A list naming thousands of Jews sheltered by Catholics in wartime Rome has been discovered, adding further evidence of the heroism of Venerable Pope Pius XII.
The list, found in the archives of the Jesuit-run Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, indicates that some 4,300 persons were sheltered between September 1943 and June 1944, when Rome was liberated by Allied forces.
Of that number, 3,600 persons are identified by name on the list, and of those, at least 3,200 were Jews, researchers say, a finding confirmed by comparing the list with archives maintained by the Jewish community of Rome.
In all, at least 100 women’s religious orders and 55 men’s communities, as well as parishes and other Catholic institutions, provided places of refuge during the German occupation.
During the period of Nazi occupation of Rome, at least 2,000 Jews, including hundreds of children and adolescents, were killed out of a total community estimated at the time between 10,000 and 15,000 people. Most died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp after a roundup of Roman Jews in mid-October 1943.
News of the discovery of the list of those rescued was presented Thursday during a conference at the Holocaust Museum of Rome titled, “Saved: The Jews Hidden in Religious Institutes of Rome (1943-44.)”
Organisers said the list has not yet been made public “for reasons of privacy,” presumably to provide an opportunity to inform family members and descendants of the people identified.
“We know where they were hidden and, in some circumstances, their places of residence before the persecution,” said a joint statement from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the Jewish Community of Rome and Yad Vashem.
“The documentation adds to the information regarding the story of rescues in the context of religious institutes in Rome,” the statement said.
According to the researchers involved in the project, the list was compiled by Italian Jesuit Fr Gozzolino Birolo between June 1944 and the spring of 1945. Birolo, who died of cancer in June 1945, had been in charge of finances for the Pontifical Biblical Institute under its rector at the time, German Fr Augustin Bea, who would go on to become a cardinal and a pioneer in Jewish-Catholic relations after the war.
Among the church facilities in Rome where Jews found refuge, according to the documentation, were the Parish of the Transfiguration, the Parish of Divine Providence, the Major Roman Seminary, the Church of San Carlo al Corso, the Parish of Santa Maria in Trastevere, the Church of Santa Maria delle Fornaci.
Researchers said that a list of religious institutes in Rome that harboured Jews, along with the numbers in each case, had already been published by an Italian historian named Renzo De Felice in 1961. However, the source material upon which his list was based had been considered lost until the recent discovery.
While the list of persons saved is overwhelmingly composed of Jews, researchers say there are also a number of individuals who were sought by the Nazis for other reasons, including Italian partisans engaged in resistance to the occupation.
Historians believe that the shelter afforded Jews by religious institutes in Rome could not have occurred without the explicit encouragement of Pope Pius XII, who was later smeared first by the KGB and then by Western commentators as a coward who remained silent and inactive during the Holocaust.
The Vatican has long held such claims to be defamatory, and German Pope Benedict XVI, three years after visiting Auschwitz, declined to visit an exhibit at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel because it claimed falsely at the time that when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, Pius “did not protest, either verbally or in writing” and that “when Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pope did not intervene”.
The late Sir Martin Gilbert, the world’s leading expert on the Holocaust and a Jew, also took the view that the exhibit amounted to a “dangerous” misrepresentation of the actions of a pope he said should be considered as a righteous gentile.
The myth of Pius’s silence originated with in The Deputy, the fictional play by Rolf Hochhuth that appeared in 1963, five years after the pontiff’s death, and which spawned a succession of polemical works.
Evidence showed that Pius could not sign the Allied condemnation of the persecution of the Jews of 17 December 1942 – the year the Final Solution was implemented – because he was not an Ally, but was neutral. B
A week later, however, he used his Christmas message to denounce the horror of “the hundreds of thousands who … solely because of their nation or race have been condemned to death or progressive extinction”.
The Reich Security Main Office, the SS department responsible for the deportation of the Jews, regarded his words as an intervention, and noted that “in a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist new European order … and makes himself the mouthpiece of Jewish war criminals”.
So as far as the Nazis were concerned, Pius was no silent pope. Adolf Hitler, who always responded to criticism violently, at a meeting of 26 July 1943 devised a plan to invade the Vatican and to arrest the Pope and his senior cardinals.
The United States, Spain and Portugal each offered the Pope exile but he refused to leave his See.
Italy became an occupied country when it signed the armistice with the Allies on 3 September 1943 and three days later Pius told senior bishops his arrest was imminent and that he would resign at that point. The bishops were to assemble in a safe country – probably Portugal – and elect a new leader.
Hitler’s plan came to light in 2007 when Dan Kurzman published A Special Mission, a book based on interviews with Karl Otto Wolff, the SS general ordered to carry it out.
The operation was delayed indefinitely when Wolff advised Hitler against it in December 1943 – at a time when 477 Jews were secretly sheltering in the Vatican; about 3,000 were in Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence near Rome, and a further 5,000 Jews were being hidden in the city’s many religious houses.
Some Jews were equipped with fake baptismal certificates and disguised as priests while the nuns of one convent gave up their beds to Jewish women.
It is of enormous significance that the acts of secret heroism were initiated on the direct instructions of Pius on 16 October 1943, the day the SS began to round up Rome’s Jews for deportation. Documentary evidence supports this.
Most of the evidence in defence of Pius has come, however, from a long line of Jewish historians who since the 1960s have established that the Catholic Church saved more lives than all the international agencies put together.
The Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide estimated that the Church under Pius saved up to 850,000 Jews from death – and he based his assessment on Yad Vashem’s own records.
Israel Zolli, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, in 1946 became a Catholic, taking the baptismal name Eugenio in tribute Pius, who was previously Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli.
(Additional reporting by Crux staff. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
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