On September 29, 2022, Gerald J. Steinacher, James A. Rawley Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who specializes in the history of the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath, delivered a lecture at Harvard Divinity School. His lecture was titled "The Pope Against Nuremberg: Nazi War Crime Trials, the Vatican, and the Question of Postwar Justice." Professor Kevin J. Madigan, Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Faculty Dean, Eliot House, Harvard College, introduced Steinacher.
Full transcript:
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: The Pope against Nuremberg-- Nazi War Crime Trials, the Vatican, and the Question of Postwar Justice. September 29, 2022.
KEVIN MADIGAN: Well, good evening, everybody, and welcome to HDS. I'd like to begin by noting that this event, this lecture, has been made possible by a truly extraordinary gift.
Having come to Harvard as student refugees from Nazi persecution in 1939 and '40, the Harvard refugee fellows later established a gift, a gift to commemorate the efforts of Harvard undergraduates who, along with several faculty members, mobilized the University community to raise support for resources, fellowships that, at the end of the day, saved the lives of many and enabled them also to continue their studies at Harvard.
In that connection, we're very pleased to have with us tonight Miss [INAUDIBLE], whose father was one of the Harvard refugee scholars. Karen, thank you so much for being here tonight. Your presence means a great deal to us.
So it is a genuine pleasure to introduce today's speaker, who's not only an honored friend whom it's always good to see but a visiting scholar and professor here at Harvard from 2009 to '11 and, therefore, someone we're also delighted to welcome back to campus as a friend of the university. Welcoming back, I'm going to speak about his many accomplishments briefly so that you might have as much time hearing from him-- from Gerald as possible.
Currently the Raleigh professor of history at the University of Nebraska, Professor Steinacher took his advanced degrees in history at the University of Innsbruck. In the roughly two decades since he earned his PhD and his advanced degree as postdoc, let's say, he's been working on German and Italian fascism on intelligence studies and on the Holocaust. On this constellation of topics, Professor Steinacher has published no fewer than four books, edited 10 more, and written six or seven dozen book chapters in journal articles.
Now, many of us came to know Gerald at Harvard, which is roughly when he published his first book entitled in its English translation and edition, Nazis on the Run-- How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice. This was really a rare book, in my view, not only splendidly researched but a very, very good read, riveting, and a volume that I think justly won the 2011 National Book Award. I recommend it.
In 2017, Professor Steinacher published Humanitarians at War, colon, The Red Cross in the Shadow of the Holocaust on the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Holocaust and the ways in which the lessons learned changed policy regarding genocide and victims of war.
And Gerald's current research project centers upon the Catholic Church's leadership and views towards the Nuremberg trials and the denazification proceedings in the first decade after the war. It's on a piece of that research that Professor Steinacher will address us today. And the title of his lecture is the Pope against Nuremberg-- Nazi War Crime Trials, the Vatican, and the Question of Postwar Justice. So Gerald, welcome back to Harvard. Please join me in welcoming.
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GERALD STEINACHER: Yeah, thank you very much for this very, very kind introduction, and thank you all for your interest in this topic and in my research. I want to thank Professor Kevin Madigan, of course, for organizing this event and everyone who was involved in organizing this event, who is really special for me because, as you know, this was endowed by refugee scholars from Nazi-- Europe, and I am a Holocaust scholar from Central Europe, so this is really close to me and personal. And I'm very honored to be here today and to be invited to give this lecture.
So I will talk for about 40 to 45 minutes. It really depends a little bit on the audience. I can tell you if you're still with me or not. [LAUGHS] And then I will open it up for Q&A. And I'm very much looking forward to your questions or suggestions because, as my colleague Professor Madigan already said, this is an ongoing project I'm writing on this new book. And I'm willing to get suggestions, ideas and to deal with questions that would come up.
So without further ado, let's get started, and I just want to say right away from the start, I'm going to read a little bit from my lecture here, but I'm also going to show you many slides and documents from the archives, including the Vatican Archives. So in a certain way, a little bit at least, I take you on a research journey, my own research journey, and you see how I draw my conclusions. And then you can agree with me-- or maybe not. [CHUCKLES] I will see that in the Q&A section.
