ADSS 9.265 Valerio Valeri to Maglione: deportation of non-French Jews

At the same time Padre Benedetto was meeting with Pius XII this document arrived in Rome confirming much of what the Capuchin was reporting to the pope.

 ADSS 9.265 Valerio Valeri, Nuncio to France to Cardinal Maglione

Reference: Report number 7809/251 (AES 4886/43)

Location and date: Vichy, 16.07.1943

Summary statement:  Information on the deportation of non-French Jews

Language: Italian

Text:

I received the dispatch number 4179/43 of 04.07.1943 (1), together with a petition addressed to the Holy Father by Mrs X.  I would be happy if I were in a position to do something in favour of Mr XX.  Unfortunately, I am unable to confirm for your Eminence that I had the opportunity to relate your reports to him with my reports numbers 6278/1132 of 12.11.1942 and 7476/193 of 27.05.1943. (2)

I have to add in this respect that the German minister, Mr Krug von Nidda (3) who I had asked about other persons arrested by the Gestapo, confirmed that the police are only deporting non-French people.  Among these are, no doubt, mostly non-Aryans.  They, in fact, it seems, after spending some time at the infamous Drancy camp (4) are conveyed under German escort, for unknown destinations so that they disappear without trace, especially as the same German authorities claim to know nothing.

Neither this government, nor the [French] police, who until recently had stopped delivering non-Aryans to the Germans, were better informed.

Therefore, for this and similar cases, it seems that it would be something the Apostolic Nunciature in Berlin could attempt to look into.  I have made appeals over these last days, without having high hopes about it.(5)

Cross references: 

(1) Not published in ADSS.

(2) Not published in ADSS.   The most recent report quoted (AES 3966/43) said:

“… I report … these poor wretches just left France, without any trace so that one cannot know if they are alive or dead. There have been no improvements in the painful situation whatsoever.  I know that not even the Red Cross was unable to obtain some facilities from the German authorities”.

 (3) Roland Hans Krug von Nidda (1895-1968), chief of the German delegation to Vichy 1941-1943 under the supervision of Otto Abetz, de-facto German ambassador in Paris.

(4) Pere Marie-Benoit wrote of the camp: (ADSS 9.264, note 17) “Drancy and Compiegne have acquired a sad notoriety through the abuse of the victim internees”.

(5) See ADSS 9.279.

More on Yad Vashem's decision on Pius XII

While I applaud Yad Vashem for taking a significant step that recognises the developments in understanding Pope Pius XII and his role/s during the Holocaust, I am concerned that the step has been taken by apologists as a definitive act that means they have "won" the "battle" over the war time pope.  And this is the language they are using - "won", "battle", "victory" etc.  This is not how history is done.  The crowing by some in the "canonise him now" camp is, at present, so loud, that any attempt to conduct a rational conversation is all but impossible.


Historians are not interested in "winning victories".  We are interested in establishing as best we can the truth of a particular period in the human story.  For those of us who have spent years researching the years of the Holocaust there are no "simple" solutions.  As the news from Yad Vashem broke and the apologists began publishing "I told you so" style responses, I was reading my way through some of the documents in ADSS concerning the Jews in France in 1941 and 1942 and the involvement of the nuncio, Valerio Valeri, the secretary of state, Luigi Maglione, and through the notations indicating he had seen the reports, the pope.  It is here that that the hard slog work is being done.  


I have not read anything in the popular blogs or news services that would indicate any awareness of the extremely complex realities that confronted the pope and the Vatican during the war years.  And that worries me.  There were no simple answers; there were no simple problems - it was a complex situation that nearly beggars belief.  But this was the reality in which they worked.


One of the oft resurrected chestnuts involves Golda Meir's famous statement of condolence on the death of the pope in 1958.  Yes, the Israeli foreign minister made a profoundly moving statement expressing the gratitude of the Jewish people for what Pius did during the war years; however, I see and read nothing that points to any understanding of things that Meir would have known nothing about, such as the conversations held between the nuncio to France in the early summer of 1942 as the massive round-up of non-French Jews in France began. And it is difficult reading because of the diplomatic tight-rope that Valeri walked, that Maglione walked and that ultimately, Pius walked.  


