Ep. 27- The Catholic Church and the Holocaust with David Kertzer

The behavior of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII is one of the most hotly debated controversies in the history of the Holocaust.  And for a long time much of the evidence about that has been locked away in the Vatican Archives.  Now, historians are finally able to access these documents.

In this episode, I talk with one of those who has access to those Vatican archives, David Kertzer, about the response of the Catholic Church to the rise of the Nazis and to the Holocaust.  

 
David Kertzer is a Pulitzer-prize-winning author and professor of social science at Brown University/

Kertzer, David, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (2022)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.955)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waittman Bourne. And today we are dealing with a, I think a very important and a very controversial topic, which has to do with the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, the role of the Pope Pius XII and the ways in which that was an organization and as individual responded.

to the Holocaust, to Nazi persecution, not only of Jews, but also of Catholics and Catholic priests and that kind of thing. And I'm very, very fortunate to be joined by an amazing scholar, David Kurtzer, who not only has written really important work on this topic, but also is one of the few people who has had access now to the Vatican archives that have recently been opened. So David, welcome to the show.

David Kertzer (00:55.025)
Nice to be with you.

Waitman Beorn (00:56.539)
Thanks so much. Can you just tell us really quickly, give us an introduction to sort of how you got into this topic in particular and kind of the path that you've taken and where you're at now.

David Kertzer (01:07.793)
That could be a very long answer, but to make it shorter, I've long been interested in politics and religion in Italy. My background is actually a social anthropologist as well as historian. And so I followed various aspects of that relationship over both 19th and 20th century for two centuries. And when one talks about religion and politics in Italy, you're talking about the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican and politics in the Italian state.

In recent years, this has led me to look at the history of the relationship between Italian fascism and the church and the Vatican in Italy. And along with this has been a interest of historians now for a long time who are interested in Italy and Italian politics and religion in the question of the Vatican during World War II, because there's been such controversy over the behavior of the Pope.

and the church more generally during the war. And there've been appeals for many years now of both historians and by the Jewish community in particular, both in Italy, US and really worldwide to have access to the Vatican archives for World War II. This particularly has to do with the controversy over the so -called silence of the Pope during the Holocaust. In fact, the Pope.

never spoke out against the Nazi attempts to exterminate the Jews of Europe as it was unfolding. So I kind of made a bet actually that with Pope Francis finally he would authorize the opening of those World War II archives. It's up to the current pope to authorize the opening of the Vatican archives for the next papacy whose archives have not yet opened. And this was the next one in line. And so I

began working in the archives that were open because if you're going to really shed light on this history, it's not enough to look at the Vatican archives. You have to look at the political archives of the various countries involved, especially in this case, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, but also the allied countries and as well as France, including Fubishi France. So I worked in archives in the US, in Britain, in France, in Italy, in Germany.

David Kertzer (03:26.609)
and had many tens of thousands of document pages of documents digitized in my computer when fortunately my timing was good. The Pope Francis announced in 2019 that the following year on March 2nd, 2020, they would finally be opening the archives for the papacy of Pius XII, the controversial Pius XII, who came to power just before World War II began. So in March 1939, unfortunately,

If you recall, March 2020, also there was a new disease being spread through the world. And after China, its epicenter was Italy. So I arranged to be on leave. I was teaching at Brown University and arranged to be on leave for the semester, rented an apartment for the semester, arrived in Rome in late February 2020. They opened the archives.

March 2nd, Monday, I was there at 8 .30 in the morning as they opened. Spent that 45 hours of the opening that week in those archives with my collaborator. And then that Friday afternoon, which would have been March, what, six, I guess, they passed around a sheet of paper saying that the archive would be closed until further notice.

And then a few days later, the prime minister of Italy announced basically the lockdown. You weren't allowed to leave your apartment. And so we, we left, but fortunately they reopened the archives in June and I was able to get the material I needed for this book that I wrote, The Pope in War.

Waitman Beorn (05:08.347)
Well, I'm looking forward to, I'm looking forward to hearing about, about some of those things. maybe a good place to start is with Pius the 12th or maybe even slightly before him with Pius the 11th. because there's, there's often, and you can, you can, I think shed light on this. You know, there's often a comparison made between Pius the 11th and Pius the 12th. I think often in kind of a, a rose colored glasses, like wouldn't have been nicer if, if Pius the 11th had been the Pope.

during the war, maybe he might have acted better, but maybe that's also kind of wishful thinking. Can you just give us some background into these two men, and particularly, of course, the man who will become Pius XII, and his sort of background, and how that's significant to what he's gonna be later doing during the war?

David Kertzer (05:59.601)
Yes, well, actually I wrote a book about the predecessor to Pius XII and his relationship with the fascist regime called the Pope and Mussolini. The Pius XI became Pope in early 1922, the same year that Mussolini becomes prime minister of Italy. And so that book kind of traced their relationship, sometimes fraught. But the fact is they reached an understanding, even though Mussolini didn't have a religious bone in his body.

the, he saw an advantage in getting the support of the Catholic Church for his ability to establish his dictatorship. So he basically made a deal with the Pope and in exchange for the Pope providing support for the, for Mussolini and the fascist regime, the dictator, Mussolini, agreed to create Vatican City as a sovereign state, which it had not been previously.

to do away with separation of church and state in Italy and to create the Roman Catholic Church as the official state religion and give all sorts of other privileges to the Roman Catholic clergy. That said, Pius XI was not happy about Hitler and the Nazis. And this is something I think people often don't understand. They tend to lump together the two fascist regimes of Italy and Germany, but

In terms of relations with the Catholic Church in the Vatican, they're radically different. There was basically a kind of clerical fascist state in Italy where the church supported and provided major support for the fascist regime and for Mussolini. And on the other hand, in Germany, once in 1933, Hitler comes to power. Hitler is trying to undermine the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, which was seen as kind of a foreign influence and a company.

competition for socializing youth in particular. And so they, Hitler is undermining the church in Germany while Mussolini's regime is basically building up the church in Italy. So when Mussolini shows increasingly his embrace of Hitler beginning in the mid thirties Pope Pius XI becomes increasingly alarmed.

David Kertzer (08:20.561)
and is not at all happy. So in fact, in the last years of the last month of the Pope's life, so we're now talking about late 1938, early 39, he has the Vatican newspaper, Los Oratory Romano, published almost daily denunciations of Nazi Germany, not for anything having to do with Jews, but for what it takes to be the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany.

When he dies, he dies February 10th, 1939, and a few weeks later, his number two, his Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli is elected Pope and takes the name Pius XII. One of the first things he does, I mean, within a couple of days is order the Vatican newspaper to stop all criticism of Nazi Germany. And he's a very different type of person. And you might say a diplomat by, he'd never been a

parish priest or in a pastoral role or a bishop of a diocese. He had been ambassador, in fact, or papal nuncio to Germany for 12 years from 1917 to 1929. So we knew Germany very well, was totally fluent in German and friendly with many Catholic conservatives in Germany. So he was

eager to find a motive for vending with Hitler. And so he tried a very different approach.