So let me just lay some foundations here. Nazi war crimes trials and denazification have received much attention from researchers for decades, as you all know. So too, has Pope Pius XII for all before and during World War II and the Holocaust, as you all know. The decision to open the archives, the Vatican Archives-- that's what I'm talking about-- for the period-- for the pontificate of Pius XII, long overdue and packed with high expectations, was finally made by the Vatican in 2019. And then came COVID, so that postponed the things. And in 2020-- late in 2020, finally, we were able to get into the Vatican Archives and to do our research about the pontificate of Pius XII.
When announcing this decision, Pope Francis stated, and I quote him here, "The church is not afraid of history," end of quote. With this remark, Pope Francis likely alluded to the controversy surrounding his World War II predecessor on the throne of St. Peter, which was Pope Pius XII.
Now that this period of church history can be deeper researched, scholars can now shift focus not just to the prewar and the World War II period but also to the Catholic Church's role in the postwar years because Pope Pius XII was the pope until 1958. So there's a lot of postwar to be researched. And that is what I'm interested in.
And I'm interested in two aspects of this postwar history-- first, the Vatican's role in helping Nazi war criminals escape justice by fleeing overseas on the so-called Italian Ratline and second-- the second aspect I'm interested in-- the Vatican's stance on the Nuremberg trials, the question of postwar justice and postwar order. These two topics are at the heart and center of my current research project.
To date, my research strongly suggests that both aspects, as a Nazi escape on the Ratline and the whole issue of Vatican's position on Nuremberg trials and denazification, are deeply connected-- intertwined. They are not separate issues. They're connected. While the Vatican's role in the Ratline is certainly sensational, the wider historical context is no less important or interesting. At least, that's my opinion, but you'll be the judge.
My talk has two parts. First, I will give you an overview of how the escape of Nazi perpetrators worked. I will show you what the Ratline, as it is commonly known-- I don't like the term-- was and how Catholic and Vatican institutions were involved in this Ratline. And in the second part of my talk, I will focus on the Vatican's stance on Nuremberg, on war crimes trials, and the wider process of denazification-- really, the big issue of guilt and responsibility and what the Vatican and the Pope had to say about that.
This talk, especially the second part, is based, as I already said, on preliminary findings from my new research from the Vatican Archive. And before I show you slides and take you a little bit on my research journey, I have to set the stage, so just a short introduction.
Even before the end of World War II, the Allies decided that the atrocities committed by the Axis powers, particularly war of aggression, war crimes, and the systematic mass murder of European Jews, should not go unpunished. But when measured against the magnitude of the Axis' crimes, how could justice best be served?
With the Moscow Declaration of November 1, 1943, the Allies announced their intention to try perpetrators where they committed their crimes. However, many questions remained unclarified-- how to deal with the leading Nazi criminals, whose crimes could not be specified to one country, so the big leaders of Nazi Germany.
In addition, the nature of these courts or these trials against Axis criminals remained disputed among the Allies. Stalin, as the Soviet leader, for example, envisioned show trials of top Nazi leaders and summary executions of German officers, and he was not alone with these views for a long time.
The US eventually choose the rule of law through criminal courts with due process and, as you all know, a long and complicated procedure. Individual guilt or innocence was to be established while notions of collective guilt were briefly discussed but, for the most part, rejected. A trial based on the rule of law would, according to its planners, draw a clear line between former dictatorship and the new beginning. The planners of Nuremberg saw it as a contribution to lasting peace by hopefully deterring future aggressors on 2022.
Largely thanks to the US, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg against some surviving prominent members of the Third Reich was created. Later, it was the United States without the other Allies that held responsible industry leaders, diplomats, SS officers, physicians, lawyers, and generals in 12 subsequent Nuremberg trials. Most people never heard about the subsequent Nuremberg trials, which went on until 1949.
However, with over 1,600 accused, the vast majority of Nazi war criminals in the US' zone of occupation were not tried in Nuremberg but at the US Army's trials in Dachau-- the Dachau trials-- from 1945 to 1947. The British, the French, the Soviets also held war crime trials in their respective zones of occupation in Germany and in Austria. Alongside these proceedings, thousands of trials of Nazi officials, as well as local collaborators and fascist leaders, were held all over Europe.
But to denazify German society, the Allies had to deal not just with the killers and the party leaders, the big shots, but also the millions of ordinary Nazis, so the ordinary Nazi party members. Therefore, denazification tribunals looked for Nazi party membership and roles inside the regime.
