Did Pope Pius XII do enough to protect Jews during the Holocaust? That question has raged since World War II. But since historians have no access to Roman Catholic files related to his reign, it has gone unanswered.
Until now. Pope Francis announced on March 4, 2019 that the Vatican will open its secret archives on Pius XII. During an event commemorating the 80th anniversary of Pius XII’s election to the papacy, Francis said he had given orders for the archive to be opened in March 2020. “The Church is not afraid of history,” he told the group.
The decision was hailed by historians, who have been agitating for more information on Pius XII’s activities during World War II for decades. Though some Catholic institutions rescued Jews during the Holocaust, Pius has been criticized for his silence during the war years and his failure to publicly condemn the Nazis.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime set up networks of concentration camps before and during World War II to carry out a plan of genocide. Hitler's "final solution" called for the eradication of Jewish people and other "undesirables," including homosexuals, Roma and people with disabilities. The children pictured here were held at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Survivors at the Wobbelin concentration camp in northern Germany were found by the U.S. Ninth Army in May 1945. Here, one man breaks out in tears when he finds he is not leaving with the first group to be taken to the hospital.
Survivors at Buchenwald concentration camp are shown in their barracks after liberation by the Allies in April 1945. The camp was located in a wooded area in Ettersberg, Germany, just east of Weimar. Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winning author of Night, is on the second bunk from the bottom, seventh from the left.
Fifteen-year-old Ivan Dudnik was brought to Auschwitz from his home in the Oryol region of Russia by the Nazis. While being rescued after the liberation of Auschwitz, he had reportedly gone insane after witnessing mass horrors and tragedies at the camp.
Allied troops are shown in May 1945 discovering Holocaust victims in a railroad car that did not arrive at its final destination. It was believed this car was on a journey to the Wobbelin concentration camp near Ludwigslust, Germany where many of the prisoners died along the way.
A total of 6 million lives were lost as a result of the Holocaust. Here, a pile of human bones and skulls is seen in 1944 at the Majdanek concentration camp in the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. Majdanek was the second largest death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland after Auschwitz.
A body is seen in a crematory oven in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany in April 1945. This camp not only imprisoned Jews, it also included Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, German military deserters, prisoners of war, and repeat criminals.
A few of the thousands of wedding rings removed by Nazis from their victims that were kept to salvage the gold. U.S. troops found rings, watches, precious stones, eyeglasses and gold fillings in a cave adjoining the Buchenwald concentration camp on May 5, 1945.
Auschwitz camp, as seen in April 2015. Nearly 1.3 million people were deported to the camp and more than 1.1 million perished. Although Auschwitz had the highest death rate, it also had the highest survival rate of all the killing centers.
Battered suitcases sit in a pile in a room at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which now serves as a memorial and museum. The cases, most inscribed with each owner’s name, were taken from prisoners upon arrival at the camp.
Prosthetic legs and crutches are a part of a permanent exhibition in the Auschwitz Museum. On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government enforced the “Law for Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases” in their attempt to achieve a purer “master” race. This called for the sterilization of people with mental illness, deformities, and a variety of other disabilities. Hitler later took it to more extreme measures and between 1940 and 1941, 70,000 disabled Austrians and Germans were murdered. Some 275,000 disabled people were murdered by the end of the war.
A pile of footwear are also a part of the Auschwitz Museum.
“Information received by the Vatican from 1942 onwards was not disseminated, nor was direction given to bishops and the Catholic faithful, with regard to the treatment of Jews,” notes Yad Vashem. But though Pius XII’s public silence is known, it’s unclear how he may have responded in private.
The decision represents a change of course for the Roman Catholic Church, which usually waits at least 70 years to release documents about popes. Since World War II, the Vatican has given historians outside the Catholic church minimal access to the files.
That lack of direct access has led to speculation on the part of historians and confusion about Pius’s role within history. In 2009, when the Catholic Church announced Pius XII was being considered for sainthood, the move was widely criticized despite Church insistence that he had quietly helped save Jews.
Though the archives are called “secret,” they are not actually hidden. The name was given to the Catholic Church’s official archives due to the Latin word “secretum,” which means private. Historian David I. Kertzer notes that the decision will also make documents available in non-Vatican archives, like that of the Jesuit order.
What will the papers reveal? That’s still unclear. It will take years for scholars to sift through the documents, and some historians doubt they will contain as much information as scholars will like. The Church may have documented little due to a fear that the Nazis would use the papers against them, historian Anna Foa told the New York Times. But regardless of what the files hold, their opening is viewed as a victory by those who have advocated for them.
The American Jewish Committee, a global Jewish advocacy group that has pushed for their full opening for decades, celebrated the decision. “It is particularly important that experts ... objectively evaluate as best as possible the historical record of that most terrible of times,” Rabbi Rosen, the group’s director of inter-religious affairs, said in a statement. "To acknowledge both the failures as well as the valiant efforts made during the period of the systematic murder of six million Jews."
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