Did Pope Pius XII collaborate with Adolf Hitler?
Was Pope Pius XII an anti-Semite?
In an extensive interview with John Cornwell, author of the year's most
controversial book, Hitler's Pope, we find out that the answer is yes.
Now, for decades there have been allegations about how Eugenio Pacelli,
better known as Pope Pius XII, collaborated with the Nazis behind the
scenes.
Both before and during World War II.
Of course, the Vatican has always denied these charges, but they've kept their
records locked up.
They haven't allowed scholars to truly investigate the relationship between Pope
Pius XII and Adolf Hitler.
Well, all that changed seven years ago, when Cambridge University historian John
Cornwell was given access to the secret Vatican archives.
Now, Cornwell was a good Catholic.
He'd written a best-selling book about the death of Pope John Paul I, and the Vatican
fully expected him to exonerate Pius XII.
Indeed, Cornwell himself hoped that the rumors about Nazi collusion were untrue.
But to his horror, he found the opposite.
Document after document proved that Eugenio Pacelli, the man who became Pope
in 1939, stands as a monumental moral failure.
A man more concerned with centralizing church authority than with the murder of
millions of people.
A man not only complicit with the rise of the Nazi party, but according to Cornwell,
a man whose silence about the fate of the Jews betrayed a deeply embedded
anti-Semitic attitude.
Now, Cornwell put all this in his controversial new book, Hitler's Pope,
the secret history of Pius XII.
And naturally, the Roman Catholic Church has strongly denied the claims of
anti-Semitism, and some have even criticized Cornwell's scholarship.
Well, I spoke to Cornwell recently, and began by asking him about Pacelli's
work in the 1930s in Germany, where he negotiated the now infamous treaty between
the Vatican and Hitler's regime.
Well, first of all, why did he go to Germany?
Why was he sent there?
And the reason is, the instrument, the effective instrument of creating an
ideology out of the whole idea of papal primacy, was this new drafting of a code
of canon law.
For the first time in the church's history, we had a code of canon law.
But they had a problem, and that problem was Germany, because Germany had one of
the largest Catholic populations in the world, 23 million.
It was wealthy, complex, highly sophisticated, many Catholic universities,
publishing houses, 400 Catholic newspapers, and a really effective
democratic political party called the Centre Party.
So his purpose in Germany was to renegotiate all these old treaties and
bring them in line with the new code, which effectively would submit the German
Catholic population to a new allegiance to the Holy See.
Year after year, he attempted to pursue this concordat, the right concordat,
and he was turned down by successive chancellors, five of whom were Catholics,
because they thought that the Vatican attempts were too authoritarian.
It wasn't until Hitler emerged in power in January of 1933 that the chance for these
two supreme authoritarians to come together and to do a deal came about.
Now, why would a pope make that deal?
Why would they withdraw Catholics from the political field?
Pacelli, even before he became pope in relation to Germany, did not trust
Catholic democracy.
They did not like Catholic parties, because they couldn't control them,
and because they thought that it might introduce democratization by the backdoor
into the church itself.
And what were they afraid of?
Why was democracy such a thing to fear for the church?
Well, they thought that it was uncontrollable, that's the first thing.
But secondly, they really did view democracy as a precursor to socialism,
which of course was a precursor to communism.
Once the concordat is signed, Hitler is joyous, but so is Pacelli.
Both think they've won.
Was Pacelli simply fooled by Hitler, that Hitler had essentially emasculated
the church, and then he could have his way with Germany under the so-called
protection of the church?
Was Pacelli simply fooled and out-negotiated by Adolf Hitler,
or was he more actively in collusion, knowing Hitler's agenda at that time?
Hitler, in his very first public statement after the concordat, said that this shows
that the Vatican believes that it can live comfortably with fascism.
That it almost blesses the fascist project?
That's right.
Both at home and abroad, so it will lull Catholics into thinking that there is no
problem whatsoever with National Socialism, and it will show the world that
National Socialism is respectable.
Now it's interesting that Pacelli was immediately outraged by this, and that
does indicate he had no great love of Hitler, no great love of National
Socialism, but he was prepared to do deals with the devil in the interests of what he
saw to be the only, the best interest of the Catholic Church, which was the
centralisation.
His great statement immediately after Hitler's, he states quite clearly that the
triumph is actually the church's, because what the concordat means is the
acknowledgement by the German state of the right of the Holy See to impose canon law
on all German Catholics.
So there we see, you know, these remarkable goals which are quite
different, but which have disastrous consequences for the history of the rest
of this decade.
We see this powerful Catholic Church withdrawing from all social and political
action, which includes the voluntary disbanding of the Centre Party,
after having voted for the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler his dictatorship.
That was all part of the deal.
