
The year 1943 began with more bishops and lay officials urging the Pontiff to more forcefully use the power of his bully pulpit. In March, Bishop von Preysing informed Pius about more roundups and deportations of Berlin’s Jews and pleaded with the Pope to intervene. But Pius told Preysing he had said all he intended in his Christmas address, that it “was brief but it has been well understood.” All he could do now, he said, was to pray.172 Those Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.
In a personal audience, the Hungarian Catholic activist Margit Slachta appealed to the Pope to intercede on behalf of the remaining Slovakian Jews—twenty thousand of the original population of ninety thousand. Many of the survivors had converted to Christianity.173 Pius “expressed his shock,” she later noted, “[but] he listened to me and said very little.”174 Vatican records show he seemed more upset that young Jewish girls were being used as prostitutes than by the pending death camp deportations.175 It took Pius more than a year before he sent a private letter to the Slovak government asking that “Jews who are still . . . [alive] may not be subjected to even more severe sufferings.”176 The Germans killed fifteen thousand of the remaining Slovakian Jews before the war ended.
Bratislava’s chargé d’affaires, Monsignor Giuseppe Burzio, sent Secretary of State Maglione a letter with details about the killings. He included a note from a parish priest: “A German officer confirmed this coldly and cynically in the presence of a person I know. Jews are killed with poison gas or guns or other means. The girls and women, after suffering every kind of humiliation and violence, are stripped and coldly murdered. Soap is made from the corpses.”177 That letter was filed in the Secret Archives. The same thing happened to an unsparing nine-page report describing the horrors in Croatia that Archbishop Stepinac presented to Pius in May 1943, his third wartime visit to the Vatican and the Pope.178,VI
A few months later in July, a French priest, Père Marie-Benoît, met with Pius and implored him to help Jews trapped in the Italian occupation zone in southeastern France.180 The Pope listened and the Vatican Secretary of State’s office later told the priest that it would work on a rescue plan with the Italian government. Nothing hap
pened. Many of those Jews ended up at Auschwitz.181
Marie-Benoît’s plea came when Pius was otherwise preoccupied. The Allies had landed in Sicily on July 10 and established a beachhead. Their aggressive offensive exacerbated his worries that they might carpet-bomb Rome as had earlier been done to many German cities. The Pope had made an impassioned plea to the British ambassador as far back as 1940, arguing that Rome should be off limits. The city was filled with historical monuments and important religious relics, contended Pius, and loved by people around the globe. Most important, it was home to the Vatican.182 The Pope warned that any attack on the spiritual center of Catholicism would result in an unequivocal public protest, the very condemnation he refused to make about the Holocaust.183 Roosevelt assured Pius that “aviators . . . have been specifically instructed to prevent bombs falling within the Vatican City.” But the British refused to give the same assurance. Anthony Eden, the War Secretary, told Parliament in January 1943, “We have as much right to bomb Rome as the Italians had to bomb London. We shall not hesitate to do so . . . [if] such bombing [is] convenient and helpful.”184
D’Arcy Osborne reflected a commonly held British government opinion when he later wrote in his diary: “The more I think of it, the more I am revolted by Hitler’s massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand, and, on the other, the Vatican’s apparently exclusive preoccupation with the effects of the war on Italy and the possibilities of the bombardments of Rome.”185
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