The Myth of Hitler's Pope

How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis

David G. Dalin

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781596981850
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Was Pope Pius XII secretly in league with Adolf Hitler? No, says Rabbi David G. Dalin, but there was a cleric in league with Hitler: the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. As Pope Pius XII worked to save Jews fromthe Nazis, the grand mufti became Hitler's staunch ally and a promoter of the Holocaust, with a legacy that feeds radical Islam today. In this shocking and thoroughly documented book, Rabbi Dalin explodes the myth of Hitler's pope and condemns the mythmakersfor not only rewriting history, but for denying the testimony of Holocaust survivors, hijacking the Holocaust for unseemly political ends, and ignoring the real threat to the Jewish people.

CHAPTER ONE

THE MYTH OF HITLER’S POPE AND WHY IT MATTERS

IT IS IRONIC THAT SIXTY YEARS after the Holocaust—with anti-Semitism virulent among Islamic fundamentalists and growing rapidly among secular Europeans—that the liberal media in the West has tried to blame Pope Pius XII (and even the Catholic Church as a whole) for anti-Semitism.

No one believed this at the time. From the end of World War II until at least five years after his death in 1958, Pope Pius XII enjoyed an enviable reputation amongst Christians and Jews alike. He was hailed as “the inspired moral prophet of victory,” and “enjoyed near-universal acclaim for aiding European Jews.” He was, as one historian has aptly put it, “universally praised by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, as the spiritual leader not only of Catholicism but of Western civilization itself.”¹ Indeed, in 1951, the eminent British writer (and liberal Catholic) Graham Greene could praise him as “a pope who many of us believe will rank among the greatest,”² an assessment shared by many other Catholics and Jews who hailed the pope for his many efforts to save Jewish lives during World War II.

The Slander of a Pope

The rhetorical campaign against the pope’s conduct in World War II began as easily dismissed Communist agitprop against the strongly anti-Communist pontiff. But the campaign of vilification became a major issue after the 1963 Berlin premiere of a play called The Deputy, written by a young left-wing German writer (and former member of the Hitler Youth) named Rolf Hochhuth. Hochhuth vilified Eugenio Pacelli (who became Pope Pius XII in 1939) as a Nazi collaborator and as an icy and avaricious pontiff guilty of moral cowardice and inexcusable silence as Europe’s Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Promoted as “the most controversial play of our time,” The Deputy was fictional, highly polemical, and offered no historical evidence. It nevertheless became a sensation and ignited a firestorm of controversy in the media and among intellectuals.³

That was forty years ago. Why does this myth persist? And why is it important? It is important, first of all, because of the duty we owe to the truth. It is also important because the battle over the reputation of Pope Pius XII is one of the most historically important battles of the culture war. An increasingly left-wing intellectual class wants to denigrate not only traditional Catholicism, but Christianity and even Judaism. It is no coincidence that some of the most extreme of the pope’s attackers—including James Carroll (author of Constantine’s Sword) and Garry Wills (author of Papal Sin)—are also outspoken critics of the late Pope John Paul II.

Very few of the many recent books about Pius XII and the Holocaust are actually about Pius XII and the Holocaust. The liberal bestselling attacks on the pope and the Catholic Church are really an intra-Catholic argument about the direction of the Church today. The Holocaust is simply the biggest club available for liberal Catholics to use against traditional Catholics in their attempt to bash the papacy and thereby to smash traditional Catholic teaching—especially on issues relating to sexuality, including abortion, contraception, celibacy, and the role of women in the Church. The anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians like Garry Wills and John Cornwell (author of Hitler’s Pope), of ex-priests like James Carroll, and of other lapsed or angry liberal Catholics exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today.

This hijacking of the Holocaust must be repudiated. The truth about Pope Pius XII—which the mainstream media has been content to ignore while helping to make bestsellers out of bad history—must be restored. The liberal culture war against tradition—of which the Pope Pius XII controversy is a microcosm—must be recognized for what it is: an assault on the institution of the Catholic Church and traditional religion.

