Did the Catholic Church support Hitler?

Introduction to the church and total war

0:00How did the Catholic Church come to have dealings with the authoritarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Ambrosio Chiani reveals why the papacy decided to strike up these deals with dictators. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Ambrosio explains how the politically neutral Curia came to be affiliated with Mussolini's dictatorship,

0:30after the First World War, and why this had even more disastrous consequences when Hitler rose to power. Your book traces the Catholic Church across the 20th century, and today we're going to be talking specifically about its interaction with authoritarian regimes and World War II. But before we start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wanted to write this book? So, by training and profession, I am an academic historian who teaches at the University of Kent. I'm really interested generally in history about how regimes or institutions lose power,

1:05and for the 20th century, there's no more dramatic loss of power than that of the Catholic Church, both in terms of territory and also in terms of faith, followers, and spirituality. I guess the immediate trigger for writing this book, in conjunction with my publisher, was the announcement in 2020 that the papers of Pius XII, the Pope of the Second World War, would be finally released, and we would get an inside perspective into the Church. And since then, there have been a lot of

1:37studies in Italian, German, and French, which have not really been accessible to a British public. They've had really interesting findings, and I wanted to bring that to a larger readership. Yes, I'm a cradle Catholic. A reviewer once described me as a disappointed Vatican II Catholic. I think that's entirely on the nose. It was supposed, I think, to be a criticism, but it absolutely reflects my position. I've never been nostalgic for a Church built on authority, and I basically believe that the Church needs to update itself culturally and politically to reflect

2:12the 20th and 21st century, that we're no longer in 1st century Galilee at the moment of its founding. So that's basically my position, liberal Catholic.

The church in 1914 and modernism

2:20Thank you for explaining that for us. So we're going to start our story today with World War I. Can you tell us, what was the state of the Church by 1914? What kind of place did it have in the world? The Church was in a very difficult and traumatic position. In 1870, it had lost its central Italian kingdom because of the unification of Italy. Basically, the new Italian state had conquered everything apart from the few acres of Vatican territory inside the city of Rome. So from the

2:51Church's perspective, it saw itself as surrounded by a hostile state. It's a time when the Pope is called the prisoner of the Vatican. Quite a luxurious prison, the Vatican city-state and the apostolic palace, it has to be said. And I think one of the key elements to show the Vatican's isolation is that the Pope, in 1870, when Italian troops took Rome and declared it the new capital of Italy, asked every Catholic leader in the world to break diplomatic relations with Italy. And everybody said no, that they wouldn't do this, apart from the president of Ecuador, Gabriel Garcia Moreno,

3:27who was the only Catholic power that said, we will break off relations with Italy. Ever since 1870, the popes would refuse to appear on the square of St. Peter's or to look out beyond the Vatican. Nowadays, we just saw it with Leo XIV. The Pope goes out on the main balcony of the Basilica to bless the crowds. At the time, they would do it inside the Basilica or the Sistine Chapel. They didn't want to look out on the modern world. By 1914, the Vatican has relations with only nine powers in the

3:59world, which is shocking when you think that the papacy was the key diplomatic power in the medieval and early modern world. And apart from the Austro-Hungarian empire, it has no major key player or ally in the world stage. So it's a story of deep diplomatic and international decline. And you mentioned there a little bit about the papacy's outlook on modernity at this time. I wonder if you could just delve into that a little bit more, its attitude towards modernism and what we mean by that in the context of the church.

4:32So I think modernism, theologically speaking, or in terms of political theology, is this notion that the church should accept certain changes in political values like democracy, the implementation of divorce or civil marriage, and the church resolutely refuses to do this. Also, there is a growing movement that comes initially from Protestantism, but a number of Catholics also believe in this, that traditions and the Gospels are not entirely in keeping with

5:08the original narrative of the Gospels. For instance, Alfred de Loisy, a Catholic theologian who's eventually excommunicated, says that Christ talked a lot about the kingdom of God, but very little about the church or bishops. And that therefore the church is not quite as grounded in evangelical or scriptural sources or history as one might think. For instance, the church proclaimed in 1864, I think, the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, i.e. that Mary was born without the stain of sin.

