The Myth of Hitler's Pope
How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From The Nazis
By Rabbi David G. Dalin
Review by Steve Muscatello
August 1, 2005
In the 1820’s, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel propagated a theory of “history” that went like this: Eternal truth does not exist. All knowledge is relative, a mere product of its time. Mankind will ultimately achieve perfection through the natural progression of History, culminating in an “absolute moment of knowledge” that yields an earthly utopia.
Hegel’s “Historicism” later inspired several generations of scholars to abhor traditional understandings of morality and religion and to create alternate “truths” – what are a few facts between friends anyway – that sought to advance insidious ideologies.
This is what Rabbi David G. Dalin is up against in The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From The Nazis (Regnery; 161 pages) as he seeks to defend Pope Pius XII against charges that the Italian pontiff was an anti-Semite and an ally of Nazi Germany.
Modern critics John Cornwell and James Carroll (among others) blame Pius XII for a host of Holocaust failures: the Vatican’s 1933 “Reich Concordat”; the refusal to excommunicate Hitler from the Catholic Church; and too infrequent public denunciations of Nazism. In due course, Dalin, a professor of history and political science at Ave Maria University, debunks each of these myths.
Orchestrated by then Vatican secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli (the birth name of Pius XII), the Reich Concordat guaranteed the freedom of profession and public practice of the Catholic religion in Germany. Critics have castigated the treaty as a tool to silence “German Catholics who otherwise might have openly opposed Hitler and held him in check.” Dalin argues to the contrary.
“The concordat was a pragmatic and morally defensible diplomatic measure,” he writes, “[that protected] German Catholics and the relative freedom of the Catholic Church in Germany.” Diplomacy, like politics, is the art of the possible. Pacelli, Dalin notes, was merely trying to place order – some measure of accountability – upon an unruly state and its despotic leader.
Formal excommunication is a powerful papal tool; it can send a forceful message and convey an eternal consequence. Yet despite Hitler’s unprecedented malevolence, he was not excommunicated. Why? Because Pope Pius XII had a soft-spot for The Fuhrer? Dalin scoffs at the notion. Rather, Dalin contends that excommunication would have been “a purely symbolic gesture – and would likely have led to more persecution, not less.”
Continuing, Dalin cites Nuremberg trial prosecutor Robert M.W. Kempner, who said “every propaganda move of the Catholic Church against Hitler’s Reich would have been not only ‘provoking suicide,’ … but would have hastened the execution of still more Jews and priests.” Prudence is not the enemy of principle; in this case, the former saved more lives than the high-minded idealism of the latter.
Was Pope Pius XII a silent, passive observer of the Holocaust? Was he sympathetic to Hitler’s Final Solution? Hardly. According to Dalin, “of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany … between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology.” In 1935, the pontiff likened the difference between Christianity and Nazism to that of “fire and water.”
Further, according to Dalin, Pius XII’s first encyclical Summi Pontificatus, “begged for peace, expressly rejected Nazism, and expressly mentioned Jews.” In fact, Allied forces “dropped 88,000 copies of the encyclical over parts of Germany in an effort to raise anti-Nazi sentiment.”
Still, critics condemn Pius XII for his ‘relative’ inaction. More was required, they argue. Dalin, however, provides a convincing retort:
One might ask what could have been worse than the mass murder of six million Jews. The answer is the slaughter of hundreds of thousands more. Pope Pius XII knew that his words would not stop the Holocaust. He measured his words so as not to risk the lives he could save. And … when he thought his words might have influence … he used them mightily in stern protests that saved more lives.
Thousands of Jews hiding throughout Europe appreciated the pontiff’s public discretion – it quite literally saved their lives.
Dalin provides much more evidence of Pius XII’s protection of and devotion to the Jewish people. There are numerous testimonials from Holocaust survivors and Catholic priests alike that credit the pontiff for his direct involvement in saving Jewish lives. Critics such as Cornwell and Carroll, however, give scarce credence to these firsthand accounts. For them, Dalin offers a scathing critique:
To thus dismiss and deny the legitimacy of their [testimonials and] collective gratitude to Pius XII is tantamount to denying the credibility of their personal testimony and judgment about the Holocaust itself. To so deny and delegitimize their collective memory and experience of the Holocaust … is to engage in a subtle yet profound form of Holocaust denial.
Having thus completed an airtight defense of Pius XII, Dalin goes on the offensive. Why, he asks, do liberal Catholics falsely accuse Pius XII and other Catholic clergy of anti-Semitism, when they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the real source of anti-Semitism: radical Islam?
Dalin proceeds to deftly trace the path from Muhammad’s “divinely based antipathy to Jews,” to Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Hitler’s primary Arab conspirator in The Final Solution and eventual mentor to Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, and finally to modern Islamic terrorists.
Dalin’s penetrating scholarship uncovers al-Husseini’s role in mobilizing “political and military support for the Nazi regime” as Hitler’s “chief mouthpiece in the Middle East” (think Baghdad Bob on steroids). The most sobering revelation, however, comes in Dalin’s citation of Kenneth R. Timmerman, who writes:
[al-Husseini’s] close ties to Hitler, and his total embrace of Hitler’s Final Solution, provides the common thread linking past to present. If today’s Muslim anti-Semitism is like a tree with many branches, its roots feed directly off of Hitler’s Third Reich.
This “tree,” notes Dalin, is the real threat to Jews, not Catholicism or Christianity writ large.
Dalin’s writing is clean, and his scholarship well-sourced. He admirably defends the legacy of Pius XII as a tireless defender of the Jewish people. In turn, he calls upon the Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, to recognize the late pontiff as a “righteous gentile,” the highest honor for those who worked to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Such recognition would formally discredit a slanderous myth, vindicate a benevolent Pope, and serve as a striking victory for truth.
Steve Muscatello is the Editorial Assistant for Townhall.com. |
