"Pius XII's defenders attempt to exonerate him of antisemitism and to represent him as a friend of the endangered Jews who did everything that he believed possible to help them.  Yet this depiction of him is riddled with weaknesses.

• Why, as a moral or practical matter, did Pius XII intervene in Germany on behalf of Catholics who had converted from Judaism but not on behalf of Jews?  His defenders have no good answer.
• Why, as a moral or practical matter, did he cause Mit brennender Sorge, the fiery encyclical protesting the treatment of religion in Germany, to be read from pulpits across the country, but not similarly denounce the persecution of the Jews, either then or when the mass murder began?  Again, there is no good answer.

• Why, as a moral or practical matter, did he protest the Germans' invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, with separate telegrams to the sovereigns of each (and printed in large type on the front page of the Vatican's official daily newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano) but not the Germans' slaughter of the Jews?  No good answer.

• Why, as a moral and practical matter, did he speak out publicly on behalf of the suffering Poles but not of the Jews?  (On the instructions of Pius XII, Vatican Radio broadcast this in January 1940: "Conditions of religious, political, and economic life have thrown the Polish people, especially in those areas occupied by Germany, into a state of terror, of degradation, and, we dare say, of barbarism. . .   The Germans employ the same methods, perhaps even worse, as those used by the Soviets.") 

• Why, as a moral or practical matter, did Pius XII not direct all ecclesiastic personnel to defend and to help save Jews? 
• Why, as a moral or practical matter, did he not lift a finger to forfend the deportation of the Jews of Rome or of other regions in Italy by denouncing this publicly and by instructing his priests and nuns to give the hunted Jewish men, women, and children sanctuary? 

• Why, as a moral or practical matter, did Pius XII excommunicate all Communists in the world in 1949, including millions who never shed blood, but not excommunicate a single German or non-German who served Hitler – or even the Catholic-born Hitler himself – as the millionfold willing executioners of the Jewish people?  To all of these questions there is no good answer.

To the extent that any of these questions are addressed (generally, they are ignored), the answers proffered by Pius XII's defenders form a third strategy to complement the first two of directly exculpating him and denying his antisemitism: inventing constraints.  They claim without convincing evidence that he chose not to do more on behalf of Jews because he had to maintain the Vatican's neutrality, so as not to endanger the Church.  Yet his demonstratively public condemnation of the Germans' invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and other acts, reveals this to be false.  (I return to this claim below.)
        Catholic hatred of the Jews isn't merely a thing of the past. It is alive and well in Catholic communities that view Pope Pius XII as a saint for not identifying with the Jews during the holocaust. The conservative Catholic site below argues that :"To put it bluntly, Pope Pius XII did not believe then or at any time later in his life that a program of extermination of the Jews ever existed"
        "In summary, if 20,000 or more people a day were being killed at Auschwitz, Pius XII, with his contacts there, would have known about it. In other words, if, in addition to the Jewish Ordeal of World War II, the Holocaust actually happened, and he said nothing about it, then he deserves our condemnation. However, if the reverse is true, that is, that there was no Holocaust, as the Allied aerial photography clears indicates, then it is the Holocaust Fundamentalist accusers of the Beloved Pontiff who deserve our scorn."

Forsaking Catholics' Souls :

Daniel Goldhagen writes in his book, called "A Moral Reckoning", aimed at the Catholic Church, that if Catholics aren't moved by what was done to the Jews for the sake of the Jews, maybe they should be concerned about what was done to the millions of Roman Catholics whose eternal salvation was put in jeopardy according to its own theology, by the clergy's deplorable "shepherding":

  In a forthright letter drafted by the German Catholic Bishops who attended the Fulda conference last month Nazi officialdom is openly accused of practicing religious persecution (of Catholics).  The letter, published in the Catholic International Press Agency in Germany, is the longest and most striking pronouncement addressed to the German congregations in recent years.

In cataloguing the repressive actions of the Nazi regime against (Catholic) religious worship the Bishops flatly accused the party of interfering with the education of Catholic youth and of depriving it of the spiritual comforts extended by the church.  The Bishops said, further, that the authorities suppressed freedom of (Catholic) worship, in effect, by subjecting the services to oppressive restrictions.  Parental authority also has been infringed, they charged.