5:38But there is not a jot of scriptural evidence for this. So a number of historians and Catholics are saying, maybe the church needs to reconsider some of its teachings in light of new scientific and historical traditions. The church doesn't always get it wrong, for instance. It never condemns Darwin. It keeps an open mind, which is quite astounding when you think about how Protestant churches condemn Darwin. So it's quite interesting. But ultimately, modernism is to be condemned. And I think the biggest

6:09challenge for the church is when France is trying to change its agreement with the church known as a concordat. And there's a separation of church and state in 1905. And the Vatican breaks off diplomatic relations with France in 1905. France had been known as the eldest child of the church because it was one of the first barbarian kingdoms to convert to Christianity. So the modernist challenge is quite scary. The Pope, just at the start of the First World War, is Pius X. And he actually requires that all priests take an anti-modernist oath that they will not promote or not seek out modernism. There's also

6:46a rather shady institution known as the Pian Solidality, which is all about hunting modernists within the church and getting rid of them or exposing them or getting them to recant. It's quite authoritarian and dark. Yeah, it sounds like it. I think it's really interesting that the church has quite an internal focus at this stage then. So how does this rejection of modernism play out

Papal neutrality during World War I

7:10during World War I? Well, one of the great ironies is that a few months before the outbreak of the First World War, the church with a slightly unknown diplomat at the time called Eugenio Pacelli, who is going to become very important in this story. He's everywhere in the 20th century until his death in 1958. He's a future pope. Spoiler alert there, I guess. Negotiates a concordat with the Orthodox kingdom of the Serbs. And this deeply antagonizes Austria-Hungary, who sees itself as the protector of

7:42all Catholics in the Balkans. So already the church is slightly antagonizing its greatest ally in the Balkans. And Pace X said he was fearful that there might be what he called in Italian il guerrone, the big war. And he was right. But to make matters worse, he dies in the summer of 1914. And they have to seek a successor. So a conclave emerges in the first year of the First World War. And they elect a

8:12new pope, Benedict XV. And initially, things don't change too much for the papacy because, as I'm sure your listeners know, Italy declares itself to be neutral during the First World War. The biggest problem for the papacy is that it has no diplomatic relations with Britain, because it's a Protestant country, and no diplomatic relations with Russia, because Russian orthodoxy is quite disdainful of Roman Catholicism. I've already mentioned that France had broken off diplomatic relations after

8:43the law of separation and state. And for obvious reasons, Italy has no diplomatic relations. So the Holy See, as the Vatican is known diplomatically, has relations with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and also with the King of Bavaria and through him the German Emperor. So there's a sense, and whether it's fair or not, I'll allow your listeners to decide, that the papacy is in favour of the central powers. The French call the pope le pape Bosch, which is an insult to say the pro-German pope.

9:13And the Italians have this slight pun. In Italian, Benedict is Benedetto. So the Italians call him Maledetto XV, or the cursed one, the cursed XV. So the Vatican is trying to be neutral, but with some difficulty. Come 1916, the papacy tries to come up with a peace plan, which is not going to be so far off Woodrow Wilson's 14-point plan. But there is one major difference. The Vatican desperately wants

9:46to save the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, because it has an established church position there that it doesn't want to lose. The problem, of course, is that the papacy gives an image of Catholicism as a centralised force where everybody thinks the same. Of course, it's not. The chaplains in the armies, the bishops in their diocese, all invoke God for victory. So therefore, it's almost a civil war amongst Catholics in some ways, which I think is a very sad story. But we have so much evidence that—I mean,

10:23I have to be careful here, because it's very difficult to quantify. I think there's an American expression, isn't there, that there are no atheists in foxholes? I.e., that when you're a soldier and you're scared, you will be likely to pray to God. But there is a sign of a certain re-flourishing of religious belief, not just in Catholicism, but also in Islam and Protestantism. And I think the position of the Catholic Church is a very, very tricky one in the war years.

Post-war bankruptcy and the search for allies

10:50So then we get to the end of World War I. What is the church's position? Well, one of near bankruptcy. I mean, one of the sillier things I find that a number of historians do is they sort of see Benedict XV as a spendthrift, that he receives a certain amount of capital when he is elected to the papacy in 1914. And by the time he dies in 1922, the Vatican is in a deep state, I guess, of looming bankruptcy. But the reason this occurs are that the Vatican has a massive

11:23humanitarian project. And it spends huge monies for sending food parcels to prisoners of war, but also major information service for those who are deemed to be lost in action or whatever. It really helps prisoners refine their families and information to be transmitted. In Italy, the church has a very bad reputation because of a number of German prelates in the Vatican who were clearly German spies. My favourite is the case of Rudolf Gerlach, who eventually has to flee Rome, but he's probably

11:57responsible for giving, through his contacts in Vatican and Italian diplomatic services, the coordinates of two Italian warships which are actually sunk in Brindisi Havre. It's a really bizarre story because his contact, who's an Italian journalist who goes to Switzerland to give head of German intelligence information, they communicate through a lonely hearts column, which is deeply bizarre. So in the lonely hearts column, Uncle is the commander-in-chief of Italian forces, the jealous lover is France,

