Jacques Kornberg "The Pope's Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War"

Jacques Kornberg's book, "The Pope's Dilemma" (2015, University of Toronto Press) arrived on my desk a few weeks before the end of the second school term here in Australia. That meant it would have to wait until exams were marked, reports written and students sent home to their parents.  And what a wait it was.  I had read the table of contents, glanced through the introduction, made a note of scholars cited in the index and resolved to resist the urge to read until I had sufficient time to do so without interruption.  I am happy to write that I was successful.

This is a significant work that advances our understanding of Eugenio Pacelli in several significant ways.  

Firstly, Kornberg is a master of the topic; his erudition is obvious from the opening pages.  This led me to believe I was in the hands of a well-informed, learned and balanced guide, who had a profound grasp of the various disciplines necessary to make serious comment on Pius XII. He demonstrates with clear and logical writing the arguments of the current historical arguments and debates as well as the claims of the "canonise him now" apologists. In order to this Kornberg has immersed himself into the available archival material, especially the Actes et Documents, as well as the latest current historical research from both sides of the debates.  And while the opening of the Vatican archives for the pontificate of Pius XII remains in the future, Kornberg, as do other historians, believes the reader has enough evidence upon which to make a sound judgement through use of the available material.

Secondly, Kornberg demonstrates a detailed familiarity with the vast literature on Pius, as well as his predecessors, Pius XI, Benedict XV and Leo XIII, and his successors John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II.  It was clear to see how Kronberg linked elements from Pius XII into broader papal politics and policies, following equally clear lines within Catholic theology and ecclesiology of the late-Tridentine era.  

Thirdly, Kornberg makes lucid and learned comment on the history of fascism, National Socialism, the relationship between the Catholic Church in Germany and the Nazi regime, the Concordat and the demise of the Catholic Centre Party.  Context is never sacrificed, and while at times, the reader might be tempted to skip a few pages here and there because of their familiarity with the subject matter, it is definitely worthwhile reading the whole text.

I believe Kornberg's most significant contribution lies in the explanation of a politics of consistency from Leo XIII through to Pius XI and then into the papacy of Pius XII. He challenges one of the consensus views of Pius XII, namely that he stood apart from other popes in his diplomatic approach to crises and his silence in the face of atrocities.  Surely Pius XI was a model of outspoken language that the more phlegmatic Pacelli sought to interpret and re-cast in more calming words?  A lengthy quote from page 186 established Kronberg's thesis.  I found it compelling.

At least until fairly recently the consensus was the Pius XII stood alone, that he brought baggage to the papacy that other popes did not, that his personality and training were ill-suited to the times ... Domenico Cardinal Tardini, Pius XII's undersecretary of state ... believed Pacelli's temperament made him a natural fence-sitter: he sought to "please everyone and displease no one" ... In keeping with this view of Pius XII, Michael Phayer argues that Pacelli's predecessor, Pius XI, far more passionate, forceful, and outspoken, would have responded differently to the destruction of European Jewry,  in keeping with the enormity of the crime.  These assessments of Pius XI are just beginning to change in the light of additional research.  Phayer later agreed with historians Gerhard Besier and Peter Godman that Pius XI was as diffident as his successor when it came to acting against "racism, totalitarianism, and Nazism."   ... I will argue that the foreign policies of modern pope just prior to Pius XII - Leo XIII, Benedict XV and Pius XI - in the face of war and even mass atrocities were all of a piece.

This chapter is the setting for the final chapters in the book that examine the priorities of Pius XII's action or inaction in the face of the mass murder and torture on unprecedented levels.  In his conclusion, Kornberg's assessment of Pius is chilling, but the process that brings him to this point is so clear and well-plotted, that I was hard pressed to find reason not to share his conclusion.

Pope Pius XII's responses, or lack of response, during the 1939-1945 war, were successful in his execution of his perceived role as Pastor Pastorum - shepherd of the shepherds -  and the visible head of Christ's church on earth.  He successfully defended the rights of the church in the face of the dangers of fascism, Nazism and Communism.  The institution survived the war; the hierarchy was still in place, churches were opened, clergy ministered to their people and the sacraments were celebrated.  However, Pius' non-defence of the moral norms and ethical principals that lie at the heart of Catholic Christianity are judged a failure.  Kornberg cites Pacelli's own words to lay the charge against him.  In his 1939 encyclical Summi Pontificatus, Pius said he would not and could not remain silent in the face of crimes against divine law.  His silence in the face of the mass-murder of Catholic Poles, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic and Orthodox Roma and Sinta, and then the genocide of European Jewry seals Kornberg's argument.

