Long object of myths, the attitude of Pie XII Faced with the Holocaust and the anti -Jewish persecution can finally be evaluated in the light of the archives. Nina Valbousquet shows this very convincingly: it is lukewarm that must be talked about, not impartiality.
Nina Valbousquet’s exciting work is a series of mistress by his knowledge of archives and historiography, his methodology, his writing, his erudition: a complete history book, not to say Total. The author displays the colors from the title, borrowed from Albert Camus commenting, in an article published in Fight, Pope Pie’s radio speaking XII At Christmas 1944. If the Pope finally supported the cause of the allies and democracy in the face of Nazism, we were far from the “ clarity “Employed by Camus – four occurrences in a few lines – which concluded the committed writer:” Our world does not need lukewarm souls. He needs burning hearts ». Because, for Camus, there was a “ wrong “, THE “ Dictatorship Acts “, And he continued to think, disappointed once again, that the Pope’s word had to denounce them.
Archives without fetishism
The whole book of Nina Valbousquet endeavors to demonstrate what are “ these lukewarm souls “, Faced with” wrong “, Not only the soul of the pope, but also those of all those around her, of a complex hierarchy of which she knows the cogs perfectly. The strength of the book comes from the fact that her author was among the first researchers to have had access to the Pie Archives XII Open by Pope Francis in 2020. Orienting himself in the Vatican archives, even more in chronological series just open, is of a huge complication – the author of these lines knew the chance and the challenge of being able to confront it in 1985 at the opening of the Benoît archives XV (concerning the First World War and the humanitarian policy of the Pope in particular). Nina Valbousquet avoids too easy pitfalls: immersing yourself in these archives to seek scoops without controlling historiography, without understanding the overlaps between the documents produced by the different cogs of what the pontifical – tiny state is, but with gigantic global ramifications and in the no less labyrinthical archives – both very hierarchical and divided spiritual power. She arrived at the Archives of Pie XIIequipped with a huge historiographical and methodological background, without “ archive fetishism », With the certainty that it was time to delve into documents as they are, full of erasures and questions, and convinced that it was time to turn the page digests Prospecting or discharge that have multiplied since the 1960s in the extension of the questions of the time of war. The archives, just the archives, without forgetting the controversies born in the 1950s and 1960s, of literary or cinematographic works, thus the Vicar from Rolf Hochhuth from 1963, or Gengis Cohn’s dance, Published in 1967, in which Romain Gary gave the floor to a German genocidal haunted by a ghost, a Dibbouk of the Jewish tradition: “ If Pope Pie XII had said something, we would have had at least one alibi not to kill the Jews. An alibi … whatever we wanted was an alibi so as not to kill them. »»
“” Impartiality »Or rather assumed silence ?
The subtitle is very important, because the book does not deal with the Vatican in the face of Nazism, the dictatorships, but facing the Shoah. The question asked is both smaller than the immensity of the challenges of the Second World War, and also more in line with questions born from the 1960s, when the extermination of European Jews became “ The black star To understand our societies: the Pope, his temporal and spiritual powers, the persecution and then the implementation of the genocide of the Jews (term created by Raphaël Lemkin between 1943 and 1944), massacres of mass east to the deportations to extermination sites. The question is: why and how, faced with all the information lifted, the “ silence », The contradictions, even the compromises of the Vatican hierarchy ? The photograph of the cover of the book, where the pope is shown three -quarters back, as absorbed by a world which is not the one where he lives with other men, is particularly well chosen.
Nina Valbousquet continues the surveys inaugurated by the master of all the historian of this period, Giovanni Miccoli, who had been as far as possible in cross -checks, reflections, the regressive method at the Marc Bloch with The dilemmas and silences of Pie XII. Vatican, Second World War and Shoah, (2005, complex, 2000 in Italian). The author who knows perfectly historiography is decided for a form of micro-history, the study of specific hanging files, thus the choice of words in the speeches of the Pope, the interventions in the internment camps, the specificity of the interest limited to the Jews converted to Catholicism. She knows all the cogs, sheds light on the new features – or not – brought by the consultation of new archives, and all this in only four years, from the opening of archives to publication, a tour de force.