12:31and movement or travel or train tickets is a major offensive. So I think part of the problem here is that clearly the Vatican becomes a listening post and information is leaked, but it is not official Vatican policy. So when it comes to the Peace of Versailles and all of the different treaties there, the Vatican does not have a seat at the table. And the Versailles Peace Treaty is a disaster for the Vatican, because in place of Austria-Hungary, its worst nightmare occurs. Liberal democracies or

13:04constitutional monarchies, as I guess Yugoslavia would become, replace the Catholic and most Catholic empire in Europe, and their Catholicism is deemed to be one religion amongst many. All of the previous privileges, power and authority is lost. So I, in the book, state, and this I think is quite new, that this is a moment when Catholicism is looking for friends. Those pinnacles that had supported Catholicism for almost two millennia, monarchy and nobility are gone. So who do you seek out

13:36instead of your traditional friends? I mean, the Vatican is deeply deluded in some ways at the moment of this search. The nuncio in Poland, Achille Ratti, who will soon become Pius XI, is slightly wondering if the Bolshevik revolution in Russia might not be an opportunity, that the Bolsheviks might help Catholicism to replace Orthodoxy as the religion of the masses. They clearly not read Das Kapital or Lenin's writings in any great depth, because state atheism is fairly clear, I would have argued.

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Aligning with Mussolini and fascism

15:42So, as we've been saying then, World War I essentially brings political irrelevance for the Curia. You know, they're left without a lot of diplomatic relations and quite isolated. And as you've just been alluding to, after 1918, the church in search of friends starts developing a connection with Mussolini's fascist regime. I wonder if you could talk us through that. How did this supposedly interior-facing, theoretically politically neutral church come

16:12to be associated with Mussolini and fascism? So, I think that the arrival onto the scene of Pope Pius XI in 1922, Achille Ratti, who one of his first acts is to proclaim Christ the King, that ultimately he reaffirms the twin sovereignty of God. Not just a spiritual sovereignty, but a political one. The church believes in authority not being shared, but coming top down. And that the state should facilitate the implementation

16:45of Catholic values. And therefore, Ratti does not actually like the Catholic parties that are emerging in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, because he thinks politics is a dirty business. He wonders if authoritarian veteran movements that are highly nationalistic might not better promote church values. Now, when Mussolini founds the Fasci di Combattimento in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan in 1919, he doesn't seem that promising. Because in his manifesto, he wants

17:17to expropriate all church land. So, that doesn't seem great. But in the 1920 elections, he gets 3,000 votes. So, Mussolini also realises he needs to change direction. So, as we're coming into 1922, he becomes more pro-Catholic. He also becomes pro-monarchy. He's making compromises which will make him more acceptable to a vast constellation of interests. And of course, the Pope had met Mussolini in Milan Cathedral in 1921 during a mass in memory of the fallen of

17:51the First World War. And he said, un uomo formidabile. He's a formidable or impressive man. And he also said, he is the future. He was right. But I don't think he quite understood it in terms of what would happen. Mussolini seizes power in the March on Rome between the 27th and 28th of October 1922. And almost immediately, he begins opening negotiations up with the church. Because the so-called Roman question after the seizure of Rome in 1870 is still

18:22unresolved. The Vatican has no official status in international law. And it's not quite clear what its position is in Italy. And Mussolini slowly starts bringing in legislation that is pro-Catholic. Crucifixes are put up in schools. Divorce remains illegal. A Jesuit, Dacchi Venturi, becomes the secret intermediary who literally meets the Pope during the day and at night goes into Palazzo Venezia in central Rome when Mussolini has his officers and says, this is what the Pope's

18:53thinking. This is what we're thinking. And it begins a very slow process of negotiations. I think it's 1924. Mussolini hosts in Perugia, which is a new university founded by fascism, a major conference to celebrate the contribution of Catholicism to Italian culture. The Duce is really pushing for this. I mean, it leads to major mayhem in his own house. His wife, Farachele, is militantly atheist, like a lot of women of Emilia-Romagna. So apparently he has to

19:25almost bring her screaming and shouting to be baptised and to have a church wedding so that he has that social respectability and to seem a genuine interlocutor. All of his children have to be baptised. And Mussolini ultimately believes, as Napoleon had before him and others, that if he makes peace with the church, they will legitimate his regime. And he's not entirely wrong. And this will yield dividends, I should say, by 1929. Yes, 1929. We are going to come on to talk about that now. But it's just interesting, isn't it,

19:57that actually the church at this time, despite being, like we've said, politically pretty irrelevant and lacking a lot of diplomatic relations, is still something which Mussolini wants attached to his regime for legitimacy. There's that interesting kind of paradox there. The funniest thing is how they resemble each other. Mussolini's authoritarian, you know, top-down orders. Duce means leader in a military sense. And the Pope says, yeah, this is my guy. You know, it's exactly how I see the church because Achille Ratti is very authoritarian.

