Historians Discover Nazi-Era
Notes of Future Pope Pius XII
(October 10, 2006)
Hubert Wolf of the
University of Muenster is leading a team
of German historians who are studying the
papacy’s response to the Nazis.
They have have found notes in the Vatican
secret archives written between 1930 and 1939 by
Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope
Pius XII in 1939, indicating that Vatican
officials were very well informed about world
events up to 1939. “I would say that
when the British and U.S. governments obtained
certain knowledge that the Final
Solution was happening,” Wolf said, “the
Vatican would also have found out.”
Pacelli, born in 1876 in Rome, had a close
knowledge of Germany, having been papal nuncio
in Berlin from 1917 till 1929. As Vatican
secretary of state, Cardinal Pacelli met
daily with his predecessor Pius XI.
The trove of correspondence
from the archives that have been recently
opened will take years to decipher, the researchers
said, because of the way they were coded.
The initial report on the discovery of the
notes gave no indication that they would
shed any new light on the controversial record
of Pius
XII during the Holocaust.
Sources: Deutsche
Presse-Agentur |