Hitler's Pope

The Secret History of Pius XII

By: John Cornwell

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Paperback | 26 October 2000 | Edition Number 1

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464 Pages

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19.8 x 12.9 x 3.0

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This hugely controversial, bestselling history tells the story of Eugenio Pacelli, the man who was Pope Pius XII, and arguably the most dangerous churchman of modern times.

As Vatican Secretary of State, Pacelli signed an agreement with Hitler in 1933 that protected the power of the Catholic Church in exchange for their complete withdrawal from politics. This act proved fatal. When he became Pope Pius XII, he continually refused to condemn the Nazis - even though he was one of the first European leaders to be made aware of the Final Solution.
And even when Italian Jews were rounded up under the walls of the Vatican and transported to the death camps. His failure to criticize Nazism, especially when seen in the light of his patent anti-Semitism, is one of the great scandals of wartime. Using a wealth of new material, including Vatican documents, John Cornwell makes a firm and final indictment of Hitler's Pope's silence.

Industry Reviews

Based on extensive research into hitherto secret Vatican and Jesuit archives, this book conclusively shows that Pope Pius XII (1939-58), currently a candidate for canonization by the Roman Catholic church, was a secret anti-Semite who assisted Hitler's rise to power and who later in private denied and trivialized the Holocaust. The Pope, Eugenio Pacelli, a career church lawyer and diplomat and sometime Papal Nuncio to Germany, devoted his entire career, says John Cornwell, to creating a new ideology of Papal power which he hoped one day to impose on the Catholic bishops. To this end he cynically concluded an 'alliance with the Devil' - a secret treaty with Hitler under which Germany's 23 million Catholics, the largest and most powerful Catholic community in the world at the time, were to be instructed by Rome to withdraw from political opposition to Hitler in return for Hitler agreeing to the Pope's right to impose Canon Law on German Catholics. As if that were not enough, Pacelli also secretly got the Catholic Centre party in Germany to vote for the Enabling Act giving Hitler absolute power in 1933. These moves took place in the full knowledge of how they would jeopardize the eventual survival of the German Jews and go far to explain Pacelli's long and hitherto puzzling silence about the Holocaust despite the huge influence that he wielded as Pope during the war years. This damning indictment of so prominent a figure is a serious embarrassment to the Roman Catholic church and will, says the author, himself a devoted Catholic, profoundly affect the power struggle that is going on in the church today between reactionaries and liberals. Recommended. (Kirkus UK)

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