Waitman Beorn (09:53.371)
Yeah. And so what is, what is his relationship with the Nazis or with officialdom, Nazi officialdom in terms of, I mean, we can talk later, of course, about the concordat and all of that. But I mean, where, where is he coming from in terms of, you know, how, how does he relate as, as leader of the Catholic church to an organization, which at least at some level is anti -Christian though, obviously they, obviously they, they sell this

in different ways and sort of undersell it probably during a lot of the Third Reich.

David Kertzer (10:26.769)
Yeah, I think for the Pope, you know, there were good Nazis and bad Nazis. I mean, in general, of course, Nazi ideology was the antithesis from the Pope's point of view of Christianity and a pagan kind of religion. But many of the German supporters of the Nazi regime saw themselves as good Christians and many of them good Catholics. Germany, especially after the annexation in March 38 of

the Anschluss of Austria was something like 40 % Roman Catholic. So majority Protestant, but very large minority Roman Catholic. And so Pope thought he could work with many of the people involved in the regime at the same time as he undoubtedly saw Hitler as a very antipathetic kind of figure.

So this was his hope to reach some kind of understanding and protect the interests of the Catholic Church in Germany and ultimately in the lands that Germany would conquer.

Waitman Beorn (11:31.035)
So what is the concordat between the Vatican, I think it's the 1933 one, right, between the Vatican and Nazi Germany that, you know, Pacelli is instrumental in some ways.

David Kertzer (11:46.929)
Right. This was also controversial because when Hitler comes to power in the end of January 1933, many nations basically boycott the new Nazi regime and don't recognize it, don't want to have anything to do with it. But the Pope decides with his Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, the man who's going to become Pius XII,

And he plays a central role here since he's now having just returned from 12 years there as Papal Nunci was the expert on Germany and German politics. They decide to negotiate a concordat again to protect the, as they see it, to protect the interest of Catholic church in a Nazi Germany. It is brought to fruition by July of 1933. So it's the first major international deal that Hitler is able to bring off. And therefore it really helps.

solidify his kind of international standing. It wouldn't take long though before Hitler begins not to recognize or not to go along with what he had agreed to. And the Vatican becomes rather quickly disillusioned with his interest in actually following through on the promises made in that concordat to protect the interests of the Catholic Church in Germany.

Waitman Beorn (13:14.427)
And so moving on from that a little bit then, to what extent are there discussions within the Vatican, I suppose, about things other than the specific relationship between the organization of the Catholic Church and the Nazi state? In other words, are there conversations about increasing anti -Semitism or increasing persecution of other people and what the church's role should be?

in that or is this just sort of a non -issue?

David Kertzer (13:49.169)
I'd say it's very close to a non -issue. I've been able to find no expression by, direct expression by the Pope, so the Vatican of concern for Jews, with a partial exception that by the last months of his life, Pius XI, would make statements often in rel of privacy in a sense and not public declarations.

Well, most famous of which he says were all spiritually Semites. And it was not published in the Vatican newspaper and not published in Italy, but was published in a number of other countries. So this is the kind of statement that his successor, Pius XII, would not want to have made and have made public. But Pius XI, again, in the last months of his life was

both beginning to regret his role in helping solidify the fascist dictatorship in Italy. And we're very worried about the future of the Catholic Church in Europe, which Hitler might increasingly be controlling.

Waitman Beorn (15:06.331)
Yeah, is, and I guess this leads to the, to the, the, the next question, which is probably something that a lot of people are wondering. And it's also one that, you know, depending on who you read, who's written about the Catholic church and the Holocaust, you know, this is what this is the question that sort of swings the pendulum, which is the extent to which Pius the 12th himself was anti -Semitic. I mean, do you have a, do you have a sense of that or?

David Kertzer (15:31.921)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (15:35.739)
And then can you separate that, I suppose, from the kind of institutionalized anti -Semitism of the Catholic Church up until Vatican II?

David Kertzer (15:45.105)
Right. So I think in the church generally, the Jews had been demonized and continue to be demonized. If you look in the pages of the various diodicous publications, other Catholic association publications, now just talking about Italy, those closest to the Pope's, the Pope's of course were all Italian and the people in the Vatican. The Curia, I mean, at the time of World War II, there were about 24 cardinals in the Curia.

central administration of the Vatican, 23 of them were Italian and only one was non -Italian or Frenchman. So it was a very Italian kind of institution. And there was this, of course, many centuries long tradition of demonizing Jews. So Pius XII, Pope Pacelli certainly was part of that. I don't myself, unlike some other scholars, don't see it as the primary explanation for his silence during the Holocaust.

I don't think it was primarily caused by anti -Semitism. The other thing I would say, perhaps in his defense, is that anti -Semitism was very widespread and not just in the Roman Catholic Church, but I grew up in Westchester in a place called Larchmont. And the two major institutions as I was growing up, social institutions, were the Larchmont Country Club and the Larchmont Yacht Club, and neither one allowed Jews.

You know, this, I think it is perhaps important to look at that larger context too.

Waitman Beorn (17:18.139)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I remember reading, I think it was, it was Michael Fayer's book, where he sort of makes the argument that, you know, Pius the 12th was, was interested in conserving the institution and was, was, was, saw, you know, I suppose saw the Nazis as a threat to the sort of existence of the Catholic church. And that was why he was sort of willing to compromise with them. Is that something that

rings true for you or

David Kertzer (17:48.081)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good part of it. He I think he saw his first duty as supreme and pontiff as defending the institutional church and its welfare. And so he again, one has to ask the question when, you know, that for now talking about the war years in the early war years, it looked very much to most people like Hitler was going to win the war and that.

I mean, if you think of what happened in the spring of 1940, there's supposed to be this impregnable, you know, magical line protecting France. And they just within a matter of weeks send the German troops through the low countries through Belgium and right to Paris. So and of course, with Dunkirk, the Brits unceremoniously being driven off the continent. So.

the Pope's point of view, he had to worry about how was he going to protect the church in a Europe that was under Hitler's control, Hitler and his kind of pal Mussolini. So, you know, I think that's a major part of the explanation for the way he behaved. Otherwise, I mean, the question of the anti -Semitism, the beginning of the war is generally dated to September 1st, 1939, the German invasion of Poland.

As the Germans are invading Poland, they're planning to annex to the Third Reich the Western regions of Poland, which are seen as somehow a German property. And so one of the things they do, they see the Polish priest, Catholic priest as bastions of Polish national identity and nationalism and therefore opposition to the German takeover.

