In God is Not Great the New Atheist writer Christopher Hitchens describes how March 2 1939 saw “the death of an anti-Nazi pope and the accession of a pro-Nazi one”. The claim that Pius XII was friendly with, or at least passively acquiescent to, the Nazi regime is an unquestioned dictum in New Atheist circles. This is despite the fact the claim Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” is a total distortion of history.

Hitchens and “Hitler’s Pope”

Christopher Hitchens was a provocateur and a polemicist rather than a careful and balanced journalist and, as such, he never let small things like nuance, counter-arguments or objectivity get in the way of his invective. Whether the point he was making was solid (e.g. condemning Hitler) or dubious (e.g. justifying the US invasion of Iraq), he drove it with steely determination. This meant that if he found a source that fitted his agenda, he drew on it heavily and reinforced its points with his characteristically trenchant and unapologetic rhetoric. Subtlety and balance were not his fortes.

So it is not surprising that when Hitchens turns to the topic of the relations between the Catholic Church and the Third Reich in his 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens depends heavily – in fact, almost entirely – on John Cornwell’s 1999 work Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. After damning the Church with faint praise for denouncing the Nazis’ “hideous eugenic culling from a very early date” (p. 285), Hitchens says that this is about where the Church’s condemnation stopped:

To decide to do nothing is itself a policy and decision, and it is unfortunately easy to record and explain the church’s alignment in terms of a realpolitik that sought, not the defeat of Nazism, but an accommodation with it. (p. 285)



These are strong words and bold claims, but Hitchens goes on:

The very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler’s government was consummated on July 8, 1933, a few months after the seizure of power, and took the form of a treaty with the Vatican. In return for unchallenged control of the education of Catholic children in Germany, the dropping of Nazi propaganda against the abuses inflicted in Catholic schools and orphanages and the concession of other privileges to the church, the Holy See instructed the Catholic Centre Party to disband, and brusquely ordered Catholics to abstain from any political activity on any subject the regime chose to define as off-limits. …. The twenty-three million Catholics living in the Third Reich …. had been gutted and gelded as a political force. Their own Holy Father had in effect told them to render everything unto the worst Caesar in human history. (p. 286)

Hitchens is referring to the 1933 Reichskonkordat which he, like Cornwell, depicts as a cynically Faustian bargain whereby the Vatican cosied up to the Third Reich to get some convenient concessions in return for easing Hitler’s seizure of total power. He notes a “parallel moral collapse of the German Protestants”, but goes on:

None of the Protestant churches , however, went as far as the Catholic hierarchy in ordering an annual celebration for Hitler’s birthday on April 20. On this auspicious date, on papal instructions, the cardinal of Berlin regularly transmitted “warmest congratulations to the führer in the name of the bishops and dioceses of Germany”, these plaudits to be accompanied by “the fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars.” The order was obeyed and faithfully carried out. (pp. 286-7)

Here Hitchens introduces the villain of his story. He notes that the ailing Pope Pius XI “had always harboured profound misgivings about the Hitler system”, but says the ageing pope was “continually outpointed, throughout the 1930s, by his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli”, who succeed him as Pope Pius XII in March 1939. He depicts the scheming Pacelli as stymieing his predecessor’s anti-Nazi efforts and then quotes (Cornwell’s version of) the letter the new pope sent to Berlin four days after his election:

“To the illustrious, Herr Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of our pontificate we wish to assure you that we remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people entrusted to your leadership. For them we implore God the Almighty to grant them that true felicity which springs from religion.We recall with great pleasure the many years we spent in Germany as Apostolic Nuncio, when we did all in our power to establish harmonious relations between Church and State. Now that the responsibilities of our pastoral function have increased our opportunities, how much more ardently do we pray to reach that goal. May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God’s help, to fruition!” (pp. 287-88)

Hitchens declares this to be an “evil and fatuous message” and evidence that it marked “the death of an anti-Nazi pope and the accession of a pro-Nazi one”. The story he tells is clear and unequivocal: any chance that the Catholic Church could have stood against Hitler was wrecked by the scheming “pro-Nazi” Pope Pius XII who traded the German people, the peace of Europe and the fate of multitudes for a deal of convenience with the worst tyrant in history, while sending warm wishes to Hitler and cheering his birthday as millions died.

Of course, Hitler and the Nazis are, justifiably, seen as a touchstone of pure evil and so, inevitably, have become a rhetorical stick with which to hit opponents in debate. Comparisons with or links to the Nazis have become such a cliche in debates that “Godwin’s Law” has been an internet adage since 1990 and everyone from Pope Benedict XVI (an anti-Nazi who was forced to join the Hitler Youth as a teenager) to Barack Obama (a “socialist” and, therefore, a Nazi, apparently) have been linked to the Nazis. Christian apologists regularly characterise the Nazi regime as “atheistic”, despite the fact Hitler often spoke of his belief in God, closed down atheist organisations and said atheism was “a return to the state of the animal”. So atheist activists counter this by not only noting the Nazi regime was not atheistic, but linking it as closely as possible to Christianity.

Hitler, we are informed, was “a Catholic in good standing until he died”. Various quotes from Hitler’s speeches and his book Mein Kampf are listed as evidence he was a Catholic, certainly a Christian and a great fan of the church. The German Wehrmacht, we are told, marched to war proudly wearing belt buckles inscribed with the Christian motto “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) :

And not only were the Nazis allegedly enthusiastic Christians, but we are assured the Catholic Church were enthusiastic Nazis. Just look at these bishops alongside Joseph Goebbels in 1935:

Or these priests giving the Nazi salute at a youth congress:

Or Papal Nuncio Cardinal Cesare Orsenigo at a Nazi rally:

Or Pope Pius XII himself being honoured by Nazis in 1939 (a photo used on the cover of many editions of Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope):

With evidence like this, how can anyone doubt Hitchens’ appraisal that Pius XII was Hitler’s friend and ally and the Catholic Church was complicit in or at least passive in the face of the atrocities of the Nazis?

Nazi cartoon depicting Germany’s enemies – The Jew, the Communist and the ‘political priest”.

The Long Shadow of the ‘Kulturkampf’

The reality is that the history of relations between the Catholic Church and the German state, both before and during the Third Reich, was actually one of hostility, suspicion and fear. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) was formed at the Council of Vienna in 1815. This linked 39 German-speaking states into a kind of economic and political union, but its largest and most powerful members were the bitter Hapsburg and Hohenzollern rivals Austria and Prussia and it was doomed to some kind of failure as a result. For the next 50 years those striving to form a true German state out of the Confederation’s patchwork argued over whether they would settle for the so-called Kleindeutsch solution, which excluded Austria, or the Großdeutsch alternative, which included it. Prussia’s Otto von Bismarck slowly increased his state’s power within the Confederation and after victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, he declared a new, united German Reich with the Prussian king Wilhelm as Kaiser. The new state excluded Austria, was ruled by a Hohenzollern monarch and was dominated by the Prussians.

All this had profound implications for the relations between the new state and the Catholic Church. Prussia and the dominant northern German states were substantially Protestant and Bismarck was a devout Lutheran and vehemently anti-Catholic. And in the 1870s plenty of people felt they had something to fear in a newly aggressive and triumphalist Catholicism. As part of his reaction to the rise of rationalism, modernism and liberalism, the highly conservative Pope Pius IX called the First Vatican Council (1868-70), which enshrined a number of new dogmas, culminating in the declaration of Papal Infallibility in 1870. The idea that the Pope was infallible when making formal ex cathedra pronouncements on faith and morals was not new, but many of the assembled bishops opposed a formal dogmatic assertion of it on both doctrinal and political grounds. The Austrian and German bishops, in particular, argued it would be seen as a political threat and provoke a backlash by non-Catholic powers.