And therefore, in a certain way, in addition to criminal guilt, denazification sought to address moral guilt and responsibility as well. So if somebody was not a killer, did not commit a crime in the narrow sense, but had a certain responsibility in the regime could also be punished for that. These efforts to achieve some form of punishment played out differently from country to country.
Now, let's talk about the Vatican Ratline. While the Allies put these efforts in place, as the Nuremberg war crimes trials all over Europe, denazification courts, at the same time, thousands of Nazi criminals and their collaborators fled overseas to escape Nuremberg justice. Now, let me give you a short overview of how these escape structures worked and what the Vatican has to do with it.
So here are some of my findings from previous research. The first finding-- Italy played a central role as a Nazi escape hatch. And if you look at the geography, when you are in Southern Germany or in Western Austria, Italy is very close. You just have to walk over the mountains, over the green borders, and then you get to Genoa. And Genoa is the first port city for people stranded in Central Europe, and that's where people wanted to go. Genoa was the way out of Europe.
There were millions of refugees and uprooted people in Europe at the time. Many of them wanted to start a new life in overseas. And these refugees in Europe in these postwar years were very diverse group-- survivors of the Holocaust, anticommunists, slave laborers, stranded POWs, and so on-- and millions of ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe. I will talk about this in a second.
And hiding among them-- of these masses of refugees, hiding in plain sight were Nazis and war criminals. In fact, the majority of Nazis and war criminals who fled Europe at the end of the war escaped through Italy. Sometimes, half-jokingly, I call Italy the Reich Autobahn for war criminals. The Autobahn, the Interstate for war criminals because they all went to Italy over the mountains to Genoa. That was the way out.
And the Italian authorities were not very much interested in these people. Italian authority just wanted to get rid of these people as soon as possible away from-- out of Italy. That was all.
Once in Italy, therefore, Nazis on the run could feel quite safe, but in order to flee or to emigrate overseas from Genoa, they need a document, passports of sorts. And this is where a well-known international humanitarian organization stepped in. And this is my second finding. Travel documents for many Nazis and war criminals were provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva in Switzerland.
The Allied refugee organization that was set up by the Allies that [INAUDIBLE] in order to deal with the millions of refugees in the postwar years declared itself not-- not-- responsible for Germans or ethnic German refugees expelled in large numbers from Eastern territories. There were more than 12 million of those.
Given this humanitarian emergency, the International Red Cross offered to help out people refugees with no passport and unresolved citizenship or maybe stateless or unclear citizenship. For example, ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, from Hungary, from Yugoslavia, from Poland, Germany's Prussia, and so on could obtain travel documents from the International Red Cross.
These travel documents, not surprising, were required in Italy for the most part from the delegation of the International Red Cross in Rome and-- guess-- Genoa. [LAUGHS] Based on the principle of neutral humanitarianism-- this is very important, neutral humanitarianism in the tradition of the good Samaritan-- these papers were intended to help all refugees and war victims-- really, everyone asking for help.
The records from the archives in Geneva from the International Red Cross indicate that the humanitarians involved made hardly any distinction between prisoners of war and war criminals, refugees and fugitives, perpetrators and victims. The boundaries of victimhood, therefore, blurred.
Given that there were no background checks and no real screening of applicants, abuse-- not surprising-- was widespread. Not just refugees but also war criminals and Nazis used a simple method to get away, in some cases, with false names but, very often, under their real names, which is surprising. One example is this one here.
So this is an application for a Red Cross document, so not the document itself but the application form that is still conserved in the archives of the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland. And here you see that it's the international delegation of the Red Cross-- so it's in Italian-- in Genoa for a certain Klement, Ricardo, who claims to be from South Tyrol, Südtirol, claims to be-- huh, [INAUDIBLE]-- who claims to be from South Tyrol. So ethnic German from Northern Italy, Südtirol, where I'm from. [CHUCKLES] And he says he's now stateless.
So he fulfills the requirement, the formal requirement, to apply for these travel documents. He wants to go to Argentina. And some of you probably don't know who this Klement was. Ricardo Klement, the whole name doesn't mean very much except for some experts here, obviously. But you all have seen a photo, an image, and even a news trail from this person. This is Adolf Eichmann. And that's the way how he got out of Europe.
And if you look at this travel document or this application form for travel document closely, there's a lot of interesting information in there. One important information is this one here, 1st of June 1950. So he got out of Europe through Italy, Genoa-- Red Cross papers-- in 1950, five years after the end of the Second War.
