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Review Essay* Speak of the Devil: Hubert Wolf on Pope Pius XI and the Vatican Archives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2011
Extract
Hubert Wolf's subtle and understated book shows that the writing of good history requires access to good sources. In 2006 Benedict XVI opened to researchers all files in the Vatican Secret Archives relating to the pontificate of Pius XI (February 1922 to February 1939). This is a vast cache: by Wolf's estimate, it includes about 100,000 “archival units, each containing up to a thousand pages” (17). Of course Wolf could not examine all or even much of this enormous collection, but he saw enough to present what he calls a “double perspective” on relations between the Vatican and Germany in the prewar years of National Socialist rule: “the view from Rome and the consultations within the Vatican about German affairs” (18). By sticking close to his sources Wolf uncovers many surprises and reveals that the devil in its modern, totalitarian guise is, as ever, in the details.
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References
1 An assessment of the issues as of the early 2000s is Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust (ed. John K. Roth and Carol Rittner; New York: Continuum, 2002). For an update see Jacques Kornberg, The Papacy and Genocide: Pius XII's Dilemma in World War II (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2012). Many thanks to my colleagues Jacques Kornberg and Michael R. Marrus for sharing their expertise in this area.
2 For another perspective on the early 1920s, from inside Germany, see Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
3 The classic text is Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The concept is revisited in Beyond the Racial State (ed. Mark Roseman, Devin Pendas, and Richard Wetzell; Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2012).
4 Most influential here are the 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy (published in German as Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel) and John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999).
5 Prominent examples include David G. Dalin, The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2005) and Ronald J. Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope (rev. ed.; Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 2010).
6 The figure of 860,000 appears on numerous websites, usually attributed to Pinchas E. Lapide. See, e.g., “Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust,” at www. users.binary.net/polycarp/piusxii.html
7 Important studies of Catholic activity, not passivity, within Nazi Germany are Kevin P. Spicer, Hitler's Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); and Martina Cucchiara, “ ‘Bitter Times’: The Poor School Sisters of Notre Dame in Hitler's Germany, 1933 to 1945,” Ph.D. diss., Department of History, University of Notre Dame, 2011.
8 See Emma Fattorini, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech That Was Never Made (trans. Carl Ipsen; Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
9 Reflections on the role of religion, particularly Christianity, in a number of cases of genocide and extreme violence, are in In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (ed. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack; New York: Berghahn, 2001).
10 Hilari Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense: The Catholic Church and the Spanish Civil War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007) and Beth Griech-Polelle, “The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on the German Roman Catholic Clergy,” in Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (ed. Kevin P. Spicer; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007) 121–35. See also Julian Casanova, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
11 Excerpts of Hossbach Memorandum in Nazism, 1919–1945 (ed. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham; vol. 3 of Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination: A Documentary Reader, 3rd ed.; Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2001) 78.
12 On Hudal, see Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Random House, 1974) 275–340.
13 Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: The Kulturkampf Newsletters, 1936–1939: The Definitive English-Language Edition of the Kulturkampf Newsletters (ed. and trans. Richard Bonney; Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009).
14 See Michael Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2007).
15 Pius XII's pattern of response to the various Nazi programs of mass killing has been most clearly depicted by Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Pope Pius XII in World War II,” presentation at the University of Notre Dame, 2006.