Pie XII Et Le IIIe Reich

A MISFILED DOCUMENT discovered accidentally in the archives of the Third Reich by a young historian working on his doctorate was the genesis of this book. It was a dispatch from the German embassy at the Vatican, stating that Pius XII had requested a special concert performance of the Berlin Opera Company in Rome. The date was March, 1941, by which time the Nazis' practice of euthanasia in mental hospitals, their oppression of Poland, and their segregation policy against the Jews were widely known. Saul Friedlander asked for the other Vatican files in the Wilhelmstrasse, and eventually decided to publish a collection of documents. Many of these were unavailable even to the author of The Deputy, the play that has aroused a continuing international controversy over the silence of Pope Pius XII in face of the Nazi mass murders. Among these documents, most of which are secret German dispatches between the Vatican and the Reich Foreign Office, are the original, harrowing Kurt Gerstein eyewitness report of concentration camp gassings; a moving letter from Eugene Cardinal Tisserant about the fall of France; a fruitless appeal to the Pope for a few words of moral support from the President of the Polish Government-in-Exile, and another from the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem; the Vatican's official statement on race, and many others. While this book cannot possibly present completely a story which is still unfolding, it offers primary historical evidence, linked with terse, objective comments by the author, in a lasting contribution to the record. It is, at the same time, a moving, exciting, and suspenseful (even though the outcome is known) account of a contemporary tragic dilemma.

Translated from the French and German

by CHARLES FULLMAN

Typography, binding, and jacket design

by WARREN CHAPPELL

SAUL FRIFDLANDER was born in Prague in 1932. He was not yet seven when his parents were forced to flee to France. In 1942 they were caught by the Nazis as they tried to escape to Switzerland, deported, and finally killed in Auschwitz. The boy was hidden in a Catholic monastery until the end of the war. He came to Israel in 1948, and has been an Israeli citizen ever since, serving in the Israeli army, and attending the School of Law and Economics in Tel Aviv (1950-3). From 1953 to 1955, he studied at the Institut d'etudes politiques in Paris, from which he was graduated with top honors. From 1956 to 1961, he was Secretary to the President of the World Zionist Organization and later Head of the Scientific Department of the Ministry of Defense. He obtained his Ph.D. in political science in 1963, after two years of study at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he is at present Associate Professor of Contemporary History. His book Hitler and the United States, 1939-1941, to be published in 1966, was first published in 1963 in Geneva. Pius XII and the Third Reich has appeared thus far in French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish editions. Mr. Friedlander is married, the father of two sons, and resides with his family in Geneva, Switzerland.

POPE PIUS XII TAKES A STAND

"Humanity owes this vow [never to rest until, among all the peoples and all the nations of the earth, the names of those shall be legion who are resolved to lead society back to the divine law] to hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or their race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction."

From the Pope's Christmas Message, 1942

"In our Christmas message we said a word about the things that are presently being done to non-Aryans in the territories under German authority. It was short, but it was well-understood. It is superfluous to say that Our paternal love and solicitude are greater today toward non-Aryan or semi-Aryan Catholics, children of the Church like the others, when their outward existence is collapsing and they are going through moral distress. Unhappily, in present circumstances, We can¬not offer them effective help other than through our prayers." "... it was a consolation for Us to learn that Catholics, notably in Berlin, had manifested great Christian charity toward the sufferings of 'non-Aryans.' Let this be the occasion for Us to express Our paternal gratitude and Our profound sympathy to Msgr. Lichtenberg, who is in prison." (Msgr. Lichtenberg died on the way to Dachau, having been arrested because he publicly prayed for the Jews. The Papal Nuncio in Berlin merely requested that the proceedings against him be hastened, in view of the poor state of his health. They were.)

Both from a letter to the Archbishop of Berlin, April 30, 1943