So among the first things they do is they arrest hundreds of priests, parish priests, Polish parish priests and send them to concentration camps where not a few die. So even though they're not death camps, but so in this context, the beginning of September 39, their incredible pleas from the clergy, the Catholic clergy in Poland and from the government, soon to be government in exile.

David Kertzer (20:11.473)
of Poland to the Pope to speak out, to denounce what is going on. And the Pope refuses to do so.

Waitman Beorn (20:20.283)
And so, I mean, begs the question, why? Why doesn't, I mean, like when actual Catholic priests are being murdered, why isn't he taking action?

David Kertzer (20:32.657)
Well, I think he was intimidated by Hitler and by Mussolini for that matter as well. And the other element here looking at his behavior during the war is, you know, who's in the army, who's Hitler's army? They're not people who think they're pagans, they're people who think they're Christians. And so later on, as the Holocaust unfolds, who's murdering all those Jewish little babies and old people and so on?

It's people for the most part who think they're Christians, many of whom think they see themselves as good Roman Catholics and go to church every Sunday with their wives and children. So he's worried about creating a split in the Catholic Church in Germany if he were to denounce what they were doing. And he was worried about the allegiance of many of the Catholics in Germany who saw themselves as loyal German soldiers.

and also who learned to see Jews as a threat to good Christian society from their parish priests growing up well before anything that Hitler promulgated.

Waitman Beorn (21:46.267)
So I mean, are you suggesting that he was worried that if given the choice or forced to make a choice between Nazism and Catholicism that enough people would choose Catholicism to sort of or Nazism to sort of cause this, that you're talking about the split in the church.

David Kertzer (22:07.057)
Well, you have to realize there already been a split in the Protestant churches, a more Nazified church. And the other thing is people in the Vatican and high up in the church have a long historical memory. And so when you think about Germany and the Roman Catholic Church, they think about the 16th century and the Reformation. So the choice isn't necessarily between Catholicism and Nazi.

paganism, it's that there'd be some kind of Nazified German Catholic Church. And there, of course, would continue to be very splits in the Catholic Church. So it wasn't really so far -fetched, perhaps, to have that concern.

Waitman Beorn (22:53.339)
Were there internal conversations? Because one of the things you mentioned I think is really fascinating to think about is, for example, the Polish Catholic Church, apparently communicating with the center, with Vatican, these things are happening to Polish priests. Can you do something about it? What kinds of conversations are going on within the Vatican, sort of internally, about these

these kinds of things, or is there no debate whatsoever? I mean, I guess how does, for someone like me who's not an expert, you know, how does Vatican sort of governance work? Or is it, is it sort of a, the Pope sort of decides everything or, you know, are there sort of bureaucracies talking like they would in any other kind of government?

David Kertzer (23:42.897)
Well, you have bureaucracy is talking, but Pius XII was pretty imperious pope. And so, you know, any decisions are going to be made by him and no one is in the Vatican anyway is going to be seen to be going against his wishes. I mean, behind his back, they may try to do things, but this behind the back isn't going to change this kind of policy. So.

There were certainly those in the church who were very upset with the pope for his failure to speak out. In my recent book, I talk about an American Jesuit fairly high up who in his diary writes how bad this is going to look in the future and how bad it is for the church and the need for the pope to be more of a moral leader and not simply

political calculations, so on. So in that sense, there certainly were differences within the church. I mentioned that the one non -Italian member of the Curia, the French Cardinal Tissarron, was really the one anti -fascist in the Curia. You have to realize the Italian Cardinals and Italian bishops had spent the previous practically two decades in this collaboration with the Italian fascist regime.

and they hadn't wanted to do anything to threaten that. So that's a bit of another issue after, especially after Italy joins the war in June 1940. The Italian aspects have to also be taken into consideration when you consider what the Pope and those in the Vatican are perceiving and what they're doing.

Waitman Beorn (25:34.427)
Is it, is it fair to say that Italian fascism and Mussolini has a different tone and a different perspective on anti -Semitism from Nazi fascism?

David Kertzer (25:51.057)
Yes, the, well, of course, Nazism is, has anti -Semitism as one of its founding principles and loses no time when Hitler comes to power and beginning a series of anti -Semitic measures in 1933. In the case of a time fascism, it's very different. I mean, the probably as high a proportion of Italy's Jews were members of the fascist party as Catholics in Italy were members of the fascist party.

And there were Jewish ministers in the government. There were Jewish mayors in cities like Trieste and Ferrara. I mean, major Italian cities had fascist mayors. So it was only really in 1938 when what from many Jews point of view in Italy came as a shock. Mussolini announced the new racial, so -called racial policy of the regime and the

anti -Semitic racial laws that get trotted out beginning in September 1938, which essentially throw Jews out of work and throw all the Jewish children out of school and so forth. So the beginning in 38s is before the war, there's a major anti -Jewish campaign in Italy, which by the way, is not opposed by the church except for insofar as it affects Catholics.

So the Pius XI does object as well Pius XII will be in a quieter way to the fact that converted Jews, that is Jews who get baptized are not considered Catholics as from the church point of view they should be and are considered as Jews and therefore subject to the racial laws. So all this is again very different situation than Nazi Germany.

Waitman Beorn (27:48.411)
And do they have the same? Is there the same attempt by the Catholic Church to try to mediate? Because as you point out, this is also a problem, obviously, in Nazi Germany and in Nazi occupied Europe. I mean, one of the sort of wild examples of this is that there were a couple of functioning Catholic churches in the Warsaw ghetto to minister to. Well, they would consider themselves Catholics, but the Nazis considered them Jews who had converted, but they are still Jews. So.

Was this something that priests and bishops and people in Nazi Germany were feeding back to the Vatican as well, or was it a different policy between Italy and Germany?

David Kertzer (28:31.761)
There were different policies, but there is certainly some similarities as well. The Jews, well, first of all, so -called Michelin, the children of mixed marriages, that is where one parent was Christian and one parent was Jewish. They actually get protected in Germany. They're not sent to the death camps until the very end.

great majority of them do survive, while of course the great majority of German Jews are murdered. So there are protections for converts in that sense. In Italy, the church kept urging the Mussolini and the fascist regime to treat baptized, not only baptized Jews as Catholics and not as Jews, but even

Jews who had church weddings had married with dispensation from the church, Catholic women or Catholic men or women. And as part of that agreed that all children would be baptized and raised Catholic. In fact, this would come to a head with the roundup of the Jews of Rome, famous roundup in October 16th, 1938. And this is 43 rather. And that's one of the things we've discovered in these newly open archives.

