Vatican, Pope Pius xii

World War II: A Unique Money-Making Opportunity

March 2, 1939, Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope. He had been the papal nuncio to Germany and had a great fondness for everything German. His family was among the Black Nobles, Roman aristocratic families that remained loyal to the Pope when the Italian nationalist army took Rome and confiscated the Pope’s kingdom in 1870. Early in his pontificate, Pope Pius XII sent Hitler a message assuring the Führer of the Vatican’s desire for good working relations with the Nazis. Shortly afterward, he directed his diplomatic representative, the Papal Nuncio to Germany, Archbishop Orsenigo, to fete (honor) Hitler on his fiftieth birthday.5

Pope Pius XII’s policy was silence in response to the atrocities of the Holocaust and the slaughter of Serbs in Croatia. Priests and bishops were actively involved in the politics and killing machinery of Croatia and Slovakia where hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, Jews and Orthodox Christian Serbs and others were killed. Though repeatedly implored by eyewitnesses to speak out against the brutality, the Pope remained silent. Even when the Nazis entered Italy, where 1200 Jews living in Rome were rounded up and transported along streets that lay just 250 yards (approximately 230 m) from the Vatican – virtually right under the Pope’s nose – to a military detention center, Pope Pius did nothing to stop the violence. A thousand of those Jews, mostly women, and children, were put in rail cars two days later and sent to Auschwitz.

Germany’s Ambassador reported, “The Curia is upset considering the action took place, in a manner of speaking, under the Pope’s own windows. The Vatican’s response at that time? An official thanks Hitler’s Foreign Minister for the German military’s respectful wartime behavior to the city-state,8 possibly a reference to a promise made by Ernst von Weizsacker, Germany’s ambassador, that Germany would protect the Vatican from damage.

Unbelievably, in 1942, Pius was pre-occupied with the filming of a movie he was having made about himself, Pastor Anglicus.