Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust: a reply to Daniel Goldhagen

Modern Age, Summer, 2003 by Dimitri Cavalli

THE LAST SEVEN YEARS have witnessed renewed interest in the controversy over Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II. His critics condemn him for his "silence" during the Holocaust and for his "collaboration" with the Nazis. By contrast, the Pope's defenders assert that he forcefully resisted the Nazis, spoke out many times, and saved many Jewish lives. One of the more vile takes on Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State who became Pius XII on March 2, 1939, comes from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in a long essay published in the New Republic (January 21, 2002). (1) Goldhagen condemns Pope Pius XII as an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer who sat by as six million Jews went to their deaths. Goldhagen, who accuses the Catholic Church of covering up its anti-Semitic past and the failures of Pius XII, concludes by asking "what should be the future of this Church that has not fully faced its antisemitic history, that still has antisemitic elements embedded in its doctrine and theology, and that still claims to be the exclusive path to salvation?"

Goldhagen first came on the public scene in 1996 with the publication of his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, an adaptation of his doctoral thesis at Harvard. Goldhagen argued that most, if not all, Germans were driven by a fanatical "elimi-nationist anti-Semitism" and wanted to rid Germany of the Jews. The book was an international best seller and thrust the author into the public spotlight. Although Hitler's Willing Executioners earned substantial praise in the mainstream press, many scholars faulted Goldhagen's methodology and research. Several books appeared that refuted Goldhagen's thesis and exposed his misuse of primary and secondary sources, including Hyping the Holocaust: Scholars Answer Goldhagen (1997), a collection of essays edited by Franklin H. Littell; Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Holocaust: A Critical Review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1997) by David North; and A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (1998) by Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn.

In his review of Hitler's Willing Executioners published in Hyping the Holocaust, Rabbi Jacob Neusner observed that "this hysterical book, full of pseudo-scholarship and bad arguments, calls into question the scholarly integrity of Harvard's doctorate [program]." Angered by the hostile reception to this book, Goldhagen went on the offensive, aggressively answering his critics, whom he accused of failing to address the merits of his thesis and making personal attacks against him. Goldhagen even tried to intimidate Birn, a Canadian war crimes investigator whose review in the Cambridge Historical Journal (1997) did the most to discredit his book, into publishing a retraction by threatening to sue her for libel. Birn called Goldhagen's bluff and stood by her arguments. During a speaking tour in Germany, however, Goldhagen finally admitted that Hitler's Willing Executioners was flawed.

After discovering that Stephen Glass, one of its frequent contributors, published many fabricated pieces in the magazine from 1995-1998, the New Republic's editors pledged on June 1, 1998, that they "have devised fact-checking procedures to insure the accuracy of our copy." It seems that the New Republic's fact checkers were too busy even to glance at Goldhagen's article. It would take a book the size of War and Peace to adequately address Goldhagen's endless number of straw-man arguments, distortions, embarrassing errors of fact, omissions, and falsehoods. Instead, let us focus on the main points of Goldhagen's attack against Pope Pius XII.

Citing John Cornwell, the British author of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (1999), Goldhagen asserts that evidence of the Pope's anti-Semitism is "unimpeachable." The proof is a letter written by Pacelli, when he was still the papal nuncio in Germany, to Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Cardinal Gasparri in 1919. Pacelli observed that a pair of Bolshevik revolutionaries, who mistreated one of his subordinates, were Jews. In the London Sunday Times (September 12, 1999), Cornwell asserted that this letter, which had "Iain in the Vatican archive like a ticking timebomb until now," showed that Pacelli was anti-Semitic because he associated Jews with Communism. It seems that Goldhagen accepts Cornwell's interpretation of the letter at face value and has never seen the original. In fact, the complete text of this "ticking time bomb" was already published in the Italian historian Emma Fattorini's book, Germania e Santa Sede: La Nunziature di Pacelli tra la Grande Guerre e la Reppublica di Weimar ("Germany and the Holy See: Pacelli's Nunciature during the Great War and the Weimar Republic," 1992). The text shows that Cornwell deceptively translated the letter to make it more controversial than it actually was and gave it an anti-Semitic spin.

Contrary to Goldhagen's claims, there is plenty of evidence that shows that Pius XII had very pro-Jewish attitudes. As a young student in Rome, Eugenio Pacelli went to school with Jews, notably Guido Mendes. In 1939 the Vatican provided Mendes and his family with exit visas to escape to Palestine. Mendes settled in the Tel Aviv suburb Ramat Gan, eventually becoming a prominent physician in Israel. In 1917, Pacelli, who was still serving as an aide to Cardinal Gasparri, helped organize a meeting between Pope Benedict XV and the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow. In February 2003 the Vatican began the process of opening its archives from 1933-1945 to scholars. One of the first documents that was found was a letter dated April 4, 1933, from Cardinal Pacelli, who was named the Vatican Secretary of State in December 1929, to Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo, the papal nuncio in Germany. "Important Jewish personalities have appealed to the Holy Father [Pope Pius XI] to ask for his intervention against the danger of anti-Semitic excesses in Germany," Pacelli wrote. "Given that it is part of the traditions of the Holy See to carry out its mission of universal peace and charity toward all men, regardless of the social or religious condition to which they belong, by offering, if necessary, its charitable offices, the Holy Father asks Your Excellency to see if and how it is possible to be involved in the desired way."