Waitman Beorn (29:57.147)
Yeah, I mean, and this leads into another area that's, I think, important because one of the things that I always say when I teach about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust, because you always get people sort of very, with very fervent beliefs on both sides of the spectrum, right? You have the people that sort of, people and or students who sort of say, you know, the Catholic Church was just as bad as the Nazis or complicit, et cetera.

And then people on the other side saying that, you know, they had nothing to do with it. And obviously, I think we all agree that the truth is, is somewhere in the middle there. And it seems like one of the, one of the ways in which you sort of see this, this disconnect is that there are individuals within the Catholic church who use that institution as a way to help Jews and other victims of the Nazis. Even when the center is sort of.

saying that they shouldn't do that or trying to stop them. Is that a fair assessment or?

David Kertzer (30:59.537)
Yes, no, I think that's right. There's certainly many Jews in Europe. And of course, I know the situation in Italy best were saved by Catholic, Catholic individuals, Catholic priests, saved in convents or monasteries or other Catholic religious institutions, not by order of the Pope or the Vatican, but because it felt part of their general feeling of the nature of their religion and humanitarianism.

And following a practice that goes back centuries of the church's sanctuary for the persecuted. And so this is true. I mean, the whole story, this has been a kind of major debate as well and controversy about the role of Catholic institutions in Italy, especially in Rome, nearest the Vatican in saving Jews after the German occupation in September 43.

you know, many Italian Jews were saved that way. The question of whether the places where they were turned down, because not all the convents would accept Jews, and which is one reason we know they weren't getting an order from the Vatican to take them in. And some insisted on charging Jews for their room and board or wouldn't take them in. And some.

actively tried to baptize particularly small Jewish children if they were taken. And so it's all very, I think, kind of complicated and still not entirely well known story. But certainly there I've met many elderly, elderly now Jews in Italy who, you know, say they were saved by Catholic lay people or by nuns and convents.

Waitman Beorn (32:49.755)
Well, it seems like this is one of the things where you really can see the effect of Pius's, Pius the 12th, I guess, best characterized as sort of non interventionist policy, right? Which is the fact that, you know, across Europe, the Catholic Church is an organization that is connected. You know, it communicates, it has a hierarchy. It also has a lot of real estate and a lot of literal physical institutions.

you know, that could have been used, you know, in the service of helping people. but it seems like what happened was that it was left up to sort of individuals or individual leaders of those institutions to make those decisions. rather than having sort of the head of the institution, the Pope saying, I would like you to direct your efforts as much as you can.

to helping, I mean, were those conversations that appear in the documents within the Vatican and sense of like, we don't want you to use your institution to sort of, for non, I guess, religious purposes.

David Kertzer (33:58.289)
Well, there were certainly one thing we do find in the newly available archives of Vatican is concerns about sheltering Jews and very few were sheltered in Vatican City and then those who were basically snuck in. But we're talking about really just a handful and Pope and his advisors on Jewish matters made clear that they thought it dangerous for the church to be seen by the Germans.

as and by the Italian fascists as providing protection for Jews. The other thing I think for the context that we haven't talked about is the fact that both in Germany and in Italy, the church hierarchy was calling on all good Catholics to do their part in the Axis war. And relatively recently, I think in 2020, the German Catholic Church hierarchy in Germany issued an apology, both for having done that.

for calling on all good Catholics to do their good part for the patriotic war that Hitler was engaged in, but also for never speaking out against the Holocaust itself, the fact that many of its own members were engaged in mass murder of the Jews of Germany and of Europe. It's a kind of statement that could have been issued by the Italian hierarchy, because they did the exact same thing when Mussolini declares war June 10th.

1930, 1940 declares war on France and on Britain. The hierarchy and the whole Catholic organizational structure of lay organizations and so on put out statements calling on all good Italian Catholics to do their part in the in the Axis war.

And this becomes in some ways even stronger after the war, the Axis war turns against the Soviet Union in 1941, when now it becomes a kind of holy crusade against the godless communists. So all this is still not, I think, still the both Italian church hierarchy and the Vatican itself haven't been able to come to terms with.

Waitman Beorn (36:13.147)
That's really interesting that the, again, I guess this speaks to the complex organization of the church where you have sort of a national, the national branch, I suppose, of the Catholic church in Germany being willing to sort of admit mistakes or admit failure, but then other elements of the Catholic church in other countries taking a different path. And that's really interesting to me as an historian, it's kind of like, you know,

David Kertzer (36:40.849)
Yeah, well, you know, it was in a way convenient for the Pope that he could portray himself as neutral in the war. But Lao, I mean, he was the Bishop of Rome. There's no Cardinal primate in Italy the way the word is in Poland and other countries. He is the Pope is not just the supreme pontiff universally, but he's also the head of the hierarchy in Italy. And he allows.

his own hierarchy to strongly support the war, the Axis war, at the same time as he can pronounce his neutrality and allow the, eventually allow the bishops in Britain and the US to call on good Catholics to do their part for the allied cause. So this is the, you might say, game that the Pope was playing during the war.

Waitman Beorn (37:38.139)
I think this is really fascinating because I think, I mean, I guess it's interesting to think about what, what is, what is he fearing, you know, in the, when Pius the 12th sort of catastrophizes about what's, what's the worst that could happen if he, if he spoke out about the Holocaust or if he suggested, you know, that Catholics should not fight for Nazi Germany or whatever. What, what is he imagining that the Nazis are going to do to the Catholic church?

David Kertzer (38:08.049)
Well, for one thing, the Allies are putting out on various propaganda that the Germans are planning to raid the Vatican City and kidnap the Pope and take him to Germany and so forth. And a lot of people seem to be taking this seriously. The Pope expressed he calls him the German ambassador a couple of times and expresses concern about these rumors. Of course, the

It would have been a disaster from the Germans point of view if they were to do this, since they were trying to portray themselves as an offender of Christian Europe against its two major enemies, which they cast as the communists and the Jews. So their whole narrative would be blown if they were seen as to be opposed by the Pope and the Roman Catholic hierarchy. But so there's a lot that

the Hitler could do against the church. I mean, one thing, and then Mussolini too, when Mussolini was in power, for one thing, the police had all sorts of files of sexual abuse of the clergy. And basically we're in a position of blackmailing, the Pope and saying that, you know, if, we've got all these reports and not very pretty, in fact, Hitler did begin to put hundreds of priests on trial, the so -called morality trials, which.

had, curiously, historians to date have largely blamed on homophobia of the anti -church, anti -clericalism of the Nazi regime. But the fact is, it's all made potent by the fact that there was a large amount of evidence that the German police undoubtedly had of sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy. So.

That's just one illustration of how the Pope could be intimidated by the Nazi regime. Beyond that, the Germans had already, I mean, at the time Hitler took power in 1933 in Bavaria, heavily Catholic Southern German region, I believe, I don't recall the exact statistics, but something like two -thirds of all children were going to Catholic parochial schools.

