On April 9, in a sudden swoop, German troops occupied Denmark and landed in Norway. On May 10 the Wehrmacht attacked in the West. On the fifteenth, the Dutch surrendered; on the eighteenth, Belgium followed. On May 13 the Germans had crossed the Meuse River, and on the twentieth they were in sight of the Channel Coast near Dunkirk. Some 340,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated back to England, thanks in part to Hitler’s order to stop for three days before attacking and taking Dunkirk. At the time the decision appeared of “secondary importance,” in German terms.5 In hindsight it may have been one of the turning points of the war.
In early June the Wehrmacht moved south. On the tenth Mussolini joined the war on Hitler’s side. On the fourteenth German troops entered Paris. On the seventeenth French prime minister Paul Reynaud resigned and was replaced by his deputy, the elderly hero of World War I, Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain. Without consulting France’s British ally, Pétain asked for an armistice. The German and Italian conditions were accepted, and on June 25, shortly after midnight, the armistice took effect. In the meantime the British government had been reshuffled. On May 10, the day of the German attack on the Western Front, Neville Chamberlain had been forced to resign; the new prime minister was Winston Churchill.
On July 19, in a triumphal address to the Reichstag, Hitler taunted England with a “peace offer.” In a radio broadcast three days later, British foreign secretary Lord Halifax (who, a month earlier, had still been the supporter of a “peace of compromise”), rejected the German proposal and vowed that his country would continue to fight, whatever the cost. Did England have the military resources, and did its population and its leadership have the resolve, to pursue the war alone? None of this was obvious in the early summer of 1940. The appeasement camp, although it had lost one of its champions in Lord Halifax, remained vocal, and some highly visible personalities, the Duke of Windsor in particular, did not hide their desire to come to terms with Hitler’s Germany.
Stalin, who within days of the French collapse had occupied the Baltic countries and wrung Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania, snubbed Churchill’s carefully worded query about a possible rapprochement. The American scene was contradictory. Roosevelt, an uncompromising “interventionist” if there ever was one, had been nominated again as Democratic candidate at the Chicago convention on July 19; his opponent, the Republican Wendell Willkie, was no less a determined interventionist, which augured well for Great Britain. But in Congress and among the American population, isolationism remained strong; soon the America First Committee would give it a firm political basis and a framework for militant propaganda. At this stage, however, even Roosevelt’s reelection would be no guarantee that the United States would move closer to war. Throughout Europe, in occupied countries and among neutrals, a majority of the political elite and possibly a majority of the populations did not doubt in the summer of 1940 that Germany would soon prevail. Many were those who aspired to a “new order” and were open to the “temptation of fascism.” The sources of this surge of antiliberalism were deeper than the immediate impact of German military might; as alluded to in the introduction, they were the outcome of a gradual evolution that had unfolded throughout the previous five or six decades.
A vast literature has described and analyzed all the twists and turns of antiliberalism and the rise of a new “revolutionary Right” (and Left), mainly on the European scene, from the end of the nineteenth century onward. In terms of this “New Right,” as opposed to the traditional, essentially conservative Right, it is generally accepted by now that the wide array of movements that came under this rubric did not spring only from a narrow social background (the lower middle classes), inspired mainly by fear of the mounting force of the organized Left on the one hand and of the brutal and unaccountable ups and downs of unrestrained capitalism on the other. The social background of the New Right was wider and extended to parts of a disenchanted working class as well as to the upper middle classes and elements of the former aristocracy. It expressed violent opposition to liberalism and to “the ideas of 1789,” to social democracy and mainly to Marxism (later communism or Bolshevism), as well as to conservative policies of compromise with the democratic status quo; it searched for a “third way” that would overcome both the threat of proletarian revolution and capitalist takeover. Such a “third way” had to be authoritarian in the eyes of the new revolutionaries; it carried a mystique of its own, usually an extreme brand of nationalism and a vague aspiration for an antimaterialist regeneration of society.6
Whereas the antimaterialist, antibourgeois spirit surfaced both on the Right and among segments of the Left in pre–World War I Europe and found strong support among Catholics and Protestants alike, its fusion with exacerbated nationalism, and the related cult of camaraderie, heroism, and death in the aftermath of the war, became standard fare of the New Right and of early fascism. Following the revolution of 1917 the fear of Bolshevism added an apocalyptic dimension to the sense of looming catastrophe. It is in this context that the attraction of a “new order” (as the political expression of the “third way”), under the leadership of a political savior who could rescue a world adrift from the weak and corrupt paralysis of liberal democracy, grew in the minds of many.