This is an important book that gives us possibly, the most important work to date on Pius XII within the contexts of the early twentieth century papacy and its relationship with the modern world.  It is a valuable complimentary volume to other works on Pius XII.  Professor Kornberg has done us a great service in his book. It is accessible to the professional historian well-versed in the study of Pacelli, and, more importantly, is accessible to the lay reader who wants to know more about a man, a pope, about whom there appears never enough said.

Emeritus Professor Jacques Kornberg

The Colonialist Papacy - it has to be fiction because it certainly is not fact!

This column appeared in the Turkish right-wing and pro-government Daily Sabah.

I am willing to take a guess that this flight of fancy was prompted by Pope Francis' homily last week on the occasion of the Centenary of the Armenian Genocide.  The Turkish government responded with some less than helpful comments.  I find it somewhat ironical that Francis' use of the word "genocide" was from a reference made by Pope St John Paul II in 2001. (See below)

Ihsan Aktas has written an appalling piece of non-historical propaganda.  He places all the wrongs of western colonialism, and I agree, there are many, at the feet of the papacy.  How bizarre.  Using the time-tested method of "cherry picking" the pieces of historical data that best suit the predetermined conclusion, Mr Aktas attempts to make a judgement in a few hundred words on issues that need far greater depth and attention. He appears woefully ignorant not only of the role of the pope within the church, but of the entire complex history of Pius XII and the Holocaust.  Enough said.

In Australia an Assyrian Memorial in the western Sydney suburb of Bonnyrigg was vandalised with anti-Assyrian, anti-Armenian and antisemitic graffiti.  Efforts by some local Turkish community groups to prevent the memorial's construction in 2010  were frustrated because of considerable community and government support for the memorial.

Turkey has nothing to lose by acknowledging the history of the Armenian genocide.  Denial and denialism only fuels more tension, hurt and nurtures hatreds.  Turkey has everything to gain by acknowledging the past; it will help heal old wounds and promote openness and understanding and create a way forward that is honest and built on truth.  2015 is an opportunity not to be missed; but the language from Istanbul suggests the old pattern of denial remains firmly entrenched. 

And in today's Sydney Morning Herald there is an article on the Turkish Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu​, saying that the European Community's call for Turkey to acknowledge the atrocities against the Armenians as genocide is tantamount to an act of racism.  Again the Pope's comments figured in the article.

So what did Francis say?

Dear Armenian brothers and sisters,

Dear brothers and sisters.

On a number of occasions I have spoken of our time as a time of war, a third world war which is being fought piecemeal, one in which we daily witness savage crimes, brutal massacres and senseless destruction. Sadly, today too we hear the muffled and forgotten cry of so many of our defenceless brothers and sisters who, on account of their faith in Christ or their ethnic origin, are publicly and ruthlessly put to death – decapitated, crucified, burned alive – or forced to leave their homeland.

Today too we are experiencing a sort of genocide created by general and collective indifference, by the complicit silence of Cain, who cries out: “What does it matter to me? Am I my brother’s keeper?” (cf. Gen 4:9; Homily in Redipuglia, 13 September 2014).

In the past century our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies. The first, which is widely considered “the first genocide of the twentieth century” (John Paul II and Karekin II, Common Declaration, Etchmiadzin, 27 September 2001), struck your own Armenian people, the first Christian nation, as well as Catholic and Orthodox Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks. Bishops and priests, religious, women and men, the elderly and even defenceless children and the infirm were murdered. The remaining two were perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism. And more recently there have been other mass killings, like those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia. It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood. It seems that the enthusiasm generated at the end of the Second World War has dissipated and is now disappearing. It seems that the human family has refused to learn from its mistakes caused by the law of terror, so that today too there are those who attempt to eliminate others with the help of a few and with the complicit silence of others who simply stand by. We have not yet learned that “war is madness”, “senseless slaughter” (cf. Homily in Redipuglia, 13 September 2014).

