- When Pope Pius XII died, the Catholic Church sealed his documents until 2020.

Today's guest was among the first to gain access to those records when they were unsealed.

In his new book reveals what the Pope knew and did while World War II ravaged Europe.

He's David Kurtzer this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Nudes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salves Pell Center.

- This week we're joined by David Kurtzer, a professor at Brown University whose new book, "The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler" provides new details recently found in the Vatican Secret Archives, giving us all a richer understanding of the Second World War.

David, thank you so much for joining us today.

- My pleasure.

- I read this book with fascination and curiosity.

It's a diplomatic history, it's a political history.

It depicts the role of the Pope in the Vatican in those critical years before the war actually starts and through the war.

But it's not a theological history.

Why is that important?

- Well, the Pope and the Vatican were an important part of World War II.

They're also very Italian.

They're all Italians.

So if one wants to understand World War II, one wants to understand Italy's part in World War II, you need to understand the Vatican.

So I leave it to others to deal with theological matters which is not my area of expertise but it's a political story and a very dramatic one, I think.

- Well, it's very dramatic.

And I wanna start prior to the actual outbreak of the war even prior to Pius XII's ascension to the papacy and talk about the role of the Catholic Church in Europe, particularly in Italy which you've written extensively about, but also in Germany.

What role did the Church play at that time in those two countries?

- Well, I think it's important to realize they play a rather different role.

Italy was 99% Catholic.

The Pope was not only an Italian but Roman, of the cardinals of Curia, that's the central administration of the Church, there are about 24 cardinals.

At the time, 23 of the 24 were Italian.

And this is a very different situation than one finds in Germany where there were more Protestants than Catholics.

Catholics were perhaps 40% more or less of the German population and they were in a very different position politically.

The other issue was that when Mussolini came to power 11 years before Hitler, Mussolini came to power in 1922, he quickly made a deal with the Catholic Church for their mutual benefit gave the Church various privileges in exchange for support for his fascist regime from the Vatican and from the Italian Catholic Church.

In Germany, Hitler, although he was born a Catholic, obviously not a practicing one and had very fraught relations with the Church.

So there was a very different situation between church and state in Germany and in Italy.

- So what animated the Vatican's relations with Hitler at least initially?

Was it merely institutional preservation?

- Well, the relations go back, I mean, before Hitler came to power, the Church stood against him.

There had been a large Catholic political party in Germany, the Centre Party, which got the support of the clergy.

But then once Hitler did come to power, the Church made a decision, the Vatican made a decision, it would be wise to try to make a deal with him to protect the interests of the Church.

And so the Vatican was really the first foreign entity to recognize the legitimacy of the Nazi regime by establishing in July of 1933, Concordat, a treaty with the Hitler regime to try to protect the Church but also which gave recognition to that regime.

So over the next years there'd be fraught relations because the then Pope Pius XI, this was the predecessor to the wartime Pope Pius XII, got quite angry because various aspects of the Concordat, that treaty were not being followed by Hitler.

And so Pius XI in his last months before his death in early 1939 was quite critical of the Nazi regime.

So this was the background for Pius XII, he becomes Pope just before the war begins in March of 1939.

He decides a less confrontational approach to Hitler and the Nazi regime would be better for the Church.

And as I discovered, and I think reveal for the first time in my book, the Pope and Hitler enter into secret negotiations very shortly after Pius XII becomes Pope to try to reach a deal.

- So why did Pius XI seem to have greater moral clarity about Hitler than did his successor Pius XII?

- Pius XI was a very different personality.

He was someone who spoke his mind, who was not very diplomatic.

If he was angry with another country, he'd call in their ambassador and he'd literally pound his fist on the table and yell at them.

Pius XII was someone who had spent his whole adult life in the Church's diplomatic service.

He'd spent 12 years as Papal Nuncio or ambassador of the Vatican in Germany from 1917 to 1929.

He then comes back, becomes Cardinal and in 1930 becomes Secretary of State or the number two man under the Pope in the Vatican and the head of the Vatican diplomatic service.

So he is of the mind that it's better to try to be diplomatic, to find a solution to these conflicts and this really guided him throughout his papacy, especially throughout the war years.

- David, you report that the first foreign diplomat that Pius XII met with was a diplomat from Nazi Germany.

Why was that relationship so much the focus of Pius XII from the earliest days of his papacy?

- Well, probably two reasons.