The world economic crisis of the thirties merely brought the fears and the urges of earlier decades to a head: the fascist regime in Italy, inaugurated by Benito Mussolini’s so-called march on Rome in October 1922, was outdistanced by the considerably more powerful and impressive Nazi phenomenon: The “new order” was becoming a formidable political and military reality. The defeat of France seemed to confirm the superiority of the new order over the old, of the new values over those that had so utterly failed.
The Danish government, kept in place by the Germans, issued a statement in July 1940 expressing its “admiration” for the “great German victories” [that] “have brought about a new era in Europe, which will result in a new order in a political and economic sense, under the leadership of Germany.”7 For several months the Belgian government, which had taken refuge in London, considered the possibility of rejoining King Leopold III (who had stayed) and accepting German domination; in October 1940 it finally chose opposition and exile. By then Marshal Pétain’s government had openly chosen the path of collaboration with the Reich. As for the populations in most of Western Europe, they soon accommodated to the presence of an occupation army widely praised for its correct, even polite behavior.
Intellectual accommodation to the new order and intellectual collaboration with it will be a recurring theme in this book. Suffice it to mention here that not only the far right of the European intellectual scene welcomed the German triumph. A strong contingent of Christian thinkers hailed the demise of materialism and modernity and acclaimed the rise of the “new spirit.” Thus, in a letter from Peking, the Jesuit paleontologist and a philosophical luminary of post-1945 Paris, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, showed an impressive understanding of the new times: “Personally, I stick to my idea that we are watching the birth, more than the death of a world…. Peace cannot mean anything but a higher process of conquest…. The world is bound to belong to its most active elements…. Just now, the Germans deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world.”8
Teilhard’s voice was one among many, even on the Catholic left. “Europe divided against itself is giving birth to a new order, not only perhaps for Europe but for the whole world,” the French left-wing Catholic thinker, Emmanuel Mounier, wrote in October 1940. “Only a spiritual revolution and an institutional rebirth of the same scope as the fascist revolution could perhaps have saved France from destruction…. Germany against the West is Sparta against Athens, the hard life against the pleasant life.” And Mounier foresaw the birth of a Europe that “will be an authoritarian Europe, because too long it was a libertarian Europe.”9
More significant for the ready acceptance of a “new order” than the enthusiasm
of some Christian thinkers was the coalition between the carriers of this new order and most of the right-wing authoritarian regimes on the Continent. As the nationalist Right in Germany had become the natural ally of National Socialism during the crucial period preceding and immediately following the “seizure of power,” and then went along as a submissive partner with the policies of the new Reich, so did the European Right during the thirties and, with even greater enthusiasm, after Hitler’s early victories. As in Germany—and in Italy—common enemies, mainly Bolshevism and liberal democracy, superseded the social (and ideological) antagonisms between the traditional elites and the extremism inherent in Nazism or even Italian fascism. And, in order to accommodate its conservative partners, mainly in east central Europe, Hitler at times sided with the authoritarian-conservative governments against their internal fascist opposition; thus, for example, the Nazi leader supported Romanian marshal Ion Antonescu’s regime against Horia Sima’s fascist “Iron Guard” during the guard’s attempted putsch of January 1941.
