The Pope and the Holocaust: Pius XII and the Secret Vatican Archives

By Michael Hesemann

For over two decades, Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, has been blasted in the public square as "Hitler's Pope", accused by bestselling authors of cowardice in the face of the Nazi regime. Some have even said that the pope was complicit in Hitler's grab for power, privately fueled by a hatred for the Jewish people. And if they are right, who would not join in condemning a leader like this, especially one who claims to represent all Christians?

But what if this image of Pius XII is completely backward? Archival and archaeological researcher Michael Hesemann has unearthed thousands of documents—including from the Vatican Secret Archives (or the Vatican Apostolic Archive), only recently opened to scholars—to give a startling picture of Eugenio Pacelli as a shrewd diplomat and a champion of the Jewish people during World War II. Saving thousands upon thousands of lives, Pius demonstrated such courage and compassion in these times that Jewish leaders across the globe praised him, and the ecumenical Pave the Way Foundation has since nominated him for the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum's Righteous among the Nations award.

The Pope and the Holocaust traces Pacelli's fight for peace in the 1930s and 1940s, including his years as apostolic nuncio in Germany, where he resisted Nazism. Even some of his most controversial moves, such as the 1933 Vatican concordat, were made to protect Jewish and Christian lives. What emerges clearly from Hesemann's evidence is a portrait of a man radically committed to the Jews and the revelation God gave to them. As Pope Pius himself remarked in 1938, "It is not legitimate for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism. Spiritually, we are all Semites."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642292190

Book preview

The Pope and the Holocaust

Michael Hesemann

The Pope and the Holocaust

Pius XII and the Vatican Secret Archives

Translated by Michael J. Miller and Frank Nitsche-Robinson

IGNATIUS PRESS  SAN FRANCISCO

Original German edition:

Der Papst und der Holocaust: Pius XII. und die geheimen Akten im Vatikan

© 2018 LangenMüller, F. A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany

Cover photos:

Courtesy of L’Osservatore Romano

Cover design by Enrique J. Aguilar

© 2022 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978–1–62164–373–9 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-64229-219-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number 2021941893

Printed in the United States of America ♾

Dedicated to His Holiness,

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI,

who inspired me to write this book

and

to Father Peter Gumpel, S.J., Ph.D.,

who became my guide

on my search for the truth,

with gratitude and in solidarity.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Father Peter Gumpel, S.J., Ph.D.

Introduction

I Night of Broken Glass!

II Spiritually We Are All Semites

III Operation Exodus

IV Aid for the Jews

V Hitler’s Enemy

VI Conspiracy against the War

VII Tyrannicide

VIII The Race against Time

IX Beneath the Cloak of Silence

X Be Proud That You Are a Jew

XI The Crippling Fear

XII The Pope’s Prudent Silence

XIII In Order to Avoid Even Greater Evils

XIV Delaying the Deportations

XV In Extreme Danger

XVI Beneath His Windows

XVII The Pope’s Hour

XVIII The Final Confrontation

Epilogue

After the Opening of the Archives

Chronology

Sources and Bibliography

Photographs

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

More from Ignatius Press

Notes

FOREWORD

Very gladly and gratefully I accepted the invitation of my esteemed friend and colleague Michael Hesemann, Ph.D. (honoris causa), to write the foreword to his new book, The Pope and the Holocaust. I do so all the more gladly because I have loved and revered this pope since my early youth and was privileged to have several conversations with him, some of them rather long. Of the popes in recent decades, I was personally unacquainted with only one, namely, Pius XI, who died in 1939, whereas I was not called to Rome until 1947. But I knew personally all seven who followed him and was able to get a rather good picture of them in the conversations and consultations to which they had invited me.

It has become customary to compare the recent popes with one another and to express value judgments about which one of them was the greatest. On that subject, I can only say that I consider such deliberations to be extremely problematic. I was able to determine that they all had very different personalities, and, furthermore, their respective terms of office fell in temporal circumstances that cannot be compared with each other. Pius XII, for example, with whom this book deals, during his papacy had to experience National Socialism and Communism, World War II, and, after a relatively short intermission, the Cold War, also. Thank God, it did not fall to the lot of any one of his successors to exercise his ministry in such difficult times. This leads me to make another observation. It is pointed out repeatedly that successors of Pius XII have already been beatified or canonized. This is true of John XXIII, who has already been canonized, for Paul VI, who was canonized in October 2018, and for John Paul II, who was raised to the honors of the altar the same day as Pope John, although he died only in 2005. Pius XII, in contrast, who died in 1958, has simply remained Venerable (the step before beatification). Many conclude from this, however, quite incorrectly, that since these successors were canonized, they were greater popes than Pius XII. To my position as professor of the history of dogma and of theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University was added the commission by Paul VI at the end of the Second Vatican Council, together with the then-general postulator of the Society of Jesus, Professor Doctor Paolo Molinari, S.J., to introduce the beatification process for Pius XII and to complete it to the best of our ability.