And this is precisely what happened in the new German state. Almost immediately, Bismarck and other German politicians took action to limit Catholic interference in politics. In 1871 the “Pulpit Law” was passed, banning political statements in sermons. In 1872 the Schools Supervision Act banned clergy from all schools and the Jesuit Order, seen as agents of Papal political subversion, was expelled from Germany. Resistance by Catholic clergy saw the Expiration Law in 1874, which mandated exile for clergy who defied the authorities.

Ultimately, however, the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in Germany failed. Far from damping down Catholic engagement in politics, the repression stirred up opposition, particularly in the Catholic south and west of Germany, and saw the rise of the Centre Party. German bishops who had previously been fairly nationalist in outlook reacted by becoming increasingly ultramontane and Bismarck drove senior clergy who had been sceptical of Pius IX’s policies into his arms. More alarmingly, secularists seized on arguments and laws against Catholic activity in politics, education and the public sphere and began applying them to all religions, to the dismay of Bismarck’s Protestant base. The Chancellor wound back the Kulturkampf and by the late 1870s the more moderate Pope Leo XIII had negotiated away most of the German legal restrictions.

Despite this, the Vatican remained highly wary of the German state and German Catholics, especially in the Catholic majority regions of Bavaria, Baden and Alsace-Lorainne, did not quickly forget how the Prussian-dominated federal government had treated their church in the 1870s. To both, the period that followed felt more like a truce than a peace.

With Germany’s defeat in the First World War the Centre Party, which was still substantially Catholic, held a prominent position in the governments of the Weimar Republic, maintaining coalitions with the more left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD) and German Democratic Party (DDP). This was not entirely pleasing to the Vatican, with Pope Pius XI regarding the SPD and DDP as dangerously socialist. Despite this, this “Weimar Coalition” prevented any dominance of the German Reichstag by either the Communist Party (KDP) on the far left or radical nationalists on the far right. From 1925 the latter included and were eventually dominated by the Nazi Party. After the failure of his abortive coup in November 1923 and on his release from prison in April the following year, Hitler sought to win power legitimately, via the ballot box, and began a ten year campaign to win a majority in the Reichstag.

The Future Pope and the Future Führer

Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was in an unique position to assess the Nazis, since from 1917 to 1920 he was Papal Nuncio to the highly Catholic state of Bavaria and from 1920 to 1929 he moved to Berlin to be Nuncio to Germany generally. This means he was in Bavaria to witness the rise of the Nazi Party there and then in the German capital to see the beginnings of Hitler’s rise to power.

Pacelli came from a family which had served the Holy See in some capacity for several generations. His grandfather, Marcantonio Pacelli, had been minister of finance for Pope Gregory XVI, deputy minister of interior under Pope Pius IX from 1851 to 1870 and founder of the Vatican Observatory. Both his father Fillipo and his brother Francesco had been lawyers with the Congregation of the Sacred Rota – the Catholic Church’s highest appellate court. He was a highly intelligent young man, who excelled academically and reportedly had a photographic memory. He was also highly strung, solitary and nervous, with a notoriously weak stomach and a speech impediment, though he strove to overcome some of his natural reticence by taking up public speaking, acting and playing the violin in recitals.

He was ordained in 1899 and, somewhat reluctantly, accepted a post in the Vatican’s State Secretariat under the newly elevated Pope Leo XIII in 1901, thus turning from his desire to be a simple parish priest and beginning a 57 year career in the Vatican. The young Father Pacelli’s mentor was Monsignor Pietro Gasparri, undersecretary at the Secretariat’s Department of Extraordinary Affairs. Gasparri told Pacelli that the Department’s role was the “necessity of defending the Church from the onslaughts of secularism and liberalism throughout Europe” and the young priest was groomed to be a Papal diplomat to this end. In 1904 he completed his doctorate with a thesis on the relationship between canon law and Papal concordats with secular states – a subject which would shape many of his later policies.

Pacelli rose through the ranks as his mentor Gasparri did, becoming an undersecretary in the Vatican Secretariat in 1914, and his skill as a diplomat saw him appointed Papal Nuncio to the highly Catholic German state of Bavaria in 1917, based in Munich. This means Pacelli was in a box seat to see the effects of Germany’s defeat in World War I in the political hotbed of Bavaria – the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, the declaration of the Free State of Bavaria, the Communist Uprising of April 1919 and the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic and then its violent repression by the Germany Army and right-wing Freikorps militias the following month.

Adolf Hitler had returned to Bavaria at the end of the War, but his lack of prospects for employment meant he stayed in the Army. He was picked by one of his officers to act as an intelligence agent and infiltrate and report on a new, small, right wing nationalist group called the German Worker’s Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP). The Party’s Chairman, Anton Drexler, took a shine to Hitler and in 1920 Hitler was discharged from the Army and began working for the Party full-time. It had since changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) – the Nazis.

The Nazi Party was tiny, generally uninfluential and just one of a plethora of similar radical groups at both extremes of German politics in this period. Despite this, perhaps because of his proximity to its geographical base, Pacelli was quick to note the danger the new party’s ideology could pose. As early as 1921, the Nuncio noted in a newspaper interview:

The Bavarian people are peace-loving. But, just as they were seduced during the revolution by alien elements – above all, Russians – into the extremes of Bolshevism, so now other non-Bavarian elements of entirely opposite persuasion have likewise thought to make Bavaria their base of operations. (Bayerischer Kurier, Oct 1, 1921)



This was a none-too-subtle reference to Hitler’s Austrian origins and the nascent radical threat posed by the Nazis and made when most people paid them little attention. Pacelli was not alone among high ranking Catholic prelates who recognised the threat of the Nazis early on. Other German bishops warned about the “paganism”, racism and anti-Christian nature of the Nazi ideology as early as 1920. An Army chaplain, Father Rupert Mayer had initially supported Hitler, but changed his mind as he realised the nature of the Nazis and in 1923 gave a speech to a conservative audience entitled “Can a Catholic be a National Socialist?”. The crowd howled him down when it became clear his answer was “no”.

Pacelli also noted the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, writing to Pope that the “followers of Hitler and Ludendorff ” were persecuting Catholics in part because of their condemnation of attacks on Jews. On November 14 1923, days after the failure of Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch”, he reported that the house of Cardinal Archbishop Michael von Faulhaber of Munich had been surrounded by Nazis chanting “Down with the Cardinal!” over his condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitism a week earlier. In May the following year Pacelli wrote in a draft report that “Nazism is probably the most dangerous heresy of our time”. Three days later another of his reports to Rome states:

The heresy of Nazism puts state and race above everything, above true religion above the truth and above justice. (Archivo Segreto Vaticano, Arch. Nunz. Monaco365,Fasc.7, Pos. XIV, Bavaria, p. 75)



These are clearly not the words of a man who can be described as “pro-Nazi.

