The Pave the Way Foundation, which works to promote dialogue between religions, publicized this Thursday.
The discoveries were made by the German historian and advisor of the foundation Michael Hesemann, author of the books “The Pope Who Defied Hitler” and “The Truth About Pius XII.” Hesemann found a number of documents in the Vatican Secret Archives that certified Pope Pacelli’s numerous interventions in favor of Jews.
He noted that Archbishop Pacelli intervened in 1917 while papal nuncio in Bavaria, going through the German government to demand that Palestine Jews be protected from the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
Hesemann also shows that in 1917, the future Pius XII used his personal influence to enable the World Zionist Organization representative, Nachum Sokolov, to meet personally with Benedict XV to talk about a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
In 1926, Archbishop Pacelli urged German Catholics to support the Committee for Palestine, which supported Jewish settlements in the Holy Land.
The foundation’s president, Gary Krupp, added these findings to the evidence he already had complied for a Pius XII symposium last September in Rome. Since this event, 300 new pages of original documents have been uncovered.
These documents, available for downloading from the foundation’s Web site, include a nun’s manuscript from 1943, detailing the Pope’s order to hide Jews in Rome and a list of protected Jews.
Another document is a 1939 report on the “new Pope” by the U.S. Foreign Service, from the American consul in Cologne. The diplomat reported surprise at the “extreme dislike” of Pacelli toward Hitler and the Nazi regime, and his support to the German bishops in their opposition to Nazism, even at the cost of losing German Catholic youth.
The foundation also provides a 1938 document, signed by then Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, in which he opposes the Polish bill outlawing kosher slaughter because he understood that this law would be a “grave persecution” against the Jewish people.
During the war, Pius XII saved 80,000 lives by persuading the Hungarian regent to prevent the deportation of the Jews. He also requested the Brazilian government to receive 3,000 “non-Aryans.”
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