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WORLD WAR TWO

Vatican to open archives of Pius XII, the WW2 pope accused of silence on the Holocaust

Pope Francis announced on Monday that the Vatican will open the secret archives of the wartime pontiff Pius XII in March next year, which could shed light on why the Catholic Church failed to intervene more against the Holocaust.

Published: 4 March 2019 15:08 CET
Vatican to open archives of Pius XII, the WW2 pope accused of silence on the Holocaust
A display critical of Pope Pius XII at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. Photo: Gali Tibbon/AFP

Researchers have long sought to examine the archives to discover why Pius XII, who was pontiff from 1939 to 1958, did not intervene more against the Holocaust perpetrated by the German Nazis, an attitude denounced as a form of passive complicity.

“I have decided that the opening of the Vatican Archives for the Pontificate of Pius XII will take place on March 2nd 2020,” the pope said. The date is the 81st anniversary of the election of Eugenio Pacelli to the papacy.

“The Church is not afraid of history,” added Francis, recalling that Pius XII found himself as head of the Roman Catholic Church “at one of the saddest and darkest moments of the 20th century”.

READ ALSO: Film claims Italian pope saved 800,000 Jews


Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli, in 1955. Photo: AFP

Francis said he made the decision understanding that serious historical research will evaluate “in a fair light, with appropriate criticism the moments of exaltation of this pope and, no doubt also moments of serious difficulties, tormenting decisions, and Christian and humane care”.

For many historians, Pius XII could have condemned more forcefully the massacre of Jews by the Nazis, but he didn't do it out of diplomatic caution and in order not to put Catholics in danger in occupied Europe.

The Vatican was officially neutral during the war. Other historians point out that Pius XII saved tens of thousands of Italian Jews by ordering convents to open their doors to take them in.

Yad Vashem — The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem — said it “commends” the decision, “which will enable objective and open research as well as comprehensive discourse on issues related to the conduct of the Vatican in particular, and the Catholic Church in general, during the Holocaust”.

It said it “expects that researchers will be granted full access to all documents stored in the archives”.

In 2012, the centre changed the caption on Pius XII in its museum, saying his reaction during the Holocaust continues to be a “matter of controversy among scholars”.

READ ALSO: 

According to Vatican Archives head Bishop Sergio Pagano, preparations to make the documents public began under Francis's predecessor Benedict XVI in 2006. The Holy See hoped everything would be ready by 2015, but the amount of documents and a lack of staff pushed that deadline back, he told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. 

Pagano said the painstaking work of archiving “a crucial period for the Church and for the world” will allow historians to discover a “superhuman work of Christian humanism”.
 
Francis said in studying the archives the wartime pope's decisions may appear to some as “reticence” and were instead attempts “to maintain, in times of the deepest darkness and cruelty, the small flame of humanitarian initiatives, of hidden but active diplomacy”.
 
In a 2014 interview the Argentine pontiff turned the spotlight away from the Vatican, saying that the Allies “had photographs of the railway routes that the trains took to the concentration camps… Tell me, why didn't they bomb” them?
 
And in a separate interview he described how Pius XII hid Jews in the Castel Gandolfo summer papal palace near Rome. “There, in the pope's room, on his very bed, 42 babies were born, Jewish children and of other persecuted people who were sheltered there,” he said. 

The perception of wartime passivity was in part fostered by a play, The Vicar by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth in 1963, which was later adapted by Greek director Costa-Gavras in the 2002 film Amen, which did much to damage Pius XII's image on the issue.

While popes John XXIII (1958-1963), Paul VI (1963-1978) and John Paul II (1978-2005) have been made saints, the beatification of Pius XII — a necessary step on the path to Catholic sainthood — is at a standstill due to the controversies surrounding his wartime papacy. 

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HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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