Hitler and Christianity

Hitler’s mother was a devout Catholic and so he was baptised into the faith as a baby. The young Hitler, however, did not share his mother’s piety and was only confirmed as a Catholic at the age of 15 very reluctantly and at her insistence. According to several reports, he ceased attending Mass once he left home at 18 and seems to have abandoned all practice of the Catholic faith around this stage.

The evidence regarding his adult beliefs is complex, but it does not support the idea that he was a Christian, let alone a Catholic. Nor does it support the idea that he was an atheist, despite the claims of some Christians. Hitler made repeated, unambiguous references to his belief in God or what he called “Divine Providence” and did so both in his public speeches and writings but also in his private conversations. He also actively rejected atheism, which he associated with Bolshevism and socialism generally and which he declared to be “a return to the state of the animal”. But unlike several leading Nazis, particularly Party ideologue Albert Rosenberg, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach and SS head Heinrich Himmler, Hitler had little interest in the occult or Germanic neo-paganism. He said that moribund beliefs died out for good reason and ridiculed those “who brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed bearskin with bull’s horns over their heads”.

His views on Jesus are best described as “eccentric”, as he seems to have regarded him as an Aryan warrior battling the forces of “Jewishness”. In 1922 he declared:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognised these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. (Speech delivered at Munich 12 April 1922)

Here Hitler depicts Jesus not only as a “fighter” but as an anti-Semite and it is telling that the gospel episode he cites is the only one where Jesus is depicted as engaging in an act of violence. Of course, many have noted his words “my feeling as a Christian” both here and in other speeches as well as in his manifesto, Mein Kampf, as evidence that he did regard himself as a Christian. However, this and similar statements need to be understood in context.

As already mentioned, in November 1923 the Nazis tried to seize power by force, staging a coup by seizing key Bavarian politicians in a Munich beer hall and declaring Hitler head of a new government. This putsch quickly collapsed and Hitler and other leading Nazis were jailed. Hitler decided that armed revolution was not the path to power and used his imprisonment to write Mein Kampf, laying out his vision of a new greater Germany. On his release in 1924 Hitler then undertook a decade long campaign to win power via the ballot box.

One of his problems was the fact that Germany was substantially Christian – 64% Protestant and 32% Catholic – and much of Hitler’s ideology was counter to fundamental Christian ideas. So he did his best to present himself as friendly to Christianity in general, mainly condemning “political priests” and any form of Christianity that was not sufficiently “nationalist” and stridently “German”.

In Mein Kampf Hitler characterised Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as an impediment to “Pan-Germanism” and noted that in the Kulturkampf of the previous century “the Catholic clergy was infringing on German rights”. He wrote:

Thus the Church did not seem to feel with the German people, but to side unjustly with the enemy. The root of the whole evil lay … in the fact that the directing body of the Catholic Church was not in Germany, and for that very reason alone it was hostile to the interests of our nationality.

He depicted a future where Catholicism would be tolerated if subordinated to a predominant German nationalism and did nothing to impede a fiercely nationalistic politics. At the same time, he recognised that Bismarck’s overt persecution of Catholicism had backfired and seems to have been keen not to repeat this mistake. This is why in the period from 1924 to his seizure of power in 1933 he was careful not to offend Christian sensibilities and made carefully-worded public declarations that presented his ideology as broadly compatible with a suitably patriotic and German Christianity. Analysis of these public statements on Christianity shows that they appear mainly prior to 1933 and become far more vague and increasingly sparse once Hitler had secured power.

It should be noted that New Atheist polemicists who quote the 1922 speech where Hitler refers to his “feeling as a Christian” always truncate it to leave out what came before that statement:

I would like to appeal here to a greater man than I: [Bavarian Prime Minister] Count Lerchenfeld. He said in the last Landtag that his feeling ‘as a man and Christian’ prevented him from being an anti-Semite. I say: my feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter …

So Hitler is not offering some unprompted avowal of faith, but is trying to counter and undermine a rejection of anti-Semitism that was based on Christianity. This is patent rhetoric, served up for public consumption by a wily politician who was a known liar.

In private Hitler was far more open in his views and made statements like:

Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.

According to his followers’ paraphrases, he stated “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature” and declared “the best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death”. As early as 1920 the Nazi Party declared acceptance of what it called “Positive Christianity”, which was a strange hybrid of some Christian ideals and Nazi nationalist ideas. This is generally seen as largely a political ploy to undermine the opposition of both the Catholic hierarchy and the anti-Nazi Protestant “Confessing Church”, though it was broadly compatible with Hitler’s odd ideas about Jesus as an Aryan anti-Semite and allowed some Nazis, like Goebbels, to juggle their Christian beliefs with their political ideology.

Overall, the evidence indicates that Hitler was a manipulative politician who could pay careful lip-service to Christian ideas where and when it suited him. He was clearly a theist, but claims he was a Christian do not stack up and depend mainly on pre-1933 public statements and writings and some isolated later statements (e.g. his reported 1941 declaration to General Gerhard Engel that “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so”) which are either rhetorical or flatly duplicitous. Hitler was not a pagan and was not an atheist. But he was not a Christian and was definitely not a Catholic.

Pacelli, as Papal Secretary of State, at the signing of the Reichskonkordat, July 1933

The 1933 Reichskonkordat

Thus the idea that Pacelli was “pro-Nazi” or that the Catholic Church was somehow inclined toward the Nazis is absurd. Similarly, the idea that Hitler was a Catholic or favourable toward the Church is equally ridiculous. So why did both sides sign a treaty – a “Concordat” – in 1933?

Contrary to Hitchens’ portrayal of the 1933 Concordat as a friendly deal, concordats were generally negotiated between the Vatican and a sovereign state when relations had been distinctly unfriendly and where the Papacy was trying to secure a legal and diplomatic basis for protection of the Church in that state – particularly freedom of worship, the right to maintain Catholic schools and the maintenance of Catholic associations and youth groups. Around the same time as the Reichskonkordat, Pius XI was also (unsuccessfully) pursuing a concordat with the Soviet Union and for precisely the same reason: an attempt to get some legal basis for Catholic activity in the face of a highly hostile regime.

Pius XI, like his immediate predecessors, had been vigorous in the pursuit of concordats, since they saw them as a way of maintaining the Church in the face of a period of rapid political and social change. As already noted, Pacelli had been educated and trained in a Vatican diplomatic corps that saw concordats as their primary instruments of political influence. Pacelli had written his doctoral thesis on their application and his mentor Gasparri had been a major driver behind various concordats secured under Benedict XV. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he centralised government in a way that made concordats Pacelli had secured with various German states either void or ineffective and, fearing a new and much worse Kulturkampf under the openly anti-Catholic Nazis, Pius XI saw a concordat with the new Reich as the German Church’s best option for protection. Pacelli had returned to Rome in 1929 and taken up the role of Secretary of State and, given he had first hand knowledge of the Nazis and shared the Pope’s faith in concordats, it is not surprising that he was an enthusiastic supporter of this option.

Of course, Pacelli was not so naive as to think a concordat with the Third Reich would somehow make relations instantly harmonious. He was under no illusions that the Nazis would not violate the agreement and commented to the French ambassador to the Vatican, Francois Charles-Roux, “If we did not have [the Concordat], we would not have a foundation on which to base our protests”. He also commented wryly to a British diplomat that he was sure the Nazis “would probably not violate all of the articles of the concordat at the same time”.

