Monday, Feb. 09, 1976
Behind the Silence
Ever since Rolf Hochhuth's bitter drama The Deputy first appeared on the stage in 1963, there has been a nonstop debate over the explosive question raised by the German playwright: Could Pope Pius XII have done more to save six million European Jews from extermination during World War II? Six books have explored the thesis that by remaining silent he became an accomplice to genocide. The issue was even aired for almost two years in a Rome civil court, when American Author Robert Katz was accused of defaming the Pontiffs memory in Massacre in Rome, a 1973 film that alleged Vatican inaction in the face of an impending atrocity by the Nazis at the height of the war.
Pope Paul VI's response has been to publish the Vatican's multi-volume history of its wartime activities.The latest in the series, Volume IX, The Holy See and the Victims of the War, continues the effort to shed light on the actions of Pius, under whom the anti-Fascist Paul VI, then Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, long served. Far more than its predecessors, however, Volume IX reveals the pressures on Pius and documents scores of Vatican attempts in 1943 to help Jews in Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland and Italy.
Volume IX also documents Pius XII's protests, though private, against German atrocities. After some 1,300 Jews were arrested by SS troops in a raid on Rome's ghetto in October 1943, for example, Hitler's ambassador was summoned to the Vatican. There he was told that the raid "was painful for the Holy Father in that so many persons were made to suffer simply because they belonged to another race." According to Volume IX, the decision to stop short of denunciation was made partly from concern over jeopardizing the Holy See's diplomatic efforts on behalf of the Jews. Another reason was an awareness, as one of the volume's researchers told TIME, that "the Vatican lives on bluff. How in the world do you influence a Hitler? By threatening to scream?"
Critics of Pius XII will find little in Volume IX to dissuade them from their belief that he had other reasons for silence. In his 1975 book, The Race For Rome, Reporter Dan Kurzman contended that Pius feared that he might be "kidnaped" by the Nazis and the Vatican destroyed if he spoke out publicly--and Volume IX confirms that there were rumors of a kidnap plan in 1943. Katz, who last November was found guilty of defamation in the Massacre in Rome case, has postulated that Pius overlooked SS atrocities because he saw the Germans as a barrier against the greater enemy of Communism. Last week Katz said that Volume IX demonstrates that Pius "did all he could"--but calls that policy "a dismal failure."
The conflicting views make only one thing clear: the facts have begun to fall into place, but there is as yet no consensus on the behavior of Pius XII. If anything, Volume IX has heightened the debate rather than resolved it.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.