David Kertzer (40:30.353)
By the time the war started in 39, this was reduced to maybe something like three or 5%. Hitler wanted the children socialized in good Nazi, Nazified public schools, not by Roman Catholic schools. So, you know, this, and he closed down a variety of convents and monasteries, other church institutions, so he could do more of this and further intimidate the regular parish.

from in terms of what they could do. So, you know, the Pope in a way had a lot to fear. Then later in the war, when it was pretty clear that the Germans were going to lose the war, we talked about when it seemed like the Germans were going to win the war and why the Pope would want to be silent and not criticize them. But we know from these newly opened archives is that the Pope was concerned in the latter years and months of the war.

that if he were to speak out against the Nazi regime and call on Germans to stop doing what they were doing, that when the inevitable defeat came, he would be blamed and the Catholic Church would be blamed. And so that too could create a post -war split in the Catholic Church. So, you know, there's, and then the one other issue we haven't really talked much about is the anti -communism.

that the Pope did not want to see Germany suffer total defeat in the war. He was desperately trying to play a role of brokering a compromise piece. And a good part of the reason for that is that he saw Germany as the major bulwark against the expansion westward of Soviet communism, which of course in a way he had reasons that turned out to fear given what happened to

Eastern and parts of Central Europe in the immediate post -war years. So this was all part of, I think, what the Pope's considerations were.

Waitman Beorn (42:35.963)
That was a really, that's a really interesting discussion and a good, really good explanation. I think one of the things that I think is really sort of. Ironic, I suppose, is that, you know, it's always sort of been my take on, on Hitler's approach to Christianity, organized Christianity in Nazi Germany, that it's something he definitely wanted to get rid of at some point.

but probably was planning on really going after it at the end of a successful war when everything was done because he didn't want to explicitly put people in the position on the horns of the dilemma of being Catholic or be loyal to Nazi Germany. But ironically, it seems like that the Pope was also worried that, you know, he didn't want to put people in that same position. And both of them were worried because they were worried that the people would choose the opposite sort of side of things.

which I think is really a really interesting way of thinking about it.

David Kertzer (43:34.353)
Right. Of course, Hitler was an Austrian Catholic in terms of his birth and family. And clearly he was certainly no practicing Catholic and was in many ways an enemy of the Catholic Church. But the so I don't know. He certainly would if he had been victorious, as he could well have been if not for Winston Churchill.

He certainly would have further tried to chip away at the influence of the Catholic Church and certainly any institution that was an alternative to the whole Nazi structure was a threat to him or something he would not like, much less one that had as its reference point a foreign potentate, you might say.

Waitman Beorn (44:28.507)
Well, and also the, you know, the, one of his major objections, of course, to Christianity is it's Jewish, it's Jewishness, right? That it's, he sort of views Christianity as a, as another way that the Jews weaken society because of all of the sort of touchy feely elements of Christianity and, and, you know, morality and that kind of thing, you know? And so, but he also seems smart enough that he doesn't want to, he's not going to, he's not going to take on too many wars at the same time. So he's going to...

David Kertzer (44:50.097)
Yeah, this, you know.

Waitman Beorn (44:56.859)
He's going to get rid of the Catholic Church as an institution that can rival anything in Nazi Germany, but probably not at the same time he's actually fighting a war because he needs people and he needs Germans to be loyal and he doesn't want to sort of antagonize them needlessly.

David Kertzer (45:13.201)
Yeah, I think that's right. But as we saw with the split in the Protestant churches in Germany, one could imagine a Nazified Catholic Church. It's kind of harder to imagine, but I could see Hitler's seeing some transition like that happening with a more national Catholic Church that spurns the Jewish roots of Jesus and early Christianity and so forth.

the way that some of the Protestant churches were evolving in Germany.

Waitman Beorn (45:45.083)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and the whole, that's a whole nother discussion, but you know, the, the mental gymnastics involved in the German Christian church of, you know, taking, you know, amen and hallelujah and other, all Jewish words out of the Bible and making Jesus not Jewish. I mean, it's just a, it's for a whole nother podcast episode. but one of the things that you sort of, you've hinted at that I'm really interested in is, you know, what, what are some of the things, what, what are the most interesting things that you discovered?

in the newly open Vatican archives that sort of change our understanding of the Pope during this period. Because I mean, I think we would love to hear this kind of stuff.

David Kertzer (46:23.953)
Well, one thing I might draw attention to is that I think really wasn't appreciated before the opening of the archives. And perhaps the publication of my book is the role that the Pope turned to a rather junior prelate in the secretary of state office named Angelo Delacqua for advice whenever controversies over what to do about the Jews came up.

Delacqua would go on to have a kind of storied career. He'd end up in Cardinal Vicar of Rome, in fact, later on after the war. But at the time, he was fairly young and inexperienced. Why the Pope saw him as his expert on the Jews, still no one seems to be able to explain since he had no previous experience along those lines. But for example, in the fall of 1942, I mean, talking about newly discovered documents that shed light, a new light on all this.

In the fall of 1942, the Pope, excuse me, Franklin Roosevelt sends his emissary to talk to the Pope and hands him a document in which they review the evidence, the American evidence the Allies have of the existence of attempts to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

And Roosevelt basically begs the Pope, he says, you know, if we just say this, it's just put down as allied propaganda that has no foundation. But if you have any evidence that could support this, it would mean the world to us because, you know, for obvious reasons. So the Pope takes the request by Roosevelt and he gives it to Delacqua and says, you know, please prepare a advice on what should I do? And Delacqua then, and we know by then,

by now also that the Pope at this point had plenty of evidence from his own sources within the church of bishops and prelates, Catholic prelates in occupied, German occupied Europe of the ongoing mass murder of Europe's Jews taking place. And so Delacqua, in the advice he gives them that we now have this document, he says, yes, it's true, we have evidence of this.

David Kertzer (48:49.777)
But I don't think you should be telling Franklin Roosevelt that we have any evidence because he'll undoubtedly use it, citing the Vatican to denounce the Nazi regime. And we don't want this to happen. And so the Pope writes back to Roosevelt and says, well, we've heard rumors, but nothing we can really verify. So that's one example. Another example involving Delacqua is

So the Nazis occupy most of Italy beginning in early September 1943. And on October 1643, they send 350 SS through Rome with lists of all the Jews in Rome and round up all they can. They end up putting over a thousand on a train to Auschwitz where most are sent directly to the gas chamber on their arrival.

The Pope does not speak out. A few weeks later, six weeks later, the Muslim puppet government, the Italian Social Republic, announces that all Jews in Italy are to be arrested, sent to concentration camps, all their property seized. And from these concentration camps, of course, they would then be sent on to Meylind Auschwitz and other death camps.