On Hitler’s side, a concordat would eliminate a vocal anti-Nazi force in German politics. German bishops and other clergy had been open in their opposition to Nazi ideology and critical of its racism, its worship of the State and its violent tactics in the street. “Political priests” had been the bugbear of the Prussians during the Kulturkampf and they, along with Jewish bankers and Soviet agitators, were standard bogeymen in Nazi propaganda. An agreement with the Vatican that granted concessions on education and youth groups in return for silencing official anti-Nazi political statements from Catholic pulpits would be a boon for Hitler early in his consolidation of power.

Hitler was well aware that both Pius XI and his Secretary of State Pacelli were inclined toward a concordat, but wanted to avoid a drawn out negotiation process and to secure a quick diplomatic and political coup. So while he largely restrained the more vehement anti-Catholic factions in his party, he allowed enough repression of the German Church to put serious pressure on Rome. He sent the Catholic politician, former Centre Party deputy and now Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen to negotiate the concordat on April 7, 1933, but in the three weeks prior to this the Nazis shut down nine Catholic publications, searched sixteen Catholic youth clubs and arrested 92 priests as a demonstration of what would follow if the Vatican did not come to an agreement.

British Ambassador to the Vatican, Ivone Kirkpatrick, later described how he saw the position of the Vatican at this point:

A pistol …. had been pointed at [the pope’s] head. The German Government had offered him concessions – concessions, it must be admitted, wider than any previous German Government would have agreed to – and he had to choose between an agreement on their lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich. Not only that, but he was given no more than one week to make up his mind. If the German Government violated the Concordat – and they were certain to do that – the Vatican would at least have a treaty on which to base a protest.” (Dispatch to London, August 19, 1933)

The agreement was able to be negotiated fairly quickly largely because Von Papen brought with him the draft Concordat that Pacelli and others had previously tried, unsuccessfully, to settle with the former Weimar Republic. It was largely these terms that they presented as a “take it or leave it” proposition. Pacelli was also heavily influenced by key German prelates, especially Cardinals Michael von Faulhaber of Munich and Adolf Bertram of Breslau, who he had become close to in his years in Germany. Both not only warned of the real danger of something much worse than the Kulturkampf, but also feared, in the face of rising enthusiastic support for Hitler even among patriotic German Catholics, open conflict with the Nazis would force German Catholics to choose between their country and their church. They warned urgently against forcing that choice, fearing, in the climate of political fervour of the time, that it would lead to a major rupture in the German Church or even a large scale schism.

So far from being a cosy deal between friends, as it is sometimes portrayed by many atheist polemicists, the Reichskonkordat came about in the context of fear, hostility, suspicion and overt oppression. The legalism and diplomatic doctrines that dominated the Vatican of Pius XI and his Secretary of State meant they had a faith in the strength of concordats that proved highly naive. And Hitler played on both this faith and on their fear of what he could unleash against the German Church to manoeuvre the Vatican into a settlement that proved far more useful to him than to it.

Pacelli’s perception that the Nazis would violate the treaty proved absolutely correct, but his belief that a Concordat would provide a robust platform for effective protest did not. He did not foresee how quickly or how totally Hitler would consolidate his power or the strength and brazen ruthlessness of a modern totalitarian regime. In the first three years of the Reichskonkordat – 1933 to 1936 – the Vatican filed more than 50 protests against Nazi violation of the agreement including several against its treatment of minorities, including the Jews – the first of these was over the Nazis’ anti-Jewish boycotts of 1933. But these protests had little to no effect. The Nazis took increasingly overt suppressive action against politically active Catholics, critical priests and Catholic institutions in Germany and the Vatican’s protests were almost completely ignored. By 1938 the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps was arguing the whole Concordat was an irrelevant and redundant anachronism and should be abandoned, noting that it was the Church that had violated it via a stream of pastoral letters, sermons, pamphlets and condemnations of the Third Reich. In the end Hitler did not bother to revoke it, given that it was effectively a dead letter. By 1940 the American correspondent in Berlin, William Shirer, was referring to it in the past tense.

The claim that the Concordat was “the very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler’s government” – made with great emphasis by Hitchens and repeated by other New Atheists – is factually incorrect. To begin with, Hitchens gets the date of the signing of the Concordat wrong: it was signed on July 20, not July 8 as he claims. And it was far from “the very first” treaty the Nazis signed with foreign powers or groups. Hitler had signed a trade and friendship pact with the Soviet Union on May 5 and an an Anglo-German trade agreement on the same day. Indeed, a month before the Concordat was ratified the Nazis signed the Haavara Agreement with the Zionist Federation of Germany – these agreements were clearly not signs of friendship, just consolidation of power. Once again, Hitchens does not let small things like facts and accuracy get in the way of his distorted polemics.

While the Concordat was clearly not some cosy deal, Hitchens depicts it as a vile pact with the Devil, claiming that in return for eliminating the Centre Party and silencing all Catholic political opposition to the Reich, Pius XI and Pacelli traded Church privileges for Hitler’s unhindered rise to total power. This is slightly closer to the truth, though still a massive oversimplification and largely wrong.

“Zentrum” and the Popes

The German Centre Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei or simply Zentrum) had been a major force in German politics since the 1870s, when it had been the major opposition to Von Bismarck and his Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. While it broadened its base in the early twentieth century, the Centre Party remained predominantly Catholic and in the turmoil of the early Weimar years it presented itself as the reasonable and moderate protector of stability in the face of increasing radicalism and violence from both the extreme left and radical right. As a result, it formed part of a succession of coalition governments throughout the years of the Weimar Republic and could be seen as holding something of a balance of power.

This also meant that as the Great Depression took hold in 1929 and spiralled into the German financial crisis of 1931, the Centre Party shared the blame for the sudden economic hardship in the eyes of many German voters. While the Centre Party had the protection of the Catholic Church’s rights as a central part of its policy platform, both the expansion of its voter base and political expediency meant it usually allied itself with the left-wing Social Democratic Party and German Democratic Party.

These alliances did not sit well with all. More right wing members of the Centre Party, led by Franz von Papen, disliked coalition with people they saw as socialists and little better than the Communist Party. Eugenio Pacelli and his successor as Papal Nuncio to Berlin, Cardinal Cesare Orsegnio, also regarded deals with the SPD and DPP with distaste. So when the German election of 1930 saw huge increases in votes and Reichstag seats for both the Communist Party and the Nazis, the Centre Party was riven by a debate about which side of the political spectrum it would swing toward. Despite Catholic apologists tending to pretend the future Pius XII was an implacable enemy of the Nazis in all circumstances, the Secretary of State Pacelli was clearly more inclined to some kind of deal between the Centre Party and the Nazis as Germany lurched from one political crisis to the next.

This is outlined in what is probably the closest thing we have so far to an even-handed and objective biography of Pius XII – Robert A. Ventresca’s Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII (2013). As Ventresca notes:

Prelates such as Pacelli and [Cardinal] Faulhaber …. were steeped in a political theology that expressed no particular preference for any one form of government. If anything, by virtue of their clerical training and personal histories, they were more likely to prefer traditional authoritarian systems over liberal democratic forms of governance (p.72)

So while Pacelli and the German bishops continued to regard the Nazis as opponents and to openly condemn their ideology as “pagan”, inhumane, racist and statist, by 1930 there was some thought in the Vatican about how the Nazis, however distasteful, may be the lesser of two evils. This view was not shared, however, by Heinrich Brüning, the moderate Centre Party leader who became German Chancellor in 1930. Due to continuing political division in the Reichstag, Brüning governed not via a coalition but by presidential decree, but this unstable form of government relied on the ongoing support from his Centre Party and the leftist SPD.

