Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (90 page)

Franz von Papen was a Catholic with a history of attendance at Maria Laach retreats.
²²
He and the abbot were close friends, and it was at this celebration of an anticipated union of the Church and the Reich that Abbot Herwegen made what remains a distilled statement of the basis of that hope. "What the liturgical movement is to the religious realm," he said, "fascism is to the political. The German stands and acts under authority, under leadership—whoever does not follow endangers society. Let us say 'yes' wholeheartedly to the new form of the total State, which is analogous throughout to the incarnation of the Church. The Church stands in the world as Germany stands in politics today."
²³

Papen had to be pleased to hear these words from such a figure, but the abbot had a secret. It involved Konrad Adenauer. Recall that during our visits to Maria Laach, my mother and I never heard Papen referred to. To our knowledge he was no Catholic; to us he was a notorious war criminal who had been condemned after the war. For his role as a Nazi, he had been sentenced to eight years in prison,
²⁴
which means he had almost certainly been released by the time we visited the monastery. I now know that in 1959, Papen, the man who had encouraged Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor in the first place, was quietly honored by the Vatican, raised to the order of papal privy chamberlain.
²⁵
We Americans in Germany in that same era heard nothing of that.

From German Catholics we heard instead about
Der Alte,
the window donor—how, as mayor of Cologne, he had defiantly refused to allow swastika flags to be flown when Hitler came to the city; how he had sent a minor functionary in his place to greet Hitler at the airport; how, as a result, the Gestapo had targeted Adenauer.
²⁶
All of this had taken place in late February and early March 1933. Hermann Goring declared that Adenauer was to be made an example of swift Nazi retribution. At the time, Adenauer was a fifty-seven-year-old father of four small children. Gathering up his family, he fled and went into hiding. Then, knowing that his presence endangered his family, he fled again, alone. He went to Berlin, but was unsafe there. "In despair," his biographer Charles Wighton writes, "he was wandering from refuge to refuge." Finally, he wrote in desperation to an old boyhood friend, Ildefons Herwegen. "At once came a telegram," Wighton writes of the abbot's reply. '"I shall be delighted to have you with me.'"
²⁷
In this way, the pro-Nazi monk offered the anti-Nazi politician refuge in Maria Laach. As the monastery's ideological sympathies became known, it proved to be the perfect hiding place. The fugitive mayor lived there secretly, in a monk's cell, from late March or early April 1933 until April 1934, when, alerted to suspicions of local Nazis, he was forced to flee.

This means that while
Kreuz und Adler
met at the monastery in April, and while the
Reich und Kirche
assembly took place in July, Adenauer was hiding nearby. So while Papen was celebrating the
Reichskonkordat
in the Maria Laach refectory, Adenauer was eating his monk's bread only rooms away. Papen and Adenauer were old enemies, with the former having accused the latter of the grievous offense of preferring the Rhineland to the nation as a whole. That Adenauer had not bought into the spirit of totalism is emphasized by the fact that one of the first of those who sought to aid him while he was a fugitive was a Jew.
²⁸
Secluded in his room, he seemed on the wrong side not only of history but of Roman Catholic piety.
²⁹

Given this fuller story of Adenauer's time at Maria Laach, that stained-glass window with its serpent slyly assaulting Adam and Eve takes on a different meaning. The odd juxtaposition of Papen and Adenauer at that decisive moment of the Third Reich provides a dramatic instance of the ambivalence that had for so long marked Catholic attitudes toward Jews, with some Catholics seeking to protect them, and others to attack them. The ambivalence was always a matter of official Church reluctance to embrace violence, but at crucial times the balance was lost, when Augustine's dictum that Jewish survival served God's purpose was replaced by a radical conversionist purpose of eliminating Judaism as a competing religion. Hitler's transformation of that impulse into a program of elimination of Jews as a people was unprecedented, but not unprepared for.