Dear Armenian Christians, today, with hearts filled with pain but at the same time with great hope in the risen Lord, we recall the centenary of that tragic event, that immense and senseless slaughter whose cruelty your forebears had to endure. It is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honour their memory, for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester. Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it!

I greet you with affection and I thank you for your witness.

With gratitude for his presence, I greet Mr Serž Sargsyan, the President of the Republic of Armenia.

My cordial greeting goes also to my brother Patriarchs and Bishops: His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians; His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, His Beatitude Nerses Bedros XIX, Patriarch of Cilicia of Armenian Catholics; and Catholicosates of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Patriarchate of the Armenian Catholic Church.

In the firm certainty that evil never comes from God, who is infinitely good, and standing firm in faith, let us profess that cruelty may never be considered God’s work and, what is more, can find absolutely no justification in his Holy Name. Let us continue this celebration by fixing our gaze on Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, victor over death and evil!

Pope Francis with Armenian Catholic Patriarchs 2015

ANZAC Day and Armenia 1915-2015.

Last week my colleague, Vicken Babkenian, published this essay on John Mendaue's blog Pearls and Irritations.  Vicken kindly gave permission for me to publish his excellent essay on my blog.

I offer it in the context of doing what historians do; namely to seek the truth of our past through thorough and diligent research.  Vicken has done this and continues to do it.  He writes of terrible things with a clear and objective tone.  There is no hysteria, no recriminations and no aggression.  He tells the story as it was.  There will be reaction and most of it will be along the lines of historical discourse, debating over interpretation, nuance and clarification.  This is what historians also do.  However there will most likely be other reactions.  These come from sources that have nothing to do with history, but with "denialism".  The only fitting reply is to ignore them and not engage.  I have encountered this with the Holocaust, I encounter it with Pope Pius XII "canonise him now" people, I am sure I will encounter it in other areas as well.

In 2005 I visited Turkey and spent a week on a history tour that incorporated Gallipoli.  Of the many happy memories I have of this beautiful country, of which I saw only a fraction, the most significant were encounters with Turkish people who showed wonderful hospitality.  I remember the driver of our tour bus who had very little English, coming up beside me as I stood looking over the beach at ANZAC Cove.  Without a word he pressed a Gallipoli pine nut into my hand, closed my fingers over it and walked away. His gesture left me with tears.  

My grandfather, Walter Henry O'Shea landed on that little beach sometime on the morning of 25 April 1915.  He was there for the entire campaign until the evacuation order was given in December.  90 years later I became the first of my family to stand there and honour his memory.  In a week or so my sister will join thousands of Australians to honour granddad and the other thousands who fought, survived and died on that peninsula in this centenary year of the landings.  I honour the soldiers of the Ottoman Empire who fought at Gallipoli; men from across the empire including Turks.

Turkey and Australia have enjoyed a mutual and warm relationship since those days.  Australians of Turkish descent have contributed to the multi-cultural and multi-faith fabric of Australian life; they have enriched us.  Acknowledgement of our histories can only make us stronger and more resilient in the face of attacks from the forces of denialism.  Accepting as historical fact events that occurred in the past is one of the first steps towards healing.  This was the point Pope Francis made at the Liturgy in St Peter's Basilica last Sunday to mark the Centenary of the Armenian Genocide.


I encourage you to read Vicken's essay.

Leading up to the Gallipoli centenary, a growing trend emerged in Australia of presenting the ‘other side’ of the story. From popular books, official histories, films and academic conferences, the ‘Turkish’ perspective of Gallipoli became widely told.[1] According to this perspective, as illustrated in a recent article by Dr Jennifer Lawless, the allied landing at Gallipoli was an invasion of the ‘Turkish homeland’ and by the end of the campaign, many more ‘Turks’ (87,000) than Anzacs (8700) died.[2] The campaign is portrayed as an almost wholly Turkish and Australian affair, contributing to the birth of both nations and a symbol of a centenary of friendship.[3] A deeper understanding of the history, however, reveals that many of these narratives are anachronistic interpretations, promoting nationalist agendas with fundamental errors and omissions.