Brüning knew that both Papal Nuncio Orsenigo and his Bavarian counterpart Cardinal Alberto Vassallo di Torregrossa were pushing Pacelli toward the idea of an accommodation with the Nazis. They argued this would require substantial concessions by Hitler, including renouncing much of his ideological platform, respecting the Weimar Constitution, recognising the Christian basis of any coalition government formed with the Centre Party and, most importantly, recognition and expansion of all agreements with the Vatican. Hitler was never likely to agree to any of this, but Brüning was alarmed enough by the prospect to travel to Rome in August 1931 to argue against it with Pacelli in a meeting he later recalled as “cordial but tense” (Ventresca, p. 74).

It was clear to Brüning that it was Pacelli’s focus on the idea of a concordat with Germany to protect the Church there that overrode all other considerations, even Pacelli’s intense dislike of Hitler and rejection of the Nazis’ ideology. Like many others in this period, Pacelli seems to have seen Hitler as someone that could be controlled and contained by the right combination of alliances and legal mechanisms and, like them, he was proven wrong.

In the end no Centre Party-Nazi coalition came about. Hindenburg won the 1932 presidential election against Hitler, but he moved substantially to the right to do so and Brüning resigned as Chancellor on May 30 as a result. The Centre Party’s most right wing leader, Franz von Papen, took his place and when the Party moderates withdrew their support, von Papen resigned from the Party and called yet another election in July 1932 and, after more chaos, another one again in November 1932. Elements in the Centre Party continued discussions of a coalition with the right, including the Nazis, but in the end manoeuvring by van Papen and the right-wing German National People’s Party (DNVP) leader Alfred Hugenberg saw Hitler elevated to the Chancellorship in January 1933.

The Centre Party campaigned hard against the Nazis in (yet another) election in March 1933 but the right wing coalition of the Nazis and the DNVP won 52% of the vote, breaking the Centre’s hold on the balance of power. Hitler introduced his Enabling Act of 1933 in bid to vest himself with legislative powers and rule without the Reichstag. The Centre Party split on the issue. The conservative Party chairman – the Catholic priest Ludwig Kaas – urged agreement with the Act, claiming Hitler had agreed to guarantee Catholic freedoms and to uphold established concordats with Rome (something Hitler was careful not to put in writing). Kaas carried the majority and Brüning, with great reluctance, ordered his faction to maintain party discipline and vote “yes”. The Enabling Act was passed on 23 March, 1933 and effectively established Hitler as a dictator.

The Enabling Act meant the fairly rapid demise of the Centre Party. By a combination of force, intimidation and false promises, Hitler either banned opposition parties or browbeat them into dissolving themselves for the national good. The Centre Party resisted the pressure for the longest but – with the Reichstag neutralised and the Nazis in firm control – it dissolved itself on July 5 1933.

Catholic apologists are as eager to distance this dissolution from the signing of the Reichskoncordat with the Vatican as polemicists like Hitchens are keen to claim one was the result of the other. Defenders of Pacelli like Ronald J. Rychlak emphasise that, far from engineering the demise of the Centre Party, Pacelli was surprised and disappointed at its sudden collapse. Rychlak says the Centre Party had “embarrassed the Holy See by supporting the Enabling Act” and notes “indeed some members had considered forming a coalition with the Nazis in 1932”, which ignores the fact that such a coalition had been under serious consideration with Pacelli’s cautious support as early as 1930. In Hitler, the War, and the Pope (2010), Rychlak quotes Pacelli’s reaction on reading of the dissolution in the newspaper:

“Too bad that it happened at this moment. Of course, the party couldn’t have held out much longer. But if it only had put off its dissolution at least until after the conclusion of the concordat, the simple fact of its existence would have been useful in the negotiations.” (p. 72)

Again, for Pacelli and his fellow legalists, it was the Concordat that was important above all. Hitchens’ claim that “the Holy See instructed the Catholic Centre Party to disband” is nonsense – there was no such instruction. There is also no evidence that the dissolution of the Centre Party was a condition of the Concordat in its negotiation and, considering it happened before the negotiations had even concluded, the idea that it was a consequence of the Concordat also makes no sense. But the apologists are being disingenuous when they try to maintain the Concordat and the end of the Centre Party are somehow unrelated. Hitler’s vague promises of compromises with the Church and hints at a concordat convinced von Papen, who swung the Centre’s fateful vote. And it is no coincidence that von Papen left for Rome to begin the Concordat negotiations within days of the Enabling Act being passed. Hitchens’ account is a caricature of what happened, but the apologists are also distort history by pretending the two things had nothing to do with each other. The real historical story, as usual, has more complexity than rigid polemics can contain.

The Church and the Reich from 1933

As already noted, the reality of the Reichskonkordat did not live up to Pacelli’s already very low expectations. On 2 August 1934, President Hindenburg died and Hitler merged the powers of the President and Chancellor, making himself Führer und Reichskanzler and dictator of a one party state. Secure in power, the Nazis were happy to violate the Concordat and largely ignore the Vatican’s protests. Attacks on Catholics and Catholic institutions were initially sporadic, but increased in number and intensity as the 1930s went on. Senior clergy were generally spared, but outspoken priests and Catholic leaders were harassed, arrested, imprisoned and occasionally killed. The “Night of the Long Knives” purge which began on June 30 1934 not only saw Hitler remove rivals from his own party, but was also an opportunity to eliminate a range of enemies. The head of Catholic Action, Erich Klausener, von Papen’s former speech writer and advisor, Edgar Jung, and the national director of the Catholic Youth Sports Association, Adalbert Probst, were all shot by the SS in the purge. Tipped off by friends that his life was in danger, former Centre Party leader Heinrich Brüning fled Germany days earlier. Fritz Gerlich, the vehemently anti-Nazi editor of a Munich Catholic weekly newspaper, had already been sent to Dachau in 1933 and was also shot in the purge.

By the later 1930s the persecution of Catholic leaders in Nazi Germany became a common element in foreign press reports. Cardinal Faulhaber was shot at and Cardinal Innitzer and Bishop Sproll of Rottenburg had their homes broken into and ransacked. Outspoken priests were arrested, usually on charges of “immorality”, and sent to concentration camps in such numbers that by 1940 Dachau had a dedicated “Priests’ Block” that held 441 German Catholic priests, of whom 94 died there. Catholic schools were harassed for not teaching anti-Semitic ideology and hundreds were forcibly closed while Catholic presses were routinely shut down. In March 1941 Goebbels closed down all remaining Catholic newspapers, citing a wartime “paper shortage”.

Contrary to Hitchens’ claim, the Concordat did not “[order] Catholics to abstain from any political activity on any subject the regime chose to define as off-limits”. It had no force against Catholic laity at all and while it agreed to keep clergy out of political parties (which had all be suppressed or dissolved by the end of 1933 anyway) and forbade political preaching, what exactly was “political” was left undefined. This is why many priests continued to preach against the immorality of many aspects of Nazi ideology, especially its racism, militarism and its eugenic policies.