We did not make it easy for ourselves. All told, we had 149 processes to evaluate, and later the task was assigned to me, first as consultor, then as relator, to judge many additional processes. I think that this entitles me to make such a judgment and, moreover, to reject any comparison with his successors. Whether a pope is beatified or canonized concerns his personal life, his life of faith, his life of prayer, and the sincere effort to carry out his ministry as well as possible. It does not mean, however, that the people who have already been beatified or canonized always made the best decisions under every circumstance and deserve to go down in history as particularly great popes. This is true not only for the popes of the modern era, all of whom I hold in great esteem, but also for all the popes in Church history. In this connection, I would like to refer to a remark that my former instructor at the Biblical Institute, Professor Doctor Augustin Bea, S.J. (later a cardinal), made when we invited him to make under oath for the beatification process a statement about Pius XII, whom he knew very well, since he had worked with him for many years. Cardinal Bea said then—and he repeated it many times later: Pius XII does not need me to give my judgment of him. I am firmly convinced that he is the greatest pope of the modern era. And then he added another sentence that I have never forgotten: You can be sure that only a hundred years from now will it be clear and evident how great this pope was, what course he set for the Church, and how much we owe to him. I think that the judgment of such a man deserves to be quoted here.

By the way, I would like to point out a fact that astonishes me again and again. Pius XII worked tirelessly and accomplished a great deal for the Church. From the beginning, he stood for peace. On August 24, 1939, only a few days before the outbreak of World War II, he said in a radio message intended for the world: Nothing is lost with peace. Everything can be lost through war. Prophetic words, which then also proved true.

Therefore, it surprises me how little is said today about Pius XII, and if people do speak about him, then only in the one regard that also concerns my friend and colleague Doctor Michael Hesemann in the present book: the question about his conduct during the Holocaust. Everything else that he accomplished seems to have been forgotten or is not mentioned. Mr. Hesemann cannot be accused of that; ten years ago, he wrote an extremely valuable overall biography of Pius XII entitled Der Papst, der Hitler trotzte [The pope who defied Hitler]. But many others prefer to keep silent about that.

There is no question that Pius XII did a great deal for the Jews, perhaps more than anyone else did. For this, too, he deserves to be venerated, but there are many other reasons, also. For instance, as I have already mentioned, his tireless dedication to the cause of peace. Pius XII did much to keep Italy out of the war, but unfortunately did not succeed. On December 21, 1939, when the Italian king and queen visited him in the Vatican, he appealed to their consciences, just as he did seven days later during a return visit in the Quirinal Palace. Nevertheless, neither these nor numerous other attempts were successful, for which he, of course, is not to blame.

But I would like to point out, too, some other activities of Pius XII that do not deserve to be forgotten or kept secret. Among the most important duties of a pope is to make sure that, when he dies, the College of Cardinals is at full membership, since it has to elect his successor. For a long time, Pius XII could not appoint any new cardinals—during World War II, it was quite impossible, because the cardinals could not come to Rome at all. Not until 1946 did he then appoint thirty-two new cardinals, among them only four Italians, remarkably. I emphasize this because in recent centuries the majority of the cardinals have always come from Italy and, naturally, then elected an Italian as pope, too. Pius XII did not want that, and he succeeded in clearing a path for a non-Italian pope. Of course, he was not against Italy; on the contrary: he loved his homeland. Yet on the basis of his extensive international experience, he had probably come to the realization that other nations, too, could and ought to produce a pope—and he achieved that. Furthermore, he introduced a new order in ecclesiastical administration. He erected eighty-seven new ecclesiastical provinces, ninety-nine new archdioceses, and 413 new dioceses, which shows what a healthy condition the Church was in at that time. When you see and know how much work is necessary to create even one single new diocese, then you can imagine how laborious the process was and how indefatigable this pope was.

Furthermore, I would like to point out the magisterial activity of Pius XII, which is extraordinary. We owe to him forty encyclicals, which concern the whole sphere of Church life. In the first place, we should mention, of course, Summi pontificatus, the programmatic first encyclical of his pontificate, dated October 20, 1939, in which Pius spoke about peace, the coexistence of nations, and the new order of states. From the theological perspective, I refer to Mystici corporis Christi (June 29, 1943), the first great attempt to explain theologically what the Church actually is. On September 30, 1943, followed the famous encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu, which explained for us how we are to understand the New Testament and the Old Testament today. On November 20, 1947, with Mediator Dei, he shifted the switch and brought the liturgy onto a new track. Finally, in Humani generis (August 12, 1950), he warned against certain tendencies that were becoming evident under the surface in the Church. From today’s perspective, with the Second Vatican Council in retrospect, this encyclical proves to be virtually prophetic and can be understood only today in its full significance.