We can now see, as we tell the narrative, I believe for the first time in a general
history, work of history, that the price of this concordat, the price of this deal,
was that the Catholic Centre Party, under the encouragement of Pacelli,
should vote Hitler into his dictatorship and then voluntarily disband itself with
the blessing of the Holy See, the Vatican, which is why so many Catholics after this,
because they had no political home to go, went in their hundreds of thousands into
the Nazi Party.
Was Pacelli simply blind to the consequences of making a deal with Hitler?
Or, more horrifyingly, did he care what the consequences were for non-Catholics?
Well, I think he had an extraordinary ability to blind himself to the
consequences of his actions all the way through his life.
It's interesting that although immediately after the concordat he said it was a great
triumph for the imposition of the Code of Canon Law on German Catholics,
he actually changed his tune later on.
He said that he was forced into the concordat with a gun to his head and that
some kind of legal agreement was better than none.
This shows extraordinary capacity for self-delusion, I think, and we see this
actually all through his life.
Now, one of the claims in this book is that he's actively anti-Jewish or
anti-Semitic.
He wrote the following passage during his time in Munich when he witnessed the
Bolshevik uprising.
Now, the Bolshevik uprising, just to remind people, many of the leaders were
Jewish.
And he wrote about seeing these Jews, things like this...
An army of employees were dashing to and fro, giving out orders.
And in the midst of all this, a gang of young women of dubious appearance,
Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in the offices with
lecherous demeanor and suggestive smiles.
Throughout it, he calls them pale, dirty, drugged eyes, vulgar, repulsive,
with faces that are intelligent and sly.
Stereotypical anti-Semitic contempt, as you call it.
Did this run through his whole life?
Did he view Jews like that?
No, it's the only evidence I've found of that kind of moral and physical disdain
for Jewish people.
But people will take this in different ways.
I've been told by prominent Catholic journalists that my interpretation of this
as anti-Semitic is bizarre.
I have to say that the immediate parallel I've found with this kind of language is
actually in Mein Kampf, talking of the same group of people during the same
period of time, between 1919 and 1920.
We have absolutely no doubt, when we teach in history class and refer to Mein Kampf
as a text, that this is typical of anti-Semitic attitudes.
Well, when we come back, we'll further investigate the silence of Pope Pius XII
during the Holocaust, so stick around.
Now, Eugenio Pacelli becomes Pope on the eve of World War II.
He's essentially spent much of the last decade negotiating this concorda with Nazi
Germany, throughout the 30s.
And people know by the early 40s what Hitler's up to.
And yet, throughout the war, Pope Pius XII never speaks out against the Nazis about
the killing of the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles.
Why was he silent?
Well, it's interesting that the view of Pius XII, the common view before my book,
is that he was the silent Pope and that this was the great scandal.
In fact, it's a pity he wasn't completely silent, because the fact is that he did
speak out.
He spoke out at Christmas 1942, and this was after six months of
systematic information coming into the Vatican about the true extent of the final
solution.
I mean, in July 1942, for example, it was published in the Daily Telegraph in
London and the New York Times that millions of Jews were going to their
deaths.
All these details were known.
And it's known, too, that diplomats inside the Vatican were supplying him with whole
dossiers of information.
And in the autumn of 1942, President Roosevelt actually sent an envoy through
enemy territory, a man called Myron Taylor, to plead with him to speak out.
So finally he speaks, Christmas 1942, and what does he say?
Instead of telling the true figures, the millions that were going to their
deaths, he scales it down to hundreds of thousands.
He doesn't mention the word Jews.
In fact, he says here, I shall read it, he says in this, what became known as his
most clear denunciation, he says, humanity owes this vow to those hundreds
of thousands who without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of
their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction.
That's right.
That's all he said throughout the war.
That is the fullest extent of all his statements during the war.
And it is clear to me that that is, it is a statement, he's saying something,
he's not being silent.
But the statement is tantamount to being a denial of the truth and certainly a
trivialization of the true holler of the final solution.
In this sense, what he said was deeply scandalous and particularly scandalous to
all those German Catholics who might have been moved by what he said, instead of
which their consciences were placated and lulled.
Peter Gumpel again says, in my considered opinion, a public protest by the Pope
would not have saved a single Jewish life.
It would have only aggravated the persecution of both the Jews and the
Catholics.
It was a strategy, therefore, a considered strategy of this Pope to remain totally
silent throughout the war.
Again, is that disingenuous?
I think it's disingenuous because it should have been explained to us after the
war that this is what he was doing.
What did he say in 1946, before a group of Arabs visiting the Vatican?
He boasted that he had spoken out clearly against the Nazis for their treatment of
the Jews, when we know that that was simply not true.
So he lied.
Well, what we certainly know is that he took credit for things he didn't do,
which means that he's a hypocrite as well.
Why is he being beatified then?
Well, the process of beatification and canonization, the making of saints,
has become, during the reign of this Pope, extremely political.