In reality, when the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, they were part of an Anglo- French invasion of the Ottoman Empire, not Turkey. The republic of Turkey was not established until 1923. Like the British and French imperial forces, the Ottoman Army reflected the multi-ethnic make up of the Ottoman Empire. While most of the officers were ethnic Turks, the army included large numbers of Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Circassians and Jews. According to Australian military historian Bill Sellars ‘two thirds of the troops who made up Colonel Mustafa Kemal’s 19th Division that faced the first wave of the Allied invasion were Syrian Arabs’.[4] A more comparable casualty comparison should be made between the empires and not ‘Turks’ v Anzacs.

During the war, the Ottoman Empire was led by a dictatorial triumvirate of Young Turks – Enver, Talaat and Djemal. Since coming to power in a violent coup in 1913, the Young Turks had been pursuing a policy of ethnic and religious homogenisation of the empire in order to create a ‘Turkey for the Turks’. The Young Turk participation in the First World War on the side of Germany allowed them to speedily accomplish this goal under the cover of war.

‘Gallipoli’, derived from the Greek word for ‘beautiful city’, was historically a Greek peninsula but had been absorbed by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. Just two weeks prior to the Anzac landings, the Ottoman authorities deported about 22,000 of the peninsula’s native Greek population into the interior of Anatolia (current day Turkey). [5]Many would die of harsh conditions. This was only a precursor to the larger persecutions to follow. Triggered by what many scholars argue was the impending landing by the Anglo-French forces on the Gallipoli peninsula, the Young Turk government arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals in the capital of the Empire, Constantinople (now Istanbul), on 24 April 1915. This marked the beginning of what Henry Morgenthau, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1915, described as a ‘campaign of race extermination’. As a representative of a neutral nation, Morgenthau stood at a critical juncture in the flow of information. His key informants were US diplomats, missionaries and businessmen stationed throughout the Ottoman Empire.

In almost every town and village in the Empire, the Armenian population was arrested and deported by orders from the central government in Constantinople. The men were in most cases killed just outside their towns and villages. A much worse fate awaited the women and children. After being uprooted from their homes, they were forced to walk southwards in huge convoys to the burning deserts of northern Syria. Most would die of starvation, murder and disease. In the Ottoman war theatre, Anzacs witnessed the Armenian tragedy—some even helped rescue survivors of the death marches. Many Anzac prisoners captured by the Ottoman Army were held in abandoned Armenian churches and homes and they became key eyewitnesses to the unfolding events.

Every major newspaper in Australia covered the genocide with regularity—the Melbourne Age having published more than 40 articles on the event in 1915 alone. Headings such as ‘Armenians Butchered’, ‘Million Armenians Massacred’ and ‘More Armenians Massacred— girls sold in open market’ were indicative of the tone of the articles being published around this time.[6] By December 1915, the United States consul in Syria reported that some one million Armenians had died and another half-a-million destitute refugees were scattered in or around his consular district. Australian prisoner of war, Private Daniel Creedon of the 9th Battalion AIF, wrote in his diary just two months later: ‘The people say that the Turks killed 11⁄4 million Armenians.’ Creedon was held captive in an isolated internment camp in the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia and died a few months after he made his diary entry. His figure was close to the figure accepted for the death toll of the massacres and suggests that the magnitude of the outrage was known and discussed by the Anzac prisoners of war.
The story of Armenian suffering evoked a strong humanitarian response in Australia at the time leading to the establishment of the Armenian Relief Fund, which began in Victoria in 1915, spread throughout the country, and continued its work for over a decade. The Victorian state war council recognised the Armenian fund as a ‘patriotic fund’ – one considered as having been formed for the purpose of supporting Australia’s allies as well as its own soldiers. The relief movement culminated in the establishment of an Australian-run orphanage for some 1700 Armenian orphans in Beirut, Lebanon.

When the war ended, the victorious Allies arrested over a hundred Turkish officials for their role in the ‘Armenian massacres’ and the ‘ill-treatment’ of Allied (including Anzac) prisoners of war. However, the subsequent rise of a new Turkish nationalist movement headed by Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) succeeded in revoking the post-war Treaty of Sevres which had stipulated an international trial of the Turkish offenders. When the new Turkish republic was

established in 1923, the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire had become a mostly homogenous Turkish nation state.

