In defense of Pius XII: one historian’s perspective

The Interview, a regular feature of The Catholic New World, is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

This week, Catholic New World staff writer Dolores Madlener talks with Martin Doorhy.

Innocent until proven guilty works for football players and presidents, not popes. Calumnies against Pope Pius XII have circulated since shortly after his death in 1958. Now it is a book by John Cornwell of Great Britain that got national attention on “60 Minutes” this spring.

Martin Doorhy, ironically a defense attorney in private practice in the Chicago area, is one of the scholar-historians who has seen through its falsehoods. Doorhy had his master’s thesis on the death of Hitler published; he’s taught courses on Nazi Germany and World War II at his alma mater, DePaul University. While a captain in the U.S. Air Force he taught military history at the Air University at Maxwell AFB, Alabama.

After graduation from Loyola School of Law, a fellowship enabled him to conduct 18 months of research into the Nuremberg Trials, interviewing Holocaust survivors, former SS men and two of Hitler’s secretaries. His research has taken him to Israel, Germany and England.

Catholic New World: The latest attack against Pius XII is Cornwell’s book, “Hitler’s Pope,” spotlighted on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” How objective were they?
Martin Doorhy: People who decide to buy that book should read the last chapter first. Cornwell condemns Pope John Paul II’s pontificate, as well as that of Pius XII. Start with the photo on the front cover that purports to be Cardinal Pacelli exiting a government building after Hitler came to power in 1933. It’s a lie. Pacelli never stepped foot on German soil after 1929.
Cornwell, a self-described “Catholic agnostic,” is the man CBS hired to be their “religious affairs expert” on the Catholic Church. Then they aired the program on the eve of Pope John Paul’s trip to the Holy Land. How objective are they?

CNW: CBS claims Cornwell got “unprecedented access” to “buried” archives?
MD: Cornwell contends on the dust jacket that he worked in the Vatican Secretariat of State archives “for months on end.” You must log in and out to the hour and minute when you access those particular archives. If you don’t, they’ll do it for you. We know his research began May 12 and concluded June 2, 1997—22 days—including weekends he was never there. The longest time he spent in a single day was seven hours. Other days he spent only one to two hours.
We know from the logs there were just two areas he accessed—the period in Bavaria, up to 1921 and in Austria, up to 1915.
To be fair to Cornwell, the reason those would be the only chronological areas he could research is the 75-year closure rule on Vatican Secretariat of State archives, a common practice with historic archives. In 1997 he couldn’t have seen anything beyond 1922. Yet he tries to pretend he’s utilized those particular archives to come up with revelations of Pope Pius XII and the Nazis in the ’30s and ’40s. That simply is not true.
On the other hand, the general archives of the Vatican have been open to scholars for decades and Cornwell had no more access than dozens of other scholars. He’s drawn most of his conclusions from secondary sources unfriendly to the church. Cornwell, by the way, possesses no degree in history, none in theology and none in law.

CNW: In Hitler’s mind was Pius “his”?
MD: If Hitler were alive today he would probably be suing John Cornwell for libel. It would be fair to say Hitler disliked Pius XII to the point of detestation. As secretary of state, with the approval of Pius XI, between 1933-1939, Cardinal Pacelli issued no fewer than 60 letters of condemnation about the Nazi regime’s treatment either of the church itself or of German and later Austrian Jewry.
When the assassination attempt on Hitler in 1939 in Munich failed, and no perfunctory letter of congratulations came from the pope, Hitler was quoted as saying, “He’s no friend of mine.” In July, 1943, Hitler was quoted as saying, “I’ll go right into the Vatican. Do you think I worry about the Vatican? I don’t care if the entire crew is in there. We’ll get the whole lot of pigs out. Afterwards we can say we’re sorry. We can always do that.” One of Hitler’s earlier quotes was that one of his missions in life was to “stamp out Christianity, root and branch.”

CNW: What about Italy’s Jews? “60 Minutes” and Cornwell accuse the pope of “doing nothing in his own backyard.”
MD: This is absolutely untrue. Most experts agree the pre-war Jewish population in Italy was about 75,000. At the end of the war 60,000 Italian Jews were still alive. That meant 20 percent perished during the Holocaust. What is truly astonishing about that figure is that of 15 occupied countries whose pre-war Jewish population was 50,000 or above, the 80 percent survival rate in Italy is far and away the highest rate in any of those countries—and I know they were not saved by Benito Mussolini!
The “Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,” published in 1990 in Tel Aviv, written mostly by Jewish scholars—a very unbiased source—credits Pope Pius XII with saving no fewer than half the Jews of Rome during the Nazi occupation.

CNW: Where did the Vatican rank in rescuing Jews?
MD: John Toland, a Pulitzer Prize author (unlike John Cornwell), in his biography “Adolf Hitler,” (1976), declared that “no person and no church was responsible for saving more Jews than was Pius XII and the Roman Catholic Church.” He went on to say that Pius XII during World War II saved more Jews than all other church groups and rescue agencies combined.

