Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  Cardinals are known as “Princes of the Church”; few in the last three centuries have been more princely than Pacelli. When, on May 18, 1917, he set off from Rome to Munich, his train included an additional sealed carriage, brought expressly from Zurich, containing sixty cases of food, in case the wartime rations of Germany should offend his notoriously delicate digestion. His private compartment, a luxury specifically forbidden during the war, had had to be specially requisitioned from the Italian State Railways, and all the stationmasters between Rome and the Swiss border were put on red alert. Six weeks later he traveled in similar state to Berlin, where he discussed Benedict’s peace plan first with the imperial chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, and subsequently with Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. Not surprisingly, the talks came to nothing; there could be no accommodation while each side believed it could win. Pacelli returned to Munich and devoted himself once again to war relief.

  At this, it must be said, he worked hard—visiting prison camps, distributing food parcels to the prisoners, giving spiritual assistance whenever and wherever he could. One incident only strikes a sour note: when he dealt with a request to the pope by the chief rabbi of Munich to use his influence for the release of a consignment of Italian palm fronds, which his Jewish flock needed for the forthcoming celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles. The fronds, it appeared, had already been purchased but were being held up in Como. Pacelli replied that although he had forwarded the request to Rome, he feared that thanks to wartime delays and the fact that the Holy See had no diplomatic relations with the Italian government, it was unlikely that anything could be done in time. He explained confidentially to Gasparri, however, that

  it seemed to me that to go along with this would be to give the Jews special assistance not within the scope of practical, arm’s-length, purely civil or natural rights common to all human beings, but in a positive and direct way to assist them in the exercise of their Jewish cult.

  In April 1919, in the confusion following the armistice of the previous November, a trio of Bolsheviks—Max Levien, Eugen Leviné, and Towia Axelrod—seized power in Bavaria. There followed a brief reign of terror, during which the foreign missions came under particular attack; the diplomatic corps consequently decided that it should send representatives to register a protest with Levien. Pacelli, then nuncio, reported to Gasparri:

  Since it would have been totally undignified for me to appear in the presence of this aforesaid gentleman, I sent the uditore [a certain Monsignor Schioppa].…

  The scene that presented itself at the palace was indescribable. The confusion totally chaotic, the filth completely nauseating … and in the midst of all this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with lecherous demeanour and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female rabble was Levien’s mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcée, who was in charge. And it was to her that the nunciature was obliged to pay homage in order to proceed.

  This Levien is a young man, of about thirty or thirty-five, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly. He deigned to receive the Monsignor Uditore in the corridor, surrounded by an armed escort, one of whom was an armed hunchback, his faithful bodyguard. With a hat on his head and smoking a cigarette, he listened to what Monsignor Schioppa told him, whining repeatedly that he was in a hurry and had more important things to do.7

  Much was to be written in later years of Pius XII’s deep love and admiration of the Jewish people. The last two quotations suggest that such reports may have been somewhat exaggerated. On matters of color, on the other hand, there was no pretense. As early as 1920 Pacelli had complained to Gasparri that black soldiers in the French army were routinely raping German women and children in the Rhineland. To these accusations, which included no suggestion that white soldiers might be inclined to do the same, the army, not surprisingly, issued vehement denials, but Pacelli continued to believe the charges and to urge papal intervention. A quarter of a century later, as pope, he was to ask the British Foreign Office for assurances that “no Allied colored troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned in Rome after the occupation.”

  NAZI GERMANY HAD annexed Austria in March 1938. Exactly a year later, after the fiasco of the Munich Agreement, German troops were massing on the border of Czechoslovakia. Yet, on March 6, 1939, just four days after his election, Pope Pius XII could personally draft a letter to Hitler:

  To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of Our Pontificate We desire to express the wish to remain united by the bonds of profound and benevolent friendship with the German people who are entrusted to your care.… We pray that Our great desire for the prosperity of the German people and for their progress in every domain may, with God’s help, come to full realization.

  This letter was not only the first addressed by the new pope to any head of state; we have the word of Monsignor Alberto Giovanetti, one of the official historians of Pius XII, that “in length and in the sentiments it expresses, it differs totally from the other official letters sent by the Vatican at that time.”

  On March 15, 1939, the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia. A week later Diego von Bergen, the German ambassador to the Vatican, reported to his government:

  I learn from a well-informed source that urgent attempts have been made, especially on the French side, to prevail upon the pope to associate himself with the protests of the democratic states against the annexation of Bohemia and Moravia to the Reich. The pope has declined these requests very firmly. He has given those around him to understand that he sees no reason to interfere in historic processes in which, from the political point of view, the Church is not interested.

  Even this was only the beginning. On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht marched into Catholic Poland, and two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany. Over the next five weeks the Poles lost some 70,000 men. From the Vatican, however, despite repeated intervention by the British and French ambassadors, there came not a word of sympathy or regret, still less of denunciation. This deafening silence continued until the third week of October, when the pope published his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus. In this, at long last, Poland received a mention:

  The blood of countless human beings, noncombatants among them, has been shed and cries out to heaven, especially the blood of Poland, a nation very dear to us. Here is a people which has a right to the human and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, because of its devotion to the Church and by reason of the ardor that it has poured into the defense of Christian civilization, so that its titles are carved indelibly on the tablets of history.

