On March 2, 2020, Watson Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Kertzer was granted access to the Vatican Apostolic Archives -- formerly known as the Vatican’s ‘secret archives.’ David used the opportunity to explore the records of Pope Pius XII, who led the church during World War II, and whose role in that war is still a source of heated debate.

In August, David published a piece in The Atlantic based on his research, about the Vatican’s behavior in the face of rising German power during World War II. It was groundbreaking, beautifully written -- and utterly disturbing.

On this episode, Sarah talks with David about what he uncovered, and why it should be a lesson for us all.

You can read David’s article in The Atlantic here.

You can learn more about Watson’s other podcasts here.

This past March for the first time ever, the church opened the archives to independent researchers. David used the opportunity to explore the records of Pope Pius XII who led the church during World War II. In August David published a piece in the Atlantic based on his research about the Vatican's behavior in the face of rising German power during World War II. It was groundbreaking, beautifully written, and utterly disturbing. Many in the Vatican's orbit were not happy with what David found.

DAVID KERTZER: The semi-official newspaper of the Vatican decided to dedicate an entire page following the publication of my piece in the Atlantic to denouncing it.

SARAH BALDWIN: On this episode, I talked with David about what he uncovered and what it can teach us about the role one of the most powerful institutions in history played in World War II. We also talk about the bigger questions his piece raises; questions about the responsibility of institutions in the face of violence, hate, and persecution.

Given the controversial work David produced from his research, I started by asking why did the Vatican open up these archives in the first place? As David described it was a long time coming.

And the controversy and the excitement really was part around the issue of the role played by the pope and the Vatican in World War II in general and in particular with respect to the Holocaust. And there's been a movement at the very height of the Vatican to address this history.

That said, still today the official position of the Vatican as stated in their official statement from the late '90s we remember is that the modern anti-Semitism had no relationship to anything and an anti-Jewish thrust of the church. That it was something identified with modern times with secularism and had nothing to do with Christianity, while some of the national churches including most recently the German branch of the Roman Catholic Church has admitted that in fact there is some and an important relationship between the two. Vatican still has not and so in that sense the current pope, Pope Francis has not changed what I think, really needs to be changed in coming to terms with his history.

SARAH BALDWIN: Well, why is it important for us to understand the popes and the church's roles in the Holocaust and in World War II?

DAVID KERTZER: The question that is so I think most important is the one of how in the middle of Europe in the middle of the 20th century among a people that was thought to be particularly sophisticated namely the German people there could have been undertaken and accomplished the mass murder of the Jewish population of Europe. And the role played by Christianity in demonizing of the Jews has been one of the major issues of use to try to explain how people could have been willing to kill little babies and old people and others.

So the question of what role the Vatican played, the Roman Catholic churches as part of this larger issue of Christianity and the Holocaust has become a major issue. Pius XII is seen by many conservatives in the church as a heroic figure in part because he was the last priest Second Vatican council pope and many of the conservatives in the church see the Second Vatican council is where the church went wrong, left its traditional teachings, and tried to make peace with modern times. So again, this is part of the heat behind the polemics around the Pope Pius XII and his relationship with Jews.

SARAH BALDWIN: Well, yeah. And you describe in this article mainstream Italian media got in on the act of portraying Pius XII in a favorable light.

DAVID KERTZER: Yes, you have to also understand it's not just the church that's reinterpreting its history, you might say whitewashing its history in terms of its relationship with the fascist regimes of totalitarian regimes that would eventually lead to World War II and the Holocaust. Italy itself, I mean I've spent many years of my life living in Italy, and to one gets the impression there that Italy fought on the side of the allies during World War II, not that it was fought with Hitler. So the church in trying to remake its history is certainly not alone when it seizes not only in Italy but other parts of Europe that was in fact complicit with the fascist period and eventually with World War II.

SARAH BALDWIN: Can we stay in the archives for a moment? Can you describe what it was like to walk in and begin to work there? What's the room like? Is it rooms?

DAVID KERTZER: Yes, curious the Vatican Secret archive or what had been recently called the secret archive has become a place of great mystery. Dan brown wrote about it dramatically and recently Daniel Silva, another kind of bestselling thriller writer, features it in his book that was just out this year. It's a place where I've worked for many years on other projects before this opening. So it's the same place as before it's just this new material that's available there that hadn't been available before.

Once you get permission to use it you have to schedule. They only allow even before COVID a limited number of people per day in, so you have to reserve a place. And it's a hundreds of years old building. It's got Fresco walls and ceilings in various parts, so it's quite a sensation working there.