Citing the needs of persons who have lost their homes and belongings in air raids and who are now being housed under strange roofs in strange environments, the Bishops said that never had a better opportunity been offered for the demonstration of Christian love and charity than is exhibited by the plight of evacuated women and children. Aid for Evacuees Urged
        The letter specifically requested that the unending streams of refugees should not be deprived of the opportunity for (Catholic) religious worship and the succor and comforts of the church.  The Bishops' pronouncement was signed by Adolph Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber of Munich, Theodore Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna, by the twenty-six Archbishops constituting the Fulda College and six deputy delegates from the protectorates.  The pastoral letter, dated Aug. 16, was to be communicated to the German congregations on successive Sundays during September.
        The letter abounds in sly but fearless thrusts at the false god and Nazi tenets The Bishops` addressed 'themselves also to "those who saw fit to create a god after their own hearts, or one designed only for national or racial consumption."
        The pastoral letter covers the problems of faith, church policy, youth and education, relations with State, and deals at length with the situation created by air raids in so far as it affects church activity.
        Denunciation of aerial warfare is outspoken.  The letter echoes the papal sentiment that "we cannot forego voicing our feelings of deep pain and horror at the truly inhuman limit to which this wary, is being prosecuted."

By Wireless to The New York Times from Stockholm, Sweden,

(Contrary to what many Christians would like to believe, the overwhelmingly Christian population of Germany at the time was not forced to mistreat the Jews, but did so willingly:)
        "A study by historian Christopher Browning, "Ordinary Men", examines a troop of reserve police officers from Hamburg who were taken to Poland to murder Jews. Browning reveals that even though the process of mass murder by inexperienced killers involved the most unimaginable horror, including blood and brain matter splashed upon the perpetrators, most of the men willingly participated in the murders. In fact, their commanding officer gave them the chance to opt out, but most carried on with their grisly task . The recent best-seller by Daniel Goldhagen, "Hitler's Willing Executioners", claims that these murderers were eager and enthusiastic because of long-standing antisemitic traditions in Germany that advocated the elimination of Jews from German society, even at the price of extermination.'
        Despite differences in interpretation, both Browning and Goldhagen make it clear that the widespread belief that Germans were forced to follow orders on pain of death is nothing more than fantasy. In reality, we have no reports of any German being court-martialed, shot, or seriously punished for refusing to carry out an order to kill civilians. A few, of course, did refuse such orders, but it now seems clear that fear of punishment was not the primary motivation of those who complied. Browning finds peer pressure at work within the battalion of police officers he studied, while Goldhagen, who studied the same battalion, argues that the murderers killed Jews out of conviction-because they wanted to kill Jews. There may have been additional motives at work as well, some of which we may never fully understand. What is striking is that at least some of the murderers felt no qualms about inviting their wives, girlfriends, or other family members to visit and observe the shootings firsthand. Secrecy about the carnage was not maintained by those in charge, and no sense of shame or guilt seems to have hindered the murderers. Gotz Aly, Ernst Klee, Goldhagen, and others have gathered personal letters and diaries written by the perpetrators in which they describe the killing as if it were ordinary work.' Given the many photographs taken of Jews just before they were shot, one also wonders about the photographers - what they thought and felt and how they could so calmly take pictures of people being murdered.
        The willingness of Germans to be executioners applied not only to Jewish victims. Europe's Sinti and Roma, derogatorily termed Gypsies, were also targeted by the Nazis. Even if they were not regarded in terms quite as unredeemably negative as those applied to Jews, they were often shipped to Jewish ghettos in eastern Europe and killed in the same gas chambers in the death camps. Thousands of the Polish intellectual and political elite were also murdered. So were over three million Soviet soldiers, held by the Germans as prisoners of war and either killed outright or forced to die through starvation. Germans were willing to kill fellow "Aryans"' as well. Nearly half the mental patients in Germany were among the one hundred and twenty thousand German Aryans put to death during the Third Reich in the Euthanasia Program. While most were selected for death by their doctors, some were turned over to authorities by family members. All were killed against their will. Also against their will, approximately three hundred thousand Germans were sterilized. Carrying out such large-scale atrocities was no simple matter. Hundreds of thousands became involved, directly or indirectly, as perpetrators."
        Yet some refused to participate in the murders. Within Reserve Police Battalion 101, Browning estimates, 10 percent or more requested and were granted reassignment, some of them even being allowed to go home to their civilian jobs and families. We can find other examples of refusal to participate in the murder of the Jews: an SS officer in the French town of Le Chambon who looked the other way when the townspeople hid large numbers of Jews; Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer responsible for supplying Zyklon B, the gas used to murder Jews in the death chambers of Auschwitz, who informed Catholic church officials about the death camps in the vain hope of arousing protests.' Such examples of actual resistance to the murder program, unfortunately, remain only a handful, and we may well ask why.
        Some of those who resisted tell us that they did so for religious reasons. The very low incidence of resistance, however, prompts questions about how religious beliefs and attitudes related to the program of death. What religious convictions sparked resistance in some and compliance in others, and why did so many people simply fail to react? (p.4)