20:29He expects that when he telephones Vatican officials that they will kneel when they receive his telephone call out of damned respect. And he expects his orders to be followed and not questioned, which is not that dissimilar to Mussolini.

The Lateran Accords of 1929

20:40No, no, there's some parallels there, definitely. Now let's go on to talk about 1929. That is the year of the Lateran Accords being signed. Could you just explain for our listeners what that agreement is and what it sets in place? So the one line answer to that, and I discuss this a lot in the book, is it puts an end to the Roman question. And we call them the Lateran Accords because there are three agreements under the umbrella of one name. So the first agreement is quite simple. It's about recognizing the Vatican

21:13as an independent micro-sovereign state. And this is about giving the Vatican its own power supply, a postal service, train connections, in order that it is able to function as an independent power in its own right. So I think that's quite simplistic. The other agreement is that the Vatican will be compensated for the loss of its central Italian kingdom to the tune of 1.75 billion lira. That's quite a lot in those times. One has to be very careful because inflation afterwards makes the

21:48lira really go down in value. But in the 1920s, it's quite high. It's a king's ransom. And it makes the curia one of the richest states or micro-principalities in the world. So it makes the church finally very wealthy. One of my favorite things from this as well is that the Italian state also agrees that no building south of the Tiber will be high enough to look into the Vatican city-state. That ultimately, the Vatican doesn't want any nosy parkers looking over its high walls, which is intriguing in itself.

22:23I think that's no longer enforced because it's impossible to maintain with modern urban planning. The third agreement is the most complicated. It's about the relationship between church and state in Italy. And ultimately, it's recognized as the religion of Italy, but not as an established church, i.e. Mussolini accepts there can be pluralism, there can be Jews, Protestants, and other religions inside of Italy, but that Catholicism will have a position of preeminence, but will not be the sole

22:54religion. Also, Mussolini insists that the church will not interfere with politics, that it will not oppose its dictatorship. Let's make it as simple as possible, that the church is all about the spiritual mission of inculcating Catholicism and providing spiritual and material welfare to the poor, but it must not defy the fascist monopoly on power. So, the Lateran Accords are three agreements, and for Mussolini, the signing of them permits him all of the sort of pageantry and showmanship that

23:30he loves. State cars going to the Cathedral of St. John Latron for the official signing ceremony, him with his diplomatic gold braid uniform, a bicorn hat and plumes next to Cardinal Gasparri, who's the Pope's, let's say, foreign secretary, signing this. And it gives him some kudos, you know. It hadn't happened in 59 years. No Italian regime had managed to do this. So, as you mentioned, the Lateran Accords, they bring kind of structural benefits for the Catholic

24:00Church in Italy. But I wonder, how does this affect the ordinary Catholic, the ordinary worshipper going to church? So, ultimately, it facilitates your life. It's fine to be Catholic in public. And, you know, until more or less 1914, the Pope had ordered you not to vote in Italian elections. There's a facilitation. But there are also going to be problems because the Catholic Church has a huge amount of civil society institutions. There's something called Catholic action. It is about living your faith, not just as an

24:37abstract thing, but in everyday society. You have mother's clubs. You have equivalents of Boy Scout movements. Catholicism has a tentacular grip on all of society. And as long as these civil society institutions play the fascist tune, all well and good. But a lot of people in these organizations are former liberals. They're a bit disgruntled with fascism, or they don't quite love its values.

25:09And also, fascism is almost a religion in its own right. You know, the worship of the leader, of the state, its own rituals, its own uniforms, its own highly performative structure, does come into sort of clashes with the church. So, in some places, there are attacks on Catholic institutions. And the Pope is horrified by this. In part, yes, the concordat brings some benefits, but it also leads

25:42to tensions. It's not a fix-all solution. So, once the church is in this agreement with Mussolini, did the Pope try to influence the fascist regime in any way? Do you think that there's any sense that the Curious saw their connection with Mussolini as an opportunity to moderate his dictatorship and curb his excesses? I mean, I'm going to really give the most annoying of all answers that historians always give yes and no. Actually, within two years of the concordat, there's a major bust-up over