One was concerns about the state of the Church in Germany.

The German Church was very important to the Vatican.

As I mentioned, something like 40% of the German population was Catholic.

Whole regions like Bavaria in the south of Germany were predominantly Catholic.

And the Church had been losing influence as Hitler's government became dominant.

For example, the parochial schools that many Catholic children went to, many of them were being closed down because Hitler preferred the youths to be socialized by the Nazi regime and go to state schools.

Seminaries had been closed down and so on.

So Pius XI, as I mentioned, being angry by all this, filled the pages of the Vatican daily newspaper, "L'Osservatore Romano," with denunciations of the Nazi regime were taking these steps against the Church.

When Pacelli, which was his name before he became Pope Pius the 12th, when he became Pope, he ordered the Vatican newspaper to stop all criticism of the Nazi regime.

And Hitler at the same time sent a telegram to the Pope congratulating him on his election to the papacy.

The Pope then wrote a personal very solicit reply to Hitler.

This all set the stage for trying to reach a new agreement with the Nazi regime on the part of the Pope.

So he was here to do this and called in the German ambassador within days of his election of the Papacy in order to see if they couldn't find a way to do so.

- So the Catholic Church, of course, is an international institution.

How did Pius XII navigate both sides of the Hitler and Mussolini question, particularly during the war?

I mean, you had-- - During the war?

- Yeah, during the war, yes.

- Well first of all, the war is generally dated, the beginning of the war to the German invasion of Poland which was September 1st, 1939.

But although Mussolini was an ally of Hitler, they had entered into a pact together, Italy did not initially join the war, it would be several months till they would do so.

So the Pope was eager to keep Italy out of the war.

And of course, the Pope had no particular positive feelings about Hitler either.

He saw Hitler probably as a pagan who was diminishing the influence of the Catholic Church in Germany.

So the initial approach to the war was to do everything that he could to keep Italy out of the war.

At the same time, once Italy does join the war, which it would do in June of 1940, the Pope is not only the head of the Church worldwide, he's also the head of the Italian clergy, the Italian Church.

And the Italian Church strongly threw its support behind the Axis war in Italy as it had in Germany.

And so the Pope ended up having to kind of play this, you might say double game as head of the Church worldwide, he took the position he couldn't take sides in a war, he was neutral.

But as head of the Italian Church hierarchy, he oversaw a hierarchy that was calling on all good Catholics to do their Christian duty and participate in the Axis war.

- What about the American Catholic Church?

There was obviously a sizable Catholic population in the United States during the war.

What were his relations with the American Catholic Church?

How did he handle that knowing that America was leading the fight against Mussolini and Hitler?

- Well, the Pope actually saw himself as having good relationship with the American President Roosevelt.

Pacelli before he became Pope, had been the first Secretary of State of the Vatican to visit the United States which he did in 1936.

And as part of that visit, he actually met with President Roosevelt.

President Roosevelt, as the war was beginning, sent a personal representative because US then didn't have diplomatic relations with the Vatican.

But he appointed a man, Myron Taylor to be his personal representative and Myron Taylor would go back and forth meeting with the Pope and bringing messages from Roosevelt and taking messages from the Pope back to Roosevelt.

One thing to keep in mind is that by fairly early in the 20th century, the US Catholic population had become the major financial supporters of the Vatican.

So even if he didn't have other reasons, which he did, the Pope would not have been that eager to offend American Catholics since the Vatican was relying on them for their financial support.

And this too is part of the Pope's public stance of not taking sides in the war, that he didn't think he could offend the Italian Catholics or the German Catholics but he also couldn't offend the Americans.

- You know David, as I read this, I was grappling with I was raised Catholic, I consider myself Catholic.

The notion of the Church as a moral authority, a moral institution does not appear in these negotiations.

It seems more like the Pope is the head of a multinational corporation with a lot of disparate interests and he doesn't want to offend any of them.

Is that an accurate portrayal of the history that you've uncovered?

- Well, I wouldn't say entirely.

I mean, it is true that, as I mentioned, I discovered the secret negotiations that Hitler entered into with the Pope shortly after the Pope's election in 1939.

And kind of amazingly, I also found a transcript, essentially a transcript of their conversations in the newly opened archives.

The archives of the Vatican from World War II were only opened in 2020, so very recently and these have only now come to light with my book.