So in the wake of this, a prelate who's very important in the relations of the both Pope's Pius XI and Pius XII and the fascist regime, the Jesuit Father Takeventuri writes basically to the Pope and says, you know, you really should be registering some kind of protest. He wasn't going as far as saying it should be a public protest. He was just saying,

you should prepare a protest to give to the German ambassador of the Holy See. And this too, this document, this appeal by the Jesuit is sent by the Pope to this Father Delacqua. And Delacqua immediately writes a fairly long response filled, and this is newly come to light with the opening of the sarcophagus.

David Kertzer (51:13.201)
And it's filled with anti -Semitic language and basically calls on the Pope to keep silent. So there are a series of documents that have only now come to light that I think make a lot clearer what was going on.

Waitman Beorn (51:30.779)
That's fascinating stuff. And it gets to another question that maybe you can talk a little more about, which is, what is the Vatican learning about the Holocaust and when, and how is it learning details about what's going on?

David Kertzer (51:34.673)
Thanks for watching!

Well, one thing I think people often don't realize when they talk with the Holocaust is they think of the concept of the death camps, Auschwitz and so forth. But the Holocaust, a large part of the Holocaust occurs not in the concentration camps, but the Holocaust by bullets. I mean, as the drive eastward takes place against the Soviet Union and so on, the

The Jews are being lined up by the hundreds and by the thousands and just gunned down and digging their own graves. So this is pretty public. It's not visible by local people. And both bishops as well as other clerics are reporting back to the Vatican on this. For example, we now know that a Roman parish priest who had

that's serving during the war as a chaplain in the military, the Italian military, is going back and forth on a hospital train to the Eastern Front, to Poland and Ukraine and so on. And when he comes back, he was regularly, sometimes actually meeting with the Pope, other times sending in his reports to the Pope detailing this mass murder, ongoing mass murder of Jewish men, women and children.

So that together with reports he's getting from various bishops in Ukraine, in Poland, and so forth, are painting a very good picture and alarming picture for the Pope of the Holocaust as it's taking place.

Waitman Beorn (53:33.595)
And what are these? I mean, I'm really interested, you know, because you've gotten a chance to look at the inside. You know, are there, are there annotations on these reports? Are there, is there commentary or are they just kind of filed away or, I mean, what, what is the sort of, what, what, what evidence do you get as sort of the, the echoes or repercussions of these, this evidence being received in the Vatican?

David Kertzer (53:58.961)
Well, sometimes you see comments, for example, Delacqua, as I mentioned, was no friend of Jews. And occasionally you'd see his scrolled comments in the margins of some of these things saying referring to Jews as prone to exaggeration and so on. But I don't think the...

It wasn't so much that they weren't believed, certainly by the Pope, is that they just didn't want to deal with them. I mean, certainly the Pope was not happy about the mass murder of the Jews. I mean, it's one thing that the Jews should be kept under control from the church point of view, shouldn't be given the same rights as Christians and so on. But it's a whole other thing that they should be murdered and that could never be supported by any good Christian from the Pope's point of view.

So all this wasn't to say that the Pope was all happy about hearing about what was going on, but for the reasons we were discussing, he didn't want to say anything publicly about it.

Waitman Beorn (55:05.275)
Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, it sounds like, you know, there's sort of like stamping received and then like putting it in a file someplace, you know, it wasn't, they weren't sort of causing discussions or anything like that within the Vatican.

David Kertzer (55:18.833)
Yeah, I mean, early on, actually, we know this from kind of something that Angela Roncalli wrote. Angela Roncalli, who would later succeed the pope and become Pope John XXIII and usher in the Second Vatican Council and a radical change, particularly with respect to church and Jews. He at the time was an apostolic delegate in Turkey. And he, I think it's actually early in

relatively early in the war, 1941, goes to visit Rome, meets with the Pope. And in his account of his meeting, he says the Pope kind of tearfully asks him, what will people think about the fact that he's remaining silent about all these horrors that are going on? So the Pope is certainly concerned about this himself and eager to portray himself in kind of heroic terms. Here in the middle of the war, in the winter of 42, 43, he commissions a

kind of documentary puff piece film of the Pope as his savior figure, which is then played in Nazi occupied Paris in the winter of 1943 as well. So, the Pope is certainly concerned about how he's being viewed and how his silence is being viewed.

Waitman Beorn (56:41.755)
And that's always been something that I found interesting and maybe I'm being too hard on the Pope, but I sort of feel like at some level, if you are the Pope and according to sort of Catholics, you're literally God's representative on earth, what better thing to happen to you than for the Nazis to kill you because you're standing up for people that are being killed? I mean, that seems like.

I mean, again, that's a hard ask, but you're the Pope, right? But of course the Pope was also a human being, which is the other side of things, right? And so like, you know, that's probably not a fair thing to say, but it seems like a very Christian thing to do, you know, would be to actually stand up for them, you know.

David Kertzer (57:18.321)
Yeah, I think.

Right. So, I mean, aside from being a tough ass to have someone being willing to be killed, it's also that, you know, he has these two jobs, you might say, that are in conflict in this kind of situation. The one is you were the head of a very large, many hundreds of million people organization with many, God knows how many, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees.

Waitman Beorn (57:27.675)
Yeah, I mean fair.

David Kertzer (57:50.673)
and you're responsible for the welfare of this institution. You're the CEO, if we put it in non -religious terms. So that's one very important set of responsibilities you have. On the other hand, you're seen as a moral authority, religious leader. And in this case, as the popes must have seen it, the two seem to be in conflict.

Waitman Beorn (58:14.363)
Yeah, I mean, and again, yeah, I mean, it does seem like, you know, here's a great example of, you know, that he's a human being and he's a different kind of human being from Pius XI and that obviously influences, you know, what he's choosing. If I could ask maybe a very specific question, but I think it's one that might lead to some more insights, which is what is his knowledge of, in particular, sort of

the role of Catholics and sometimes actual clergy in, for example, Croatia with the Eusticia, you know, who are literally like here you have literal Catholic priests who are sort of perpetrators. Does he know about that? Does the Vatican know about that? And if so, is it is it interested in that or?

David Kertzer (59:05.073)
yes, very much. They're very sensitive to this. I mean, think of Slovakia, Tiso. I mean, he's a Catholic priest, he's the head of the government that is enacting the Holocaust in Slovakia and sending the Jews to their death. So, you know, aside from his more general collaboration with Hitler. So this is embarrassing for the Pope. And again, he's not happy about it, but is he willing to defrock these people?

Waitman Beorn (59:09.723)
Yeah. Yeah.

David Kertzer (59:34.737)
Or take any action he is willing to, for example, with Tizio, he'll send his nuncio in Slovakia to meet with Tizio and to tell him, you know, this pope is not happy about what he's doing. And, but this is all kind of private conversation and Tizio defends himself.

