World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseBorn Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli into a powerful Vatican family, Pope Pius XII became the 260th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church on 2 Mar 1939 after a 40-year career with the church. Already well-versed in diplomacy from his experience with the Vatican equivalent of the foreign ministry, including nine years as Cardinal Secretary of State, his papacy was one that was heavily influenced by international politics. Although by no means a proponent of Nazism, he was criticized for his failures to speak out against Nazi atrocities. The first failure came before his papacy when he was accused to persuade his predecessor Pope Pius XI not to speak out against the Nazi Party after Kristallnacht in Nov 1938 where Nazi Party members attacked Jews and destroyed Jewish-owned businesses in Germany and Austria. In 1941, he received Ante Pavelic, leader of a German-sponsored puppet nation in Croatia; though it was a private audience and not a diplomatic one, it reflected Pius XII's personal recognition of the puppet nation that conducted a program that many regarded as genocide. In the same year, when approached by Philippe Pétain of France to determine whether anti-Semitic laws violated church doctrine, Pius XII responded that the church condemned racism but refused to give a specific answer whether anti-Semitic laws forced by Germany upon Vichy France was supported by the church or not. In May 1942, Polish ambassador to the Vatican Kazimierz Papée made a public complaint that the Pope failed to condemn Berlin even though atrocities against the Polish people were made known to the world. Many similar incidences repeated themselves over and over again where the Pope refused to condemn Nazi Germany, insisting that the atrocities against Jews and other groups were rumors, even when respected leaders of the church such as Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini (future Pope Paul VI) sent words of the Holocaust to the Vatican. While some speculated that he might not have been well informed of the seriousness of the Holocaust, a 1999 study by the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission concluded that he was aware of many details of the genocide as early as Jan 1941, based upon the study of correspondences to the pope before and during the war. Despite these failures, he did show support for the monarchs of the Low Countries when they were invaded and helped many European Jews to escape to the Americas and Palestine. Despite refusal to public denounce anti-Semitism, he did also privately communicated with various leaders in Europe to plead them not to obey German demands for deportations of Jews. Overall, his reaction to the Holocaust was inconsistent. "At times, he tried to help the Jews and was successful. But these successes only highlight the amount of influence he might have had, if he not chosen to remain silent on so many other occasions."

ww2dbaseAfter the war, Pius XII advocated to pardon all war criminals. He passed away at Castel Gandolfo in 1958.

Photographs

Pius XII Timeline