Edited by: Fern Sidman
Shocking new evidence about the Vatican’s role during the nightmarish years of the Holocaust has now been revealed by Brown University historian, David I Kertzer.
JTA reported that in an article published by The Atlantic magazine on Thursday, Kertzer found that the Vatican both fought efforts to reunite two Holocaust orphans with their relatives and urged Pope Pius XII not to protest the Nazi deportation of Italian Jews..
Kertzer’s findings came after his investigation into Vatican documents unsealed in March.
The focus of the investigation revolved around a set of Jewish twins named Robert and Gérald Finaly. According to the JTA report, the boys were kidnapped and baptized by French Catholic priests. A Vatican Secretariat of State official named Angelo Dell’Acqua played a pivotal role in the smuggling of the Finaly twins from France to Spain. Dell’Acqua later became the cardinal for Rome, as was reported by JTA.
The smuggling of the children came in the aftermath of orders handed down by French judges. The twins were hidden from the Nazis at a Catholic monastery, and ordered to be handed over to their aunt, as was reported by JTA. That finally happened in 1953, and the twins now live in Israel.
Until his death in 1958, Pope Pius XII, who led the Holy See during World War II and the Holocaust years, had been legitimately accused of being callously indifferent to the plight of European Jewry as he did nothing to bring attention to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis.
Towards the end of World War II, a story circulated that Pope Pius finally called upon Hitler to stop the wholesale slaughter of Europe’s Jews, however by this time, almost all Jews in Europe had already met their end in the Nazi death camps. It is said that when Pius issued his request to Hitler to cease the killings, Hitler retorted with, “We are only finishing the job that the Catholic Church started centuries ago.”
Kertzer’s findings serve to buttress this widely-accepted impression of Pius, according to the JTA report. Among his findings is memorandum advising Pius against formally protesting the rounding up of about 1,000 Jews in Rome in 1943 for deportation to Auschwitz.
Pius XII was counseled by Dell’Acqua to hold private discussions with a German ambassador about the roundup in a talk “recommending to him that the already grave situation of the Jews not be aggravated further,” according to Kertzer’s investigation. JTA also reported that he asked the pope not to protest the move publicly and he complied with this directive.
From Kertzer’s report:
“The silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust has long engendered bitter debates about the Roman Catholic Church and Jews. The memoranda, steeped in anti-Semitic language, involve discussions at the highest level about whether the pope should lodge a formal protest against the actions of Nazi authorities in Rome. Meanwhile, conservatives in the Church continue to push for the canonization of Pius XII as a saint.”