  Not altogether surprisingly, the encyclical was welcomed by the Allies; the French air force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany. The language was clear enough for the German Foreign Office; “Pius XII,” it informed its ambassador to the Holy See, “has ceased to be neutral.” It should be noted, however, that there is no mention anywhere in the text of Germany, Nazis, or Jews.

  There was a curious incident in November 1939, when the pope was secretly approached by a group of German conspirators with a request for help. Their intention was to overthrow Hitler and to return Germany to democracy; but before they could do so they needed a guarantee that the Western powers would not take advantage of any period of chaos that might result and impose on Germany terms as humiliating as those imposed after the First World War at Versailles. Would the pope be prepared to act as go-between, seeking assurances that Britain and her allies would agree to an honorable peace?

  Pius was fully aware that he was being asked to take part in a conspiracy. This obviously represented a huge risk. Had any intervention of his become known, Hitler would almost certainly have vented his anger on the Catholic Church in Germany; Mussolini, for his part, might have claimed a breach of the Lateran Treaty and invaded the Pa
pal State, or at least cut off its water and electricity supplies. Not surprisingly, he asked for twenty-four hours to consider. He consulted none of his Curia, not even his secretary of state; the answer with which he returned the next day—that he was prepared to do all he could for the sake of peace—represented his own decision and no one else’s.

  The decision, however, left him deeply uneasy. The British minister to the Holy See, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, had an audience with him shortly afterward, and reported:

  He wished to pass the communication [from the German conspirators] on to me purely for information. He did not wish in the slightest degree to endorse or recommend it. After he had listened to my comments … he said that perhaps, after all, it was not worth proceeding with the matter and he would therefore ask me to regard his communication to me as not having been made. This, however, I promptly declined, as I said I refused to have the responsibilities of His Holiness’s conscience unloaded on to my own.

  In the final event, the whole thing came to nothing. Neville Chamberlain’s government insisted on far more information than the conspirators were prepared to give and was anyway unimpressed by the thought of making any sort of peace while the German military machine remained intact. It insisted, too, on bringing in the French, which the conspirators were extremely reluctant to do. It may be that the latter lost their nerve; for whatever reason, the plot simply ran out of steam. It has seemed worth recording here simply as an indication of Pius’s basic anti-Nazi feelings, of his courage in making an exceptionally dangerous decision, and of his strange insecurity once that decision was made.

  AND SO WE come to the mighty question mark that casts its shadow over the pontificate of Pope Pius XII: his attitude to the Holocaust. A strong vein of anti-Semitism had always run through Catholic thinking: had not the Jews murdered Christ? The Tridentine Mass, promulgated by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century,8 contained a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of “the perfidious Jews,”9 and the right-wing Catholic parties in France, Germany, and Austria made no secret of their anti-Semitic feelings. It is hardly necessary to say that such views found no place in the official teaching of the Church; but the passages quoted earlier in this chapter make it clear that they were shared at least to some extent by the young Pacelli—and he is unlikely to have been alone.

  “The Jews,” declared Hitler in a broadcast on February 9, 1942, “will be liquidated for at least a thousand years.” Within a month, active persecution was under way not only in Germany, Austria, and Poland but in Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, and Marshal Pétain’s unoccupied France. All this was well known in the Vatican; indeed, it was common knowledge throughout Europe. On April 21 Osborne wrote to his friend Bridget McEwen, “Yesterday being Hitler’s birthday, I wore a black tie in mourning for the millions he has massacred and tortured.” The pope could hardly have worn a black tie, but he could have spoken out against the continuing atrocities. Despite Osborne’s continued entreaties, he refused to do so. On July 31, Osborne wrote again to Mrs. McEwen:

  It is very sad. The fact is that the moral authority of the Holy See, which Pius XI and his predecessors had built up into a world power, is now sadly reduced. I suspect that H.H. [His Holiness] hopes to play a great role as peacemaker and that it is partly at least for this reason that he tries to preserve a position of neutrality as between the belligerents. But, as you say, the German crimes have nothing to do with neutrality … and the fact is that the Pope’s silence is defeating its own purpose because it is destroying his prospects of contributing to peace.

  By now the mass deportations had begun; before the end of the year 42,000 French Jews would be sent to Auschwitz alone. In September President Roosevelt sent a personal envoy to the pope to beg him to condemn the German war crimes, but still Pius refused. The papal secretary of state, Cardinal Maglione, would only repeat that the Holy See was doing all that it could.