26:12Catholic institutions. And the Pope actually publishes an encyclical in Italian, not unprecedented, but quite rare, called Noi Non Abbiamo Bisogno, We Don't Need You, which is quite a good title for an encyclical, sort of saying that we should only worship God, not the state, and that I've got big issues with this. And, of course, the secret intermediary between the Curia and Mussolini, Taki Venturi, is ending up taking a lot of nighttime trips to see Mussolini again in Palazzo

26:44Venezia. But they come up with an agreement. Ultimately, that the more political Catholic institutions, like the Federation of University Students, will be wound up, but that the Boy Scouts and the less politicised ones will be allowed to operate in parallel with other fascist institutions. There's a further agreement. And the Vatican doesn't have problems with dictatorship. At the end of the day, the Church is not a democracy either. So it doesn't really criticise dictatorship. But in 1935, and this had been a long-term ambition of Italy, Italy finally gains its own empire. There's

27:24the invasion of Ethiopia. And the papacy is against, because diplomatically it has to be neutral and it has to think about just war theory. But Italian Catholics and the Italian hierarchy are very enthusiastic. The most ridiculous narrative that emerges in some Catholic newspapers is finally we are going to bring the heathen, their words not mine, to the light. There is a problem in this. The Ethiopians are some of the oldest Christian sects in the world. You know, the Ethiopian Bible is a marvel of

27:55erudition scholarship and the addition of quite a number of apocrypha from the Old Testament and the new one. This is not actually a war against non-Christians, but a deeply, in some ways, depraved attack on them. And Mussolini decides to come up with his own vision of robust or masculine Christianity. It's around this time that there's a cult created, the Madonna del Manganiello, Our Lady of the Truncheon, because the Virgin Mary seems a little bit too nice. So they actually put a truncheon in her hand, which is a very remarkable image in an attempt to make this all authoritarian.

28:31So on the one hand, the Vatican's against, but Italian Catholics, very enthused, icons or images of the Virgin Mary are actually sent with the troops. And unfortunately, the Italians actually commit atrocities, which I cover in my book, which haven't really had much attention outside, I guess, of African history. It's a crime against humanity, without doubt. Where I think the church performs rather better is when Mussolini is forced into a greater friendship with Hitler. And in 1938,

29:01he brings in the racial laws. And this is where I think Pius XI comes into his own. He actually states, spiritually, we are all Semites. This is a big admission, given that the church had always had, and I think we're splitting hairs here, the church always says it's had more of an anti-Judaic or anti-Judaizing legacy, in which it always felt that the Jews should be prompted to convert to Christianity. But ultimately, it is against anti-Semitism. But Pius XI is ultimately really anti the racial laws.

29:36When Hitler comes on a state visit to Italy in 1938, the Pope goes to Castel Gandolfo and closes the Vatican museums to ensure that Hitler, who sees himself as a great aficionado of art, won't be allowed inside the Vatican museums. The relationship with Nazism is different from the relationship with fascism.

Negotiating the Reich Concordat with Hitler

29:55Now, you mentioned there the church's connection with Hitler and Germany. In the book, you suggest that we should understand the church's response to Nazism in its European context. I wonder if you could just expand on that a little bit for us. Yes, of course. So, on the one side, and I think it's probably redundant of me to go into this in too much detail here, there's political response from nations like France, Britain, and what have you, which usually comes under the umbrella of appeasement. And I think you can situate the church

30:25to an extent within appeasement. But at the same time, I think the church has a slightly different version of this. In Italy, in Portugal, and eventually, but although it's a very different story in Spain, it makes agreements with highly authoritarian regimes, and it sees this as beneficial. We let you get on with the business of dictatorship. You let us get on with the business of controlling people's spiritual, moral, and private domestic lives. And the church says, we can probably do the

30:59same with Hitler. We can probably come to some nice, cosy arrangement in which he can get on with ruling Germany, and we can get on with ruling the consciences of the people of Germany. And I think that's something of a miscalculation. Yes, you're absolutely right. It definitely was a miscalculation. And we will come on to discuss that in a second. But for the moment, could you summarise how the church came to an agreement with Hitler, and what that looked like? Well, it's quite embarrassing. So the Freising Conference of Bishops condemns Nazism and says

31:32you cannot be a Nazi and a Catholic, which is more than slightly problematic for the church when Hitler comes to power. And one of the first acts they do is to lift this ban, because they realise that taking Nazism to task so directly is going to be problematic for the church. And Hitler almost immediately makes a rather ambiguous speech stating that he sees Christianity as one of the foundational and one of the most important aspects of German culture and tradition. And we met him at the start