This was part of Pius XI and, later, Pius XII’s policy. They believed that the Concordat would give at least some level of protection to German Catholics so long as they limited their protests to matters of doctrine and morality rather than politics. But it was a fine line. As the extremism of the Nazis increased, the Vatican’s policy of formal neutrality and outward acceptance of the Nazi state as a political reality while trying to criticise it on moral grounds became increasingly difficult to sustain. Open conflict was inevitable.

This is the context in which we see bishops giving Nazi salutes and attending Nazi rallies in the photos above. Catholic prelates, especially in the early to mid 1930s, were instructed to accept the Nazi regime as the legitimate German government. So clergy did give the Nazi salute at official ceremonies, as did other dignitaries and public servants, whether they were Party members and supporters or not. The two bishops pictured with Goebbels above were Bishop Franz Rudolf Bornewasser of Trier and Bishop Ludwig Sebastian of Speyer. Far from being Nazi supporters, both were outspoken critics of the regime. Bishop Bornewasser condemned Nazi policies both publicly and in private protests to Hitler himself and accounts of the physical attacks on him by Nazi thugs were later used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials. Bishop Sebastian’s defence of clergy arrested by the Nazis prompted attacks on him in the Nazi press, which in turn provoked such outrage from the Catholic population of Speyer that the local Nazi Gauleiter, Joseph Bürckel, (also seen in the photo with Goebbels) ordered a Nazi rally in the city for the day of a planned mass protest by Catholics. He bussed in thousands of Nazi Party members and stormtroopers to take over the streets and prevent any demonstration in support of the bishop. Anti-Catholic polemicists who use the photo of the two bishops to illustrate any supposed Catholic support of the Nazis are, as usual, twisting history.

Of course, there were some Catholic clergy and many more Catholic laity who did support the Nazis. The end of the political chaos and economic collapse of the early 1930s, the seemingly miraculous revival of the German economy, the annexation of formerly lost territory and, eventually, the victories in the period from 1939-41 meant many German Catholics were swept up in the nationalist fervour of the earlier years of Hitler’s regime. But most Catholics remained either wary of the Nazis or openly opposed to them. And the German Resistance, which was active even in the heady early years of the regime, had a Catholic backbone.

There were some enthusiastic pro-Nazi clergy, but their numbers were tiny. Kevin P. Spicer’s analysis in his book Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism concludes that of around 42,000 priests in Germany and Austria, only 138 or 0.5% were Nazis. Others, including some leading prelates, were not supporters but were sufficiently nationalist to find the policy of outward political neutrality more comfortable than most. Cardinal Adolf Bertram, who had influenced the Vatican’s positions on the Concordat and the Centre Party, was clearly one of these. It was he who ordered the annual birthday good wishes to Hitler that so outraged Hitchens. What Hitchens does not bother to note is that it had also outraged many of Bertram’s fellow senior clergy at the time. Bishop Konrad von Preysing was so vehemently opposed to the gesture that he wrote angrily to Bertram about the “fundamental divergence of our views over the church-political situation”, and had to be talked out of resigning his see by the Pope. But the Vatican could not avoid a public confrontation between Bertram and von Preysing at the German Catholic Bishops Conference the following year, where von Preysing attacked Bertram’s approach so vehemently in his opening address that Bertram dissolved the Conference to prevent any further public conflict. Hitchens, of course, holds up Bertram’s actions and says nothing about von Preysing, who went on to openly attack the Nazis and work covertly with the German Resistance. Polemics usually consist of telling only part of the story – objective historical analysis does not work like that.

This is why much of the supposed “evidence” of church support for the Nazis is patent misrepresentation. For example, German soldiers did indeed have the motto “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) on their belt buckles. But they had carried this motto for about 60 years before the Nazis ever existed. It had been a heraldic motto in Prussia for centuries and so became the motto of the unified Germany’s Imperial standard in 1871 and had been inscribed on German helmets in the First World War. Nazi belt buckles, on the other hand, had no religious slogans. Those of the Waffen SS carried their motto “Meine Ehre heißt Treue” (My Honour is Loyalty) while those of the Hitler Youth read “Blut und Ehre” (Blood and Honour). And the photo of Pius XII supposedly being honoured by Nazi guards, which was used on the covers of most editions of Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, was actually taken in 1927 when the then Papal Nuncio Pacelli was visiting President von Hindenburg. The “Nazi guards” are actually soldiers of the democratic Weimar Republic, though the covers of Cornwell’s book artfully retouch the photo to highlight Pacelli and blur the soldiers to make it easier to mistake them for SS guards. The distortion here is quite literal.

Mit brennender Sorge

By 1937 the violations of the Concordat, the ongoing persecution of German Catholics and the increasingly repressive and violent expression of Nazi ideology in the Third Reich meant Pius XI felt a clear statement against Nazism needed to be made. He and Pacelli met with leading German prelates on 21 December 1936 and the encyclical the Pope envisaged was drafted over five days in January 1937 by Pacelli and the more vigorously anti-Nazi Cardinal Faulhaber and Bishop Preysing, but also the more accommodationist Cardinal Bertram. With the ailing Pope too ill to be closely involved, the encyclical was very much Pacelli’s document: Pius XI noted after the encyclical was issued that “Not one line leaves this office that [Pacelli] does not recognise”. Faulhaber had written the first draft of the document, but it was Pacelli who added what Robert A. Ventresca describes as its “most forceful and consequential paragraph” (p. 144):

“Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, a particular form of State, or the repositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the worldly community… whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.”

The encyclical was entitled Mit brennender Sorge (“With burning concern”) and was pointedly issued in German rather than the more usual Latin. In a remarkable operation, it was smuggled into Germany and 300,000 copies were secretly printed or made by hand using typewriters. It was then read from pulpits all over Germany on Palm Sunday to large Easter congregations to maximise its impact.

The Nazis were furious. All copies of the encyclical that could be found were seized and the presses that printed it were shut down. Hitler ordered another round up of “political priests” and a crackdown on “immorality” in Catholic institutions and hundreds were sent to concentration camps. While part of the encyclical had condemned oppression of Catholics and the violations of the Concordat, it was the broader condemnation of the Nazi “myth of race and blood” and the racism of Nazi ideology that caused Hitler’s fury at the encyclical and earned praise from other world powers who were increasingly uneasy at the rise of Nazi Germany.

Catholic apologists tend to hold up Mit brennender Sorge as the boldest and most unequivocal statement possible and, correctly, note Pacelli’s key role in its drafting and issue. Detractors point out it did not explicitly name Hitler or Nazism, couched its criticisms in general terms and maintains the anti-Semitic language of deicide in one reference (“Jesus received his human nature from a people who crucified him”). The latter reflected the Catholic doctrine of the time – the concept of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus was already being vigorously argued against but would not be officially overturned until 1965. But the lack of an explicit mention of Nazism and Hitler contrasts with the anti-Communist encyclical, Divini Redemptoris, which was issued just nine days after Mit brennender Sorge. That letter openly condemned “the violent, deceptive tactics of bolshevistic and atheistic Communism”. Of course, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who and what Mit brennender Sorge was condemning – the Nazis in particular got the point – but it did contain guarded language and careful assurances that the Church, for example, did not intend to prevent young Germans from establishing “a true ethnical community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country”. Here we can see the hand of Pacelli, attempting to tread the fine diplomatic line between condemnation and a desire to temper Nazi excesses. “Is this,” Ventresca asks, “a pointed assault on the Nazi’s totalitarian aim to control every aspect of society” or “the expression of a naive belief that Nazism might yet be tamed?” (p. 117). It could be argued to be something of both.