We should also mention the numerous addresses by Pius XII, which were published annually in the series Discorsi e radiomessagi di Sua Santità Pio XII 1939–1958. Pius XII had the habit, whenever he received in audience the participants of one of the numerous professional congresses organized in Rome, to prepare thoroughly beforehand for the topic in question on the basis of the latest literature in the field, so as to be able to say something truly well-grounded. His addresses were not short messages of greeting, but carefully elaborated treatises based on Church teaching. Especially close to his heart were medicine, Christian marriage, and the battle against abortion, which at that time was already becoming an increasingly common practice, but also political questions. Back then, the audiences were not yet held on Saint Peter’s Square or in the Aula Nervi, which was built by Paul VI, but rather in the great halls of the Apostolic Palace. Afterward, Pius XII took the time to speak individually with every participant in the audience. He was always accompanied by a secretary, who recorded any requests in writing, so that the matter could be pursued later on.

He had considerable influence on the Second Vatican Council. Pius XII himself originally had the desire to convoke a council, but then he refrained from doing so and left this task to his successor, because he wanted to create more order in the Church first. And this is an accomplishment of his that no one can dispute: During his pontificate, order prevailed; everyone in the Church knew where he stood. We already knew as young Catholics what he thought about National Socialism. As young priests, we knew his thoughts about Communism. We knew also what he did for the Jews. All that must not be forgotten today. My boss at that time, the famous university professor Paolo Molinari, S.J., once gave a lecture at the University of Marseilles on The Presence of Pius XII at Vatican II. In it, he counted up exactly how often Pius XII is quoted in the conciliar documents, namely, 219 times—more than all other popes taken together. In the index of the Acta Synodalia, his name is found a total of 1,673 times. Consequently, the influence of Pius XII on the council cannot be called into question.

Still, allow me to say a final word on the topic of this book. I said at the start that it astonishes me how much about Pius XII is kept secret—even by many ecclesiastical authorities—while all the focus is on one single issue of his pontificate, the issue of the Shoah, the Holocaust, which is also the subject of the present study by my esteemed colleague Doctor Hesemann. It is utterly mistaken to maintain that Pius XII was anti-Semitic; after all, his best friend even in his school years was a Jew, Guido Mendes, whose emigration to Switzerland he facilitated in 1938; from there Mendes moved to Palestine. The two men remained lifelong friends, and when Mendes was already a famous physician in Israel, he came to Rome twice to renew his contact with his friend. When Pius XII died on October 9, 1958, Mendes remembered his friend with words of high praise. And he was not the only one; the Israeli foreign minister at the time, Golda Meir, the second prime minister, Moshe Sharett, and many other Jewish authorities praised and lauded Pius XII for everything that he had done from the start for the Jews, while so many others had refused to help them. Again and again, Pius made every effort and here, too, in Rome made sure that the Vatican and more than two hundred ecclesiastical institutions opened their doors for the Jews when the persecution of them reached the Eternal City. I can testify to this, for when I myself was in Rome in 1947 as a brand-new instructor of philosophy in the Pontifical German College, I had the opportunity to speak with many of them.

Priests told me how they had been instructed by the pope to go from one religious house to the next and to say: Open your doors for the Jews. Even in cases where this is actually forbidden, for example in cloistered and women’s convents, exceptions were made. The lofty goal was to save human lives—that was all that mattered. Two successors of Pius XII—John XXIII and Paul VI—both declared later that in all their efforts to save Jews, they had always done only what the pope had demanded of them. There are today, thank God, many Jews who acknowledge this. I mention here in the first place the Pave the Way Foundation of Mr. Gary Krupp from New York. But there are also renowned Jewish scientists like Sir Martin Gilbert, who was knighted by the Queen of England for his scientific achievements; he defended Pius XII again and again, in his books and lectures, and he went personally to Yad Vashem to protest the fact that Pius XII could be seen in the so-called Hall of Shame alongside Hitler and Eichmann. But unfortunately there are also others whose statements are so impressively refuted by the present book.

Another important chapter in history is mentioned in this book, namely, the conspiracy of German generals and admirals against Hitler, their plan to do away with him, and their collaboration therein with Pius XII, who uncharacteristically did not deliberate for a long time first but, rather, assured them of his support spontaneously and within a few hours. That was an extremely courageous decision, for if Hitler had ever learned about it, the Catholic Church in Germany would have been threatened by an even more relentless persecution than the one already taking place.

All this is unfortunately forgotten today. It is therefore high time for authors like my friend Michael Hesemann to remind the public of what Pius XII really did and what personal risks he took thereby in order to save human lives. If all his efforts to ensure peace and to remove Hitler had succeeded, neither World War II nor the Shoah, the terrible Holocaust, would have taken place. It is the tragedy of his life that, despite all his attempts, he did not succeed in preventing those horrors. Yet it is to his credit that he tried everything humanly possible.