32:08of this podcast, Eugenio Pacelli. And he becomes, in the early 1930s, a cardinal secretary of state, basically the Pope's prime minister or foreign secretary, depending on how you want to see it. And he says, I think we need to have a concordat with Hitler's Germany to come to some sort of understanding. And the Reich's concordat, or the imperial state concordat, is quite an advantageous agreement. It again allows the church to benefit from state recognition, that it will be free to pursue

32:41its spiritual aims. It also enshrines pew taxes. This still exists in Germany, that if you declare yourself to be Catholic, part of your taxes go to the church. And on the face of it, the Reich's concordat is not too dissimilar, I guess, from the Lateran Accords, especially the third part of the Lateran Accords, which govern church and state. But the problem is that Hitler is an even more unreliable interlocutor than Mussolini. On the face of it, the Nazis seem quite promising for the church.

33:15Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler are all cradle Catholics. But what they hadn't really looked into were their current views. And they believed that nature has deemed the German peoples to have complete mastery of the world. You get a lot of this in Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the 20th Century, which the Catholic Church thankfully puts on its index of prohibited books. Rosenberg is condemned, but the Catholic Church is too scared to put Mein Kampf on the index of prohibited books. Catholics can read

33:45Mein Kampf. So ultimately, the Reich's concordat is signed in 1934. And Eugenio Pacelli makes the joke, I'm sure they're going to break some of the terms of this agreement, but surely they won't break all of them. Little did he know. Before we move in to how some of those agreements were actually broken, I wonder if we could pull out a little bit more about the difference between Mussolini's treatment of Catholics and Hitler's. How were Catholics treated under the Reich's concordat? There is very little accommodation between this sort of notion that, you know, you can have a

34:18parallel Catholic Boy Scout institution or civil society route. What the Nazis slowly tried to do and eradicate is actually church schools. The church is ignored in terms of its policy. You know, it's laws on euthanasia or the liquidation of those with mental health issues or handicaps. The church is entirely ignored. Also, the church is persecuted. Now, I want to be very careful here. I'm not saying that the church is as persecuted as anybody else. That would be ridiculous.

34:51But it's given a number of warnings, and some of them are quite difficult to assess. So, one area in which I think the church is persecuted is that a lot of religious orders send money back to the Vatican. Part of the charity they receive has to be sent back to the mother hub in Rome. And you get several things called in German, Wiesenprosesse or currency trials, because it is illegal to send Reichsmarks outside of Germany. And nuns, clergymen all get prosecuted under this. And I hope I won't upset anybody, but they are technically guilty. But it seems quite

35:29unfair that what they've been doing all along under the Weimar Republic suddenly becomes a crime. The other aspect, and I apologize to listeners, this is quite difficult to hear. The Nazis start prosecuting priests for basically, I guess, child abuse or sexual misdemeanors. What we know today makes me wonder if Hitler and the Nazis rather craftily hit the church where it knew it was most vulnerable. Because Mussolini's secret police files, and this is something historians

36:02have been studying since they've been released, Mussolini knew that a lot of Italian priests were pedophiles or child abusers, but they kept this in reserve. He said, we can use this in secret negotiations. The Nazis used this a lot. As we're getting closer to the war, it's clear that Hitler does not like the Catholic Church. Hitler has this weird notion of positive Christianity, which basically means Christianity with the removal of the Judaic parts. Nazi Protestants actually produced something called the De Judeo's Bible, which is actually quite a short book,

36:34unsurprisingly, because if you remove the Jewish bits of the Bible, it really doesn't work bearing. I mean, Christianity is a Jewish heresy at the end of the day. Let's put it in those terms. So it's much more hostile. And almost immediately, the church knows that it's not dealing with Mussolini's regime. With the Nazi regime came the Holocaust, and there is a lot of controversy now about the

The Holocaust and church complicity

37:02church's response to this. But first of all, can you run us through how the church responded to the Nazi persecution of the Jews? This is perhaps the most difficult issue. So the two views are that the church was a collaborator and colluded with the Nazi regime. And the other extreme view, which is the official Catholic Church's position, that the church was a major rescuer of Jews and a major institution that aided the Jews. I've done a lot of research into this, and I've used a lot of new

37:37studies and a lot of new material from the Vatican archives in the book. And I'm afraid that neither view holds water. The official Vatican line that hundreds of thousands of Jews were saved under Vatican instruction, I don't think holds water. Ultimately, what we do know, thanks to studies by Johann Ix, is that about 4,000 requests for help came to the Vatican from Jews. That's quite short of 100,000. I think everybody will agree. And about 3,000 of these requests were accepted. But for

38:10instance, in some cases, especially with a Portuguese Jewish lady in Paris who's seeking an exit visa to Portugal, the Vatican said no because she was in an adulterous unmarried relationship, and therefore they thought it would be unseemly to help her. So I think we can say that about 3,000 Jews were helped directly from the Vatican. Where it gets complex is that huge numbers of monasteries, of nunneries, of Catholic civil associations, welfare organizations, all tried to help the Jews.