Pacelli did not give any ground in his April 1937 response to a formal Nazi complaint about the encyclical issued by the German ambassador to the Vatican, Diego von Bergen. He denied the claim the encyclical was a political document and maintained it was purely doctrinal – the lack of explicit references to the regime was largely so he could make this argument. But when the Kristallnacht pogrom ushered in yet more persecution of Jews in Germany in November 1938, Pacelli resisted calls such as those by Cardinal Arthur Hinsley for a statement of condemnation by the increasingly ill Pius XI. Three prominent cardinals, Italian, French and Belgian, were instructed to issue strong condemnations of Nazi racial theory, with Cardinal Pierre Verdier of Paris referring to “thousands of people” who recently “were tracked down like wild beasts [and] stripped of their possessions” all in the name of “racial rights”. But Pacelli’s response was to deliver a sermon in Rome’s Church of San Giacomo to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the canonisation of Saint Vincent de Paul in which he likened the travails of the saint to the lamentations of the exiled Israelites in Babylon. Noting this rather oblique and rarefied reaction, Ventresca notes:

As a spiritual exercise this had much to recommend it. But it was a decidedly tepid political response to the escalating excesses of the Hitler state …. Pacelli was still struggling, seemingly in vain, to find an effective political response to increasing Nazi radicalism. (p. 126)

But with the death of Pius XI on February 10, 1939, Pacelli’s need to find a political response to Hitler became more pressing still.

The New Pope and the Reich

Pacelli was elected pope on March 2 1939 and took his predecessor’s name as Pius XII. He had been the preferred candidate for most western powers, who saw him as the best person to help defend democracy in Europe. The Nazis generally regarded him with hostility, seeing him as instrumental in the “anti-German trend” in diplomatic relations with the Reich. So, not surprisingly, his election was not greeted with joy by the Nazi press or the German newspapers generally, with the Berlin Morgenpost declaring “[He] has always been opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor”.

Pius XII soon embarked on a policy that he felt best suited the interests of the Catholic Church in Germany and the Church generally – outward neutrality, avoidance of purely “political” issues and a focus on defending the rights of the German Church and speaking out on matters of doctrine and morals only. The letter he sent Hitler after his accession that so outraged Hitchens was not, in fact, an “evil and fatuous message” as Hitchens characterises it. It used very similar language to the letters he sent to other world leaders at the same time. Read in the context of the new pope’s almost two decades of observation of and engagement with the Nazis (and shorn of the exclamation marks added by Cornwell and retained for rhetorical effect by Hitchens), it is quite clearly a diplomatically-coded warning that the previous policies would be retained, with warm references to “the German people“, but none at all for the Hitler regime. Hitler got the point – he was the only world leader who received a letter from the new pope and did not reply. Germany was also the only nation to not send a representative to the new pope’s coronation.

Many leading Catholic prelates and intellectuals were not happy with the pope’s determined policy of remaining above politics, especially when confronted with the Italian Fascist invasion of Albania in April 1939 and the clear intentions of Germany toward Poland as the year went on. But Pius resisted pressure to take a side in the political crises of that year, arguing in his first address to the College of Cardinals on June 2 that the Church needed to warn of the “incalculable material, spiritual and moral consequences” of war, but could only do so without becoming entangled in disputes among states. He had cardinals and nuncios work behind the scenes to urge the relevant parties to avoid a war and, on August 24, made a pastoral appeal for peace, but he steadfastly refused to make any partisan statement or condemnation of particular sides as aggressors. The Second World War broke out a week later with the German invasion of Poland.

The patterns of Pius’ policy did not change in the first years of the war. Statements were made and condemnations of war in general and violent excesses and persecutions of civilians in particular were issued, but always couched in the lofty language of moral condemnation and spiritual guidance, with no explicit references to who the perpetrators were. Given that the perpetrators were, in Poland, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, there was no doubt who the condemnations were aimed at, but diplomacy and neutrality remained paramount. So Pius’ first encyclical, Summi Pontificalis (October 20, 1939) seemed to many to be a ringing condemnation of the Nazis, including the point that in the Church “there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision” – a quotation of Colossians 3:11 and a clear reference to Nazi racial policy and the persecution of Polish Jews that was already underway. But the reserved and intellectual Pius clearly thought these careful words had far more unequivocal impact than they did. That said, the Nazis were predictably outraged at the encyclical, while the British and French air forces dropped 88,000 copies of it, translated into German, over western Germany.

As the war raged and reports of Nazi atrocities became more numerous and alarming, it was increasingly difficult for Pius to maintain a clear line between “moral condemnation” and “political statement”. By December 1942 the Vatican’s well-informed intelligence networks were making it clear that the Nazis were engaging in wholesale and increasingly systematic murder of Jews in the Reich. An Italian Army chaplain, Father Pirro Scavissi, travelled with the Axis forces in occupied central Europe and relayed what he witnessed directly to the pope. He also met with Pius on two occasions while on leave in Rome and reported how the pope “cried like a child and prayed like a saint” when the Nazi atrocities against Jews and others in Poland were described to him in detail. Not surprisingly, vehement critics of the policy of outward, lofty neutrality, such as Bishop von Preysing, pressed for a more overt condemnation of the Nazis.

This came in the pope’s Christmas Address of 1942, delivered via Vatican Radio and widely disseminated in written form throughout occupied Europe. Most of the 45 minute address was a general dissertation on human rights, but it made a clear condemnation of totalitarianism:

[T]here are those various theories which, differing among themselves, and deriving from opposite ideologies, agree in considering the State, or a group which represents it, as an absolute and supreme entity, exempt from control and from criticism even when its theoretical and practical postulates result in and offend by, their open denial of essential tenets of the human Christian conscience.

And at its end Pius addressed his hopes for a renewal of fundamental principles in a post-war world and stated:

Mankind owes [this] to the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.

As oblique as this is, it was (for Pius) a highly pointed reference to Nazi racial theory and the atrocities it was driving. And it was quickly perceived as such. The Nazis certainly got the message. The central office of Himmler’s RHSA security arm did not mince words:

The Pope has repudiated the National-Socialist New European Order …. He is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.

The speech was covered widely in the press around the world and commented on favourably, with the New York Times editorial for December 25 1942 declaring the pope a “lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent”. Later Pius commented to Harold Tittmann, the US ambassador to the Vatican, that, in the words of a British diplomat’s report, “he considered his recent broadcast to be clear and comprehensive in its condemnation of the heartrending treatment of Poles, Jews, hostages etc. And to have satisfied all recent demands that he should speak out.”

Others were less satisfied. Bishop von Preysing, yet again, did not think the reference to the victimisation of the Jews was specific enough. Harold Tittmann also pressed the pope to go further, but he did note to his government that “the reference to the persecution of the Jews and mass deportations is unmistakable”. The problem for the Americans and the other Allies was that Pius’ typically abstract approach made it hard for them to give his message the propaganda spin they wanted – which was, at least in part, precisely its intention. This was not simply a continuation of the policy of outward neutrality and an appearance of staying above “politics” – it was also a recognition of a deeply political reality. As Pius noted to Tittmann, a more explicit reference to precisely which totalitarian regimes he was condemning and a more detailed exposition of their atrocities would require an equal condemnation of the Soviet Union and, the pope observed carefully, this “might not be wholly pleasing to the Allies”.

