Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Breaking with the tradition of keeping papal documents private for 100 years, the Vatican released a carefully edited trove of papal documents from World War II in 1966, called Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatif à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. They did this in an attempt to spin the unfavorable narrative about Pope Pius XII’s silence during the Holocaust. Sereny discusses the papers in Rome with one of the Jesuit historians who assembled them, Father Burkhart Schneider.

Pius XII learned of the Nazis’ euthanasia program when it started in 1941, yet said nothing until 1943, years after the program had already killed everyone the Nazis intended. From 1941 onward, Pius XII received multiple credible reports detailing Nazi extermination and concentration camps; he remained silent.

Father Schneider makes numerous excuses for the Pope’s silence. Chief among them is that because the Vatican lacked physical power, it had to go along with the governments that were in power. With this in mind, Pius XII left it to individual priests to weigh the pros and cons of public protest. In response to the Bishop Preysing of Berlin’s second plea to defend the Jews in 1943, Pius XII responded that the Vatican had already helped:

It has required, on the part of the executive branches of Our relief organization, a maximum degree of patience and self-effacement, to comply with the expectations—one must really say the demands—of those seeking help, as well as in overcoming the diplomatic difficulties. Of the very great sums which, in American currency, we spent on overseas travel for emigrants, we do not wish to speak. (756)

Father Schneider also claims that the Pope feared for his safety, citing a Nazi plan to arrest the Pope after the Italian Fascist government fell in 1943. Records show that Nazi leaders, including Hitler, opposed this plan as reckless. When the Nazis occupied Rome in 1943, they assured the Pope that the Vatican would remain untouched.

Sereny questions Father Schneider about whether the Vatican gave money to Stangl and other Nazi criminals after the war. It likely cost around $10,000 in 2022 dollars to secure the escape of someone like Stangl. Bishop Hudal helped at least 100 SS escape, likely many more. Therefore, Bishop Hudal, who had little money himself, gave over $1,000,000 in 2022 dollars to Nazis like Stangl to escape Europe. Father Schneider claims that the Church was poor, that no funds for such people existed, and that Bishop Hudal was an outsider in the Vatican who acted alone.

According to Bishop Jakob Weinbacher, Bishop Hudal was friends with Pope Pius XII (who, because he’d spent his adolescence in Germany, liked to surround himself with German clergymen). Bishop Hudal made only half-hearted attempts to conceal his German nationalism, and he was known for it in the Church. He doubtlessly helped many Nazi leaders escape with his Red Cross connections. Bishop Weinbacher believes it possible that the funds Hudal dispensed to such Nazis came from the Pope. Though he helped some non-Nazi refugees after the war, Bishop Hudal mainly focused on helping powerful Nazis of whose identities he was aware.

During the war, Karl Bayer served as an interpreter in the Luftwaffe—the Nazi air force. After World War II, Bayer directed the International Caritas—a confederation of Catholic charities—in Rome, making him privy to the spectrum of aid the Church dispensed to refugees. According to Bayer, former SS constituted a small portion of the refugees the Vatican helped at the end of World War II. Most refugees in Italy were either people fleeing Soviet states or other foreign nationals who didn’t want to return to Germany or the Soviet Union. Individual clergymen dispensed both financial aid—which came from the Vatican—and non-financial aid, such as help obtaining documents, through personal connections.

Given the large number of refugees in Italy after the war, it was difficult for aid organizations to verify people’s identities. An accepted method of verification was to have an Italian attest to a refugee’s identity. There were Italians who would vouch for foreigners they didn’t know for a small fee. Stangl could’ve had Italians he’d met through the black market during his work on the Einsatz Poll vouch for his character to obtain a Red Cross passport.

Bayer confirms it would’ve been relatively easy for Stangl to cross the border between Austria and Italy as there was both word-of-mouth information regarding the best routes and guides who led illegal crossings.

The Red Cross “passports” (laisser-passers), like what Stangl used to emigrate to Syria, were not actual passports but temporary identity documents. The Red Cross issued them to tens of thousands of refugees in Italy in an effort to move them out of the country and ease the economic strain they caused. However, many refugees used them for longer than the intended six months, and in South America, they became accepted as passports.