38:41That probably takes us into tens of thousands of Jews saved by Catholics. Now, the Vatican's line is, well, ha-ha, these guys must have been operating under secret instructions from the Pope, from Pius XII, the new Pope, who was elected actually in 1939. Well, this is tricky because most of the evidence we have from this comes from the 1960s and 70s when the Church decided to open a process to make Pius XII the saint, a process that has not made much headway, it must be said. And all of the survivors and people who'd helped the Jews were sort of asked a rather leading

39:13question. But of course, the Pope did tell you to do this. And as loyal Catholics, they said, oh, yes, it did. He did. Absolutely. Since we've opened the archives, and even the curator of this, of the Pius XII papers in the Vatican, Giovanni Corco, in his newest book, says there is not a single document to prove that the Pope actually had a policy of rescuing the Jews. Another Italian historian has recently published a very, very interesting study of the Vatican gendarmerie. And he's actually found

39:46documents in which in the middle of the war, the Vatican actually asked monasteries and church properties that if they held any Jews or refugees to turn them out, because it would compromise Vatican neutrality. So the opposite is the case. But huge numbers of pious Catholics did come out in favour of the Jews. That's undeniable, and they must have saved tens of thousands. But I think at the same time, we can't focus just on the Catholic Church saving Jews or behaving well

40:18in Eastern Europe. But also, we have to understand that a lot of Catholics were perpetrators of the Holocaust. So for instance, in Hitler's puppet state of the Slovakian Republic, the head of state was a Catholic priest, Josef Tiso. In Croatia, where you had Ante Pavlević, my apologies, my Balkan language is not very good. You had the Eustacia regime, and the Catholic Church entirely supported not just its persecution of the Jews, but also the forced conversion of Croatians, of Orthodox Serbian

40:53Croatians to Catholicism. So I think one has to be very careful about being overly simplistic and just saying that the Catholics were saviours of Jews. There was also a lot of persecution by certain Catholics of the Jewish population. So I think that the Church did try a position of neutrality, but it didn't officially collude with Hitler. By no means it disliked the Hitlerian regime, but it certainly didn't see the Holocaust as its problem. Ultimately, I think another thing which is untenable is this view

41:30that the Church didn't know. That's not merely untrue, it's unhistorical, because the Vatican, since the First World War, had started renewing its networks of diplomatic agents and humanitarian organisations. So especially after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, it was getting an infinity of reports about massacres, killing fields, concentration camps in Eastern Europe. And there is no sense that the Vatican didn't know that this was the truth. In Poland, where there

42:04was a policy, especially in Western Poland, of depolenisation to remove the Poles, huge numbers of Catholic nuns and priests were also sent to concentration camps. So it can't be said they didn't know. But the key official dealing with relations with the Jews in the East of Europe, Angelo de Lacroix, and this is something new we've discovered, made his own anti-Semitic comments on reports that we're receiving. For instance, he said, can you really trust the Jews? Or can you really trust these reports? And also, it is not the Vatican's role to act as a humanitarian agency

42:38to save these people. I mean, it's deeply, deeply tragic and disturbing. Even when Italy starts losing the war and changes side to the Allies, which leads to the German occupation of Rome, you have in October 1943, a German invasion of the Jewish ghetto and the roundup of its population. And even then, the Vatican doesn't lodge an official protest. It's deeply, deeply disturbing. What it does do is it

43:10asks to have access to the military training college, which is almost adjacent to the Vatican on the Tiber, and to go in and see if they can find if there are any Catholic converts in the Jewish population being rounded up there. And David Kurtzer, who's one of the finest historians of the Second World War and Catholic relationships to the war, tells, I think, one of the most disturbing and horrifying stories I've ever heard. One of the officials of the Secretariat of State notices

43:41that a woman has just given birth after she'd been removed from the ghetto. And we can only assume that the child she gave birth to would have died nine days later in Auschwitz. And that does make you think that ultimately they couldn't save a child like that just because there wasn't evidence of a conversion to Catholicism, that it was seen in such cold and unfeeling and uncaring. Now, I need to be