It is astonishing that so little commentary exists about the extreme nature of the attacks on the Catholic Church. Books and articles attacking Catholicism have become a cottage industry of the mainstream media. One example is the January 21, 2002, issue of the New Republic, which published Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s essay, “What Would Jesus Have Done?”—one of the most hateful attacks against the Roman Catholic Church (and in particular, Pope Pius XII) ever printed in a major American publication. The New Republic devoted an unprecedented twenty-four pages to Goldhagen’s anti-Catholic diatribe and featured it as the cover story.

In fall 2002, Goldhagen expanded this essay into a book-length attack on the Church, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, which has added new fuel to the controversy over the Vatican’s role during the Holocaust.⁴

Goldhagen is no stranger to controversy. In 1996, he created an international sensation with the publication of his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which received widespread media coverage and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Goldhagen’s explanation for the Holocaust was remarkably simple and simplistic: Blame for the Holocaust should be placed on the ordinary Germans and their uniquely vicious brand of anti-Semitism, whose aim was the elimination of the Jews. The Holocaust, claimed Goldhagen, was attributable to a murderous or “eliminationist” anti-Semitism that was widely prevalent among the German people and intrinsic to the German character. The Nazi extermination of the Jews could thus take place because the vast majority of the German people were already predisposed to kill Jews, and thus became willing and enthusiastic followers of the Nazi leadership in its successful efforts to implement the Final Solution. While Goldhagen gained international celebrity, his book’s simplistic argument was widely criticized by serious scholars and historians.⁵

In his new book, Goldhagen’s historical understanding and interpretation of anti-Semitism is, once again, remarkably simple and simplistic. It is irresponsibly dishonest and misleading as well. In A Moral Reckoning, Goldhagen condemns Christianity, and specifically the Catholic Church, as the preeminent source of anti-Semitism ancient, medieval, and modern.

Much like Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Goldhagen’s new book is full of factual errors, historical misrepresentations, and suppression of overwhelming counterevidence to his argument. Thus, for example, several of the dates he provides for the establishment of European ghettos are wrong.⁶ The establishment of the Jewish ghetto in Rome, one of the memorably tragic milestones in the history of Catholic-Jewish relations, took place in 1556, not in 1555 as Goldhagen asserts. So, too, the Venice ghetto was erected in 1517, rather than in 1516 as stated by Goldhagen, while the Frankfurt ghetto was established in 1462, rather than in 1460. In dating the establishment of the Vienna ghetto in 1570, moreover, Goldhagen is wrong by more than fifty years, as Viennese Jewry were not confined to a ghetto in their city until 1626.

In A Moral Reckoning, Goldhagen focuses on Pius XII as the symbol of Catholic evil and repeats almost every accusation, including the most discredited ones, that has ever been leveled against him. While condemning Pius XII as an anti-Semite and a collaborator with Nazi Germany, however, Goldhagen doesn’t limit his anti-Catholic diatribe to Pius alone. Goldhagen’s irresponsible screed climaxes with an attack on Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church today, minimizing or virtually ignoring John Paul II’s historic role as a friend of the Jewish people, a pope who did more than any other to usher in a new and unprecedented era of Catholic-Jewish dialogue and reconciliation.

Goldhagen also identifies Christianity itself with anti-Semitism. He declares, “the main responsibility for producing the all-time leading Western hatred lies with Christianity. More specifically, with the Catholic Church,”⁷ conveniently ignoring the anti-Semitism of atheistic Soviet Russia and the fact that the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust were anti-Christian as well as anti-Semitic. For Goldhagen, as for Carroll and other papal critics, anti-Semitism is a core Catholic value that is the source of European anti-Semitism. Goldhagen, in fact, repudiates the New Testament and Catholic thought deriving therefrom as inherently anti-Semitic with an “obvious integral relationship to the genesis of the Holocaust.”⁸ Goldhagen sees Pius XII’s alleged anti-Semitism as something to be expected, since he rose through “the profoundly anti-Semitic establishment of the Church, an institutional culture centrally animated by the notion that all Jews were Christ-killers and responsible for many of the perceived evils of modernity.”⁹