How do you deal with statements in ADSS 8.449 where Pierre Laval, the vicious Jew-hating Vichy minister tells the nuncio that according to Otto Abetz, the de-facto German ambassador to France, it was for the pope alone to speak on the Church's response to antisemitic laws and actions, not the nuncio?  Why did Laval say that unless he and, presumably Abetz, knew that Pius would be extremely reluctant to speak publicly?  And on what was that based, if it was true?  The statement was made a month after the Dutch bishops' protest in July 1942 and at the time of the protest sermons of Cardinal Gerlier, Bishops Saliege and Theas (ADSS 8.452, 454, 463) and before the Brazilian ambassador's initiative among the allied diplomats in the autumn of the same year to get Pius to speak out clearly and condemn the murder of European Jewry.  The outcome of the Dutch protest was the round-up and deportation of "non-Aryan Christians" including Edith and Rosa Stein.  The outcomes of the French protests was the opposite.  The deportations continued but with significant passive and growing active resistance from the French and evidence of major hiding operations, especially in the unoccupied zone.  (See the work of Lucien Steinberg and Renee Bedarida as two examples)

What did Pius know?  All of the above.  He also knew of the actions of French Protestant Christians, especially the work of Pastor Marc Boegner. I believe, based on the evidence available so far, that as far as France was concerned, the actions of the local bishops - six out of a hierarchy of over 100 - was judged sufficient to let the Vichy regime know what the pope thought about the persecution of the Jews.  And given the reaction of both Vichy and the Germans, the statements appear to have had the desired effect.  It is a simplistic answer, but I lack time to go further.


If all that seems confusing and convoluted, it is.  And this is why I get concerned when I see blog entries such as the one that follows in the next post, that make things look so simple.  If only they were.  And just in case I did not make the point clear enough, the reference to ADSS is to published material, not material from archives that have not been released.  So, if making my way through the available material is so fraught with difficulty and lack of clarity, I doubt the release of archives in 2014 will necessarily make the matter that much clearer.


On a personal note.  I was one of the participants at the 2009 symposium at Yad Vashem to look at recent developments in the study of Pius XII and the Holocaust.  There were no raised voices.  There was a lot of shared opinion and discussion of new material from the archives.  There was a sense that we are moving forward.  I only wish that the apologists and their fellow-travellers would read what we have written, instead of believing every conspiracy theory that flies their way.  


The change of the text next to the portrait of Pius XII is indicative of historians doing their job well.  It is a slow process.

Bishop Jules Saliege 

1870-1956

Bishop Pierre Theas

1894-1977

Pastor Marc Boegner

1881-1970

All three were honoured by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

Reflections on ADSS Volume 11

I finished reading my way through the "conventional" war as recorded in the Actes et Documents.  Volumes 1, 4, 5, 7 and 11 cover the diplomatic activity of the Secretariat of State of Pope Pius XII throughout the 1939-1945 war.  What follows are a series of thoughts.  They are ruminations rather than any form of academic exercise.

As the editors attempted to find a way through the millions of documents they found that they it would be easier for the purposes of presenting a portrait of the activities of Pius, Cardinal Maglione, Monsignors Tardini and Montini, to name a few, if they divided the material into two distinct sections.  The volumes cited above describe the diplomatic activities of the Holy See, its engagements with governments and government agents: Allied, Axis and Neutral.  The remaining volumes deal with the letters of the pope to the German bishops (2) and Poland and the Baltic States (3 parts 1 and 2).  In order to deal with the Vatican's relief attempts and the growing awareness of the murder of European Jewry, the editors collated their selection of documents in volumes 6, 8, 9 and 10.

What did I learn through a close reading of the "diplomatic war" in Volume 11?

The volume opens in January 1944 and the focus remains firmly centred on Rome until several weeks after liberation in June.  Preoccupation with having the city declared "open" takes up many documents as does the energy spent on enlisting support throughout the Catholic world in the media.  There are some references to the Via Rasella partisan action in March 1944 and hints that point to knowledge of the vicious German reprisals carried out in the Ardeatine Caves.  As the days of German occupation drew to their close, the Vatican was keen to ensure that the departure of the Germans and the arrival of the Allies was orderly.  Apart from the quite reasonable and pastoral concern to preserve the city and its people, there was the fear that communist partisans would take advantage of the confusion and chaos and attempt to seize power.  Pius did not want that to happen.

