GERMAN RESISTANCE ASKED PIUS XII NOT TO 'ATTACK' HITLER
GERMAN RESISTANCE ASKED PIUS XII NOT TO 'ATTACK' HITLER
(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 5 - Wartime pope Pius XII was asked by the German Resistance not to speak out directly against Nazism and Hitler, the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano said on Friday.
"The German anti-Nazi Resistance asked Pius XII not to directly intervene against Hitler," said the daily, citing documents published by Italian historian Ennio Di Nolfo on relations between the United States and the Vatican from 1939 to 152.
L'Osservatore referred specifically to a document dated June 3, 1945 reporting on a meeting between Josef Muller, a Catholic, anti-Nazi German lawyer and Harold H. Tittman, the US envoy at the Holy See.
Tittman told Muller he had "heard widespread criticism of the Pope...because he had waited until Germany was defeated before publicly attacking the Nazis".
"Muller responded at length, providing precise details of when the German Resistance led by aristocrats and officers - which organised the failed attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944 - had repeatedly asked the pope" not to speak out, the daily said.
It was the second time this week that the daily has come out in defence of Pius XII.
On Monday, it countered fresh allegations that he didn't do enough to support Jews during the Holocaust.
The opinion piece in the daily referred to two documents discovered by Italian researchers in the UK, which appear to lend support to critics of Pius.
But L'Osservatore Romano dismissed the contents of the diplomatic notes, saying they revealed nothing new about the pontiff and his beliefs.
According to the daily, the decisions and remarks made by Pius ''were not a choice against the Jews - anything but''.
Instead, said the daily, the documents reflected Pius's approach as ''a prudent one that allowed him to take effective and concrete action, both on behalf of Jews and on behalf of the many others subject to persecution''.
''Every public sign of protest or rebellion would have been counterproductive,'' it said.
The documents were uncovered by Italian researchers while working at the UK national archives in Kew, on the outskirts of London.
According to Mario Cereghino and Giuseppe Casarrubea, the documents, neither of which published before, lend support to those who say Pius was not sufficiently concerned with the fate of Jews.
The first document is a telegram dated October 19, 1943, just three days after an infamous round-up of some 2,000 Jews in Rome under Nazi occupation.
The telegram from Pius makes no mention of the deportation and instead expresses concern over the ''Communist gangs stationed around Rome'', an apparent reference to Resistance units, and ''the absence of sufficient police protection''.
The second document, dated November 10, 1944, was a letter from London's ambassador to the Holy See, Francis D'Arcy Osborne, to Britain's foreign minister at the time, Anthony Eden.
It describes a meeting in which D'Arcy Osborne asked the pope to publicly address the slaughter of over 400,000 Hungarian Jews by Nazi troops by issuing an ''appeal against the mistreatment of the Jews in Hungary''.
The pontiff replied that if he did decide to speak out, any condemnation ''would have to be anonymous, as in the past'', an apparent reference to his previous criticisms of attacks on Jews, in which he condemned the violence but made no mention of Jewish victims.
However, D'Arcy Osborne's letter also recognized the extremely difficult position the Vatican found itself in during the German occupation.
''I personally believe that, if the course of the war had not turned against the Germans, they would have invaded the Vatican City and the diplomatic missions haboured within it,'' he wrote.
''Judging by their own methods and mentalities they could not believe that the Pope's guests were not abusing his hospitality by sending political or military information out of Vatican City''.
The British ambassador also noted that Pius had agreed with him when he said that ''history offered nothing to compare with Hitler's mass condemnation to extinction of the Jewish race''.
Pius XII's supporters have long maintained that the wartime pope chose not to speak out against the abuses of Jews because he feared an intervention would aggravate the situation.
However, they insist he worked quietly behind the scenes to ensure as many lives were saved as possible.
Jewish groups say the only way to settle the issue of Pius's wartime role is to open the Vatican's archives on the war years.
Controversy over Pius's wartime role flares up periodically but has been back in the headlines over recent weeks following the Vatican's recent decision to elevate him closer to sainthood.
Jewish communities were outraged in mid-December when the wartime pontiff was recognized as 'venerable', the second of four stages in the canonization process.
The Vatican sought to downplay the decision, explaining there was no certainty over when Pius would be beatified, the next step towards canonization.