(The Christian clergy were much more supportive of the persecution of the Jews than Christians today would like to believe:)
        ". . . not all clergy were outspokenly supportive of government atrocities. Very few, however, were outspokenly opposed, particularly to the Nazi policies of disenfranchisement, deportation, and murder of the Jews. The question posed by this book is Why? What can we identify in the history, institutional structure, and teachings of the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany that hindered their active protest against the persecution of the Jews? What led them, instead, to a general support of Adolf Hitler and his policies? How did the churches' attitudes change during the course of the Third Reich, particularly during the war? What could the churches have done, had they wished to protest the treatment of the Jews?
        The contention of this book is that the German churches played a far more important role in Nazi atrocities than has hitherto been supposed. Most important, their role involved moral suasion: Through the Support for Nazi policies articulated by many religious leaders, ordinary Germans were reassured that those policies did not violate the tenets of Christian faith and morality. This role was actively encouraged by the Third Reich, which viewed propaganda as central to meeting its goals and at first courted the churches as powerful shapers of public opinion. A minister wearing long black robes, preaching from the church pulpit on Sundays, could be far more effective than a politician, especially for believers. A minister claims to he God's voice on earth, while politicians are notorious as nearly universal symbols of duplicity.
        In addition, we will present evidence that large and powerful segments of the Catholic and Protestant churches supported Nazism with enthusiasm, under circumstances in which silence would have been morally preferable and politically more judicious. Indeed, the passion for National Socialism witnessed among some theologians and pastors indicates their fervent belief that Nazism was beneficial for church as well as state. Such evidence forces a reevaluation of the churches' role and a new judgment of their behavior during the Third Reich." (p. 4)
        (Contrary to what many Christians would like to believe, the Christians of Germany were not powerless before the Nazi machine:)
        "During the years immediately following the war, National Socialism was viewed as an iron cage, a totalitarian state that locked its citizens in a grip of terror. In that view, the end of the war in the spring of 1945 came as a liberation to the German people, freed from Adolf Hitler's tyranny. That image is no longer viable. The Nazi government was not absolute, but a maze of intrigue, as various factions within the government, the SS, and the National Socialist Party fought for power and influence. This was no well-oiled machine, methodically crushing all in its path, but a lurching mechanism, striking more haphazardly. Karl Schleunes has shown, for example, how different officials struggled for control of Jewish policy, with some advocating radical measures to appropriate Jewish property, while others cautioned that such measures would backfire against German efforts at economic reconstitution.
        The totalitarian image implies oppression as well as efficiency. While personal liberties were curtailed shortly after Hitler came to power, it would be wrong to view most German citizens as prisoners of the Nazi state. Rather, there was widespread support for Hitler and satisfaction with most of his policies, at least until the later war years began to undermine public confidence. Some of the most frightening aspects of the Nazi regime were not imposed from above but functioned with the cooperation and active support of average citizens. Take, for example, the Gestapo, the very image of the Nazi police state. Robert Gellately has shown that the number of official personnel employed by the Gestapo was shockingly small, given the large German population it kept under surveillance. In Nuremberg in September 1941, there were 150 Gestapo officials responsible for keeping watch over 2,771,720 people spread out over 14,000 square kilometers.'" Yet the Gestapo managed to write thorough and frequent reports about citizens' actions and beliefs, carry out investigations, and arrest, torture, and try their suspects. Such activities were made possible, Gellately reveals, only by relying upon normal citizens to observe and disclose the activities of their neighbors, co-workers, friends, and family members. This cooperation came readily: The vast majority of investigations undertaken by the Gestapo were initiated by civilian denunciations. Thus, to inspire terror among some Germans, the Gestapo depended upon the enthusiastic teamwork of their ordinary fellow citizens.
        If the Nazi state, even in its most frightening manifestations, was a cooperative venture of its citizens, what does this suggest about the German people's relationship to the "Jewish question"? What did they know about the persecution and murder of the Jews? How did they react to the information they received? What guidance did they receive from churches in shaping their responses?(pp. 4-5)