SARAH BALDWIN: So it sounds more like a beautiful historic space rather than like a musty basement.

DAVID KERTZER: Yes, exactly. Of course, when you're there you're working alongside people who work on very different topics, some of them for periods 1,000 years ago because the documents cover over 1,000 years of church history. So you might be next to a polish monk who's working on the history of the polish church in the 18th century this kind of thing.

SARAH BALDWIN: Before you tell us what you found could you just set the stage for us. Describe the Jewish population in Italy and Mussolini's racial laws. And was it a big part of the population, was it small, were relations friendly?

DAVID KERTZER: Yeah, they're relative size of the Jewish population of various countries in Europe but vary tremendously. In Germany itself it was about 1% of the population and Italy it was only one-tenth of 1% of the population. So it's about 40,000 or so Jews lived in Italy in the late '30s and early '40s.

SARAH BALDWIN: Those racial laws, if I've understood it, are important in the future, but first I think we need to talk about what you did discover. So what were your two main discoveries when you were granted access to the archives?

SARAH BALDWIN: And that was mostly women and children and older people?

DAVID KERTZER: Yes, I mean curiously at the time the Jews somehow thought or most Jews thought that it was men and particularly young men had most risk of being rounded up, they couldn't quite conceive of the roundup of one-month-old babies and 95-year-old women and so on. And so when the Gestapo came to the homes of the identified as Jewish homes in Rome, for the most part the men were absent and so of the over 1,000 people taken the great majority were women, children, and older men.

The fact that the pope did not protest this happening right as it said under his window has led to a lot of polemics, a lot of discussion. What I discovered in the newly opened archives was a series of memos from one of his top advisors suggesting that some protests be made. And then a memo from another top advisor, a man who later becomes cardinal vicar of Rome, saying no they shouldn't protest. And there're various reasons that we could discuss for why they thought the pope shouldn't lodge protest. But both memos, both the ones suggesting he should protest and the one suggesting he shouldn't, we're loaded with anti-Semitic stereotypes language. The argument of the person who said they should protest was that the racial laws were already keeping the Jews under control and were a great thing. So why do you need to now round them up and massacre them?

SARAH BALDWIN: And so you found these documents, how much of a surprise was it to confirm that in fact you didn't discover soul searching by the pope or the pope actually wanting to protest this? Did it confirm something for you or did it surprise you?

DAVID KERTZER: No, I would say it's more confirmatory because the one thing we did know from a document that had been published by the Vatican previously as part of an earlier effort to publish a series of documents dealing with World War II was that the secretary of state was really the number 2 one to the pope who meets every morning with the pope as the Jews were being rounded up or just as they were being rounded up that day called on the German ambassador to the Holy See and met with him and we have the secretary of state, the cardinal secretary of state's account of that meeting with the German ambassador where he said this is terrible, this has really upset the pope and the rest of us here that you'd be rounding up the Jews in Rome, do you really need to do this. And the ambassador says, well, do you really want me to let Berlin know that you're protesting this because this was ordered by the various highest authority in Berlin namely, of course, Hitler.

And to that the secretary of state, and this is from his own account of the meeting, says, no I didn't say that. I leave it to your discretion. So we knew that from this already that the pope and those around him were eager to maintain good relations with the Germans. It's not that the pope was any fan of Hitler, he certainly was not. But among other things, at the time Rome was being occupied by the Germans and the pope was eager to keep cordial relations with the Germans, worried that the interests of the church in Rome and the Vatican city itself might be somehow threatened if he angered Hitler and the Nazis.

SARAH BALDWIN: Well, isn't there also put forward the argument that he was feeling protective of Catholics in Poland, he didn't want to put them more at risk?

I think one of the reasons it's not generally recognized for the pope's silence, the pope's decision he would not directly criticize the Nazis, is that he realized that a large number of the Nazis were Catholic. And he was afraid that if he would think of it put the Catholic Nazis in a position of choosing the Nazi party or the Catholic church, they would leave the Catholic church or maybe even worse create a secessionist church of German Nazi Catholics which he certainly didn't want to see.

And from my point of view, this is really the major issue about the silence of the pope it's that who was it who was murdering all these Jewish, little children and old people and so on? A lot of them were people who thought of themselves as good Christians and in fact had grown up with deeply anti-Semitic notions inculcated in them by the various churches.

SARAH BALDWIN: Tell us about the Finaly affair.