While congratulating the author once again, I express the hope that this book will be translated soon into many languages, especially into English. May it help justice to be done finally for this great pope.

Father Peter Gumpel, S.J., Ph.D., Vatican City

Relator in the beatification process for Pius XII

INTRODUCTION

He often acted secretly and silently because, in the light of the practical situations of that complex period of history, he foresaw that only in this way could he avoid the worst and save the greatest possible number of Jews.

— Pope Benedict XVI about Pius XII on October 9, 2008¹

This book is the product of fifteen years of thoroughgoing research. It began in 2003, when I was dealing with the pseudo-religious aspects of National Socialism for a research project. In my book Hitler’s Religion, which was published in 2004, I prove that Adolf Hitler’s hostile attitude toward the Catholic Church was founded not only on his fanatical anti-Semitism—at the very least he recognized the Jewish roots of Christianity—but also on his claim to be the quasi-prophet of a new doctrine of salvation, of a political religion (Voegelin) that syncretistically combined pagan and Gnostic, Darwinian-rational, and mystical-occult elements and displayed them with Wagnerian stagecraft and cynical brutality. The first to recognize that with crystal clarity was, of all people, the papal nuncio in Munich at the time, Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli, who as early as 1925 accurately described National Socialism as the most dangerous heresy of our time. The fact that, of all people, this Eugenio Pacelli, who in 1939 became the successor of Peter with the name Pius XII, was defamed as Hitler’s Pope seemed to me in 2003 nothing short of absurd. So I kept researching and devoted to this most prominent twentieth-century victim of fake news a chapter in my book Die Dunkelmänner [The obscurantists], which gets rid of so many anti-clerical black legends. Even then I had collected so much material that I could not possibly do justice to it all in only one chapter, and that was the origin of my 2008 biography of Pius XII, Der Papst, der Hitler trotzte [The pope who defied Hitler], which is of current interest now as ever. The title is a direct response to the black legend about Hitler’s Pope (the title of John Cornwell’s book). It appeared in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pius XII and just before Pope Benedict XVI promulgated his heroic degree of virtue, the next-to-last step before beatification in a process that had been opened by Pope Paul VI forty-three years before, namely, in 1965.

During my research in Rome for this book, I became acquainted with the relator (examining judge) of this process, Father Peter Gumpel, S.J., Ph.D., who subsequently became my teacher and paternal friend. Meanwhile, almost ninety-five years old [as of 2018], he is one of the most fascinating personalities of the Jesuit Order, indeed, of the whole Vatican. As fate (or Providence) would have it, he was introduced as a six-year-old to then-Nuncio Pacelli. He is a descendant of an important family of the Weimar Republic; his grandfather, an influential banker, was one of the advisors of Reich President Hindenburg. Born on November 15, 1923, in Hannover-Kleefeld, Gumpel was brought at the age of nine to Paris after Hitler seized power because his grandfather wanted to ensure his safety. Three years later, the boy returned to Germany, lived with his mother in Berlin, where he attended the Jesuit secondary school, and was forced to experience the abduction of his mother by the Gestapo. Only with the help of influential friends of the family, among them Admiral Canaris, did she escape execution and survive the war. In connection with her release, the fifteen-year-old Gumpel met the SS-Squad Leader Karl Wolff, who even then seemed to him so much more humane than the minions of the Gestapo. Shortly afterward, in January 1939, Gumpel left the Reich for the second time—and definitively—and first attended a Jesuit boarding school in Nijmegen, Netherlands. There he witnessed how Archbishop de Jong in 1942 protested against the deportation of the Dutch Jews, whereupon the Nazis responded by murdering a total of 694 Jewish converts to Catholicism.² After the war, Gumpel entered the Society of Jesus and was sent by his order to Rome, where the brilliant young theologian quickly started an academic career and soon was teaching at the Jesuit University, the Gregorian. At that time, Pius XII repeatedly asked him to check the quotations for his sermons and addresses. The pope’s integrity, intellectual caliber, profound humaneness, and holy way of life impressed Gumpel profoundly. His closeness to Peter in turn soon made him an important, oft-consulted collaborator with the Vatican. Together with his great confrere Father Paolo Molinari, S.J., Ph.D., he prepared documents for Vatican II; then the two Jesuits were commissioned to assume the positions of postulator and relator in 149 beatification and canonization processes. This concerned personages who wrote Church history—but no one exerted as much influence on him as Pope Pacelli, probably also because they were kindred souls. Thus, Father Gumpel became the leading expert worldwide on matters concerning the pope of World War II.

