Nicole Winfield Associated Press

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican has long defended its World War II pope, Pius XII, against criticism that he remained silent during the unfolding Holocaust, insisting he worked quietly in behind the scenes to save lives. A new book, citing newly opened Vatican archives, suggests that the lives the Vatican worked hardest to save were Jews who had converted to Catholicism or were children of Catholic-Jewish “mixed marriages.”

Documents attesting to frantic searches for baptismal records, lists of names of converts given by the Vatican to the German ambassador, and heartfelt appeals by Catholics for the pope to find relatives of Jewish descent are contained in ” The Pope at War” by David Kertzer, being published in the United States on Tuesday.

The book follows Kertzer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Pope and Mussolini” about Pius’ predecessor, Pius XI. It uses the millions of newly released documents from the Vatican archives as well as the state archives of Italy, France, Germany, the United States and Great Britain to craft a history of the Second World War through the prism of the papacy of Pius XII and its extensive diplomatic program. network with Axis countries and allied countries.

“The amount of material in this archive about finding baptismal records for Jews that could save them is really quite amazing,” Kertzer said in a phone interview ahead of publication.

The 484-page book, and its nearly 100 pages of endnotes, portrays a timid pontiff who was not motivated by anti-Semitism, but rather by the belief that Vatican neutrality was the best and only way to protect the interests of the Catholic Church during the war. rages.

Kertzer, a professor of anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University, suggests that Pius’ primary motivation was fear: fear for the Church and Catholics in German-occupied territories if, as he believed until the very end, the Axis was winning; and the fear of godless communism spreading across Christian Europe if the Axis lost.

To allay this fear, Kertzer writes, Pius charted a course of paralyzing caution to avoid conflict with the Nazis at all costs. Direct orders went to the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano not to write about German atrocities – and to ensure transparent cooperation with the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini in the Vatican’s backyard.

This meant never saying a word in public to explicitly denounce the SS massacres, even when Jews were rounded up just outside the Vatican walls, as they were on October 16, 1943, and boarded trains bound for Rome. ‘Auschwitz.

Kertzer concludes that Pie was not “Hitler’s Pope” – the provocative title of John Cornwell’s latest Pie-era blockbuster. But neither was he the champion of the Jews that Pius supporters support.

Marla Stone, professor of humanities at the American Academy in Rome, said the book “takes a stand between previous poles of historical interpretation.”

“The choices used to be either Pius XII was ‘Hitler’s pope,’ deeply sympathetic to the Nazis, hungry for Nazi-fascist victory, obsessed with defeating the Soviets at all costs, and a staunch anti-Semite,” he said. she told a panel. at the academy last month. “The other historiographical position held that Pius XII did everything in his power to help those who suffered from Nazi and Fascist oppression and that he was simply constrained by circumstances.”

“The Pope at War” is one of many books that are starting to come out two years after Pope Francis opened the archives of Pius XII ahead of schedule. This gave researchers access to the complete set of documentation to resolve outstanding questions about Pius and what he did or did not do during the unfolding of the Holocaust.

One of the first to be written in-house by the archivist of the Vatican Secretariat of State, Johan Ickx. It is perhaps understandable that he praises Pius and the Vatican’s humanitarian efforts to care for Jews and people fleeing war, recounting the hundreds of files from Jews who have turned to him, begging for help.

“For the Jews it was obvious and clear that Pius XII was on their side and he and his staff would have done everything in their power to save them,” Ickx told Vatican News.

The Reverend Peter Gumpel, the German investigator who promoted the cause of Pius’ saintliness, argued that Pius could not speak out more publicly because he knew it would enrage Adolf Hitler and result in the death of more of Jews. He cites the case of a Catholic bishop in the Netherlands who spoke out against the deportation of Jews and the response of the Gestapo: to deport Jews who had converted to Catholicism.

The Vatican had already taken the extraordinary step, between 1965 and 1981, to publish an 11-volume set of documentation, curated by a team of Jesuits, in an attempt to refute the criticisms of Pius’ silence that erupted after the 1963 play” The Deputy,” which alleged that he turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities.

But even the Vatican’s own prefect of the archives, Monsignor Sergio Pagano, said recently that the initiative, while “dignified” at the time, now needs to be revised.

During a panel discussion organized by a Spanish research institute in Rome, Pagano acknowledged that the Jesuits “sometimes looked at half of a document, and the other half did not”, and that he had learned of certain “strange omissions ” which are now becoming obvious. . But he insisted there was no attempt at the time to hide inconvenient truths, just a lack of full access to all files and the chaos of working quickly with disorganized archives.