My third finding-- in Italy, there was a close cooperation between the Papal Aid Commission for Refugees and the Red Cross. The Red Cross and the Vatican worked together in many ways, including the issuing of travel papers. How that played out, I will illustrate in a minute, but first, I need to talk about the Papal Aid Commission. What was the Papal Aid Commission?
In 1944, Pope Pius XII established the Papal Aid Commission, as the Italian name is Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza, PCA, which was supervised by the Vatican's Secretariat of State, especially by Giovanni Battista Montini, then later Pope Paul VI.
The PCA, or the Vatican Aid Commission, worked closely with other Vatican relief offices, and they were all part of Vatican's overall effort to aid war victims-- Catholics but not only Catholic war victims. The Vatican Aid Commission organized cafeterias and soup kitchens for the poor, homeless, and the numerous Catholic and other refugees from all over Europe. In addition, the Vatican Aid Commission provided religious, legal, and material support for those in prison and camps and sent food and clothing to all countries, including Germany.
Much of the needed money for this humanitarian work came through the National Catholic Welfare Conference, in other words, the US Catholic Church, because they had the money at the time. They were not so destroyed like other countries and institutions. Cardinal Francis Spellman from New York was a key player in this fundraising effort.
Pius XII, the pope at the time, had a special interest in this work, as his close confidante, Sister Pascalina Lehnert, stressed and remembered. She wrote how much Pius XII welcomed it when Monsignor Portelli, who was the head of the Vatican Aid Commission, asked him to create the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza. "How very much interested the Holy Father was in this!" Exclamation mark. "It was really his ideal for the modest, humble beginnings corresponded with his tendency to do good in secret," end of quote.
The Papal Aid Commission set up 20 national subcommittees in order to manage the wave of Catholic refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. These national subcommittees were an integral-- I repeat-- integral part of the Vatican Aid Commission, as records in the Vatican Archives clearly show. Let's take a closer look at the leading figures in these subcommittees.
Head of the Austrian section of the Austrian subcommittee of the Vatican Aid Commission was Bishop Alois Hudal, a Christian anti-Semite, German nationalist, and anticommunist, who had dreams of a Christian national socialism. He considered himself a bridge builder between the Nazis and the Catholic Church, especially in the 1930s, when this was still considered a possibility or a hope, at least, that compromise is possible.
In 1937, he published this book here-- that's the book cover, basically, with his photo and his signature-- The Basic Foundations of National Socialism, [SPEAKING GERMAN]-- explaining the Nazi ideology from his point of view, the Catholic point of view, and making the argument that the compromise might be possible between Nazi ideology and Catholic teachings.
But remember or look at the time, 1937 was also the year when Pope Pius XI wrote the encyclical letter with burning concern, Mit brenneder Sorge, where he clearly criticized the violations of the concordat and also racial anti-Semitism. So Hudal was not fully in line anymore at this point in time with the Pope and the Vatican.
After 1945, he was one of the most outspoken-- Hudal was one of the most outspoken Catholic figures to help Nazi criminals escape justice. One of the people he helped was Paul Stangl. So-- I have to move a little bit again.
So what you see here is a letter of recommendation from the Vatican Aid Commission-- from the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza. From August 17, 1948, it's addressed to the International Committee of the Red Cross. So they had this already printed because there were so many forms that they had to fill out, which is faster.
And it says here, "Please, the Committee of the International Red Cross, issue a travel document. Here is a [ITALIAN]," which is actually a passport. "It's a travel document from the International Red Cross to Stangl, Paul, who is stateless," [ITALIAN]. And here, it says [GERMAN]. That means Austriaco, so he was a former Austrian somehow. "And he wants to go to Argentina. Thank you very much." And then the signature from the Secretariat is also a stamp-- and the stamp of the Vatican Aid Commission.
So with this letter of recommendation, this Paul Stangl, a few days later, goes to the ICRC in Rome, as you can see here-- see here. So just a few days later, August 25, he goes to the Red Cross delegation in Rome. He says he's Paul Stangl, and he can show, of course, the letter of recommendation from the Vatican Aid Commission.
And he also states he is a former Austrian. [ITALIAN]. So he's a former Austrian, and he's now stateless, [ITALIAN]. And it's very interesting what it says here between the parentheses, [ITALIAN]. It's a little bit cut off-- for political reasons.