From the start, he kindly took me under his wing and also wrote the foreword to my first book about Pius. I owe it to him that eventually I myself was able to do research and in 2008 gained access to the Vatican Secret Archives and, from 2014 on, also to the archive of the Secretariat of State. In the Collegio Militare, at precisely the place where on October 16, 1943, more than a thousand Jews waited to be transported to Auschwitz, the American Pave the Way Foundation (PTWF) had invited experts from all over the world to a conference, in which they confronted the black legend with facts and extensively rehabilitated the name of Pius XII. I spoke with the organizer, Gary Krupp from New York City, and learned that he is Jewish and finds it unbearable that this great friend of his people is defamed and that his effective aid to the persecuted Jews is hushed up or disputed. His foundation had set for itself the task of interreligious dialogue and the reconciliation of Catholics and Jews, and saw here an obstacle that had to be overcome. I was grateful for having found like-minded people, and I said that I was willing to represent the PTWF from now on in Germany. Since then, I have been close friends with Gary and his wife, Meredith.

From then on, I did research for the PTWF in the Vatican Archives, while Gary and his team publicized the findings gained thereby through the worldwide media. Thus we succeeded also in convincing the curators of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial above Jerusalem, to replace a plaque originally critical of Pius XII with one having a neutral text. Currently they are examining whether to comply with the proposal by the PTWF to award to the Pope of World War II the title of Righteous among the Nations, as they have done to so many who saved Jews at his behest.

At the Sorbonne, the famous university in Paris, during a Pius Symposium in 2012, we convinced the dean of the History Faculty, Édouard Housson, about the efforts of Pius XII and initiated a productive collaboration with the Vatican Archives. At the same time, we countered the spokesman of Pius’ opponents, the Italian historian Alberto Melloni, a representative of the leftist School of Bologna, who accused me of citing documents too often—while he himself could present no documentary evidence for the overall picture that he postulated. Actually, every historian must know that archival studies are indispensable and that documents are the mosaic tiles out of which history is reconstructed. When his disciples then interpreted another papal quotation in a deliberately falsified form,³ the die was cast: we had won the debate.

In those days, I experienced a growing desire to condense the new information and facts that had been acquired in hundreds of hours of archival work into a book specifically about the pope and the Holocaust. Of course, I was still waiting for the archives to make accessible their holdings on the pontificate of Pius XII; so far, as of 2006, only the acts from the pontificate of Pius XI could be inspected. Three times we (the PTWF) had a one-hour consultation in the Vatican Secretariat of State, the first time in 2009 with the Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, the second time in 2015 with his successor, Pietro Parolin, and finally in 2017 with the Undersecretary of State Archbishop Paul Gallagher. Each time they assured us that the opening of the archives’ holdings was only a matter of months. And so I, too, was confident at first, kept my schedule in 2016 and 2017 practically free, and took up no new major book projects in that time, so as to be able if necessary to fly immediately to Rome and to inspect the acts—and I waited in vain. But for what?

As early as 1964, as a direct response to Rolf Hochhuth’s ahistorical, scandal-mongering drama Der Stellvertreter [The Deputy]—a piece of propaganda cooked up by KGB agents⁴—Pope Paul VI had commissioned four learned Jesuit historians to publish the most important Acts and Documents of the Holy See relating to the Second World War (ADSS)⁵ in an eleven-volume edition. In 1981, the mammoth project was completed. Since then, 5,141 hitherto secret documents filling 7,698 pages have been public, of which 2,522 deal specifically with the situation of the Jews—but, of course, so far they have been largely ignored.

"Why not work with the ADSS? Cardinal Bertone asked me when I spoke to him about my project. Two men whom I trust, both of whom have access also to the closed section" of the Vatican Archives, Father Gumpel and the archivist of the Secretariat of State, Doctor Johan Ickx, credibly assured me that more than 90 percent of the relevant documents are to be found in that series of volumes. Moreover, I have access to the acts of the beatification of Pius XII, which its postulator, Father Paolo Molinari, arranged with the utmost precision, and to numerous archives in which one can already inspect originals from the war years. The more I thought about it, the more I had to admit, therefore, that the cardinal was right: Even when the sixteen million pages⁶ from the pontificate of Pius XII are released in their entirety, it would take years, maybe even decades, for me and others to sort through them all. Surely we would find one thing or another that the four Jesuits overlooked or did not consider sufficiently relevant, but will that change anything about the overall picture? Probably not. Therefore, I decided to be content with what is already available (and can also be viewed online, thanks to the initiative of the PTWF, which is responsible for underwriting the digitalization of the documents).⁷ As soon as all the documents are accessible and something relevant is in fact found, I will inform the public about it on the website of the PTWF (www.ptwf.org) and on my own homepage (www.michaelhesemann.info).

This book, therefore, is by no means appearing too early, but rather just in time for the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Pius XII (d. October 9, 1958), the eightieth anniversary of the Pogrom Night (November 9, 1938), the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bloody Sabbath and the deportation of the Jews of Rome (October 16–18, 1943)—and shortly before the eightieth anniversary of the election and coronation of Pius XII (March 2 and 12, 1939). The time has come for justice to be done for this great life-saver and at the same time to remember once more the six million whom no papal assistance could save. The lies about Pius XII still divide Christians and Jews. The truth about the pope, who in that darkest time of history was also their worried father, can only bring them closer to each other!