We know from the diplomatic correspondence by saying he's just doing what he learned to do as a good Catholic, which is to deal with the great threat to Christian society presented by Europe's Jews.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:13.147)
Wow, yeah, that's talking about sort of turning your words back on you. Maybe another question to sort of as we move towards the end. Into the post -war period, you know, the Catholic Church has kind of another scandal, a controversy they're involved in, which is the role of the Vatican in particular, and of course, some very famous

individuals like Alwal Hudal and others, but involved in aiding Nazi war criminals and some of these other people like in Tiso's government and in the Eusticia as well, aiding them, hiding them, first of all, and then enabling them to escape, escape justice, knowing that these are, these are people who are clearly sort of

criminals of genocide, not just sort of Nazi bureaucrats and people like Franz Stangl, who was the common of Tripulinka, you know, these kinds of things. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what the Vatican's role is in that and maybe what, what you think Pius's attitude was towards that. And then of course, if there's anything really interesting that you found in terms of documents and things that change our understanding from, from the archives.

David Kertzer (01:01:32.433)
Well, this actually is an active area of research right now. So we've been focusing on the warriors, but the papacy of Pius XII, and therefore the papers that have just recently become available, go up till the end of his papacy, which 1958. So include, of course, the post -war period as well. And there are a number of people now working on the so -called rat line and the role of the Vatican and the Catholic clergy.

in helping Nazi and Nazi allied perpetrators escape justice. I actually was part of a quite remarkable event last October. I was with a group that was being led by the director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to Rome. They were involved in a major project of digitizing Vatican and ecclesiastical documents having to do with the Holocaust.

and bring them to the museum in Washington. And among the church institutions that were allowing its archives to be digitized by the Holocaust Museum in Washington was the German church in Rome, the same church where Hudal, the prelate Bishop Hudal, the prelate most identified with the Nazi escapes from Europe.

the so -called rat line. This is where the church he headed for many years and certainly right into the, through the war into the post -war period. And the rector there, so the man who's the Austrian priest who's taken basically who who dolls place, laid out for us, took us to the archives of the church in Rome and laid out for us a selection of the who dolls papers, which included forged

identity documents for Priebka, one of the major Nazi war criminals in Italy, that Hudol had prepared for him. And in kind of a remarkable speech to us, to our group from the US Holocaust Museum, but including the various young German speaking priests who lodge at that church institution, the rector kind of begged forgiveness.

David Kertzer (01:03:53.265)
and lambasted his predecessor for the role he'd played in helping Nazi war criminals flee justice. So, you know, it's something that it's kind of unimaginable that a, you know, a Pope, for example, would lambaste some predecessor for actions that he did. So, there are people, the best book on this subject to date is by a historian named Gerald Steinecker, Nazis on the Run.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:19.835)
Mm -hmm.

David Kertzer (01:04:21.649)
And Gerald is now working in these newly opened Vatican archives to continue that research and enrich it through the documents that he's finding there. So I think we're all waiting for the newest editions of Nazis on the Run to take this further. But there are others as well. And one of the big questions is, you know, who else in the Vatican knew what was going on? And some of the most recent research, now research going on right now is indicating

The Vatican Commission for Aiding Refugees was heavily involved in this as well. But they're not the only ones responsible. Red Cross is involved in some ways, the US government in some ways. So Catholic Church is not the only guilty party here.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:59.611)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:06.459)
absolutely not. Yeah. I mean, is the motivation. And again, I think this, this one of the, you've already highlighted one of the really important questions from the Vatican perspective, which is sort of, it's the standard conspiracy question, which is who knew what, when kind of thing, you know, did the, did the Pope or did higher level Vatican people know, and was this sort of a either explicit or implicit sort of

policy or or wink wink nudge nudge kind of policy or is this really a case of a few individuals sort of abusing their positions or is it is it somewhere in the middle?

David Kertzer (01:05:46.641)
Well, there is something that I have been looking at and documents I've been collecting that shed, I think, important light on this kind of question in that because the Vatican did get involved in trying to protect and defend various Nazi war criminals after the war as they were put on trial. So these are not the ones who got away, but the ones who didn't get away. And whether trials in Nuremberg or other war crimes tribunals that were taking place in various parts of Europe after the war.

And the, so in these newly opened archives, we see a lot of correspondence, including from the lawyers who defending these Nazi war criminals to that can asking for help. And we're generally one of the kind of amazing documents I found is one that refers to these trials as a result of American Jewish desire for revenge. And that's how they account for the Nuremberg trials, for example.

and that there should be kind of forgiveness and so forth. So, you know, this is part of the mentality as well.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:57.371)
And does this also go in some ways back to Pius XII's support for anti -communism and sort of viewing these people as having fought against communism and therefore trying to sort of reward them for that or protect them for that?

David Kertzer (01:07:16.081)
I think that's partly true. I mean, those who argue that the church was seeing these people as major or fierce anti -communists, as kind of trying to seed them in various countries, for example, in South America to help keep communism far away throughout the world. I don't entirely buy that. It just seems like a little bit, well, in part too conspiratorial, but just too much.

It's hard to exactly see how that would work. Of course, others have referred to the US government and FBI and so forth and similar playing a similar role.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:56.507)
Yeah, I mean, it's a real interesting, you know, because there are there are compelling arguments, many of which you've laid out here, you know, for reasons why a pope or the Catholic Church might be interested, I suppose, in supporting the Nazis or at least not in antagonizing them during the war. But then you have this postwar period, which is even sort of more damning because none of those things apply anymore in terms of like a threat. And so now they're

Now they're aiding and abetting the escape of some of these people, some of whom perhaps they didn't know all the details, but some they definitely did. And it's an interesting sort of counterpoint to that previous sort of argument too.

David Kertzer (01:08:40.561)
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the Pope was heavily influenced by his time in Germany and felt very close to German conservative Catholics. And my, I'm no German historian, but from what I read and talking to colleagues who know this better than I do, there was pretty widespread feeling in Germany, especially among conservative Catholics, that they shouldn't be keeping being punished after the war.

and they'd suffered enough and the Allies were going overboard and perhaps various conspiracies about Jews being behind it in the US and so on. So I don't think the Vatican and the Pope would have been alone in these kinds of views of the war crimes tribunals.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:25.467)
No, certainly not. Yeah, that's certainly true. Maybe I'm curious because you've had an opportunity that I think is amazing, right? And one that many, most people, most historians haven't had, which is to get into some of these archives. Are there things that you are looking for more information on or things that you hope to find?

more information on in these sort of newly released archives, maybe things that you or other scholars of the Catholic Church have sort of noted in the era before these archives were open as kind of like, man, I wish I could find information about this thing, but I can't because the archives are closed to me. Other things you're looking for.