CNW: Are detractors correct who say the pope saw Communists as a greater danger than the Nazis?
MD: The pope had nothing but contempt for both. He called Nazism “neo-paganism.” I don’t want to be as disingenuous as John Cornwell. I will acknowledge that Pius XII and Pius XI both perceived Bolshevism as representing a greater threat to Europe than Nazism. Stalin actually murdered more human beings than Hitler did, which is no compliment to Hitler. We have somehow ignored this.

CNW: Did the pope ever use radio appeals?
MD: In 1942 The New York Times praised the Pope’s Christmas Eve broadcast as a lone voice crying out in the wilderness while Hitler said the pope was making himself “a mouthpiece of the Jews.” As we know, the pope never spoke out on behalf of the Catholic people of Poland although he did on behalf of the Jewish people of Poland and Europe. This better than anything else, vividly illustrates, I think, the conundrum that confronted the pope throughout the war.

CNW: What was that?
MD: He tried to explain it to his inner circle this way: If I condemn the sufferings of any one group then I must name all. Near the end of 1942 when President Roosevelt’s personal emissary, Myron Taylor, approached the pope, he asked for an explicit papal condemnation of Nazi atrocities. The pope’s response was: Then obviously I would also have to condemn those of the Soviet Union. Taylor withdrew his request, underlining the fact that the Allies were not interested in moral outrage being addressed by the Vatican but a propaganda coup for one side of belligerents against another side.

CNW: Is Pius a victim of revisionism?
MD: I call it “derision-ism.” Britain and the U.S. were allied with the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, Joseph Stalin. Why did our president refer to Joseph Stalin in private as “Uncle Joe”? Could you imagine Pius XII referring to Hitler as “Uncle Adolf”?
What was Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain doing a year before the outbreak of World War II grinning and shaking hands with Hitler on newsreel footage? No one ever questions Chamberlain’s personal morality or his character. It’s always his judgment, his discretion, or wisdom.

CNW: Did the Allies surpass Pius XII’s efforts to save Jews?
MD: Pius, with no armed forces, saved as many as 860,000 Jews in Europe, directly or indirectly, according to Pinchas Lapide.
Throughout the war, the one great weapon the Allies possessed was air power. There were no fewer than 52 Nazi concentration camps dotting the European countryside orbited by 1,201 “satellite” camps. I’ve taught at the Air University in Alabama and have seen the documents. I have never seen a mission undertaken by the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II against a concentration camp.
The only exception I can think of occurred in 1944 when the American 15th Air Force in Italy could have bombed Auschwitz. Prominent British and American organizations implored their respective governments to “Bomb Auschwitz, it’s well within the range of our airforce.” They would not do it. There were eight synthetic oil refineries within 45 miles of Auschwitz. Between July and November 1944, we sent 2,800 B-17s to bomb the oil refineries. One was within five miles of the Auschwitz gas chambers. We never bombed one of them.

CNW: What was their rationale?
MD: The documents I’ve examined show that our War Department had a long-standing policy not to intervene in what they called “rescue operations” to assist refugees. Their theory was that it could eventually present a serious diversion of men and supplies from “legitimate military objectives.”

CNW: OK, how effective was the Allies’ “talk” ?
MD: There were about a half-dozen major meetings of the great leaders of World War II—Casablanca and Teheran in 1943; Yalta, 1945 (at which post-war tribunals were discussed) and Potsdam in 1945. At not a single one was there a public proclamation concerning the destruction of European Jewry. The Allies did precious little “talk.”

CNW: Had a Wojtyla been in the Chair of Peter instead of Pacelli, would it have made a difference?
MD: Can a man’s efforts always have been improved? Of course they could have. Are there things the pope could have done better? Perhaps. Overall, I firmly believe Pope Pius has nothing to apologize for, in his personal conduct and efforts to save (not just talk about) European Jewry. As Catholics we should take pride in what he did. He was a master of languages, a diplomat for decades, with a Ph.D. in canon law at the age of 26. He was brilliant; honest and straightforward to a fault.
Anything he could do he did, up to and including something a lot of readers are probably unaware of because the pope never spoke of it publicly. In early 1940 before Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries, Pope Pius XII acted as intermediary between Britain and France and a group of German Army conspiratorial generals. Britain and France were offering the Germans a cessation of hostilities, provided they return to their pre-1939 borders. They also made clear that it had to include “the removal” of Adolf Hitler as chancellor. It was obvious to all, including the pope, it meant Hitler’s assassination. Pius nonetheless remained the intermediary between those generals and Britain and France! Hardly “Hitler’s Pope.”

CNW: There isn’t space here to ask you to refute every error in “Hitler’s Pope.” What worthy sources in the bookstores can you recommend for truth-seekers?
MD: Here are a few: “Pius XII & the Second World War,” by Jesuit Father Pierre Blet; “Pius XII Was Not Silent,” by Dr. Jeno Levai; “Pius XII: Architect for Peace,” by Sister Margherita Marchioni and “The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators,” by Anthony Rhodes.

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