Michael Hesemann

Rome, June 2, 2018

I

Night of Broken Glass!

Your Eminence, please let me in. We urgently need your help!

The Jewish lad was so agitated and frightened that his whole body was trembling. He had just run for his life to escape the Nazis and to alert the archbishop of Munich. The mob of Brownshirts was laying waste Jewish businesses, hauling Jews into the street and beating them. The synagogue on the Herzog-Rudolf-Straße was in flames. With the utmost haste, indeed, in a panic, their rabbi, Ernst Ehrentreu, had tried to save at least their seventy Torah scrolls, the most sacred objects in his place of worship, from desecration and destruction by the Nazi rabble. He himself was about to be thrown into the fire by the SA men [from the Sturmabteilung, a political militia], but he begged for mercy and reminded them that he, too, after all, was the father of a family. He was the one who had sent the lad to Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, the only non-Jew whom he trusted unconditionally. Perhaps he sensed that this day would change everything, that the time of relative peace was now definitively over, and that the starting gun had been fired for a persecution that would end in the largest genocide in history.

It was Thursday, November 9, 1938, shortly before midnight, when the gates of hell were opened in Munich. After it became known that the German diplomat and fellow Party Member vom Rath was deceased, struck down by the hand of a cowardly Jewish murderer, spontaneous anti-Jewish demonstrations formed throughout the Reich. The profound indignation of the German people was vented also in many instances in forceful anti-Jewish activities.¹ So the synchronized German press had reported that evening. But it had all happened quite differently.

On October 9, 1938, the Polish government had decided to allow the passports of all Polish citizens who had lived abroad for more than five years to expire. Affected also by this ruling were the approximately 18,000 impoverished Polish Jews who were living in the German Reich—many of them illegally. The German government then gave Poland an ultimatum to guarantee the return of the Jews by October 26; otherwise, they would be expelled immediately. When the date of the ultimatum arrived, the Gestapo throughout the Reich began making massive arrests. The Polish Jews were dragged out of their lodgings, packed into heavily guarded trains and trucks, shipped to the German-Polish border, and driven into Polish territory. The Polish border officials, completely taken by surprise, refused, initially with armed force, to let the expelled persons return to their homeland. For days, the latter had to remain without food in no-man’s-land or at totally overcrowded train stations on the border, until the Poles had mercy on them and allowed them to enter. Some 11,000 returned to their villages; around 7,000 who had no papers and no relatives were brought to a refugee camp near Poznan.

During the bilateral crisis that had been caused by the Nazis’ Operation Poland, a seventeen-year-old Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, who was living in Paris, learned that his whole family was among the deported persons. His despair drove him to a knee-jerk reaction with devastating consequences. He obtained a revolver, forced his way into the German Embassy in Paris, and shot to death the twenty-eight-year-old embassy secretary, Ernst Eduard vom Rath, who since 1932 had been a member of the NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers’ Party] and of the SA [Sturmabteilung]. Later, after Grynszpan was arrested, it came out that this was by no means a random murder, but that it was certainly not a declaration of war by world Jewry, either, as the Nazis later tried to depict it. In fact, Grynszpan was acquainted with the German diplomat from the Parisian homosexual scene. He may have blackmailed him previously so as to get hold of travel documents for his family. It is conceivable also that vom Rath had made false promises to the younger man in order to have his way with him.²

When vom Rath died of his injuries two days after the attempt on his life, the NS leadership had just gathered in Munich to commemorate their imaginary martyrs of the movement. That was what the Nazis, deliberately perverting the Christian concept of martyr, called the casualties of Hitler’s November putsch in 1923, which began in the Bürgerbräukeller, a large beer hall, and ended at the Feldherrnhalle, a monumental loggia on the Odeonsplatz in Munich. From then on, November 9 was considered the National Socialist Good Friday, and after the seizure of power it had been observed as nothing short of a ritual. Never did Hitler and his vassals show so clearly that their Party had long since become an anti-Church, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish sect.³ Thus, even Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, noted in his Spandau Diaries:

Up to this point I had taken the phrase Das Tausendjährige Reich as purely rhetorical, a mere claim to establishing something that would last more than a single lifetime. But when I saw Hitler virtually canonizing the ritual in this manner, I realized for the first time that the phrase was intended literally. I had long thought that all these formations, processions, dedications were part of a clever propagandistic revue. Now I finally understood that for Hitler they were almost like rites of the founding of a church.⁴

