Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Kertzer's superbly documented book tells a dispiriting story—familiar in its basic outlines but augmented by the recent opening of Pope Pius XII's personal archives—about the Pontiff's silences in the face of Nazi conquests and the Holocaust and Italian fascist collaboration with German policies during World War II. As is well known, the pope refused to utter any criticism of Hitler's war, claiming publicly that the Catholic Church could not legitimately intervene in political questions. He also cited, unofficially, his fear that German Catholics would be placed in grave conflicts of conscience and that National Socialist anti-Catholics would make German Church life impossible and ultimately move against the Vatican itself. Kertzer repeatedly, but without laboring denunciations, refers to papal silences and to recommendations from the curia and the episcopate to say nothing as the all-too-accurate reports of mass murder reached the Vatican.

The book is constructed as a page-turner—a highly engaging narrative from the last days of Pius XI in 1939 through the end of the European war (Kertzer documented Pius' relationship with Mussolini's regime in The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe [New York, 2014]). The narrative flow can obscure the subtle analyses that are provided throughout, for instance of Kertzer's careful delineation of antisemitic attitudes among the curia, key church cardinals, and the pope himself. Pius XII emerges as a sheltered ascetic diplomat, sensitive to public relations, almost childishly buoyed by the adulation of the faithful Romans who crowded St. Peter's Square to hear his allocutions and receive his blessings. He remained convinced that his convoluted, toothless rhetoric was an adequate denunciation of crimes against humanity. When in 1943/4 he pleaded with the Allies to spare Rome from bombing, he found his right to protest limited by his earlier silence in the face of German air attacks on Warsaw, London, and Rotterdam. Despite multiple reports from Catholic laymen and clergy in eastern Europe about the growing massacres against Poles and the mass murder of Jews in eastern Europe, despite the Italian racial laws and the deportation of Italian Jews, he spoke only in the most generic terms about the sanctity of life. When the Vatican establishment occasionally sought to intervene as the Italian racial laws isolated and degraded the Italian Jewish community, excluding it from state [End Page 131] employment and teaching, and when fascist officials collaborated with the Nazis in deporting Jews, the position of the Church leadership was that only Jews who converted to Catholicism should be spared from persecution.

Kertzer provides memorable portraits of Luigi Maglione, Cardinal Secretary of State, Pius' chief political advisor, and his two undersecretaries, the earthy Domenico Tardini and teacher's pet Giovanni Battista Montini, later to become Paul VI. Kertzer's portrait of Benito Mussolini, the chief foil in the narrative, is also penetrating: Hesitant to commit himself to the Axis war (despite the 1939 Axis Pact of Steel), Mussolini cut a pitiful figure as a commander-in-chief, increasingly feckless and pitifully dominated by Clara Petaci, his tenacious young mistress. The Nazis even compelled him to approve the execution of Count Galeazzo Ciano, his son-in-law (whom the Nazis had installed as head of the puppet regime in German-occupied northern Italy) in January 1944, after his removal from office by the king and turncoat Grand Council members seeking an armistice with the Anglo-American forces poised to invade the peninsula.

Kertzer's personal and psychological portraits make the deepest impression, but, as he explains, and stresses again in his conclusion, the Vatican's silence also rested on institutional structures. Pius XII's predecessor Pius XI had negotiated fundamental treaties or concordats with the Italian fascist regime in 1929 (the Lateran Pacts) and the National Socialist regime in 1934. The Lateran accords traded Vatican approval of...