        David Bankier (in "The Germans and the Final Solution") provides helpful answers to these questions. According to his examination of Gestapo reports, which attempted to measure the attitude of German citizens in response to Nazi policies, most Germans were pleased in the early years of the regime to see Jews expelled from their jobs in the civil service. The Jews, it seemed to them, were receiving what they deserved. They had become too "uppity" and were now being put in their place. The random and occasional physical attacks against Jews in Germany proved distasteful to many - not, if seems, because of a lack of antisemitic attitudes but because of discomfort over street violence and the breakdown of orderliness. When the German Jews lost their citizenship on the basis of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, there was general indifference. . . in preparation for the Berlin Olympic Games in early 1936, street violence and visible signs of antisemitic agitation were suppressed by the regime.
        This period of relative calm, which continued through 1937, would prove deceptive, but at the time many Jews hoped that it marked the end of anti-Jewish measures by the Nazi state. By 1938, as Germany began accentuating militarism and war talk, the number and severity of antisemitic incidents increased. A program of "Aryanization" led to the expropriation of Jewish property and its transfer into suitably Aryan hands. Schools and universities expelled Jewish students. Jewish families became subject to house searches and individuals subject to arrest, Jewish stores were defaced, and Jews were required to take the name "Sarah" or "Israel" and have the letter l stamped on their identity card. In late October thousands of Polish Jews living in Germany were sent back to Poland. The young son of one such family, Herschel Grynspan responded to his parents' plight by shooting an official in the German embassy in Paris, whereupon the Nazi leadership made this minor act the pretext for a nationwide pogrom. On November 9 and 10 - the so-called Kristallnacht - Nazi thugs smashed windows in Jewish shops and homes throughout Germany, burned and destroyed almost all synagogues, humiliated and beat countless individual Jews, and arrested ten thousand Jewish men, who were then sent to concentration camps.
        No one in Germany could be unaware of these events, which transpired in cities, towns, and villages across the nation and received widespread press coverage. How did people react? According to Gestapo reports, most Germans were shocked by the violence, even though, Bankier argues, they remained antisemitic. They had expected a government of law and order and found instead shattered glass in the streets, Nazi thugs beating Jews, massive destruction of property, and a disturbing economic question: Who would pay for the damage? Yet there were neither protests nor demonstrations against Kristallnacht. 'The following Sunday, most pastors and priests in their pulpits did not mention it, not even the widespread destruction of houses of worship that had occurred in their communities. As Bankier notes, aversion to unseemly violence did not equate with moral outrage: "We rarely find rejection of Nazi anti-Semitism on ethical principles, or indignation based on humanitarian values."
        As anti-Jewish measures continued to grow in number in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the Ministry of Propaganda poured out antisemitic messages to explain and justify harsh actions. Jews were portrayed as a danger to Germany a threat to all Germans. They were compared to parasites and bacilli that could infect and destroy innocent Aryans. When war broke out, it was portrayed as a Jewish assault on Germany, especially after 1941, when the participation of both the capitalist Americans and the communist Soviets was attributed to Jewish influence.Thus, it was suggested, German attacks on the Jews were not hostile and aggressive, but defensive e efforts to protect the Aryan race.
        By this time there were few Jews left in Germany, of course, since Nazi terror had produced massive emigration. By the fall of 1941, only one hundred and fifty thousand Jews remained from a pre-Nazi population of five hundred thousand. These remaining Jews became suddenly more visible, however, when a new decree required them to wear a yellow badge. They produced a mixed reaction among their Christian neighbors. Most of the Jews still in Germany were elderly and poor, and their miserable condition evoked sympathy in some but contempt in others. Churches were not immune to the latter response-when Christians of Jewish descent, who were considered Jewish under Nazi law, appeared with their yellow badges, some Aryan Christians complained that they did not want to pray or take communion next to Jews. ' Yet Bankier argues that many Germans exhibited compassion in response to this visible evidence of Jewish hardship. Joseph Goebbels himself is said to have complained about "idiotic sentimentality" among Germans, and the government issued a decree: From 24 October 1941, anyone who showed public sympathy for the Jews would be sent to a concentration camp for three months."
        It is important to gauge the response of Germans not only to Jews in their proximity - whether suffering during Kristallnacht or donning the yellow star-but also to the millions of Jews in eastern Europe. Bankier tries to measure German attitudes and the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda while rumors of brutality and murder began to spread. Throughout the Nazi period, propaganda had been ubiquitous. Bankier argues, however, that during the war years, especially when rumors of mass murder proliferated, Germans increasingly distanced themselves from the antisemitic propaganda of the state.