And in those conversations, it's clear that the Pope is overwhelmingly concerned with the institutional interests of the Church in Germany and trying to protect them.

And he doesn't, for example, raise the the subject of the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime.

That said, as the war goes on, he's under great pressure to speak out against the Nazi atrocities in general, including the attempts to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

He refuses to speak out publicly on this, but we know partly from these newly opened archives, he is quite anguished about this because he does realize that the Pope is looked to as a moral authority as well and he's worried how he will be regarded after the war if he hasn't taken a firmer position.

- Did you come away with the impression that Hitler and the Nazi regime in their negotiations with Rome, with the Vatican in particular, was simply manipulating, using pressure as they could generate it by putting pressure on the Church in Germany to then keep the Vatican neutral or non-committal as they ran in that run up to war in 1939?

- Right, you have to realize that not just up to the run up to the war, but after the war begins, the Nazi regime and the Italian regime too are portraying themselves as defenders of Christian Europe against the enemies of Christian Europe, which are basically from the Nazi point of view, the Communists and the Jews.

So it's in the interest of Hitler to not be publicly rebuked by the Vatican and the Pope.

And so I think in entering into these secret negotiations in 1939 that then go on past then well into the war, Hitler is basically trying to keep the Pope quiet which he does, which he's successful in.

I don't think Hitler had any idea that he was going to give any new privileges to the Church or give back what he had taken away in terms of the privileges that the Church had enjoyed in Germany.

But he is engaged you might say in a stalling tactic.

In Italy it's another question because Italians, one thing I learned I wasn't quite sure about this, because after the war everyone of course is anti-fascist and anti-Mussolini in Italy.

But it's true that the Italians had no interest in joining the war.

They had just fought a war against Germany not that long before, World War I.

The Nazi idea of Aryan supremacy was not going to appeal to many Italians.

So the idea that they should now go risk their life and go fight on behalf of the Nazi regime was going to be a difficult sell for Mussolini.

So the last thing Mussolini needed was for the Pope and the Catholic Church to voice any opposition to his joining Hitler's war.

- So David, you mentioned that Pius XII was anguished as he began to learn details of what we now call the Holocaust.

Maybe you can get into that in a little bit more depth and in particular, what was his inner circle advising him?

I mean, in retrospect of course, this is just a horrible position to take not to really speak out against what was happening.

- Well, first of all, we do know that the Pope had very good sources in occupied Europe about what was going on.

So he didn't necessarily know all the details of exactly what was happening in concentration camps but he knew that the Germans were engaged in the systematic slaughter of Europe's Jews.

And he had many horrifying reports, including by for example, there was a priest from Rome who was a chaplain with the Italian army going back and forth on a hospital train to Ukraine, to Russia in '41, '42 and he was coming back and giving long reports to the Pope about what he had seen.

But the Pope was also getting in terms of the slaughter of the Jews and the attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews, the Pope was also getting many other reports from Church sources in various parts of occupied Europe.

One thing we do discover with the newly opened archives is what kind of advice the Pope was getting about should he speak out, when for example, Roosevelt asked whether he has any evidence that the Nazis are trying to systematically murder the Jews of Europe.

And for example, in that case, which was in the fall of 1942, we have the memo that his main advisor on Jews as he saw it prepared for him, which he said we do have such information but don't let Roosevelt know this, because if we do, undoubtedly the Americans will use it as part of their anti-Nazi propaganda citing us and we don't want to get dragged into this.

- You know, the fecklessness of the institutional church really strikes me in reading this history.

And it stands in such sharp contrast with the both moral and physical courage of so many Catholic priests and officials in Poland after Nazi Germany invades.

And you recount how the Nazis targeted those Catholic leaders because they were seen as sources of Polish nationalism and offering resistance to the Nazi invasion.

What consideration did Pius XII give to those Catholics in these newly occupied territories at the time of the war?

- Well, this brings up an important point, I think which is when we talk about the silence of the Pope during the war, we think of course immediately of the Holocaust and his failure to speak out.

But actually the controversy over the silence of the Pope during the war began basically on day one of the war and had nothing to do with Jews, had to do with Poland, Polish society, which was heavily, of course Roman Catholic.

And as you mentioned, among the targets of the Germans in invading Poland were the local Polish priests, Catholic priests who were seen as local supporters of Polish nationalism.

And hundreds of Polish priests were being sent to concentration camps where many died.