When on April 1, 1933, Hitler ordered the boycott of Jewish businesses, he made his "Jews out!" plan crystal clear even without the smashing of glass that would come later. At that early date, not even Adolf Hitler, much less his Catholic admirers, could have known into what abyss his impulse would carry him. As late as 1938, in a furious public rebuttal by Hitler to the world leaders who had denounced the Kristallnacht pogroms, his decidedly unfinal solution to the Jewish problem was still "Jews out!," not "Jews dead!" His proposal, at that point, was the moral and political equivalent to Queen Isabella's, the expulsion of all Jews from the lands controlled by the Reich.
³⁰
Jews were offered immediate exit visas—but exit to where? The same world leaders, notably Neville Chamberlain and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had denounced the anti-Jewish violence of the Nazis declined to receive Jews as refugees.

The movement toward the Final Solution came to seem to have been inexorable, but it was not. As we have repeatedly noted, it is simplistic to say that Christian anti-Judaism caused the murderous policies of the Nazis, however much it sowed seeds of the Nazis' lethal antisemitism, but here the moral question is something else. The Church's failure to denounce publicly or privately early Nazi violence aimed at Jews, a failure rooted in the Church's own antisemitism and its own theology, was part of what allowed that violence to become genocidal. Crucial to its building to a point of no return was Hitler's discovery (late) of the political indifference of the democracies to the fate of the Jews, and his discovery (early) of the moral and religious indifference of Christians to that fate. Nothing laid bare such indifference more dramatically than the Nazi-Vatican concordat and the
Reichstheologie
of the German Catholic Church—both of which sought the restoration of a civilization that excluded Jews. The steps from "Jews out!" to "Jews dead!," from religious elimination to physical elimination—from elimination, that is, to extermination—would prove all too small.

52. Pius XII: Last Days of the Roman Ghetto

I
CROSSED THE
Tiber not far from the site of the Milvian Bridge, where Constantine had pushed this story into second gear with his vision of the cross and its legend, "In this sign, conquer." I entered the district that is still sometimes called the ghetto, and that is still marked by the Hebrew letters of shopkeepers' signs. A block from the river, I came to the towering synagogue. A high, iron-spiked fence surrounds the building, which evokes the sensuous Moorish style instead of the stricter lines of classical Rome or the Renaissance. A dome rises majestically from the squared-off building, a worthy, if modest, counterpoint to the
cupolone
of St. Peter's. Jews were living in Rome before there were Christians.

When John Paul II came to this place in 1986, the first time a pope had ever visited a synagogue, he forthrightly condemned antisemitism "by anyone." In particular, he expressed his "abhorrence for the genocide decreed against the Jewish people during the last war." He added, "The Jewish community of Rome, too, paid a high price in blood."
¹
This was a direct reference to the event that, as we saw early in this book, served Rolf Hochhuth as the indicting climax of his play
The Deputy.

"Your Eminence, we now have come to this!" the play's Riccardo says to the Cardinal. "Citizens of Rome—outlaws! A manhunt for civilians underneath the windows of His Holiness!" All of the accusations against Pius XII, from his overreadiness in 1933 to negotiate the Nazi-legitimizing
Reichskonkordat;
to his indifference to the fate of unbaptized Jews, as reflected in the "secret annex" and the record of other Vatican initiatives limited to converted Jews; to his 1939 cancellation of his predecessor's encyclical condemning Nazi antisemitism;
²
to his refusal to condemn the brutal German invasion of Catholic Poland; to his tacit acceptance of Nazi and fascist anti-Jewish legislation;
³
to his failure to mention the Jews, or even the Nazis, by name in his Christmas message of 1942;
⁴
to his meeting repeatedly with Croatian Ustashi leaders, including Ante Pavelič, a mini-Hitler who found refuge in the Vatican after the war; to his declining ever to excommunicate Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels, or other Catholic Nazis—all these accusations pale beside this one, dating to events in October 1943. As the Hochhuth character Riccardo wails, "Will no action be taken even now, Your Eminence?"
⁵