As Jewish scholar Michael Berenbaum has noted, Goldhagen “omits all mention of the countervailing traditions of tolerance”¹⁰ within Roman Catholic thought, past and present. He misrepresents the early Church leaders who advocated tolerance toward the Jews, and his skewed treatment of Saint Augustine’s views of Jews and Judaism is especially appalling. Similarly, Goldhagen’s unsubstantiated claim that “there is no difference in kind between the Church’s ‘anti-Judaism’ and its offshoot European anti-Semitism” that led to the Holocaust is as unsophisticated and wrong a statement as someone claiming to be a historian could possibly make.

Goldhagen’s book—despite its near utter lack of disinterested scholarship—has carved a permanent niche for itself in the list of anti-Catholic literature, alongside Paul Blanshard’s 1949 scaremongering book American Freedom and Catholic Power. Blanshard was a much-reprinted staple for anti-Catholic Evangelical readers. Goldhagen has become one of many staples for secular leftists whose hatred of Catholicism derives from the Church’s opposition to abortion, gay rights, the ordination of women, and the rest of the liberationist agenda. If, as Jewish theologian Will Herberg once put it, “anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of secular Jewish intellectuals,” then Goldhagen is the most anti-Semitic of Jewish papal critics.

Goldhagen’s demand that the Catholic Church as we know it be abolished as a disgrace and a danger to us all should be a warning to all people of faith of the hatred that burns in secular hearts to abolish traditional religion. That the book has found its readership out in the fever swamps of anti-Catholicism isn’t surprising. But that a mainstream publisher like Knopf—and a mainstream liberal magazine like the New Republic—would print it is an intellectual and publishing scandal.

But it is scandal made intelligible by the myth of Hitler’s pope that the liberal mainstream media has been so eager to propound as truth. When Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope was published in 1999, it became a bestselling international sensation. Cornwell denounced Pope Pius XII as “the most dangerous churchman in modern history” without whom “Hitler might never have . . . been able to press forward with the Holocaust.” Readers of Cornwell’s bestseller were led to believe that before assuming the papacy Pacelli had been a devoted follower and supporter of Hitler. In fact, as we will see, he was one of Hitler’s earliest and most consistent critics.

Hitler’s Pope was excerpted in Vanity Fair and London’s Sunday Times. Most liberal reviewers and commentators uncritically endorsed Cornwell’s allegations, apparently without investigating their veracity. Cornwell became a celebrity in demand on the lecture, talk-show, and book-signing circuit, and was given a flattering profile on television’s 60 Minutes.

Cornwell later backed away from his own claims, but it wasn’t under pressure from the mainstream media, which happily endorsed his unverified (and strongly anti-religious) conclusions.¹¹ Author Eugene Fisher—who holds a doctorate in Hebrew culture and education—lamented, “It is a sad commentary on the secular media that this blatantly anti-Catholic screed was ever published, much less hyped into bestseller status.”¹²

To be sure, there have been recent books published by Catholic scholars like Ronald J. Rychlak, Pierre Blet, Margherita Marchione, Ralph McInerny, Justus George Lawler, and Jose Sanchez defending Pope Pius XII. They offer well-documented accounts of papal efforts to save and shelter Jews during the Holocaust, and show how the pope’s diplomacy and the Vatican’s rescue operations saved hundreds of thousands of Jews and other innocent victims from Nazism. But these books—well documented as they are—have been virtually ignored by the liberal mainstream media, published not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter One: The Myth of Hitler’s Pope and Why It Matters
• Chapter Two: Popes in Defense of the Jews
• Chapter Three: The Future Pope
• Chapter Four: A Righteous Gentile: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust
• Chapter Five: The Liberal Media and the Culture Wars
• Chapter Six: Hitler’s Mufti: Muslim Anti-Semitism and the Continuing Islamic War against the Jews
• Chapter Seven: John Paul II and Papal Condemnation of Anti-Semitism
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index