So everybody who knows the history of Austrian interwar years until the Anschluss, the history of the Austrian illegal Nazi party, knows exactly-- pretty much likely what the background of this person is, that he was a former illegal Nazi in Austria. He was probably involved in the failed Nazi putsch in Austria in 1934, fled to Austria-- fled to Germany, lost his Austrian citizenship. And after 1945, he didn't get the Austrian citizenship back. In other words, hardcore Nazi, not very. [CHUCKLES]
Where does he stay? He stays in the Via Della Pace number 20 in Rome. Write down this address. When you arrive in Rome, it's worth a visit. This is the Austrian-German national church-- the address of the Austrian-German national church, which was the residence of Bishop Alois Hudal. So this man says, see, I'm living there. I'm staying there. That's where I'm living while I'm in Rome and waiting for traveling overseas, to Argentina, obviously.
And then he had said that all this information is vouched for and confirmed by Monsignor Luigi Hudal, so Bishop Hudal confirmed this information. This is all true and accurate. Then you have the photo of the person and the signature and so on and so on.
So who was Paul Stangl? Paul Stangl was really Franz Paul Stangl. Paul Stangl is his-- Paul is his middle name. And Franz Stangl was the commandant, among many other things, of Treblinka extermination camp. In one year, between 1942, 1943, almost 1 million people were murdered, and he was in charge in this. That's how he got out [INAUDIBLE].
Hudal later said, well, what motivated me is this. "To help people, to save a few, to work selflessly and determinedly without thinking of the consequences is naturally what should have been expected of a true Christian. We do not believe in the hatred taught by the Talmud but in Christian love, mercy, and forgiveness," end of quote.
Although Alois Hudal was the most notorious, he certainly was not-- he was not-- an exception within the Catholic Church or the Papal Aid commission. The Hungarian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, and Croatian national committees worked in a very similar fashion. Hudal stands out because Hudal loved to brag to the press at the time. He talked too much, and that became a burden for the church.
If we go back to the travel document for Ricardo Klement, alias Adolf Eichmann, you will see another interesting detail here that this information that was stated that he is really-- Ricardo Klement-- that he's really an ethnic German from South Tyrol and so on is confirmed by [INAUDIBLE]. Patre, a father, so a Catholic priest.
And who was this [INAUDIBLE]? He has worked in the context of the Hungarian committee of the Vatican Aid Commission for refugees with Eichmann. He was also somebody-- [INAUDIBLE] was also somebody who worked with Hudal on a number of occasions to help people leaving Europe.
The fourth and my last finding about Nazi escape and the Vatican Ratline-- by 1947, the latest, these escape routes, like I briefly outlined them, were no secret-- were no secret anymore. The Red Cross and the Vatican knew, and several newspapers reported on the matter in some detail. So one could read about this basically in the newspapers.
Washington launched a deep investigation, which resulted in the 1947 La Vista report. Vincent La vista was a state department official in Rome, and he did investigations and wrote a long report about all these structures. So that was known already in 1947.
US diplomats approached the institutions involved, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Vatican's Secretariat of State, so the Vatican government, basically. But the matter was to be handled discreetly. And by December of 1947, things changed quickly. The Cold War had reached Italy.
The US decided not to shut down these underground structures but instead, in some cases, use them for Cold War purposes, as illustrated in the case of Klaus Barbie, which is a famous case and most of you are familiar. But just briefly going to talk about it in two minutes because I want to make a point here.
The case of Klaus Barbie is a good example of this. Barbie was the former chief of the Gestapo in Lyon, had a reputation as a brutal torturer and sadist, killing resistance fighters and arresting Jews. After the war, Barbie was wanted by French authorities for war crimes. He was arrested by the Americans, and the US and their counterintelligence deemed him useful for fighting communists and therefore protected him and did not hand him over to the French authorities for prosecution.
And after a few years of service, he was provided a Red Cross travel document under the alias of Klaus Altmann. You see here the application form for the travel document for Klaus Altmann. Of course, it states that he is an ethnic German from Romania, from [INAUDIBLE], from Transylvania, and he wants to go to South America, too.
And he got the help also not just of the US intelligence at the time-- Klaus Barbie-- because he worked for them, but also from Catholic dignitaries. And if you take a close look at this document, this information he provided was basically vouched for by this man here, Professor [INAUDIBLE].