The ideological ambitions of a “new order” and the Nazi-fascist-authoritarian power coalition were undermined from the outset by contrary forces, weak at first but growing in strength as time went by. When it became clear that Great Britain would not give in and that the United States would mobilize its industrial power to support the British war effort, doubts about a final German victory surfaced here and there. Hatred of the Germans spread, intensely in Poland, then in the Balkans, more slowly yet persistently in the West. Generally speaking, during the early years of the war, before the German attack against the Soviet Union, the majority of the European populations was neither psychologically nor practically ready for some form of anti-German resistance (despite armed attacks against the Wehrmacht in Poland and later in Serbia). In the West in particular the population concentrated on overcoming everyday difficulties and opted for various strategies of “accommodation.”10
One of the major factors that bolstered accommodation with the existing power coalition on the European continent was the conciliatory attitude of the traditionally conservative Christian churches, and particularly—in terms of its influence—that of the Catholic Church. During the rise of Nazism to power in Germany, and during the 1930s, the tension between Hitler’s movement and then between his regime and the Catholic Church had been considerable, as already alluded to; yet, as we shall see, Pius XII’s accession to the pontificate signaled a resolute quest on the part of the Vatican for an arrangement with the Reich. Catholicism would not give in on matters of dogma (the sanctity of baptism and its precedence over the notion of race) or on issues of canon law. Yet political considerations outweighed any thought of adopting a strong stand against the fascist-authoritarian front.
And, during these same years, Antonio de Salazar’s Portugal, Francisco Franco’s Spain, the post-Pilsudski Polish governments, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary, and, from March 1939 on, Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia, displayed various shades of a not-unnatural political-religious alliance against communism, liberalism, and “materialism,” the common enemies of both the Christian churches and authoritarian right-wing regimes. Soon Antonescu’s Romania would march down the same path, and, even more violently and viciously, so would Ante Pavelíc’s Croatia. As for Vichy France, its authoritarianism and Catholicism epitomized a strangely stunted return of the “ancien régime”—without the monarchy.
The alliance against communism, liberalism, and “materialism” included to various degrees, as we have seen, some of the main ingredients of modern anti-Jewish hostility. One should add to this brew the themes spread by Nazi propaganda and a variety of national anti-Semitic rantings: those of the Endeks in Poland, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, the Croatian Ustasha, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Action Française—and, for good measure—those of the still-exiled Ukrainian OUN and the underground nationalist militants in the Baltic countries in the summer of 1940. The “new order” thus also became an intrinsically anti-Jewish new order. In 1940, however, the ultimate consequences of this tide of hatred could not yet be perceived; the common aim was exclusion and segregation.
Against the background of this momentous ideological evolution and in the midst of an expanding war and a heightening political and moral crisis throughout much of the Western world, the influence of the pope came to play a major role. A few months before his death, Pius XI, whose growing hostility to the Nazi regime we already mentioned, had demanded the preparation of an encyclical against Nazi racism and anti-Semitism. He received a draft of Humani Generis Unitas as he lay dying. His successor must of course have known of the existence of the document and probably decided to shelve it.11
Pius XII’s attitude toward Germany and mainly toward the Jews has often been contrasted with that of his predecessor, thus creating the impression that, in many ways, Pius XII’s policy was unusual, even aberrant.12 In fact Pius XI, as legate nuncio to Poland in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and during most of his pontificate, openly expressed unconcealed anti-Jewish attitudes, as had been the case among most of his predecessors in the modern era. The change that led to Humani Generis Unitas occurred during the last years of Pius XI’s life and created a growing rift with the Curia, the Roman Jesuits of the periodical Civiltà Cattolica; the Vatican daily, Osservatore Romano; and possibly his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII.13 Thus it can safely be said that Pacelli himself, as secretary of state and later as pope, merely followed a well-established path, even though he may have perceived that the world around him was changing radically. The new pontiff, however, added a personal imprint and initiatives of his own to a well-honed tradition.14
Distant, autocratic, and imbued with a sense of his own intellectual and spiritual superiority, Pacelli was as fiercely conservative in politics as in church matters. Nonetheless he was considered an able diplomat during his tenure as nuncio in Munich (1916–20) and then in Berlin in the 1920s. His drive for centralization and for the control of the Vatican bureaucracy over the national churches led him to strive for a concordat with Germany, even at the cost of sacrificing the German Catholic Party, the Zentrum, in the process. The Concordat was signed in July 1933 and ratified that September. The German signature was Adolf Hitler’s. In return, on March 23, 1933, the Zentrum had voted full powers for the Nazi leader, which, for the Catholic Party, meant its own demise and the final demise of the German Republic.