We're talking about John Paul now.
We're talking about John Paul II.
What would be the politics behind the beatification of Pius XII?
It would be, surely, that his policies of extreme centralization, his policies of
absolutism, his conduct during the war, would be exonerated, not only exonerated,
but actually confirmed.
Knowing about this, and you're a Catholic, does this shake your faith?
Does this change your attitudes as a Catholic towards the institution of the
Catholic Church?
Well, I don't regard myself as a particularly good Catholic.
I go to church.
But, you know, there have been bad Popes in the past, and there will be bad Popes
in the future.
And what we're learning from, I hope, one of the lessons that I've certainly
carried away from my journey through the life and career of Pius XII, is that,
you know, the Catholic Church is not the Pope.
The Catholic Church is to be found in all the people of God, and not just consented
in this one man.
Now, John Cornwell's book, Hitler's Pope, is a well-researched and a thorough
chronicle of the shameful, the deceitful acts of a Pope who has, up to this point,
been very well protected by church apologists.
Now, the first half of the book is a bit dense.
It focuses on church history before Pacelli's reign as Pope.
But this second half of Cornwell's book is nothing short of a harrowing read.
Now, it obviously gave Cornwell no pleasure to expose the Pope, Pius XII,
as a moral failure and as an anti-Semite, but to his credit, he does it without
backing away.
I would put this book on your must-read list.
This is history at its best.
Investigative, explosive, and finally revelatory.
It's published by Viking.
I'm Evan Solomon, and I'll see you again in seven.
Well, 50 years ago this week, Pope Pius XII died, known as Eugene Pacelli.
And we want to spend a few moments talking about this infamous Pope and what your
thoughts were on him.
Yeah, exactly 50 years ago, I think it's this weekend, that Eugene Pacelli,
a.k.a.
Pope Pius XII, died.
I remember it very well.
I was living in South London at the time.
I remember my father telling me that the Pope had died and the Catholic Church
would never be the same again.
In some ways, I think he was right, because the Vatican Council came along and
turned the whole thing upside down and pointed in a left-wing direction.
But, yes, he died 50 years ago this week.
A very emotional man, so they say.
He used to have all his meals on his own, with just a canary for company,
which is very sad.
So says Mother Pasqualina, who was his housekeeper at the Vatican, I think,
for about 19 years.
She was also with him in Bavaria.
Interestingly, I think the day after she died, she was summoned to one of the
offices of one of the senior cardinals in the Vatican.
I think it's Cardinal Ottaviani, who said, Your service is no longer
required, but take the Vatican and take the bird with you.
So rather sad for the bird as well.
He'd probably been quite happy there.
But in the early days of his death, I think possibly in the 60s, it was
rumoured very much so that he would be made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.
Christians believe that we are all saints when we're born again, but he would be
confirmed, canonised, as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.
Just explain to us what canonisation means, please.
Well, canonisation is when they open up a file on a prospective candidate who's
going to be made a pope.
They appoint a devil's advocate, as they say, to look at the man,
to find out all of this, and to investigate claims that he was a worthy
man, he was a holy man, and that three or four miracles are done.
People say, well, I prayed to such and such, Padre Pio, whatever it was,
and my wishes were recurred.
So that will go on for a few years.
Then he becomes venerable, and then eventually passes on and becomes
canonised, becomes a full-blown saint.
It didn't happen, of course, because the rumours were still surfacing that the
Vatican had been very much involved with the Nazis.
The infamous Concordat of 1933, which he signed not as Pius XII,
but for Pius XI.
When he was Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli, was signed in 1933.
And there's a famous picture, of course, you can see him at the table signing this.
Franz von Pappen's there, and we've written about him on our website,
and you can read all about this very distinguished, high-ranking, Masonic,
Catholic gentleman, Franz von Pappen.
You can see Cardinal Ottaviani, who I've just mentioned there,
he was Monsignor Montini.
And right out of the picture, there's a little figure standing there, he was
Monsignor Montini, of course, who later became Pope Paul VI.
But yes, that's when the beginning set, that the Vatican would recognize the Nazi
government, wouldn't criticize them too much, and in return, they were able to
practice their beliefs and so forth.
Of course, later on, several books came out highlighting what had happened.
Certain telegrams came forward that had been sent to the Vatican, the plight of
the Jews, and to their credit, certain German bishops saying,
Look, you know, we've got a concentration camp near us, people are being rounded up
in the night, we're very concerned about this.
We've been to the Nuncio in Berlin, I think his name was Orsonego,
Archbishop Orsonego, and nothing much has been done about it.
So there were people doing something, by and large, since the Vatican sleptwalk
through this.
And of course, ten years ago, the infamous book came out, I can't remember the
author, is it Robert Cromwell?
No, Robert Cromwell, yeah.
Cromwell, Hitler's Pope, which you'll probably see flashing up on the screen
about now.