[INAUDIBLE] was the most active person in the Vatican Aid Commission for Croatians in Rome. And he helped many Holocaust perpetrators escape justice. This is not classified, by the way. He was very prominent. He was very much exposed in those years.
The Vatican's involvement in the Ratline raises a number of questions, at least to me. Was it just a few individual black or brown sheep who acted on their own for whatever reasons, or was it more the rule rather than the exception? Was this kind of Nazi escape aid ultimately sanctioned by the top leadership of the church? In other words, did it happen with the Pope's blessing? Big question mark. And if so, what was the motivation, the reasons for such actions?
In order to find answers, I broadened my research. I started to look at the bigger context of the Vatican's stance on the Nuremberg trials, criminal justice, the postwar order. What is the context of all of this?
So I'm now moving to the second part of my talk, the Vatican and Nuremberg. And I start with this photo here. You all know where this is, right? This is [CHUCKLES] a view into the Vatican, and this is the view from my apartment in Rome. [LAUGHS] And I like this photo because it shows me, looking from my apartment, behind the walls of the Vatican-- inside the Vatican. And here is the wall that divides-- it's an international border-- Italy on this side, my apartment on this side, and the Vatican on the other side. And it's kind of illustrating what I was doing when I worked in Rome. So I like this photo.
Here's some preliminary findings of this new research. First, the Pope rejected any notion of German collective or even widespread guilt. The Pope rejected any notion of German collective or even widespread guilt. I want to repeat that.
In his eyes, only a small clique of criminals was guilty and needed to be punished. But the German people should be welcomed into the family of nations again very soon. The Vatican repeatedly condemned the brutal expulsion of Germans from East Prussia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other regions. At the same time, the Pope condemned the Soviet occupation of Central and Eastern Europe nations in no uncertain terms. Pius XII also stressed that Europe needs the church for true peace. There is no peace in Europe without the church.
Given these premises, the Vatican had a number of reservations about the international Nuremberg trial, as of 45-46. But with only a handful of Nazi leaders-- 24 were accused, which is a very small number-- it seems he went along. The Vatican even submitted records for the trial, which underlined the victim status of the church during the Second-- during the Third Reich, during the Second World War.
The Catholic leadership tried to appear neutral and focused more on saving souls and other religious work. One example for this talk about the international Nuremberg trial is the case of Hans Frank. And here you see Hans Frank during the Nuremberg trials. Hans Frank was the general governor-- generale governor-- of Nazi-occupied Poland, one major Holocaust perpetrator, no doubt about that.
He was convicted to death. He was sentenced to death in Nuremberg. But in Nuremberg, he converted to the Catholic faith. He became a Catholic, and the church and the Vatican, as Vatican records show, clearly show, went above and beyond to save his life. But the focus was on the religious saving his souls.
Second finding-- over time, the Catholic opposition grew and became more principle in nature-- the Catholic opposition against Nuremberg. In May 1946, the Vatican's Secretariat of State told the US authorities that the Nuremberg trials were flawed because they were based on the notion of widespread German guilt and not innocence.
With this, it reflected the concerns of the German Catholic leaders, who became the spokespersons for the defeated nation as the Catholic Church but also the Protestant in Germany became very powerful because there was no German government left. So the German churches, the Catholic, in particular, became the spokespeople for the German nation.
On October 17, 1946, barely one day-- so less than 24 hours, after the executions in Nuremberg had been carried out-- the powerful Cardinal Josef Fins of Cologne made clear that further denazification and war crimes trials needed to stop immediately. In a meeting with English bishops, he stated that the end of the international Nuremberg trial must also be the end of revenge-- revenge-- and the beginning of reconstruction.
Opposition against "victor's justice"-- between quotation marks, as they labeled it-- always more grew. The Pope and church leaders not only voiced their concerns but tirelessly attempted to undermine and even derail these Allied efforts to retributive justice. The church intervened by sending petitions to officials at every level up to and including the president of the United States, providing affidavits for the defense, working as close aids to the defense lawyers, and provided material and financial support for the accused and convicted Holocaust perpetrators. All of this amounted eventually to a campaign against Nuremberg justice.
And in recent times, recent weeks, there was a lot of talk that appeals from Nazi victims to the Pope, asking the Pope for help-- Jews and others-- are now made accessible online or digitized and can be looked up. But there is also another side of this kind, appeals of Nazi perpetrators to the Pope after the war, asking the Pope for help-- family members but also they themselves.