So the Christmas Address of 1942 remained the most explicit and pointed condemnation of the Nazis that Pius made in public, even though his many and quite vehement private condemnations are well documented. The apologists highlight the latter, while the detractors wave them away and condemn Pius XII for his qualified and carefully-worded public pronouncements. But the story that has been, until recently, largely ignored is what the pope was doing behind the scenes and under the cover of his carefully diplomatic facade.

The Pope’s “Secret War”

New Atheist luminary Sam Harris is, as I have detailed before, spectacularly bad at history. Like many of the scientists who make up the ranks of the leading New Atheist polemicists, he seems to think you “do” history by finding support for what you want to think in a book and then presenting what that book says. So when he turned to the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazis in his The End of Faith (2004), he found condemnation of the Church in Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial and much-criticised book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) and so, in his usual lazy fashion, did not bother to look much further.

But in 2015 Harris actually managed to read another book on the subject and, I suppose to his credit, he substantially changed his mind. The book was Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler by Mark Riebling, a writer who specialises in the history of espionage. Harris was so impressed with Riebling’s book that he interviewed him on his blog in a piece entitled “Re-thinking ‘Hitler’s Pope’“. In the interview Harris did all he could to still criticise and condemn Pius XII and the Catholic Church as much as possible, but he was forced to admit “I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling that I’ve been too hard on the Vatican for its conduct during the war.”

Riebling’s excellent book highlights and details an element of Pius XII and the Catholic Church’s role in the Second World War which is usually only mentioned in passing or relegated to footnotes: namely, the persistent covert assistance given to the Allies and to the German Resistance to actively work toward the fall of the Third Reich and the overthrow or, if possible, assassination of Adolf Hitler.

That Pius was inclined to assist the Allies covertly has been noted many times in the past, though it is rarely emphasised and is usually ignored or dismissed by his detractors. As Riebling details, the Vatican had what was effectively the oldest intelligence network in Europe – thousands of clergy with lines of covert communication back to Rome that had been in operation for centuries. It was via this network and its connections to disaffected anti-Nazi officers in the Wehrmacht and, in particular, the Abwehr – the German Army’s espionage arm – that Pius learned of the Nazis’ intention to invade Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium in May 1940. Pius ordered that a coded radio warning be sent to the nuncios in Belgium and Holland so they could warn the Allies. The warning was passed on to London a week before the invasion, but Western forces failed to capitalise on the information. Similarly, the Vatican’s German links allowed Ludwig Kaas – the former Centre Party politician who had negotiated the Reichskonkordat and was now in exile in the Vatican – to warn the Allies of the impending invasion of Norway in April 1940. Again, the Allies did not respond or act on the warning.

But Pius’ covert actions against the Nazis went much further. As Riebling details, a clique of anti-Nazi officers within the Abwehr, led by the intelligence unit’s chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and his chief of staff Hans Oster, began to plot against Hitler soon after the invasion of Poland in 1939. Canaris needed a way of communicating with the Allies to gain assistance and to win concessions for Germany once the Nazis were overthrown. The plotters decided to use the Vatican as their go-between and enlisted a Catholic Abwehr reservist, Josef Müller, as their key conduit to Rome. Müller – a large, gregarious, beer-drinking, charmer nicknamed “Ochsensepp” (Joey the Ox) – emerges as the main hero of Riebling’s story. He was a man who in 1934 faced down an SS interrogation led by Himmler himself and was released because the SS leader admired his courage, faith and principles. Müller already knew Pius from his time as Nuncio in Munich and used a variety of covers to relay messages between the Resistance leaders and the Vatican, liaising directly with the pope’s private secretary, Robert Leiber. Leiber and Kaas then passed on relevant intelligence to the British Government via their ambassador to the Holy See, Francis d’Arcy Osborne.

But the pope’s involvement with the Resistance went much further than acting as a conduit. Via Müller and a network of German Jesuits, Pius was directly involved in no less than three plots to kill Hitler. The first faded out in 1939-40 when the German officers involved lost their nerve. The second failed when explosives in Hitler’s plane failed to go off in 1943. And the third was the von Stauffenberg plot, where a bomb wounded Hitler but failed to kill him in 1944. But as early as 1939 Pius had made the decision not only to help the Resistance overthrow the Nazis, but also decided that Hitler met the theological justifications for actual tyrannicide – he decided to assist the German Resistance even if they acted to assassinate Hitler. Some of his aides, including his secretary and adviser Robert Leiber, were shocked but Leiber’s own notes from the time record that when asked what kind of government the German plotters should work toward, Pius answered emphatically “Any government without Hitler”. So much for “Hitler’s Pope”.

The Lessons of History

It should be clear by now that virtually every element of Hitchens’ characterisation of relations between Pius XII and the Nazis is factually wrong or a grotesque misrepresentation of history. When exposed to even the slightest criticial analysis, his claim that Pius was “pro-Nazi” is utterly absurd. The Reichskonkordat was not “very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler’s government”. It was not some friendly deal and it did not secure protection for the Catholic Church in Germany. It did not order the silence of German Catholics. And there was no papal instruction for the Centre Party to dissolve. Every point Hitchens makes is wrong.

As usual, the real history is complex, but it bears almost no resemblance to the bizarre caricature found in the works of leading New Atheists or the hysterical ranting of many online atheist polemics. Overall, despite a few collaborators and enthusiasts, the Catholic Church’s response to the Nazis was one of opposition, up to and including active or covert resistance.

The historical “Pius Wars” are likely to continue, with both his defenders and detractors likely to find grist for their respective mills in the documents from his wartime pontificate that the Vatican has recently announced it will release. Apologists overstate his public condemnation of and opposition to the Nazi regime, but overall their case is stronger than that of the detractors, who are guilty of selective evidence, speculation and misrepresentation. John Cornwell, whose publication of Hitler’s Pope in 1999 brought the criticism of Pius XII more fully into the public arena and who was effectively the key source of Hitchens’ distorted polemics, has since backtracked on many of his arguments.

Debate will certainly continue on whether Pius’ policy of outward neutrality while engaging in covert action was the best course. Certainly many of the German Jesuits who worked against the Nazis did not feel so, given they were later instrumental in shaping the bolder and more outspoken policies seen in the papacy of John XXIII and his successors, which formed the modern Papacy of today; one that is far more vocal on matters that Pius would have considered too “political”. As Riebling has pointed out in interviews, Eugenio Pacelli was born on the eve of Custer’s last stand and died on the eve of the launch of Sputnik. He was a man who bridged two very different worlds.

Debate also continues on the other key issue of Pius XII’s record – his response (or lack thereof) to the persecution of the Jews and to the Holocaust. But while Pius was not an outspoken saint who stood alone against tyranny in the dark days of World War Two, as Catholic apologists would have us believe, the idea that he was some kind of quisling is absurd. And the claim that he was “pro-Nazi” or “Hitler’s Pope” is total and complete garbage.

Further Reading

Gerard Noel, Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler (Continuum, 2008)

Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler (Basic Books, 2015)

Ronald J. Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Genesis Press, 2000)

Klaus Scholder, A Requiem for Hitler and Other New Perspectives on the German Church Struggle (Trinity Press, 1989)

Robert A. Ventresca, Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII (Harvard, 2013)