  It was not—if only because, as 1942 drew to its close, the Vatican clearly had something else on its mind. It was terrified that the Allies were going to bomb Rome. Poor Osborne was being summoned almost daily to the Secretariat of State and entreated to extract a firm undertaking from the British government that there would be no air raids on the Holy City. In vain he pointed out that Britain was at war and Rome was an enemy capital; and he well knew that, even if the city were not to be bombed, it was highly unlikely that the Italians would be given advance information of the fact. He wrote on December 13:

  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 bombardment of Rome. The whole outfit seems to have become Italian.

  The following day he had another talk with Cardinal Maglione:

  I urged that the Vatican, instead of thinking of nothing but the bombing of Rome, should consider their duties in respect of the unprecedented crime against humanity of Hitler’s campaign of extermination of the Jews, in which I said Italy was an accomplice as the partner and ally of Germany.

  Finally, on Christmas Eve 1942, Pius XII made a broadcast to the world. It was long and, for the most part, stiflingly turgid. Only at the very end, when the majority of his listeners had probably switched off through sheer boredom, did he come, after a fashion, to the point, calling on men of goodwill to make a solemn vow “to bring back society to its center of gravity, which is the law of God.” He continued:

  Mankind owes that vow to the countless dead who lie buried on the field of battle. The sacrifice of their lives in the fulfilment of their duty is a holocaust offered for a new and better social order. Mankind owes that vow to the innumerable sorrowing host of mothers, widows, and orphans who have seen the light, the solace, and the support of their lives wrenched from them. Mankind owes that vow to those numberless exiles whom the hurricane of war has torn from their native land and scattered in the land of the stranger, who can make their own the lament of the Prophet: “Our inheritance is turned to aliens, our house to strangers.” Mankind owes that vow to the hundreds and thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.

  That was it. Once again there was no mention of Jews, of Nazis, or even of Germany. The racial element of the Holocaust had been toned down by the addition of the two weasel words “sometimes only”; the two or three million victims—even by Christmas 1942—had been delicately reduced to “hundreds of thousands.” When Mussolini heard it, he said to Ciano, “This is a collection of platitudes which might better have been made by the parish priest of Predappio.”10 He was not far wrong.

  UNTIL NOW, IN comparison with their Central European brethren, the Italian Jews had been relatively lucky. Although the 8,000-odd people who made up the Jewish community of Rome doubtless shared in full measure the general indignation at the pope’s apparent spinelessness, while the Duce continued in power they were left for the most part undisturbed. Mussolini had enacted a number of anti-Semitic laws, but they had been largely disregarded. Then, in July 1943, everything changed: the Allies invaded Sicily and bombed Rome; Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were shot and left hanging from the roof of a garage; and German troops poured into Italy. On September 11 Rome came under German occupation, and Marshal Albert Kesselring declared martial law. On October 18, the SS gave the order to round up the Jews.

  There had been Jews in Rome before there had been Christians. The first Jewish settlers had arrived in 139 B.C. After the coming of Christianity the fortunes of their community had varied; several of its tribulations have been recorded in earlier chapters of this book. Never in all its history, however, had Italian Jews faced a threat such as this. Already at the end of September they had been compelled to collect fifty kilograms of gold within thirty-six hours; they had succeeded only through the generosity of their fellow citizens, Christian and Jewis
h alike, who had rallied with donations. (After several hours’ hesitation, the Vatican had offered a loan; it was politely rejected.) There was a general assumption that this gold had been the price of security; only when the long line of open army trucks took up its position in the ghetto in the early hours of October 16 did it become clear that it was nothing of the sort.

  As the trucks threaded their way through the pelting rain to their gathering point at the Military College, from which their human cargo was to be transported to Auschwitz, powerful voices were raised to stop the operation. Several of those voices were German: one was that of Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, the ambassador to the Holy See; another was that of Kesselring himself. Yet another objector was Albrecht von Kessel, the German consul in Rome. All three were convinced that if the deportations were allowed to go ahead, there might easily be a general rising against the occupying forces. What was needed now was for the pope to make a vehement protest against this new outrage that was taking place on his very doorstep. But nothing came. Weizsäcker himself wrote to his colleague Dr. Karl Ritter in Berlin:

  Although pressed on all sides, the Pope did not allow himself to be drawn into any demonstration of reproof at the deportation of the Jews of Rome. The only sign of disapproval was a veiled allusion in Osservatore Romano on 25–28 October, in which only a restricted number of people could recognize a reference to the Jewish question.

  And so the deportation went ahead.

  How can we explain this contemptible silence on the part of Pius XII? It all goes back first to his innate anti-Semitism and then to his fear of communism—always, both to his predecessor and to himself, a far greater bugbear than Nazi Germany. As he himself put it in a conversation with the American representative at the Vatican, Harold Tittman, he believed that a protest would provoke a clash with the SS; he could have added—but did not—that such a clash might well have resulted in a German occupation of the Vatican and his own capture and imprisonment. That in turn would have played directly into the hands of the Communists. He himself had come up against them in Munich, and he was fully aware of the atrocities that they had committed against the Church in Russia, Mexico, and Spain. With Europe in its present state of chaos, a Communist takeover in Rome could not be discounted, and to avoid that, even the deportation of Roman Jewry would be a small price to pay.