And one example I have here-- this is the case that I just looked up a few weeks ago actually and researched a little bit deeper just a few weeks ago, so that's fresh from the Vatican Archives. And you might not be able to read the name, but this is basically the Vatican's Secretariat of State asking a Cardinal-- the Cardinal of Russia-- Russia-- to help and intervene in one case of a German Nazi war criminal who is on trial and convicted in a Polish court for crimes he committed during the war. His name was Erwin von Helmersen.
And it's very small, but what his background is is clear here in this line-- [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] Auschwitz. So he was an SS doctor, this man now on trial in Poland, the Vatican intervening for him. In Auschwitz, he worked there for about six months, was involved in experiments on humans, on Roma and Jews. And he also-- as far as I could figure out, also worked together with Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz.
But the church authorities, especially priests from his hometown, made it sound that he's a good Christian and he could never do such things and should be helped. We have many of these cases in the Vatican Archives. That's also interesting, Nazi perpetrators asking the Pope for help.
Third finding-- while rolling out these extraordinary efforts, the Vatican also shielded Nazi collaborators from extradition to countries where they had committed crimes, particularly to Central and Eastern European countries now under communist rule. Given the increasing confrontation with communist states, the Vatican made no secret of its noncooperation with extraditing suspected war criminals. In some cases, the Vatican hid wanted war criminals inside its own territory.
With this move, the Vatican openly went against Allied agreements, like the Moscow Declaration that I mentioned earlier, about the treatment of war criminals and the extradition to the countries where they committed crimes. And the work of the Papal Aid Commission must be also understood in this context.
So what you can see here barely because it's very small-- and I'll make it bigger for you in a second-- [LAUGHS] is an appeal by the Pope, by the Vatican's Secretariat of State to the Americans, to the Allies not to extradite a number of suspected Yugoslav war criminals.
And interesting here in this document is that the Pope basically reacted to a request by the Croatian Confraternity of St. Jerome, in other words, by the home base where [INAUDIBLE] was operating. Basically, this is the operation of [INAUDIBLE] and his interest to help Yugoslav suspected war criminals not to be extradited.
The Vatican was very clear on this. By 1947, we are not going to extradite suspected war criminals to Eastern European countries, even in those cases where it was very clear these people are absolutely guilty of horrible war crimes. I have to wrap up a little bit. Yeah, OK.
So my fourth finding-- the Vatican and the Pope also aimed to strengthen the influence of Catholic teachings in the church and to society. The rechristianization of secular society was a crucial goal. In this context, Catholic leaders tried to save as many souls as possible by bringing former Nazis back to the church. For this aim, the Vatican was even willing to face attacks and some damage to the church's reputation, which I illustrated briefly in the case of Hans Frank.
The Vatican intervention to save him basically from execution did not-- was not well received in Poland at the time, as you can imagine. But as Pius XII stated when attending the conversion of American GIs in Rome, and I quote Pope Pius XII here, "The harvest of souls is worth any sacrifice," end of quote.
And this was also in the case of one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials, a very famous case of Oswald Pohl. Oswald Pohl was a Nazi war criminal, was in charge of the Nazi slave labor universe, was convicted to death in Nuremberg.
And while in Nuremberg on trial, he converted to the Catholic faith. And his conversion was celebrated accordingly and so really, very much, celebrated by the church, with the hope that many other former Nazis would follow him and also convert and come back to Christianity, come back to the church.
And [INAUDIBLE], who was the prison chaplain of these convicted Nazi war criminals, wrote to the Bishop of Augsburg about the conversion of Oswald Pohl with the same enthusiasm, which "he--" Pohl-- "once served the Phantom," so Hitler. "He now wants to dedicate his life to the Catholic religion and, as an apostle, wants to lead many back to the church."
So when you read this closer, he is basically-- he also in the publication that came very soon, [INAUDIBLE], where this conversion was celebrated by the church and was commissioned by the Diocese of Augsburg, and he was basically compared to St. Paul. So this is pretty remarkable.
My fifth finding-- and I'm slowly wrapping up-- by 1948, the Pope openly called for an end of war crimes trials and denazification under the motto of forgive and forget.
The world should forgive and forget Germany's war crimes and instead help to rebuild the country was the message by the Pope, which was also then reported in an article here by The New York Times in 1948. "The world should forgive and forget Germany's war crimes and help in Germany's reconstruction. It's time to move on in 1948."
