Noel himself rightly acquits the Pope of anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism, arguing that his silence over the Holocaust, was ‘motivated by a sense of duty towards the Catholic Church’, which he feared would suffer grievously if he spoke out. He also genuinely feared that the Jews themselves would suffer, for, as the Pontiff put it, ‘No doubt a protest would have gained me the praise and respect of the civilised world, but it would have submitted the Jews to an even worse fate’. He based this upon the effect that the Dutch Catholic bishops’ outcry had against the fate of the Jews in Holland, after which the Nazis responded by killing 80 per cent of all Dutch Jews and refusing to recognise conversions to Catholicism (although they did to Protestantism).

Pius also weighed the perceived dangers to the sovereignty of the Vatican City in his calculations, as well as his Church’s ability to continue to protect tens of thousands of Italian Jews from Nazi persecution, including an estimated 3,000 at his summer residence alone. This is one of the most studied and debated aspects of the second world war, even though it is doubtful that even the harshest papal encyclical would in reality have done anything much to stymie the plans of men like Himmler and Heydrich. Pius was naive to believe that a protest would have made European Jews’ situation worse, however, since by the autumn of 1941 the Final Solution was already under way. After Rome was liberated in June 1944, the Pope could have at least threatened to excommunicate leading Nazis, as he did anyone voting Communist in the Italian elections of 1948.

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