And there you can see Pacelli winging out towards this Mercedes-Benz, and there's
German soldiers standing inside saluting him, Hitler's Pope.
Hasn't that title stuck?
Is it not true that the Catholic bishops threw parties for Hitler every year when
they were in Germany?
Yes, yes.
On his birthday every year, April the 20th, I believe, there was a big reception
and a party held in Berlin.
And Pius never criticised Hitler, did he?
Pius never criticised it at all, no.
Nothing was ever said about that.
And Churchill and Roosevelt couldn't understand why he wouldn't criticise... he
had Vatican radio, and he never criticised the Nazis.
We know that priests and nuns were murdered by the Nazis, but the hierarchy
was safe.
Yeah, priests and nuns were murdered by the Nazis, and a couple of bishops were
thrown in there as well, but Pius did nothing about it, turned his back on it,
nothing done at all about it.
And also strong speculation that at the end of the war, Pius XII actually gave
Hitler a requiem mass.
Rumour is, and I think this may have come from Malachi Martin, but I can't be too
sure that Pius XII officiated at a requiem mass.
I mean, Hitler's body wasn't there, of course.
It was in the bunker of Berlin.
But a requiem mass can be held in any country, in any cathedral out in the
world, for the soul of Adolf Hitler, who was born and bred a Catholic in
Austria, as so many of them were.
And died a Catholic as well?
As far as we know, he died a Catholic as well, yeah.
I mean, he was very close to the Jesuits, which we'll come to in a minute.
I mean, Mein Kampf, for example, which was written when Hitler was in
Landsberg prison, one of the editors who looked at the manuscript when Hess took it
all down, Rudolf Hess took it down, was a Jesuit.
Father Robert Stempel, I think his name was, you'll have to pull me up,
but it was Stempel who was anti the Jews, hated the Jews, you know, and did edit the
book.
And I think in the foreword of the original Mein Kampf, he does thank Father
Stempel for his input into this book, for the editing and so forth.
And he had a very painful death, didn't he, Pius XII?
Like all these popes who had very painful deaths.
Terrible death, awful death, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
But I think a couple of months before he died, he was struck by an awful illness of
hiccups.
And it went on for something like three or four days of hiccups, hiccup, all the
time, they could do nothing about it, and this will weaken anybody's physique.
And of course he died very much alone.
His doctor then sold some awful photographs of the body lying in the bed,
another count, because he was a count, Count Pacelli, of course.
So, a lot of these men do have awful deaths, certainly the popes.
And he rubbished the book of Genesis, said it was written for primitive people,
I think he said.
Yes, I don't think they've ever been pro-Genesis in the way that we would be.
I think they sort of think they've given Darwin...
They've alibrized, they've alibrized.
Yeah, they've alibrized.
I think they've given Darwin the possible doubt that what Darwin's saying could be
right.
But yes, he rubbished that for idiots, so you're an idiot and so am I.
Do you think the man's saved?
Absolutely not, no.
No, I don't think... any of those popes are saved.
And I knew a priest who'd worked in the Vatican some years ago, and he was
convinced that this pope, Pius XII, was the last real true Roman Catholic.
Well, if he's the last true Roman Catholic pope, I think that's what he meant,
the proper traditional pope, then he's languishing in the fires of hell.
So there you are, 50 years ago this week, Eugene Bocelli, a.k.a.
Pope Pius XII, passed away.
A very controversial pope.
He hasn't been canonized, because we believe he was too close to the Nazis.
And that's his stigma.
Yeah, I mean...
That's his legacy, really.
I think the man, what I can make out, was very highly strung, and I think like
so many of these men who are highly strung, I think Anthony Eden was as well,
they push the problem to the back of their mind, and I think they hope that it will
go away.
Well, of course, Anthony Eden was prime minister, he was dealing with world
events, but Bocelli was dealing with millions of people, men, women,
and children, who were being shipped off to the camps every day, for what,
from 1936, when Dachau opened up, and we went there, and you can look at our
pictures of Dachau, certainly until 1945.
Klaus Barbie was still sending people, from Jews in Paris, late 1944,
early 1945, with the connivance of the chief of police, who was a Roman Catholic,
and with the connivance of the bishops, the French bishops who went along with
this.
And interestingly enough, the man who became pope after Pius XII, Roncalli,
who was the nuncio, not the nuncio, they call it apostolic delegate in Turkey,
was the man who was elevated to cardinal, everybody was surprised, sent to Paris to
weed out these bishops who had been pro all of this, and to get rid of them,
I think they found about two, became the next pope.
Talk about him another time.
So there you are.
We're going to do a series of videos in the coming weeks on Roman Catholicism.
This is the start with Pius XII.
As always, thanks for your videos, thanks for your comments, thanks for your
thoughts, and Maranatha.
Maranatha from this ministry as well.