44:11careful here because I'm making it sound as if the church had no moral backbone during the Second World War. And the Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, in the middle of the war actually condemns euthanasia. And shortly thereafter, I didn't think it's only his role, but Hitler holds the euthanasia program. And apparently Himmler put in his diaries, as soon as the war ends, we'll have to hang von Galen from the steeple of his own church as a sign to others. At the start of the war, Pius XII had also tried to put the allies in touch with the German resistance, the so-called Abwehr plot,

44:47but it stumbled on a sense that the allies didn't trust them. So I'm really sorry to listeners who want me to say that the church behaved badly or it behaved well. It did both, but it certainly wasn't the beacon of light or the moral backbone of the world in this moment. That's untenable. In the same way as there are people who, despite not having Vatican instructions, saved the Jews, there are also people who, despite not having Vatican instructions, persecuted and helped in

45:20their murder. If I'm honest, I think that the biggest response to the Holocaust was probably indifference that people wanted to save themselves and not stick their neck at. And also because there was a long tradition of Catholic anti-Judaism, because Jews were accused of deicide, of killing Christ and God, there wasn't a huge overabundance of sympathy or compassion for the Jews. And that probably helped to create a culture of passivity before they applied. Yeah. It's a difficult reality to come to terms with that, I think, probably for a lot of our

45:55listeners. Now, as you explain in the book, the church had no role in ending World War II, but what was its position after it?

Post-war fears and the anti-communist campaign

46:06Well, since the Bolshevik revolution, it had learned a few lessons and it was terrified of communism. So, fear of communism was the overarching sense of the Catholic Church. So, again, in terms of making friends, it finally came to terms in, I think it's the Christmas message of 1944, the Pope says that Catholicism and democracy are not incompatible and that the future will be with Catholic parties that share Catholic values. And that was what is going to happen in Italy with Christian democracy

46:36and in Germany as well. But, and this is maybe more serious, the Pope is deeply against the allied policy of unconditional surrender. Because Pius XII had been a diplomat, Germany in 1918, he felt that the Versailles punitive settlement against Germany had led to a resurgence of warfare and hostility. He wanted to avoid that. So, the church was trying to oppose the unconditional surrender.

47:06But I think, thankfully for humanity, the church was ignored in that. When it comes to the Nuremberg trials, the church has a highly ambiguous position. Because on the one hand, I think there was a recent film, wasn't it, with Russell Crowe playing Goering, all about the Nuremberg trials. And it makes it seem as if the Vatican was against them or compromised by the Nazi regime. Well, actually, the Vatican did open its archives and did provide evidence for the prosecution. But it also advised leniency. And in one case, I think it's particularly

47:39disastrous. The ultimate idea was that Hans Frank, who was known as the butcher of Poland because he'd been the military governor of Poland and he had enthusiastically supported the Holocaust. Well, during his incarceration pending Nuremberg, he had converted to Catholicism and therefore the Catholic Church lobbied to be spared the death penalty, which I think seems insane in light of what we know about what the Nazis did.

48:10But also, the church is not shy of condemning a lot of groups in our society, which one would argue have not actually massacred hundreds of thousands of people, unwed mothers, people who, through no fault of their own, undergo early terminations of pregnancies or homosexuals have been condemned. But Hans Fransk, the butcher of Poland, is worthy of forgiveness. I find that troubling. I find that deeply, deeply difficult to understand. Now, the other issue that the Vatican has to face in the immediate post-war is,

48:40and I don't know if our listeners are familiar with this, rat lines, i.e. the huge numbers of Italian fascists and German and Yugoslav Nazis managed to escape to South America mainly, and that Catholic humanitarian organizations who were under the auspices of the Vatican facilitated the flight of huge numbers of Nazis. So, ultimately, fear of communism is the immediate post-war response. The work of the

49:14Italian historian Cantananti has brought about a very interesting study about Pius XII's decision to issue a general excommunication for all communists, that you can't be Catholic and communist, because there were a number of Catholic communists and priests who said that the two things are not incompatible. The Pope said, no, you're wrong. You can be only one or the other. And the church gets quite a bit of sort of CIA money and CIA support in its anti-communist campaign. My favorite story in all of this is the slogan that characterizes the Christian democratic campaign in Italy in 1948. This is the

49:51first elections after the fall of Mussolini, the first democratic elections. And the Christian Democratic Party says, remember, in the polling station or the polling booth, God can see you, but Stalin can't, which I think is awfully good.

50:10That was Ambrosio Chiani speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Ambrosio is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Kent, and his latest book is Flirting with Evil, the Catholic Church in the Age of Total War and Globalisation, which is out now.