On occasion of the whole year 1950, the Vatican made another push to draw a line under the Nazi past. Now, the demands of high-ranking church officials, including the Pope's spokesperson in Germany, Bishop [INAUDIBLE], culminated in demands for generous, very generous, amnesty. In this plea to Allied authorities, the anti-Semitic papal representative blamed rising anti-Semitism on the Jews and the ongoing revengefulness.
It's interesting to look at the letter that the papal delegate wrote to the US high commissioner asking for generous amnesty. He said, "It is to be regretted that certain organizations are writing to your direct proposals for an amnesty. Such an attitude will keep alive a spirit of vindictiveness that is not good for peace and prosperity. It will reawaken racial resentments that, in the interest of those very organizations, should be weakened and done to death as quickly as possible." I mean, that's pretty interesting what he is saying here, the papal representative asking for amnesty for war criminals and the stop of Nuremberg and denazification.
And the US High Commissioner John McCloy then answered him-- answered the Bishop and the Vatican indirectly in January 1950 to this letter, saying, "I do not believe that world opinion, in general, is prepared to accept the proposition that those crimes have yet been sufficiently atoned for or that the German people should now be allowed to forget them. Anything approaching a general amnesty would, I fear, be taken as an abandonment of the principles established in the trials of the perpetrators of those crimes," in other words, abandonment of Nuremberg-- the whole project of Nuremberg. And this is 1950. It's only five years after the end of the war. I mean, it's a little bit early to talk about a general amnesty. That's what John McCloy is saying.
The church's call for almost unlimited forgiveness through a generous amnesty is somewhat surprising, as the perpetrators did not meet even the minimum standards of Catholic forgiveness. They almost-- the perpetrators almost never admitted personal guilt. They did not repent, nor did they ask for forgiveness, at least not in public. Also, it should be noted that the surviving victims were not asked to share their opinions in this Catholic campaign, so the victims played no role in this forgive-- no role whatsoever, the Jewish victims, especially, in this forgiveness campaign.
So I want to conclude with a few sentences because my time is out. The Vatican and Catholic Church leaders sought to end postwar criminal justice efforts in various ways. As international and American-led trials against Nazi criminals began, the church soon worked hard to shield perpetrators from prosecution. At the same time, Vatican institution helped Nazis escape overseas where they were safe from extradition.
These interventions represent different points on a spectrum but is often unclear where one ended and the other began. I argue that Catholic help for Nazi war criminals was ultimately one aspect of the Vatican's response to the new postwar order in the early Cold War.
Based on my preliminary research findings, Catholic leaders looked for ways to heal the wounds of German society and European society and build lasting peace. They pleaded for a rejection of Nazi teachings and a return to Christ and Christian values as the way to mend postwar society.
At the same time, the Vatican and prominent Catholic leaders strongly condemned anything perceived as revenge or collective guilt and demanded-- demanded-- forgiveness for perpetrators. The church largely rejected considerations of widespread guilt and responsibility, as argued, for example, by-- at the time, by philosopher Karl Jaspers or Lutheran theologian Martin Niemoller and Holocaust survivors like Simon Wiesenthal.
After 1945, the rejection of punishment, not the demand for it, was a rallying cry for the Catholic Church. As the church forcefully opposed Nazi persecution and just as forcefully preached forgiveness for the war criminals, its message contained an underlying desire for the world to move on, to forgive, and to forget.
But even with these aims, Pope Pius XII's response to the Nuremberg trials and denazification carried with it political implications that reflected geostrategic realities of the day. During the Second World War, Pius XII worked tirelessly to preserve the interests of the church as an institution in a delicate balancing act between the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler. In order to successfully defend church interests, he was prepared to compromise.
Although the portrayal of Pius XII as Hitler's ally is unfair, research strongly suggests that he saw godless communism as the principal enemy of the church. The Vatican argued that only a small group of Nazis were guilty, while most Germans, just like the Catholic Church, the victims themselves. In addition, the Pope seemed convinced that harsh denazification and ongoing administrative purchase would only weaken German society and therefore make the country and Western Europe easier prey to communism.
While the Vatican's views on guilt and responsibility were initially at loggerheads with the Western Allies, this quickly changed with the increasing Cold War confrontation between the blocks. In the Pope's crusade against Nuremberg, perpetrators were quickly forgiven, and the victims quickly forgotten Thank you for your attention.
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SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2022. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.