Among the more con­tentious issues in Holo­caust his­to­ri­og­ra­phy is the response of Pope Pius XII to the depor­ta­tion and exter­mi­na­tion of the Jews. Was he the pope who, accord­ing to Israeli diplo­mat Pin­chas Lapi­de, was ​“instru­men­tal in sav­ing at least 700,000 Jews… from cer­tain death at Nazi hands” or the pon­tiff who, accord­ing to Ital­ian Auschwitz sur­vivor Set­timia Spizzichi­no, in a 1995 BBC doc­u­men­tary stat­ed: “… I lost my moth­er, two sis­ters, one broth­er and my niece. Pius XII could have warned us about what was going to hap­pen. He played right into Ger­man hands…he was an anti-Semit­ic pope…he didn’t take a sin­gle risk. And when they say the pope is like Jesus Christ, it is not true. He did not save a sin­gle child. Noth­ing.”

The book under review is the most recent addi­tion to the con­tro­ver­sy which has pit­ted most­ly Catholic his­to­ri­ans in the ongo­ing argu­ment as to whether the pope, by order­ing the use of con­vents and monas­ter­ies as sanc­tu­ar­ies for Jews, had done all in his pow­er to con­front the Nazi per­pe­tra­tors of the Holo­caust. Focus­ing on the events lead­ing to the depor­ta­tion of Rome’s Jews Thomas, a pro­lif­ic author, has relied on most­ly sec­ondary sources, inter­views, and Vat­i­can doc­u­ments to defend the record of Pius XII dur­ing the Shoah. In describ­ing the rela­tion­ship of Pius XII to Rome’s Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, Thomas’s riv­et­ing nar­ra­tive, which reads like a nov­el rather than a work of schol­ar­ship (con­ver­sa­tions are record­ed with­out foot­not­ing sources), relates the ongo­ing deci­sions in regard to the Jews made by Pope Pius XII, who is, inci­den­tal­ly, on track to be ele­vat­ed to saint­hood. He cites the pope’s orders to open con­vent and monastery doors to har­bor Jews, issu­ing Vat­i­can pass­ports that allowed thou­sands of Ger­man Jews to leave Nazi Ger­many, and dis­play­ing his diplo­mat­ic efforts to pro­tect Rome’s Jews from depor­ta­tion fol­low­ing the Nazi occu­pa­tion of the city.

Thomas reveals that the pope’s plan was not to pub­licly denounce the excess­es of the Nazis. To do so, states Thomas, ​“would destroy an effec­tive strat­e­gy to pro­tect the Jews and give them an oppor­tu­ni­ty to escape the Nazi tyran­ny… the strat­e­gy was silence. Any form of denun­ci­a­tion in the name of the Vat­i­can would inevitably pro­voke fur­ther reprisals against the Jews.”

Pius’s ​“silence,” how­ev­er, was deaf­en­ing dur­ing the depor­ta­tion of Rome’s Jews (let alone the rest of Euro­pean Jew­ry) to Auschwitz and oth­er death camps. Thomas recre­ates the agony of the Nazi roundup and depor­ta­tion of Rome’s Jews, which took place almost under the pope’s win­dow, thus rais­ing the ques­tion why he had not warned the Jews that mass exter­mi­na­tion was about to hap­pen? The Pope’s strat­e­gy of silence also does not explain oth­er ques­tions deal­ing with his response to Hitler’s war against the Jews: When it was appar­ent that the strat­e­gy of ​“silence” was not effec­tive, why didn’t the Pope issue an encycli­cal con­demn­ing the Holo­caust? Why did he not excom­mu­ni­cate Nazi Catholics, includ­ing Hitler and Himm­ler? Why did the pope’s Christ­mas mes­sage both in 1942 and 1943 not address the depor­ta­tion of the Jews?

Ques­tions such as these sur­round Pius’s papa­cy but will not be resolved until 2020 when the Vat­i­can will release a selec­tion of wartime doc­u­ments relat­ing to the pope’s deci­sions dur­ing World War II. As Thomas notes, ​“the wartime files…will final­ly end the con­tro­ver­sy that Pius was ​‘Hitler’s pope’ and silence the argu­ment that he is not wor­thy to become a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.”