So it was the Catholic Poles initially who were begging the Pope to speak out to denounce this and the Pope refused to do so.

Why did he refuse to do so?

Well, part of the reason is who were the Nazis, who were the Weimar, who were the German army.

Something like 40% of them were people who thought of themselves as Roman Catholic, who went to Catholic Church and so on.

And the Pope was worried about their reaction if he were to denounce their government.

And he worried about, among other things we learned from these newly opened archives, he worried about creating a new schism in the Church in Germany.

And so this was certainly on his mind.

The other thing on his mind to keep in our mind is that the Pope initially had good reason to believe the Germans were going to win the war, that Hitler would win the war.

And so from his point of view, his duty was to protect the institutional church in a Europe that could be coming under Hitler's regime, Hitler's rule with his sidekick Benito Mussolini.

So keeping them both happy or at least not unhappy was something he saw as in the interest of the Church.

- You know, this is a little bit beyond the scope of your book, but I'm mindful of the fact that a young Karol Wojtyla, the eventual Pope John Paul II, finished his education in his ordination in occupied Poland during the war.

Do you think is there an alignment between his experience in occupied Poland during the war translate into the way he responded and used the moral authority of the Church at the end of the Cold War?

Is there something about that contrast between Pius XII and John Paul II that grows from that moment?

- Well, that's an interesting hypothesis.

And of course with Benedict's recent death, Pope Benedict's recent death and the fact that he was in Hitler youth as a young man under the German army, I guess, brings up these issues of what impact all this had on another Pope as well, on John Paul II's successor.

John Paul II, certainly I'm not an expert on him, but I would imagine this would have had a big impact.

No Pope is going to criticize his predecessor so I wouldn't have expected John Paul II to say anything negative about Pius XII or his silence during the war, but perhaps he did learn a lesson there.

- So David, I'm gonna take a little bit of a digression here.

Talk about the Secret Archives, why they were released, where in the Vatican they were, and your time spent there.

I imagine they were vast and extensive and just weeding through to get anything coherent, nevermind the amazing book you've written must have been difficult.

Can you just talk about that for a moment?

- Yes, well the Vatican first of all, takes its history very seriously so keeps meticulous records of its history.

It's up to the current Pope to decide when to open the archives of the next papacy, whose papers have not yet been opened.

So unlike state archives, which may have say a 50 year rule, the Vatican, it has to do with papacy.

And when you open papers, you open it for an entire papacy.

The Vatican has been under great pressure to open the papers for the papacy of Pius XII and especially the World War II papers ever since the controversy over the silence of the Pope began to be on the kind of public radar screen in the 1960s.

And finally, Francis as part of his effort for greater transparency in the Church announced in 2019 that he was authorized in that opening as of year hence.

So on March 2nd, 2020, I was at the door of the Vatican Archive as it was being opened for the first time for this papacy.

Now, you mentioned the Vatican Secret Archive.

One other thing that the current Pope Francis has done with respect to these archives is he's renamed the Vatican Secret Archive.

It's now called the Vatican Apostolic Archive.

He apparently thought secret led to some unfortunate descriptions of what the nature of the archive was, but there are actually a number of different archives of the Vatican that I've worked in, a number of them for this book, the Vatican Apostolic Archive, the former Secret Archive, but also there's a separate archive of the Secretary of State.

There's a separate archive of what used to be called the Inquisition, now the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

All these are important in providing the evidence that allows us to reconstruct the actions of the Pope and the Vatican during World War II.

And there were those who thought that not a lot new was gonna come out because the Vatican did because of the criticism, have a group of four Jesuit scholars prepare four thick volumes of papers from World War II in the Vatican.

And those were published a number of years ago.

One thing I discovered is that they left out some rather significant and in some cases, embarrassing materials.

So there's a lot new that is now coming out.

- Hey, David, literally in about 30 seconds, what is the bottom line takeaway about the role of the Vatican and the papacy of Pius XII in the history of the Second World War?

30 seconds.

- Takeaway I think is that Pius XII is neither a evil villain or a great heroic figure.

He was rather limited in his diplomatic approach to World War II.

He was trying to protect the institutional interests of the Church.

He suffered privately for not speaking out against the moral evils of the Nazi regime but he judged it more prudent to keep this to himself.

- Well, David, the book is "The Pope at War."

For anybody interested in this history, this is an important book.

Thank you so much for being with us.

He's David Kurtzer.

If you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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