Vatican archives reveal what pope knew about Nazi massacres
German researchers find evidence Pius XII didn’t relay reports of atrocities
The long-awaited opening of Pope Pius XII’S wartime records lasted a week before the coronavirus shut Vatican archives down. But that week, documents emerged that reflect badly on the pontiff accused of silence during the Holocaust.
German researchers discovered the pope knew from his own sources about Hitler murdering Jews in 1942. But he concealed this from the U.S. government after an aide argued that Jews and Ukrainians — the Vatican’s main sources — could not be trusted because they lied and exaggerated.
These reports come from seven University of Munster researchers who went to Rome March 2 for the historic opening of the papers. American and Israeli researchers never arrived because of the pandemic.
Catholic priest and historian Hubert Wolf, 60, led the German team. The prolific author enjoys a reputation as an objective analyst. He also served as historian for conservative Catholics who want Pius canonized as a saint.
“If Pius XII comes out of this study looking better, wonderful. If he comes out worse, we must accept that,” he told a Catholic weekly,
Pius XII (pope 1939-1958) was the 20th century’s most controversial pontiff. For decades, historians asked for his archives to be opened for scrutiny. Pius defenders praise his decision to hide Jews in the Vatican and monasteries. The Vatican published 11 volumes of selected archival documents to prove his innocence.
A 1999 Catholic-jewish investigative commission broke up within two years because the Vatican wouldn’t open its archive until 2028. Now, the Munster team has published its first findings; they reflect badly on Pius.
In September 1942, a U.S. diplomat gave the Vatican a secret report on the massacre of 100,000 Warsaw Ghetto Jews plus 50,000 murdered in German-occupied Lviv, Ukraine.
The intel came from the Jewish Agency for Palestine’s Geneva office. Washington asked if the Vatican, which received information from Catholics around the world, could confirm this from its sources. If so, would the Vatican have ideas about how to rally the public against these crimes?
The archive has a note confirming Pius read the American report. Two letters to the Vatican independently corroborated massacres in Warsaw and Lviv, Ukraine.
A month before the American request, Lviv’s Ukrainian Greek Catholic archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky sent Pius a letter reporting 200,000 Ukranian Jews massacred under “outright diabolical” Nazi occupation.
Wolf says the Secretariat of State’s Angelo Dell’acqua, who became a cardinal, wrote a memo warning Pius to distrust the report because Jews “easily exaggerate” and “Orientals” — meaning Archbishop Sheptytsky — “are really not an example of honesty.”
In September, an Italian businessman named Malvezzi told Mgr. Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, of “incredible butchery” of Jews he witnessed during a recent Warsaw visit. Montini reported this to his superior, the Vatican’s secretary of state.
The archives also held three photos of emaciated concentration camp inmates and corpses in a mass grave. A Jewish operative gave them to the Vatican ambassador in neutral Switzerland to send to the Vatican which confirmed receipt in a letter two weeks later.
The Vatican told Americans it could not confirm the report.