Once Rome was liberated stories of the French colonial Moroccan troops, the Goumiers, began to circulate.  The Goumiers had a reputation for hard fighting and, more darkly, for taking seriously their belief in their right to rape, loot and pillage.  Thousands of Italian women and girls were savagely raped in the months up to June 1944.  Pius's plea to General Mark Clarke to keep "coloured" troops out of Rome only makes sense if it is a reference to the Goumiers.

Volume 11 also refers to the exit of the Allied diplomats immured in the Vatican and their replacement by the Axis ministers.  Some members of the German embassy were not quick enough leaving their residences in Rome and were arrested by the Allies and interned in Taormina, much to the impotent fury of Berlin.

In August, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, the pope's secretary of state died of heart disease.  Pius took over Maglione's role personally for the rest of his pontificate.

There is mention of the Warsaw uprising in August 1944, always coloured by the growing fear of the Red Army's march westward.  The fear of communism is never far away and it grows in intensity as the war neared its end.  News from Poland, the Baltic States, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the eastern provinces of Germany is nearly always "bad".

As France is liberated the nuncio in Vichy, Valerio Valeri returns to Paris to find General de Gaulle is determined to cut all ties with bishops who, in his opinion, collaborated with the Vichy regime of, the now German held, Marshal Petain, including Valeri himself.  Rome attempts to calm de Gaulle to no avail.  When the nuncio in Argentina, Giuseppe Fietta, declined the move to Paris, the role fell to the Apostolic Delegate to Greece and Turkey, Monsignor Angelo Roncalli who sped to France towards the end of 1944.

Gustavo Testa, the representative of the Holy See in Athens, sent several reports describing the descent into civil war once the Germans had left Greece.  It makes for incredibly sad reading.

The last months of the war are described through documents that show the Vatican sensitive to the peace-feelers put out by some Germans and Mussolini's rump-fascist Salo Republic.  There is the positive response to FDR's call for an international body that would work for peace in the world, the genesis of the United Nations.  Pius expressed his happiness to cooperate in such a venture.

Finally, as communication with much of central and eastern Europe ends because of the collapse of nearly all social order, Pius expresses his deep personal sorrow to Eleanor Roosevelt on the death of FDR in mid-April 1945.  The last documents are the pope's telegrams expressing his joy at the liberation and return of peace to Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg - echoing his telegrams to the heads of state of each country in May 1940 when Germany invaded them.

What do these documents show?  On their own, they demonstrate the high volume of accurate information arriving in Rome and being responded to by the Vatican.  They were very well informed.  The texts also show that Rome seized every opportunity to save Rome from the fate that had befallen other European capitals and cities while also demonstrating that no talk of peace from either side would be dismissed.

There are levels of unreality throughout.  The phobia about communism in the west and particularly in Italy was without foundation.  The fear of communism in the east had an historical basis but ignored what was happening in reality.  The Polish bishops quite often found that the Soviet-backed Lublin government needed the help of the Church to rebuild the country for the simple reason that it was the only social institution that had survived five and half years of German occupation.  What the long-term aim of the Lublin politicians was going to be cannot be surmised from these texts and we must be wary of hindsight.  I am not saying the communists were well-intentioned towards Catholicism (or Orthodoxy for that matter) but Stalin did see a difference between the system in Russia and the need for some adaptation outside Russian borders.

There are also developments in understanding as well.  At the beginning of the war, Rome was still suspicious of liberal, popular democracy.  By war's end, democracy was seen as a force for good in the world.  This was no doubt helped through the positive relations Pius enjoyed with FDR and the lived experience of liberation by the United States Fifth Army.  Pius' embrace of the idea of the United Nations was also a major step forward in the Vatican's understanding of its place in the world and its relations with "the world".

All this must now be placed alongside the next phase of my study of ADSS - the victims.  My generally positive assessment of the Vatican's position in liberated Europe in the early summer of 1945 needs to be weighed against its role in working to help and save the millions of people displaced by the war.  This next part of the story will be far more complex and shaded in more hues of grey than the diplomatic war.