David Kertzer (01:10:12.273)
Well, first of all, although the archives for the Papacy of Pius XII were opened in March 2020, not all the material was yet either there or inventoried. And so it's actually been a trickle of sometimes important material that have become available. So you have to, you know, I just got back from Italy and from the archives there.

So you keep finding new material so that, for example, some of the private papers of both the Pope and one of his top aides, Giovanni Battista Montini, who would become Pope Paul VI, those papers are only this past year becoming trickling in and being inventoried or having inventories published so that they can be accessed. The papers of the Apostolic Delegation in Washington

There wasn't a nuncy on Washington because there wasn't official diplomatic relations. But those papers, initially, none of them were available when they opened in 2020. And they're still, most of them are not available yet. And the archivists in the Vatican complained that for whatever reason, Washington is very slow in getting those archives to Rome. So that's one aspect of the problem. The other is,

Pius XII was a very cautious kind of man and certain sense of things he probably didn't want to put in writing at all. And for example, when the racial laws come out in the fall of 1938, there's a strange missing pages in his diary that he kept of his meetings with Pope. And there's nothing for most of that period when we most would like to know what was going on in his private conversations with the Pope.

So, you know, there are very suspicions about that. The other thing I'd say is, you know, I met before they opened the archives of Pius XI's 2006, I met with the man who's been now the longtime head of the Vatican Secret Archives, recently renamed the Vatican Apostolic Archives by Pope Francis, Bishop Sergio Pagano, and I asked him, are you making everything available?

David Kertzer (01:12:35.729)
researchers. And what he told me basically was, well, yes, everything that could possibly interest researchers, the only thing we're not making available are sensitive personnel records. And I didn't think too much of it at the time, although I was curious. But subsequently it occurred to me, in all this huge amount of attention to clerical sex abuse, I've never seen anything based on archival evidence from the Vatican. And that's because it's not made available to us as scholars.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:01.819)
Hmm.

David Kertzer (01:13:05.905)
Because we know from, you know, various sources that they did do various kinds of investigations of allegations of clerical sex abuse, but we don't get to see those records at all. So, you know, when people who work in these archives get together, this is sort of the kinds of things you talk about what may be missing.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:27.163)
It's always, I think it's always raises, raises hairs in the back of a scholar's neck when someone says, we've, we've given everything we think will be of interest to historians because, you know, obviously as historians, everything is of interest and we don't know, we don't know if it's not of interest until we've seen it. So that's kind of makes you wonder like, what's being, what's being left in the background.

David Kertzer (01:13:45.361)
Yeah, that's right. I might say the other thing is people seem to think, well, because other archives were opened earlier, that's all known and people published based on the Italian diplomatic archives, the German diplomatic archives, the British diplomatic archives. But even in those archives, the US archives and national archives, even there over time, there's

For various reasons, new documents become available to scholars either because they have declassification, they've been previously classified or because for whatever reason they were sitting in a warehouse somewhere and never got inventoried and finally were inventoried. So it's not just the Vatican that new material that sheds light on this history becomes available.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:34.203)
Absolutely. And I mean, and of course, one of the amazingly positive things about this archive is that I feel like, and again, I'm not a scholar of the Vatican or the Catholic Church or the Holocaust, but it seems like a lot of the previous work, as you point out, can really only rely on, and could only really rely on information that had been available in external archives. But you couldn't compare it to sort of what was received in the Vatican and what the Vatican was sort of.

doing with that information. You sort of had, you had transmission, but not reception. And at least now you can sort of potentially put those two things together and kind of a synthesis to sort of say, we know what somebody was saying to the art, to the Vatican. And now we can know maybe what the Vatican was doing with that information.

David Kertzer (01:15:19.089)
Well, you can know behind the scenes what kind of advice they were getting internally, the Pope was getting. But well, I just would put one footnote on that, which is in reaction to the controversy over the silence of the Pope that first came to conventional attention with the play, The Deputy, 1963 by the German playwright Ralf Hachow. The Pope at the time, Paul VI, I mentioned earlier,

Waitman Beorn (01:15:37.467)
Mm -hmm.

David Kertzer (01:15:48.529)
called on a group of Fort Cheswood historians to go into those closed archives and presumably publish all the relevant archival material having to do with the Second World War and the Vatican. And between 1965 and 1981, they published 12 thick books, each one containing many hundreds of documents. So many thousands of documents were published. And so researchers were relying on those.

And there were some who said, yeah, what's a big deal opening the Vatican archives? They've already published all the relevant materials. Well, one thing we have discovered is, well, they haven't published all the relevant materials and some of the most sensitive materials that weren't published. And even some of the materials they published, they left out some unpleasant like anti -Semitic language that was there and just put dots in there and a little footnote, which said, you know, personal

Waitman Beorn (01:16:24.123)
you

David Kertzer (01:16:44.497)
observations not relevant or something. So, yeah, so it's not that there was nothing available from the Vatican's perspective before, but now we just have a lot more, much richer understanding.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:56.635)
Well, and it just goes to show for all you young historians out there, you know, don't take other people's word for what things are historically relevant from an archive. If you can go to the archive itself and look at the documents, because, you know, even the best of intentions, best of intentioned archivists are making, you know, decisions about things and they may not be looking at what you're looking at. And so, you know, and of course, in this case, we don't have the best of intentions, I think often with

With a pretty, for example, that Jesuit commission, David, thank you so much for coming on. I want to, I want to close with, with our final question that I ask all of our guests, which is, if you could recommend one book, that's been important to you or about this topic or whatever about the Holocaust, what would you, what would you recommend?

David Kertzer (01:17:47.025)
I think the book that was probably most influential to me, it's now been out for a number of years. So this is dates to before the opening of the recent opening of the Vatican archives. Susan Zucotti's book Under His Very Window, Under His Very Window refers to the fact that that roundup of the over a thousand Jews from Rome in October 16th, 1943, they were kept for two days at a holding facility, a military college.

right outside the walls of the Vatican. And those two days before those Jews were put on the train to their death at Auschwitz, the Pope chose to remain silent. And so that's under his very window title, but she talks about the controversy over the silence of the Pope, but also about the role of Catholic institutions in Rome in protecting, in housing and protecting many Jews. So.

She, I think, was a pioneer in this history and the book is still very valuable.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:52.827)
thank you so much. And, and as always, we will have in the show notes links, to professor Kurtzer's books, as well as his recommendation there, of Susan Akati's book for everyone else. once again, thank you for listening. If you can take a minute to give us a rating and a comment, if you're finding the podcast to be engaging, worthwhile, thought provoking, et cetera.

Once again, David, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your research and your findings in the new archive with us.

David Kertzer (01:19:28.273)
My pleasure.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:31.227)
Awesome. Thank you so much. That was really great. Wow.