Specifically for the purpose of venerating them in the future, Hitler had the bodies of the sixteen casualties of his political adventure in 1923 exhumed twelve years later. Their mortal remains were collected in sixteen bronze sarcophagi, which were at first set up in the Feldherrnhalle, which was lined with brown drapery and decorated with fire bowls. Shortly before midnight, after a commemorative speech in the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler, standing in an open automobile, rode through the Siegestor [Victory Gate], where a sea of flames awaited him. From there to the Odeonsplatz, Ludwigstraße was lined with 240 [architectural] pylons covered with blood-red fabric, with smoking braziers, each of which bore in gold letters the names of the martyrs of the Party. The flames immersed the scenery in a ghostly, flickering light. Amid the trellis of nervously dancing shadows, SS and SA units formed fiery lines with thousands of torches. Hitler rode past their ranks at a walking pace, followed by a procession of old warriors who had followed him from the Bürgerbräukeller. While the names of the fallen men were being called out and sixteen cannon shots were fired in their honor, the automobile stopped in front of the Feldherrnhalle, and Hitler, his arm raised in a salute, climbed up the steps on a red carpet. Absorbed in his own thoughts like a high priest, he lingered at each one of the coffins, as though in a wordless conversation with the dead; then 60,000 uniformed Party members marched by silently with their flags.

The next morning, on November 9, 1938, in the gloomy gray of a November day,⁵ the solemn memorial procession set out to follow the march route of 1923. At the head of the parade walked Hitler, followed by the holders of the Blood Order that he had instituted and of the Führergruppe or leading group with the bloody flag, the relic from 1923. The holy relic of the movement, as Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach called it, was exposed only twice a year: at the dedication of flags at the Reich Party Convention in Nuremberg and on November 9 in Munich. Again and again, from a thousand loudspeakers resounded the martial Horst-Wessel-Lied, the Party anthem, which recalled the flag and the dead men: Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen fest geschlossen ... (The flag held high, the ranks firmly closed). Sixteen artillery salvos roared over the city when the procession had finally passed the blood-red pylons and arrived at the Feldherrnhalle. While the bells of the city tolled up a storm, Hitler once again climbed the steps of the Feldherrnhalle, which the NS Party mouthpiece, Völkischer Beobachter [People’s observer], called our altar, and laid down a wreath for the dead men. Then the coffins were loaded onto sixteen horse-drawn vehicles and driven to the two open honorary temples lined with columns in the Greek style that the architect Ludwig Troost had erected on Munich’s Königsplatz. While the wind bands played the Song of Germany [Deutschland, Deutschland über alles ...] again and again at an ear-splitting volume, the funeral procession reached the Square of the Resurrection. Once again, the names of the sixteen dead men were called out, but now each time the assembled Hitler Youth responded in chorus with a thunderous Here!⁶

When this bombastic travesty of the Passion play—as the historian David Clay Large describes it⁷—was over, another Party reception was held that evening in the Old Courthouse. That was where NS-Propaganda Minister Doctor Joseph Goebbels learned about the death of the homosexual diplomat and about the first violent demonstrations of his fellow Party members in Kassel and Passau. In his diary he noted:

I go to the Party reception at the old courthouse. A gigantic event. I present the matter to the Führer. He decides to let the demonstrations go on. To withdraw the police. The Jews should get to feel the people’s wrath for once. That is right. I immediately give appropriate instructions to the police and the Party. Then I speak briefly to that effect to the Party leadership. Thunderous applause. Everyone rushes off to the telephones. Now the people will act.

Some area commanders lag. But again and again I cheer everyone on. We must not let this cowardly murder go unanswered. Hitler’s assault detachment immediately starts cleaning up in Munich.... One synagogue is smashed to smithereens.... I am issuing now a precise circular letter that explains what may and may not be done.... Meanwhile, the assault detachment is doing its work. And, indeed, it does thorough work.... About to go to the hotel, I see the sky blood red. The synagogue is burning.... The assault detachment does terrific work. From all over the Reich reports come in now: 50, then 75 synagogues are burning. The Führer ordered 20–30,000 Jews to be arrested immediately. That will go over well. That will make them see that now we have reached the end of our patience.⁸

It was 11:59 p.m. when the first call of this night of shards and flames came in to the Munich Fire Department. In the display window of the Jewish fabric store Hans Weber on Augustenstraße, there was a small fire. With that began a whole series of malicious acts of destruction, arson, and plundering, which were to last well into the early morning hours. At the fashionable hat store of Heinrich Rothschild on Sendlinger Straße, the display windows were smashed, but the owners were taken into custody instead of the perpetrator. In Uhlfelder’s department store in Rosental, which with its escalators, catering service, and petting zoo had previously been a symbol for stylish Munich, the destruction of the showcases led to plundering and devastation and finally to arson. At the haberdashery store of Joachim Both on Lindenstraße, the windowpanes were smashed in by men from the Sturmabteilung. When Herr and Frau Both returned home from an evening at the theater, they surprised the plundering Nazis. We had not yet entered the house when about ten men who were standing at the entrance to the house rushed at us and pummeled us with their hands, Marjem Both later remembered.⁹ She was still aware that the Nazis were dragging her husband up the stairs when she was beaten unconscious. The next morning, she found her husband’s corpse in the nursery. Besides businesses, countless private homes and social institutions were also targets of the rioters. The Jewish nursing homes on Kaulbach- and Mathildenstraße were stormed; money, furniture, and equipment were stolen. When an eighty-three-year-old female resident asked one of the SA men present where she was supposed to go, she got the cynical answer: Lake Starnberg has room enough for you all.¹⁰

