Pius' Silence

THE PAPACY

In 1963, Historian Saul Friedlander, 34, was researching the archives of the German Foreign Office for his doctoral thesis on Hitler and the United States when he came across a misfiled memorandum on German relations with the Vatican. In his mind it raised the question of the failure of Pope Pius XII to protest Hitler's extermination of Jews--and the possibility of compiling official German documents on the subject. From these and other sources--but not from Vatican documents, which were not available to him--Friedlander wrote Pius XII and the Third Reich (Knopf; $4.95). It seems likely to create the same kind of stir as Playwright Rolf Hochhuth's polemical The Deputy.

Hochhuth, basing his play on a hit-or-miss reading of history, argued that Pius stayed silent because he wanted Germany preserved as a bulwark against the conquest of Europe by Russian Communism. Friedlander, an Israeli citizen whose parents died at Auschwitz and who is now associate professor at Geneva's Graduate Institute of International Studies, comes to much the same conclusion.

Protest Would Do No Good. He cites Pius' attempt to help save the Jews of Rome from deportation by the Germans, takes note of papal statements that indicate Pius' personal anguish over Nazi atrocities. Friedlander also quotes from a long letter that the Pope wrote to Berlin's Bishop Konrad von Preysing in 1943 suggesting that an open protest would do no good, since it would only stir Hitler to worse evils. He includes the argument made by Vatican diplomats that for Pius to attack Hitler during the war would involve German Catholics in a crisis of confidence, and would be open to one-sided exploitation by Allied propaganda.

The Nazi archives, when taken at face value, tend to undercut this rationale. Nazi diplomats kept reporting back home that Pius had "affection" and "respect" for the German people. Shortly before the fall of France, Diego von Bergen, the German Ambassador to the Vatican, wrote to Berlin that high-placed officials of the Holy See had assured him that they wanted the Allies to accept a negotiated peace on the Western front. In August 1943, the new German Ambassador to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, told Berlin that in Rome, "Bolshevism is the greatest cause of concern." Friedlander is aware that the Nazi archives are incomplete but could find only three ineffectual and half-hearted inquiries by the Vatican nuncio in Berlin, Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo, regarding Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Self-Serving Motives. Friedlander has already been subject to counterattack. In a recent issue of America, Jesuit Historian Robert Graham says that he ignored documents that do not support his case. Other Catholic experts charge that Friedlander has failed to consider the self-serving motives of the German diplomats whose reports are so crucial to his thesis. Von Bergen, for example, was an ambitious professional diplomat who hoped for promotion in Germany's foreign service. Von Weizsacker was an anti-Nazi Protestant who apparently wished to prevent Hitler from taking any action that would harm Pius personally.

Friedlander acknowledges that the full truth cannot be known until relevant Vatican documents are made public. Breaking its rules of secrecy, the Vatican is now slowly publishing selections from its wartime archives, and these documents will certainly cast new light on the Pope's actions. But the arguments over his motives will probably go on forever.

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