By the mid-1930s, the Armenian genocide had largely faded from the world’s collective memory. It was an observation not missed by Adolph Hitler when he made his infamous remark in 1939: ‘Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost 49 members of his family during the Holocaust, coined the word ‘genocide’ in 1944. Lemkin cited the Armenian case as a defining example of what the word meant. International jurist Geoffrey Robertson calls the event an ‘inconvenient genocide’ because recognising and remembering the crime in many countries often results in harsh diplomatic reactions from Turkey. In the case of Australia, the Turkish foreign ministry banned some NSW MPs from visiting commemorations at Gallipoli after having voted in favour of an Armenian genocide resolution in the NSW parliament in 2013.

It was not until 1967, some 50 years after Gallipoli, that Turkey and Australia formally established bilateral relations. Since then, the relationship between the two nations has developed rapidly with frequent high-level visits and expanding bilateral trade and investment.[7] On the issue of the Armenian genocide, the Australian federal government has been faced with a moral dilemma. For decades, the government has maintained a policy of non involvement in ‘this sensitive debate’. However in 2014, for the first time, Australia’s foreign minister, Julia Bishop, expressed her Liberal government’s position on the issue in a letter to the Australian Turkish Advocacy Alliance organisation. She wrote that the Australian government does ‘not ... recognise these events as “genocide”’ adding further that ‘Australia attaches great importance to its relationship with Turkey, which is underpinned by our shared history at Gallipoli, and by the recent cooperation in the G20’.[8] Diplomatic cables between Ankara and Canberra obtained under Freedom of Information laws revealed that last year the matter arose in a letter from Ms Bishop to her Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu. Ms Bishop wrote that ‘recognising the important interests at stake for both countries, I assure you that there has been no decision to change the long-standing position of successive Australian governments on this issue’.

It seems that our nation’s collective memory of Gallipoli and the government’s position on the Armenian genocide are influenced more by current economic and political relations than a true reflection of the past. If, as some historians have suggested, that telling the honest truth about Australia’s First World War experience is the best way to honour our war dead, than it’s time for a more truthful representation of the ‘other side’ of Gallipoli.

Vicken Babkenian is an independent researcher for the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney. He is the author of a number of articles on Australia’s humanitarian response to the Armenian genocide.

[1] Russell Crowe’s movie, The Water Diviner is an example.
[2] See Dr Jennifer Lawless, ‘Gallipoli: A Turkish Perspective’, Teaching History (NSW), March 2015.

[3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-28/friendship-wall-unveiled-at-auburn-for-gallipol- centenary/6270026
[4] http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/01/200849135129326810.html
[5] http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/Greeks-of-Gallipoli-1915.pdf
[6]http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=armenian+massacres&exactPhrase=&anyWord s=&notWords=&requestHandler=&dateFrom=1915-05-01&dateTo=1923-12- 31&sortby=dateAsc
[7] http://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/turkey/Pages/turkey-country-brief.aspx
[8] http://www.dailysabah.com/politics/2014/07/23/australian-fm-armenian-case-not- genocide 

Generalplan Ost - what the Pope could not have known

What the pope could not know and did not know.

The General Plan for the East

As the German-led war “in the east” unfolded with ever-increasing severity and brutality the position of the church in north-central and northeastern Europe grew more and more precarious.  We have seen through ADSS volumes 3.1 and 3.2 how the German occupation imposed varying degrees of terror and insecurity on local populations based on the National Socialist bio-political worldview.  Throughout the war years the response of the Catholic Church through its bishops and other religious leasers also varied in response to the level of local terror.  And these responses formed the basis of much of the information that was sent to Rome. 

For many of the persecuted the realities of daily survival precluded the luxury of rationalizing the “why” of Nazi terror.  In fact most of the leaders of the Catholic Church in Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States were at a loss to understand the murderous hostility shown to the church, even if their religious-cultural histories allowed a measure of “understanding” of German actions against the Jews.