Gertrude Dupuis—who held a powerful position in the International Red Cross in Rome during and after World War II—said that while the Red Cross was sometimes suspicious of those requesting a laisser-passer, it didn’t have the resources to investigate these concerns: “There were so many who needed help; the practical difficulties we faced almost defy description. We were, after all, an ‘aid’ organization, not detectives” (804). While it was possible to forge a laisser-passer, Stangl likely didn’t need to: Bishop Hudal’s attestation to his character would’ve been all Stangl needed to obtain a genuine one.

During the war, the Nazis allowed Catholic convents and monasteries in Rome to harbor some Jews to assuage clergy members who opposed Nazism. Father Anton Weber, a German priest stationed in Rome, hid only baptized Jews (he estimates he helped around 200-300). Some Jews pretended to be Catholics; Weber was careful to question supposedly converted Jews and refuse those he suspected of lying.

After the war, Weber helped many former SS men escape. Most notably, he helped Adolf Eichmann—one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Eichmann came to Weber under an assumed name and claimed to be from East Germany. Weber claims he didn’t suspect Eichmann’s true identity, but Sereny finds this dubious: Eichmann had a pronounced Austrian accent, which would have immediately revealed he was not from East Germany. Despite his attempts to justify helping Nazi criminals escape, Weber remains visibly troubled by his actions.

Dr. Eugen Dollmann was an SS member who served as Hitler’s interpreter in Rome. His life in Rome was far removed from the hardships of war and the horrors of the Holocaust (of which, he claims, he was ignorant).

Dollmann says in all his work he never heard Hitler, Mussolini, or Pope Pius XII mention the Jews. Given that there were few Jews in Italy, Sereny concedes that Hitler might not have discussed the Jews with either of these men and would’ve instead talked about other Italian-centered issues. Dollmann doesn’t think Pius XII ever received precise reports about the extermination of the Jews during the war; upon Sereny informing him that the Pope did receive such reports, he wonders what kept him from saying something.

During the war, Kazimierz Papée, the Polish Ambassador to the Vatican from 1939 to 1958, repeatedly wrote Pius XII detailing the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews in Poland and pleading for him to intervene. Sereny visits Papée in Rome in 1972. Papée is anguished by his failure to convince the Pope to speak against the genocide. Despite his tenuous position in Rome (with no money of his own, he relies financially on the Vatican) he tells Sereny where she can find records of his letters informing Pius XII of the genocide in Poland.

Sereny views three of these letters through the Polish archives; the Vatican omitted them in their 1966 publication of the papal documents from World War II (Documents du Saint Siège relatif à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale). On December 21, 1942, Papée personally handed Cardinal Tardini a letter for the Pope in which he detailed the Nazis’ ongoing extermination plan and estimated the number of Polish Jews already killed at over 1 million:

The Germans are liquidating the entire Jewish population of Poland. The first to be taken are the old, the crippled, the women, and children; which proves that these are not deportations to forced labour, and confirms the information that these deported populations are taken to specially prepared installations, there to be put to death by various means [while] the young and able-bodied are killed through starvation and forced labour (945).

Three days later, on Christmas Eve 1942, Pius XII obliquely referenced the Nazi extermination of Polish Jews at the end of a 45-minute address to Catholics worldwide: “Humanity owes this vow to the hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own, sometimes only owing to nationality or descent, are doomed to death or to slow decline” (950). This was the only reference Pius XII made to the Nazis’ ongoing extermination of the Jews.

Papée says it would’ve been impossible for the cardinals to suppress his letters to the Pope to insulate him from knowledge of the Holocaust. Papée allows that the Pope, hemmed in by fascism, was in a precarious political situation. However, he recalls that when he personally visited Pius XII for the 10th time in 1944 to plead with him to intercede on behalf of all Poles, the Pope was angry: “‘I have listened again and again to your representations about Our unhappy children in Poland […] Must I be given the same story yet again?” (953).