SA men in civilian dress also made their way into the synagogue on Herzog-Rudolf-Straße and ruined the furnishings before setting the building on fire. When Cardinal von Faulhaber learned about it through the Jewish lad, he reacted promptly and sent a truck belonging to the diocese. It brought the Torah scrolls rescued by Ehrentreu into the Archbishop’s Palace and thus to safety.

One of the earliest documents in the Vatican Archives that mentions Hitler and also points out the anti-Catholic character of his movement and the Church’s resistance against his anti-Semitism

The rabbi knew that they would be in the best of hands with Faulhaber, for the churchman had never yet disappointed him. Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber (1869–1952) was an outspoken friend of Judaism, which was certainly a rarity then even in Catholic circles. After his priestly ordination and the completion of his doctorate, he had taught Old Testament exegesis and biblical theology at the University of Strasbourg from 1903 to 1910, and had familiarized himself extensively with the Jewish intellectual world. Next, when Pope Pius X appointed him bishop of Speyer for a year and then archbishop of Munich and Freising, he unabashedly included on his episcopal coat of arms the menorah, the seven-branched candelabra of the Jews, kindled by the dove representing the Holy Spirit. Significantly, we find his name in one of the first documents in the Vatican Secret Archives that mentions the name Adolf Hitler. The Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli on November 14, 1923, a few days after Hitler’s Bürgerbräu Putsch, had composed a report for Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri that referred in particular to the anti-Catholic character of the Nazi uprising. Pacelli’s own words [translated from Italian]:

This [anti-Catholic] character was revealed above all in the systematic incitements against the Catholic clergy, with which the followers of Hitler and Ludendorff, especially in their speeches on public streets, stirred up the population, thus exposing ecclesiastics to insults and mockery. Their attacks were aimed in particular at the learned and conscientious cardinal archbishop, who in a sermon given in the cathedral on November 4 and in a letter to the Lord Reich Chancellor [Gustav Stresemann], published ... on November 7, had denounced the persecutions of the Jews.... So it happened that during the disturbances last Saturday afternoon a large group of demonstrators stood in front of the Archbishop’s Palace and shouted Down with the cardinal!¹¹

In 1926, Cardinal von Faulhaber joined the Amici Israel [Friends of Israel], a group of high-profile Catholic clerics who favored a change in the Good Friday liturgy according to the 1570 Roman Missal, which was still used throughout the Catholic world. In it, the Latin introduction to the eighth intercessory prayer reads: Oremus et pro perfidis Iudaeis, which does mean "Let us pray also for the unbelieving¹² Jews, yet offered anti-Semites a point of attack: they could speak about the perfidious Jews and, furthermore, cite the Catholic Church as their authority. This abuse, this danger of being co-opted in a time of anti-Semitism that was increasingly racist in its motivation, was denounced by the Friends of the People Israel". In an open letter to Pope Pius XI (1922–1939), they demanded a reform of the Good Friday intercession. Moreover, they advocated an overdue reconciliation between Catholicism and Judaism.

The archbishop of Munich, Michael Cardinal Faulhaber

The president of this remarkable priestly movement was, after all, the general abbot of the Benedictine Congregation of Monte Cassino, Benedict Gariador (b. 1859—d. 1936). Among its most prominent members were then-Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri; the secretary of the Holy Office (today: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val; the prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Wilhelmus Marinus Cardinal van Rossum; the general of the Dominican Order and former nuncio to Munich, Andreas Cardinal Frühwirth; the archbishop of Cologne, Karl-Joseph Cardinal Schulte, and Faulhaber, along with thirteen additional cardinals, 287 bishops and archbishops, and also around 3,000 priests.¹³ Only the strenuous opposition of conservative ecclesiastics caused this initially proud campaign to crumble; indeed, it even led to an about-face in the case of Cardinal del Val, who finally accused the Amici of dangerous expressions, erroneous statements, and religious indifference. This clerical philo-Semitism went too far for Pope Pius XI, also. Thus the Holy Office explicitly rejected a reform of the Good Friday petition, but nevertheless emphasized in its decree dated March 25, 1928: The Catholic Church ... unreservedly condemns hatred against the people once chosen by God, a hatred that is generally described today as ‘anti-Semitism’.¹⁴ That clearly repudiated also the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.

Thus, despite the defeat of the Amici Israel, Faulhaber loyally stayed his course during the following years, too. In November 1930,