New evidence shows Pope Pius XII helped Jews

BY ANABEL INGE
NEW EVIDENCE has emerged to suggest that Pope Pius XII, the wartime pontiff frequently accused of being silent in the face of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, was actually regarded as an enemy by Hitler's regime. Letters and memos reveal that the pontiff secretly helped displaced Jews and Poles in spite of the fact that critics have long dubbed him "Hitler's Pope". The findings, which were unearthed at a depot formerly used by the Stasi, the German secret police, will fuel hope among Catholics that the defamation of Pius XII as an antiSemite who failed to speak out against Hitler will come to an end. According to the new papers, acquired by the Rome-based newspaper La Repubblica. Nazi spies working in the Vatican were, on the contrary, concerned that the Pontiff was too towards Jews. of written by m sympathetic tow One memos, wtten by the head of Berlin's police force to Joachim von Ribbentropp, Germany's Foreign Minister, said that were the Catholic receiving eceiving assistance Church "both in terms of financially". A and nancially". A Nazi spy at the Vatican claims in another document that "our source was told to his face by Fr Robert Leib ner [a secretary to Pope Pius] that the greatest hope of the Church is that the would be obliterated by the war". La Repubblicare claimed that the documents were sent to the heads of the Third Reich secret police after war had ended. Pope Pius XII, who led the h from 1939 to 1958 after a number of years as the papal nuncio to Germany, has been widely criticised over the decades for his attitude towards the Holocaust. Critics of the Church have alleged that the Pontiff turned a deaf ear to reports of Hitler's persecution of Jews, and considerable pressure had been placed on the Vatican to Open up its secret archives in order to investigate the veracity of such claims. The discoveries come a month after former Lieutenant-General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who led the Romanian secret service before he defected to the West in 1978, claimed that he was involved in a Kremlin scheme that sought to discredit Pope Pius by painting him as a "coldhearted Nazi sympathiser". The operation, launched in 1960 under the codename Seat12, allegedly led to the 1963 play TheDeputy, by Rolf Hochhuth, which gave rise to contemporary claims that the Pontiff had backed Hitler's Holocaust.