The author chose a three -part plan, “ Jews and ‘Catholics non-Aryens’, 1938-1941 “,” Help and silence. The Vatican in front of the genocide, 1941-1944 “, And “ After the Shoah ». A before, during and after the Shoah, from the persecution of the Jews since 1933 until the implementation of their systematic extermination in the East in 1941, the generalization of genocide in the west in 1942, finally the consequences until today, of the tempered oblivion by more open individualities to the emergence of the genocide of the Jews in which the Vatican follows the general scheme To see the persistence of anti-Semitism in Poland after the war, for example during the Pogrom in Kielce.
With this exemplary method, Nina Valbousquet can now conclude: yes, the Pope’s silence on the Shoah on which he was very well informed in 1941 was weighing, weighed, and definitive, which did not prevent attempts and rescue successes, but for what purpose ? The idea impartialit (is the pope’s neutrality) not like the “ lukewarm From the International Committee of the Red Cross as soon as the first believes that the slightest attempt to denounce the Nazis endangered the German or European Catholics, and that the second is worried about the fate of prisoners of war for which he has before any mandate ? Throughout the years 1939-1945, the line does not change: it is better not to demonstrate its hostility to Nazism too much at the risk of seeing worse … But what could still be worse, as we see for both “ Jews statutes »And Vichy’s policy towards them in France for example ? A myth is forged after the war to defend the pope among the Catholics and particularly Catholic historians: Pie XII would have had the certainty of an immense danger run by the German and European Catholics if he intervened for the Jews ; Some still taught this in universities in the 1980s. However, throughout the first part, the author testifies to the persistence to the Vatican of the old background of anti -Judaism and then of Christian anti -Semitism, Nonces and Bishops not hesitating to resume the argument (in Vichy for example) of “ Jews War Merchants ». As the American historian Marion Kaplan has shown well cited by Nina Valbousquet, the acceptance of the persecution of rights (legal persecution against the Jews, marking by the star, etc.) changes very quickly in the persecution of lives. The author shows in a very subtle way that if rescue there was still as long as it was still possible, in particular by helping emigration, it was not that of persecuted human beings, but that of souls. Indeed, only the converted Jews or, depending on the formula full of meaning, the “ Non -Aryans Catholics “That is to say converted, can take advantage of” benefits »From the Vatican. The focal length placed on the Brazilian sector, its successes and failures is effective in showing that even before the genocide, the silences are stronger than the dilemmas, and that of dilemmas there is no longer when the Jews are no longer Jewish, but Catholic.
It is also the voice of the Jews found in the documents that Nina Valbousquet makes it heard, restoring their agentity that many studies on the Holocaust and in particular on churches in front of the Shoah have tended to forget. She could have developed a little more the fact that Churchill and Roosevelt, like Pie XIIwere warned very early on from the specificity of the extermination of the Jews and that none of them took the measure of the disaster which took place at the same time as the war. They all thought, starting with pie XIIthat the extermination of the Jews was a detail because it arranged their policy and, for the pope, his faith, including at the time of the deportation of the Jews of Rome in 1943 during which he continued to be wary of the Jews than their executioners.
This remarkable book, by its form and its fund, must be accompanied by the catalog of the exhibition of the Shoah Memorial To the grace of God: churches and shoah of which Nina Valbousquet was the commissioner who allows you to see original archives and puts her new research at the service of the general public. She also directed the number of History Review of the Shoah “” The Vatican, the Catholic Church and the Holocaust »(October 2023) which allows you to deepen this or that file with a good team of authors.
The time required to deepen work in the archives should not call into question the interpretation scheme of Nina Valbousquet. He is also accepted by the current Pope who does everything possible to try to understand his and his predecessors, so different from him in the face of the horror that humans were then capable. But so many other genocides, other extreme violence continue not to stir “ lukewarm souls Who at least have the power to say no.