Pope Pius XII was certainly not the only one who did not grasp the extent of the murderous intent of the German plans for Eastern Europe and European Russia.  It was not until after the war that the first information of a systematic plan to reshape Eastern Europe was revealed; firstly at the Nuremburg Trial in the testimony of former SS Standartenführer Hans Elich (1901-1991), one of the planners of what was known as Generalplan Ost (Master Plan for the East).

Generalplan Ost (GPO) grew out of the Nazi concept of lebensraum (living space) an idea that Hitler had spoken of regularly since the 1920s.  In its simplest form, lebensraum was the belief that Germany’s growing population needed more living space.  That “living space” would come from “the East” in general, and Poland and European Russia in particular.  Since in the Nazi Weltanschauung most of the peoples of Eastern Europe were one or other members of different untermenschen (sub-human races) they had no permanent place in the New Order.  Their fate was either a form of servitude for the Germans who would in course settle the new lebensraum or they would be expelled.

Planning the GPO began around January 1940 and continued through a number of revisions until late 1942 when the emerging crisis at Stalingrad brought the planning to an abrupt halt.

The GPO was executed under the supervision of the Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) and the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) with constant reference to the Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler.  A government planning team of this nature would not have met without the explicit approval of Hitler. 

GPO was supposed to work on two actions; movement of desirable people in, and movement of undesirable people out.  Himmler envisioned GPO would take about 30 years to implement but shortly afterwards insisted that the program be completed in 20 years.  It was his hope that by the end of that period the Greater German Reich would not only be territorially huge, but it would be populated by a majority of Aryan Germans and tiny minorities of non-Aryan groups would serve the Herrenvolk (Master Race) with unquestioning obedience.  GPO statistics suggested that an estimated 4.5 million ethnic Germans would be settled in the conquered territories over the lifespan of the plan.

Part one of the GPO was the expulsion of racial undesirables in the newly conquered land (1939-1941) and the settlement of ethnic Germans in their place.  Over the three years the GPO was in operation about 850,000 Germans were settled “in the East”, mostly in Poland and the Baltic States, but some in Ukraine and Crimea.  Ultimately the GPO forecast a future population of about 23 million of which 5.3 million were existing Germans, a residual German population of 5.4 million and 12.4 million German immigrants from the Reich.

The second part of the GPO was the removal of “alien races”.  Czeslaw Madajczyk’s study of GPO, General Plan East: Hitler’s Master Plan for Expansion (1962) sets out the percentages of local populations slated for removal and / or destruction.  The welfare of populations targeted for “resettlement” were not a concern of the architects of the New Order.

An estimated 45 million people were to be removed from Eastern Europe and European Russia:

Jews – 100%

Latgalians (indigenous Latvians) – 100%

Poles – 80-85%

Lithuanians – 85%

Russians – 75%

White Russians – 75%

Ukrainians – 65%

Latvians, Estonians, Czechs – 50%

The remaining 14 million people were to be judged for racial suitability and Germanisation or kept for slave labour for the German settlers.

GPO planners were under no illusions that the scale of expulsions would result in deaths on a previously unimagined scale but incorporated this into their planning. 

Deliberate murder of a population was only used against the Jews after the summer of 1941 and, in that regard, was the only part of the GPO that approached its target goal.  Originally Jews were, like other undesirables, to be expelled into Siberia.

The implementation of the plan stalled in February 1943 after the loss of Stalingrad and the call for Total War before it was “shelved” as Germany faced defeat.  However, if “success” was to be judged by the number of non-German dead in the area proposed for the GPO, then the plan attained some of the goals its authors intended. The total number of deaths in Eastern Europe and European Russia exceeded over 30 million men, women and children.

From H-Net: Simon Levis Sullam on Italy and the Holocaust

I am a subscriber to H-Net for a number of threads.   This article below was sent in by its author, Simon Levis Sullam.  Interested readers may wish to subscribe to this excellent news service here.

