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Pie XII et la Seconde Guerre mondiale d'après les archives du Vatican by Pierre Blet S.J. (review)

Pie XII et la Seconde Guerre mondiale d'apres les archives du Vatican. By Pierre Blet S.J. (Paris: Perrin. 1997. Pp. 342.) The death of Pius XII on October 9,1958, brought unanimous praise of his work for peace and relief of suffering during World War II. Jewish leaders repeated their thanks, which had started during the war itself and climaxed at its conclusion, for his unremitting efforts to save their people from extermination. Publication of Rolf Hochhuth's play Der Stellvertreter in 1963 reversed this positive image. Overnight the Pope became the hero of a black legend who during the war stood mute and inactive, motivated either by political calculation or cowardice, in the face of bureaucratically planned mass murder which he could have ended with a single flaming protest. Confronted with what he knew from his own close collaboration with Pius XII throughout the war to be a grave falsification of history, Paul VI in 1964 ordered the publication of everything in the Vatican Archives which could shed light on the actions of his wartime predecessor. An international team of four Jesuits, including the author of this book, produced twelve volumes between the years 1964 and 1981. As Blet writes in his foreword, however: "Fifteen years after the publication of the final volume many of those who speak or write about the Holy See during the war remain unaware of the contents of these volumes, or even of their existence." Blet's book is an attempt to make the record more widely known. Drawing on the twelve volumes of Vatican documents, but also on published collections of documents from government archives on both sides, as well as on memoirs, articles. and monographs, Blet has produced a narrative history of the Holy See's wartime role. The account is largely devoid of commentary. Blet limits his interpretation to the minimum necessary for intelligibility. A footnote at the beginning of each chapter lists the sources for the material which follows. The Pope's wartime policy was not neutrality (which could imply indifference) but impartiality, which enabled him to judge events and nations according to truth and justice. At times, however, he stretched impartiality to the limit: informing the British government in January, 1940, that a group of German generals was prepared to replace Hitler if they could be assured of an honorable peace, and warning Britain, France, and the Low Countries of Hitler's impending attack in May, 1940. Those communications were secret. Not so the Pope's telegrams of sympathy to the Belgian and Dutch sovereigns following Hitler's attack. When Mussolini threatened the Pope with "the gravest consequences" for this supposed breach of neutrality, Pius said that he was not afraid to go to a concentration camp and had had revolvers pointed at him before (as Nuncio in Munich in the 1920's). In the same interview the Pope said that he had wanted to speak words of flaming protest" against the well-known Nazi atrocities in Poland. He had refrained only to spare the victims further suffering. Following Hitler's attack on his erstwhile ally, Stalin, in June, 1941, the Pope refused repeated demands that he endorse a crusade against Bolshevism. And he assured American Catholics that while the previous papal condemnations of communist ideology remained in force, these need not limit support for the Soviet Union now invaded by a power whose leader, like Stalin, was the declared enemy of Christianity. …