Bottum: The Pius War Revisited

Pius XII is back in the news, this time in reports that the man who would later become Pope John XXIII criticized Pius for inaction during the Holocaust. The various news reports, mostly from the Associated Press, are based on an article in the Israeli journal Haaretz , which noted:

Prof. Dina Porat, who headed the Project for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Tel Aviv University, centered her research on criticism of Pius XII from the Papal Nuncio Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who 15 years later became Pope John XXIII. According to Porat’s research, in 1943, Roncalli, then the nuncio in Turkey, wrote to the Catholic president of Slovakia asking him to stop the deportation of Slovakian Jews to Auschwitz. He wrote at the behest of Jewish Agency delegate Haim Barlas with whom he had a close personal relationship. In 1944, Barlas received the "Auschwitz Protocols," detailed accounts by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who had escaped the concentration camp in April of that year. Barlas sent the diaries directly to Roncalli, later writing in his memoirs that a shocked Roncalli read them with tears. According to Barlas, after reading the eyewitness accounts, Roncalli told him he was filled with resentment towards his superiors, "whose power and influence are great, but who refrain from action and resourcefulness in extending concrete help."

The newsworthiness of all this lies in the fact that Giuseppe Roncalli¯a hero of resistance to the Nazis’ destruction of the Jews¯is on record as consistently praising Pius XII. If that was only his public stance, if in private he was denouncing the pope, then his support for Pius can be discounted as merely politic chatter. Over the years, I have grown so tired of all the talk about the World War II pope. Since all the way back in 1963, when Rolf Hochhuth published his anti-papal play The Deputy , it has been, as I have described it before, like a giant game of Whack the Mole: Up pops some new accusation against Pius, splat goes the hammer of critical response, and undeterred up pops the mole somewhere else. Pop goes John Cornwell , splat goes Ronald Rychlack . Pop goes Susan Zuccotti , splat goes William Doino . Pop goes Daniel Goldhagen , splat goes David Dalin . There are genuine and serious criticisms to be made of Pius XII, and years ago I began writing about the Pius War in order to make them. But all such criticisms are meaningless in the current context: We have to start by clearing out all the misinformation and agenda-driven junk that litters the scene. So, about that Haaretz report: In the article, Dina Porat mentions the coordination between Roncalli and Barlas on behalf of Jews in Slovakia around 1943 but doesn’t mention that Pius XII was involved in these rescue efforts¯a fact both Roncalli and Barlas acknowledged. As my friend William Doino points out, in Actes et Documents , there is a three-page letter, dated May 22, 1943, from Roncalli to Cardinal Maglione (Pius XII’s secretary of state) that reads: "Even today the secretary of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Mr. C. Barlas, came to thank me and to thank the Holy See for the happy outcome of the steps taken on behalf of the Israelites in Slovakia." Much of this new attack on Pius depends on the timing of the Auschwitz Protocols . Barlas and Roncalli were not alone in receiving the report: It was widely distributed among diplomats and political leaders¯and one portion was actually conveyed to the O.S.S. in 1943, meaning the Allies had a sense of it a full year before any Vatican official knew about it. A key part of Porat’s use of Barlas involves the claim that the Vatican received the Auschwitz Protocols in May 1944, rather than in October, as scholars had believed till now. But, as the Czech historian Miroslav Kárný notes, not Roncalli but Giuseppe Burzio, a Vatican official in Bratislava, sent the Auschwitz Protocols on May 22, but the report did not arrive at the Vatican until the second half of October, as the official Vatican edition of the document shows. The source here is Actes et Documents , volume 10, p. 281. It is a note, dated May 22, 1944, from Burzio to Cardinal Maglione that reads: "I have been urgently asked to send to the Holy See the enclosed report [i.e., the Auschwitz Protocols], concerning the fate of the Jews who have been deported by Germany. The person who has handed over to me this report asks that, eventually, you should be made aware, in a very reserved way, of the contents of this report." A footnote to the document adds that it "apparently arrived at the Secretariat of State [because of wartime communication delays] only in October [1944], perhaps at the same time that another text sent by the apostolic nuncio (Bernardini) in Berne, on July 28, dealing with the so-called Protocol of Auschwitz, prepared by two young Jews of Slovakia, who had escaped [from Auschwitz], preparing a German document of some 29 pages." The July 28, 1944, note from Bernardini is similar to the Burzio note, conveying the Auschwitz report, but does not mention any involvement from Roncalli. In another footnote, the editors write that they could find "not a trace" of anything else relating to the Auschwitz Protocols¯which means there is no archival evidence that Roncalli sent a telegram on June 24, 1944, as Porat uses the private Barlas diaries to assert. The only document from Roncalli at the time recorded in Actes et Document is dated June 29, 1944, and was sent to Bernardini in Berne, who then forwarded it to Maglione: a request for the Holy See to do something in favor of the Hungarian Jews. But already, five days before this plea, on June 25, 1944, Pius XII had sent his open telegram to Admiral Horthy: "We are being beseeched in various quarters to do everything in our power in order that, in this noble and chivalrous nation, the sufferings, already so heavy, endured by a large number of unfortunate people, because of their nationality or race, may not be extended and aggravated . . . . Our Father’s heart cannot remain insensitive to these pressing supplications by virtue of our ministry of charity which embraces all men." The Haaretz article draws a connection between Roncalli’s supposed telegram of June 24 and the pope’s appeal to Horthy the next day, but¯apart even from the lack of evidence for any such telegram¯the Hungarian telegram from the Vatican had already been written. As Robert Graham (one of the Jesuit editors of Actes et Documents ) noted, "The papal telegram to Horthy, according to the papers of the Secretariat of State of His Holiness, had already been drafted on June 12." Even before that, on June 2, 1944, in an address to the College of Cardinals, Pius XII declared: "To one sole goal our thoughts are turned, night and day: How may it be possible to abolish such acute suffering, coming to the relief of all without distinction of nationality and race, and how we may help toward restoring peace at last to tortured humanity." The allocution was published on the front-page of L’Osservatore Romano the following day¯almost a month before the alleged Barlas-Roncalli activity. As William Doino asks in his analysis of the Haaretz article: "This is indifference? This is silence?"

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