The appearance of good relations between Pius XI and Nazi Germany did not last. From 1936 on, as the danger Nazi racial tenets posed to Catholic dogma grew clearer, as important aspects of the Concordat regarding Catholic institutions (youth movements and religious orders) and church property were disregarded by Berlin, and as trumped-up charges against priests and nuns signaled the possibility of direct persecution of the Catholic Church, Pius XI became increasingly hostile to the new Reich. The pope’s 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (“With Deepest Concern”) heightened the existing tension. There can be little doubt that Secretary of State Pacelli was involved in the preparation of the encyclical and shared Pius XI’s outrage at Nazi measures. It was most probably in this context that, in April 1938, Pacelli handed a confidential memorandum to the U.S. ambassador to London, Joseph P. Kennedy, during a meeting in Rome. Compromise with the Nazis, it stated, was out of the question. At approximately the same time, in a conversation with the U.S. consul general in Berlin, Alfred W. Klieforth, Pacelli supposedly said “that he [Pacelli] unalterably opposed every compromise with National Socialism. He regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel, but as a fundamentally wicked person. He did not believe Hitler capable of moderation.”15
Once Pacelli was elected pope, however, some of his first initiatives (apart from the shelving of Humani Generis Unitas) confirmed the persistence of an ultraconservative stance and showed an unmistakable desire to placate Germany. Thus, in mid-April 1939, in a radio broadcast, the pontiff congratulated the Spanish people on the return of peace and the achi
evement of victory (Franco’s, of course), adding that Spain “had once again given the prophets of materialist atheism a noble proof of its indestructible Catholic faith.”16 A few months later Pius XII rescinded his predecessor’s excommunication of the French antirepublican, monarchist, furiously nationalist, and anti-Semitic Action Française. The Holy Office lifted the condemnation on July 7, 1939, but the decision was announced in the Osservatore Romano on July 15, that is, on the morrow of Bastille Day: The choice of date may have been sheer coincidence.17
On March 6, the new pontiff had announced his election to Hitler (as was the custom) in a particularly long letter originally written in Latin, the German version of which he had manifestly reworked himself and signed (as wasn’t the custom).
The Nazi-Soviet pact, on the other hand, must have reinforced Pius XII’s personal lack of confidence in the Nazi leader; it may explain why the pontiff maintained brief contacts with German opposition groups planning an anti-Hitler coup in the fall of 1939. From the outset, however, the pope was faced with a very different and no less pressing issue: What should both his diplomatic and public reaction be in the face of ever more massive Nazi crimes?
Pius XII made it clear to his entourage that he would be personally in charge of relations with Hitler’s Germany. Intentionally, no doubt, the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic Cesare Orsenigo was kept as nuncio in Berlin.19 Regarding the entire gamut of Nazi crimes, Pius’s policy, during the first phase of the war, may be defined as an exercise in selective appeasement. The pope did not take a public stand regarding the murder of the mentally ill, but he made a plea for the “beloved Polish people” in his encyclical Summi Pontificatus of October 20, 1939 (although this appeared insufficient to the Polish episcopate and the Polish minister to the Vatican).20 Concerning both euthanasia and the fate of the Catholics in Poland, the Vatican also appealed to Berlin either via the nuncio (mainly about Poland) or in urgent pleas to the German bishops. In letters of December 1940 to both Cardinal Bertram of Breslau and Bishop Preysing of Berlin, Pius XII expressed his shock about the killing of the mentally ill.21 In both cases and otherwise, however, nothing was said about the persecution of the Jews.
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination Page 11