Sullam's article in an interesting and, I believe, important context-setting exercise for our continued study of Pope Pius XII. He was a Roman and an Italian who shared many of the social and cultural attitudes of the time.  Sullam's thesis that the largely accepted theory that Italy's behaviour during the Holocaust as it was implemented in the country between 1943 and 1945 should be challenged with historical rigour is to be applauded.  He cites several historians whose work sets out compelling reasons to dismantle the mythologies surrounding Italian involvement in the implementation of the Final Solution without neglecting the genuinely heroic role played by many ordinary Italians who put their lives at risk to help save their Jewish neighbours.

Simon Levis Sullam

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The following is a piece I wrote for this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day
(27 January).  I sent it recently to various Italian newspapers. It deals
with the Italian involvement in the Holocaust and specifically with the
use of the category of genocide in writing the history of the period
1943-45. This approach, in my view, can allow the historian to say - and
should bring the Italian (and not only Italian) citizen to consider -
that, contrary to wide-spread common knowledge, ordinary Italians were
indeed involved as direct actors (co-protagonists) in the destruction of
the Jews of Europe. Despite many important books and much research
available today, I believe the story of ordinary Italians during the
Holocaust (ordinary men and women, in Christopher Browining's sense)
remains to be written in much greater detail.

Simon Levis Sullam

January 27, Remembrance Day: ordinary Italians and genocide 1943-45,

by Simon Levis Sullam*

What is a genocide and how does it occur? This is a question that we
Italians can and should ask as Remembrance Day (January 27th) approaches
again this year.  We should ask ourselves if what we remember and how we
remember is enough. And, we should take into consideration the sense of
saturation that this institutional recurrence can provoke in some of us. 
Can we try to ask some new historiographical questions this year, seventy
years after the beginnings of the deportation from Italy?  Is the category
of genocide useful for the historical interpretation of the Holocaust in
Italy, and specifically of the Italian participation in the deportations
and extermination of Jews in 1943-45?

In recent years the best historiography on the Holocaust has been
developing in growing relationship with research on genocides (from the
Armenian to the Cambodian genocide, from Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia).
This has allowed us to compare, and at the same time, to better define and
contextualize  the “historical singularity of Auschwitz.” It has also cast
new light on the different national contexts and on the dynamics in which
the “Final Solution” was carried out: to compare does not mean to dwell on
similarities but to highlight specificities.


Twenty-five years ago, the historian of Fascism Renzo De Felice said in an
interview with Corriere della Sera, that Italy was outside  the “shadow of
the Holocaust” – and this phrase became notorious. Such a view – still
largely held as credible among the general public and even among
historians – can hardly be considered tenable today, especially if
Remembrance Day, as established by Italian law in 2000, is truly to make
sense. De Felice wrote, “Italian Fascism is immune from the charge of
genocide.” With this precise formula he meant to exclude not only Italian
liability, but even Fascist responsibility in the Holocaust.


The first and strongest refutation of De Felice’s position came a few
years later with the publication in 1991 of the monumental book, Il Libro
della Memoria (The Book of Memory), edited by Liliana Picciotto for the
CDEC Foundation (Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica
Contemporanea). The Libro della memoria provided a list of names and
biographical information about the individual fate of approximately 8,000
Jews who were victims of the Holocaust in Italy. The book also contained
precise details on the arrest of Jews carried out by Italians between 1943
and 1945. In 1995 David Bidussa drew on these data – and the numbers until
now neglected, revealed that the arrests were mainly carried out by
Italians – for his short but influential study, aimed precisely at
deconstructing from a historical perspective “the myth of the good
Italian”. Drawing on, among other evidence, the number of arrests in
Picciotto’s work, Bidussa revealed a part of Italy’s history – the period
of Fascist extremism and collaborationism of the Republic of Salò, from
1943 to 1945 – that resulted not only in the suppression of the Jews’
rights, but also in the direct Italian participation in the extermination.

Since 1988, Michele Sarfatti’s research on Mussolini’s racism and on
Fascism and the Jews, together with a series of studies on the Italian
path to anti-Semitism (which still continue), have helped rewrite a
history that clearly did not begin only in 1938, at German instigation,
nor can it be understood reductively as the “Nazification” of Italian
Fascism, as some also recently still claim.  It would be enough in this
regard to turn one’s attention, as some historians have been doing for a
while, to the history of Italian colonialism, which began well before
Fascism, so that we can understand that we Italians have had no need of
instructions or models when we chose to use violence.

