Why would a church campaign against the punishment of mass murder? Gerald Steinacher’s answer, drawn from more than sixty archives, is uncomfortable: the Vatican played an unequivocal role in helping Nazi fugitives, beginning with clemency petitions and ending with forged identities. Steinacher, whose Nazis on the Run won a National Jewish Book Award, returns to the ratline — the escape network that moved Nazis overseas — with the Pius XII papers unsealed under Pope Francis.
The evidentiary core is Ernst von Weizsäcker, Hitler’s ambassador to the Holy See and, in the Vatican’s estimation, “the good Nazi.” Pius XII sheltered von Weizsäcker inside Vatican City after Rome’s liberation, wrote his family blessings by hand in German, and had the archives combed for exculpatory material. After a Nuremberg court convicted the former number two in Hitler’s foreign ministry — who had raised “no objections” to deporting six thousand Jews from France to Auschwitz — the pope told his envoy in Germany to press the American High Commissioner “to annul or at least mitigate the verdict.” The sentence was cut, and Weizsäcker walked free in 1950. Steinacher’s conclusion is damning: an appeal for mercy became a bid for impunity.
Steinacher reconstructs the machinery around this case and demonstrates how bishops recast Germans as victims twice over — first of Hitler, then of the Allies. Prison chaplains harvested converts among the condemned; Giovanni Montini, the future Paul VI, cabled the pope’s blessing to Oswald Pohl, who ran the camps’ slave-labor system. The Papal Aid Commission, funded largely by American Catholics, also vouched for Red Cross travel papers that carried Franz Stangl of Treblinka, Adolf Eichmann, and Klaus Barbie out of Europe. Anti-communism ties these episodes together, as does a conviction that re-Christianizing Europe outweighed settling accounts. Bishop Hudal, who supplied the false names, felt no need to apologize: “I am a priest, not a policeman. I helped him.”
Some of the sharpest material pertaining to Jews is found in the margins of these transactions. When Jewish refugees at La Spezia, blocked from sailing to Palestine, went on hunger strike in 1946, a papal adviser observed that patient suffering was not a Jewish habit. Vatican officials helped paint the German Jewish prosecutor Robert Kempner as a vengeful émigré. The pope’s envoy in Germany warned Washington that refusing amnesty would “reawaken racial resentments,” which blamed Jews for the antisemitism they faced. The book’s verdict is unsparing: the Vatican spent extraordinary energy on perpetrators and nothing comparable on their Jewish victims.
That verdict would be stronger had Steinacher tested it directly. The author notes that thousands of wartime petitions from Jews reached the same Vatican officials, but he does not provide a specific measurement of how differently those officials treated victims and perpetrators. The title also suggests steadier opposition to Nuremberg than his own chronology supports: Pius XII cooperated in 1945 with Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor, and hardened only as the trials widened.
Neither reservation diminishes what Steinacher has established. He closes at Rome’s Teutonic College, where a plaque honors Hugh O’Flaherty for saving more than six thousand people from the Nazis. In the same college’s cemetery lies Alois Hudal, with nothing recorded about what he did. Umberto Eco supplies the standard the Vatican has still not met: to forgive does not mean to forget.
Jan Burzlaff is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University, specializing in Holocaust, Jewish, and modern European history. His current book project is a victim-centered history of the Holocaust.
