Will history judge Pius XII a protector of Jews?

Although Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) left a considerable pastoral and theological legacy--one that many think laid significant groundwork for the Second Vatican Council--his place in history has been colored by the controversy over whether he could have done more to protest the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust.

The question of Pius's responsibility was first brought to public attention by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy) that rebuked Pius for his silence during the Holocaust. Recently the controversy flared again when an Israeli member of the Anti-Defamation League charged that Pius ignored a 1942 letter from a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress testifying to the mass extermination of Jews in Nazi concentration camps.

Supporters of Pius have pointed to his general denunciations of genocide and his concern that making specific accusations against the Nazi regime would lead to retaliations against Jews and even against Catholics (as some argue happened in the Netherlands when Dutch bishops spoke out after the Nazi invasion of that country). He also intervened personally to assist Jews, efforts that some estimate saved anywhere from 100,000 to 750,000 Jews, especially Italian Jews after the German occupation of Rome in 1943. In addition, he served as an intermediary between German army generals and British authorities in the plot to assassinate Hitler.

His critics have argued that his denunciation of Nazi terror should have been stronger, more in the vein of his predecessor Pius XI who condemned National Socialism in his 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern)--which was smuggled into Germany and read in all Catholic churches. Pius XII has also been faulted with a partiality to Germany, dating from his time as nuncio there in the 1920s, and with believing communism to be a greater danger than Nazism.