        Assessing Bankier's claim requires knowing g what Germans knew about the murder of Jews and when they knew it, as well as how they reacted to this news. According to Heinz Boberach, already in 1939 in the aftermath of the German invasion of Poland, rumors circulated in some German cities about atrocities and even murders committed against Polish Jews. In the summer of 1941, when the real murder campaign began with the invasion of the Soviet Union, rumors increased, and during 1942 it became difficult to avoid hearing rumors or even gaining direct knowledge of murders and atrocities.
        Goebbels intensified antisemitic propaganda during those years, equating Bolsheviks with Jews in the "crusade" against Russia. Ian Kershaw notes that the general public refused to respond to this propaganda barrage, and he suggests that antisemitism was simply a low priority in the face of more important hardships and concerns. Bankier prefers the argument of Martin Broszat, who suggests that Germans tried to distance themselves from the anti-Jewish propaganda of the Nazis because they knew of crimes being committed and wanted to evade complicity.' Bankier makes no concession regarding the antisemitic attitudes of the German people, suggesting that popular opinion often pushed harder against the Jewish population than did Nazi edicts. However, Gestapo reports and other evidence suggest a public aversion to antisemitic propaganda by late 1941.
        Bankier explains this paradox as based upon self-interest. Aryan Germans, broadly antisemitic in their attitudes, accepted any anti-Jewish policies that hurt Jews, especially when they opened opportunities for Aryan Germans, unless the policies might seem counterproductive For example, hooliganism against Jews bred anxiety about law and order, implicitly suggesting that other Germans might be targeted next. Hooliganism might also hurt Germany's prestige abroad or inspire countermeasures. According to this theory, rumors of genocide prompted not moral outrage but the worry that Germany might suffer revenge, especially if the war should turn in the Allies' favor."
        Until the fall of 1941, German troops prevailed wherever they turned.That fall, however, their failure to win a victory over Russia presaged a series of frustrations and defeats. By late 1942 and early 1943, Germany suffered major military losses in North Africa and at Stalingrad, while at the same time Allied bombing of German cities grew in intensity. Some Germans viewed this change of circumstances as punishment for what they had done to Jews, perceiving the bombing of Cologne Cathedral in 1942, for example, as retribution for the destruction of synagogues during Kristallnacht.'" Others believed that Jews themselves dominated American and British policy and picked out targets for bombing specifically in terms of punishment and revenge. Finally, Jews and their allies could be expected to take a particularly harsh revenge should Germany actually lose the war. Under these circumstances, Bankier believes, average Germans refused to accept Nazi antisemitic propaganda, refused to associate themselves with the policies of murder, and tried to avoid knowing or at least to pretend they did not know about what was happening. "People chose to turn a deaf ear to anti-Semitic preaching in order to bury their unpleasant awareness of the extermination. They made a conscious decision to withdraw from it, suppress it and make it taboo, in the belief, whether conscious or not, that they could absolve themselves of collective guilt by dissociating themselves from the social consensus that had sanctioned so horrible a crime.`
        -By 1943 both police reports and the Nazi press shed light on the predicament facing Goebbels' propaganda machinery. It encouraged Germans to ever greater intensity of effort, with the threat of Jewish and Allied revenge should the German war measures now fail. This was meant to promote a commitment to fight to the finish, a sense that all Germans were in the struggle together. Having embarked upon a solution to the Jewish question, they must prevail in that effort too or suffer retribution. Stressing the danger, however, included the risk that Germans would be tempted more toward defeatism than toward greater effort. Bankier believes that defeatism prevailed. Instead of greater commitment, Germans rejected and distanced themselves from the propaganda, not out of indifference toward antisemitism, but because Nazi policies now seemed to endanger average Germans. As Bankier Concludes, "During the war the public sensed collective guilt, since its awareness of killing-operations exceeded mere suspicion. Outward passivity and apathy were the way the public chose to minimize discomfort.""
        During the years immediately following the war, the common response of Germans to the Holocaust was to deny any knowledge of the murder of the Jews. The collective response was to claim the crimes had been committed far away, that they had been undertaken in great secrecy and without the consent of the general population. It Wasn't Us, Hitler Did It is the title of a satirical play written by Hermann von Harten and produced in Berlin during the 1980s. The satire of the title reflects a significant truth: Nearly everyone, even the most prominent figures arrested and tried at Nuremberg, denied personal responsibility for Nazi crimes. Army officers blamed the SS, and the SS blamed commanding officers, who in turn claimed they had to follow orders or they would have been shot. The denial of responsibility was a continuation of the wartime effort to avoid complicity. Knowledge of the murder of Jews was dangerous; to know about the atrocities would demand a response, a protest, yet none had ever been expressed. It was better not to know and to hope that charges of complicity could be avoided.(pp. 5-9)