But what can we achieve today by analyzing the deportations of Italian
Jews between 1943 and 1945, the arrest and imprisonment of thousands of
young and old people, women and children, within the context of the
international historiography on genocide?

First of all, historians concur today that genocides do not take place
exclusively in colonial or ex-colonial contexts or in conquered
territories. We cannot imagine them as taking place only in distant
places, for different reasons unfamiliar to us (Cambodia or Rwanda, or
even the Armenian-Turkish border or Tito’s decaying regime with the rising
inter-ethnic conflict in post-1989 Yugoslavia). Indeed, there is an
intrinsic relationship between intimacy and genocide: genocide actually
strikes our next-door neighbors – thus it can involve us and it does
involve us all – as Jan T. Gross has shown in his book, Neighbors (2001),
dedicated to the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish
compatriots in 1941, before the arrival of the Germans.

But on the Italian territory, one might object, no massacre took place;
not at the hands of Italians. This is generally true if we consider only
physical extermination by mass shooting – as in the first phase of the
Holocaust in Eastern Europe (readers may recall on this, for instance,
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, 1996) – or the industrial
extermination in gas chambers that took place in the heartland and at the
hands of the most civilized, (Judeo-)Christian, Europe.

However, historians of genocide such as Donald Bloxham or Jacques Semelin
have explained that, in addition to detention in prison camps and
consignment of people in the hands of “willing executioners” (or even
consignment to an Eichmann-style “desk executioner”), preexisting behavior
can become genocidal acts, especially in the context of war.  This
behavior includes the identification, arrest and separation of groups on
the basis of ethnicity, religion, social difference or other criteria (and
let’s not neglect perceived physical or mental differences, one of the
first criterion for the extermination policy that started the Holocaust in
Europe).  Acts of this nature clearly concerned the tens, hundreds,
perhaps thousands of Italians who contributed to the design, organization
and implementation, on political, bureaucratic and police bases, of the
“Final Solution of the Jewish question” in Italy from 1943 to 45, after
the Italian Social Republic had declared the Italian Jews “foreigners” and
“enemies.”

Ordinary Italians in the police, the armed forces and among the volunteers
of the revived Fascist Party, but also ordinary citizens who were simple
collaborators and informers (as Mimmo Franzinelli documented in an essay
included in La Shoah in Italia, 2010, 2 volumes by various authors), got
up one morning in the autumn of 1943 or the winter, or the summer of 1944,
shaved or did their make-up (there were women executioners directly
involved), drank their coffee, greeted their families and then went out to
hunt for Jews who had been their next-door neighbors, their classmates,
their colleagues (perhaps their friends?). They seized property,
imprisoned Jews, transferring them to transit camps and delivering them,
finally, into German hands. They sent these Jews, not to some “unknown
destination,”  but consciously, to certain death, as Liliana Picciotto
began to shown in her L’alba ci colse come un tradimento (Dawn Caught Us
As a Betrayal, 2011).

Although it is a duty to remember the thousands of Italians who saved
their fellow Jewish citizens, individual stories of ordinary Italians who
participated in the genocide – Italy’s history inside the shadow of the
Holocaust – remains to be written. It is a process that, in many ways,
began at the very earliest with the promulgation of the Racial Laws in the
autumn of 1938, thus involving thousands of Italian “executioners,” even
if what eventually developed out of those laws was not already written
into them.

This is why we commemorate Remembrance Day and – I write as a historian
first and foremost to my fellow historians: the seventy years since those
events and the twelve years since the promulgation of Remembrance Day in
Italy have not been enough to show us the urgency and necessity of writing
that particular history; the history  of “ordinary” Italians and genocide:
our history.

Translated by Paul Arpaia, Indiana University of Pennsylvania/Editor of
H-Italy, and Alessandro Cassin, Primo Levi Centre, New York.

*Simon Levis Sullam teaches modern fistory at the Ca ‘Foscari University
of Venice and is the author, among other works, of  L’archivio
antiebraico. Il linguaggio dell’antisemitismo moderno (Laterza 2009) and
the co-editor of Storia della Shoah (UTET 2006-2007) and La Shoah in
Italia (2010)).