DAVID KERTZER: So the other case that I wrote about in the recent Atlantic article that's gotten a fair amount of attention is this case of these two little boys who were orphans of the Holocaust and they were part of a larger phenomenon. With millions of Jews murdered during the Holocaust, they left many thousands of orphans behind. Of these a fair number were protected by Catholic institutions like monasteries and convents but also Catholic families.

SARAH BALDWIN: And where did the boys end up?

DAVID KERTZER: Well, they ended up in Israel.

SARAH BALDWIN: And they grew up Jewish after that?

DAVID KERTZER: Yeah, they've led a you might say normal life as adults in Israel. So all of this was known at the time. What wasn't known is the role played by the pope in the Vatican in orchestrating what would happen and that's what I was able to discover in these recently opened archives.

SARAH BALDWIN: How long did it take you to piece together these stories from millions of pages, I imagine? And I wonder if the pandemic which was ramping up especially in Italy, did that limit you, did that limit your access in this process?

DAVID KERTZER: Yes, so after only a week of opening. So we waited for 50 years for these archives be opened. They were opened March 2 and then that Friday we were told this was the last day till further notice because of the pandemic. Fortunately they opened up again at the beginning of June. Americans have not been as you know allowed to go into Italy given our situation here with COVID, but I have a collaborator who is an Italian and church historian who works with me and we've written a number of pieces together. And he's been able to since they reopened work there. And so we've worked together on examining the archival material, these hundreds of pages that have become available.

SARAH BALDWIN: Have you gotten any pushback either from within Italy or from other scholars who don't appreciate the Catholic church being or Pius XII being outed in a way?

DAVID KERTZER: Yes, I wouldn't say from scholars but there's a whole industry of defenders of Pius XII, the Vatican newspaper, the semi-official newspaper of the Vatican L'Osservatore Romano decided to dedicate an entire page following the publication of my piece in the Atlantic to denouncing it.

SARAH BALDWIN: Denouncing your article?

DAVID KERTZER: Yes, it's entirely devoted to denouncing that article. And that's pretty unusual actually for the Vatican newspaper to do for any article by anybody but because my piece is based on hundreds of pages of the Vatican's own archives because they can't dispute really the accuracy of those space they change the subject ad hominem attack that was followed up by the Catholic defense league in the US and some of their allies writing a series of again kind of personal attacks and changing the subject attacks. So anybody who impinges on this heroic of Pope Pius XII as a great protector and friend of the Jews is unfortunately open to this kind of attacks. I'm certainly not the first.

SARAH BALDWIN: So how is the legacy of anti-Semitism in the Catholic church playing out today?

DAVID KERTZER: There was this major change with the Second Vatican council and so certainly the main thrust of the Vatican and the Catholic church is toward understanding and brotherhood sisterhood with the Jewish people. But there is among a minority in the church identified really with the right wing of the church a very different kind of view of relations with Jews. So far as the Second Vatican council is seen as where the church went wrong, part of where it went wrong was in its idea that Jews should be regarded as equally worthy of respect from a religious point of view.

So if you go online, you can find evidence of this all over the place. Any day and again Pius XII tends to be a hero for this segment of the church, so occasionally I'll go on Twitter and put in Pius XII and I normally find scores of tweets from that day many of which will refer to Pius XII as the last real pope and that since then the popes have been in the hands of the Jews, the Masons and so forth.

So unfortunately, there's still a wing of the Roman Catholic church that can point to this history to justify their negative attitudes toward Jews fortunately it is a minority.

SARAH BALDWIN: So more broadly thinking about your readers what do you hope people will take away from your work in terms of possible lessons about silence bigotry?

DAVID KERTZER: Well, I think it's that when you demonize the other it can lead to consequences that you actually bear responsibility for. So the demonization of the Jews which the church played a major role in it's true and certainly the pope was not happy to see the massacre of Europe's Jews and in fact was horrified by it, but it was made possible by many decades of vilification of Jews that people heard from the pulpit as they grew up. These are things obviously in today's world where various others obviously not just Jews get vilified whether Muslims or other ethnic minorities or religious minorities or for other minority groups. The Holocaust should be a lesson that cause people to think about exactly what their responsibilities are.

SARAH BALDWIN: David, thank you so much for talking to us about your work today. It's been fascinating.

DAVID KERTZER: Oh, I'm glad to do so. Thanks

SARAH BALDWIN: This episode was produced by Dan Richards and Alina Coleman. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. I'm Sarah Baldwin. You can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, stitcher, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you like the show, leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. It really helps others find us. For more information about this and other shows, go to watson.brown.edu. Thanks for listening and tune in in two weeks for another episode of Trending Globally. [MUSIC PLAYING]