The Germans had occupied Rome in September 1943. Until then, Jews had been relatively safe, but at 5:30
A.M.
on October 16, the noise of gunfire broke the night silence of the ghetto. By then it was home to about four thousand Jews. The streets leading out of the quarter were blocked. SS officers drove residents from their homes, and in a few hours the Germans had arrested more than twelve hundred people. The Jews were taken to a temporary jail in the Italian Military College, which stood a few hundred yards from Vatican City. Yet from the Vatican, no voice was raised in public support of the Jews.
⁶

Two days later, the prisoners were put on trucks, taken to the railroad station, and loaded into boxcars. Again, no voice was raised in protest. The arrested Jews were gone. Five days later, this entry appears in the meticulously kept log at Auschwitz: "Transport, Jews from Rome. After the selection 149 men registered with numbers 158451–158639 and 47 women registered with numbers 66172–66218 have been admitted to the detention camp. The rest have been gassed."
⁷

On his visit to the Roman synagogue in 1986, John Paul II recalled the 1943 fate of Roman Jews, but he made no reference to the Vatican's silence. After Hochhuth's play had been performed around the world between 1963 and 1965, the Vatican had released documents showing that many thousands of Jews were rescued during the war by various officials of the Catholic Church.
⁸
John Paul II praised the Roman priests, monks, and nuns who opened "the doors of our religious houses, of our churches, of the Roman seminary, of buildings belonging to the Holy See and of Vatican City itself ... to offer refuge and safety to so many Jews of Rome being hunted by their persecutors."
⁹
The pope made no mention of his predecessor, but defenders of Pius XII credit him with having directly sponsored this multitude of individual acts of heroism. The 1998 Vatican document "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" honors Pius for what he did "personally or through his representatives to save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives."
¹⁰
Acts of rescue performed in secret by the lower clergy and Catholic laity are defined as acts of the pope, although no records directly tying such heroism to Pius XII have ever been uncovered.
¹¹

In response to John Paul II's remarks at the synagogue, the president of the Jewish community of Rome, Giacomo Saban, acknowledged the truth of much of what the pope had said. Nevertheless, he included in his reply this rebuke: "What was taking place on one of the banks of the Tiber could not have been unknown on the other side of the river, nor could what was happening elsewhere on the European continent."
¹²

Defenders of Pius XII insist that his initiatives, even in this case, took place behind the scenes. They assert that his response to events of October 16, 1943, was not mere silence but an urgent diplomatic intervention in behalf of the Jews. "It was not just coincidental," says one papal defender, "that the round-up of the Jews of Rome ceased after only one night. What took place the next morning was a dressing-down of the German ambassador by the Holy See's secretary of state."
¹³
Advocates for Pius XII define this meeting as an unambiguous act of pro-Jewish papal heroism, and for that reason it merits close attention.

The Vatican secretary of state was Cardinal Luigi Maglione. The German ambassador to the Holy See was Ernst von Weizsäcker, who, until shortly before, had been chief state secretary in the Nazi Foreign Office in Berlin, and whose son Richard would serve, decades later, as the president of the Federal Republic of Germany.
¹⁴
Maglione summarized what took place in their meeting:

Having learned that this morning the Germans made a raid on the Jews, 1 asked the Ambassador of Germany to come to me and I asked him to try to intervene on behalf of these unfortunates. I talked to him as well as I could in the name of humanity, in Christian charity.

The Ambassador, who already knew of the arrests, but doubted whether it dealt specifically with the Jews, said to me in a sincere and moved voice: I am always expecting to be asked: Why do you remain in your position?

I said: No, Ambassador, I do not ask and will not ask you such a question. I say to you simply: Your Excellency, who has a tender and good heart, see if you can save so many innocent people. It is sad for the Holy See, sad beyond telling that right in Rome, under the eyes of the Common Father, so many people have been made to suffer only because they belong to a particular race.