Deborah Castellano Lubov
Though historians contest it, Pius XII is still accused of failing to
do enough to help the Jews during World War II. In particular, he is
criticized for too much silence.
But well-known German historian Michael Hesemann says the Pope's
decision to be guarded in protest was a result of what he'd learned some
years before, when while working in the Vatican Secretariat of State
and as nuncio, he was privy to the Vatican's information on the Armenian
genocide and its attempts to stop it.
Protests from Pope Benedict XV and his diplomats only made the
situation worse for the Armenians and that was history Pius XII didn't
want to repeat, Hesemann explains.
In an interview with Zenit ahead of Pope Francis' Nov. 28-30 trip to
Turkey, Hesemann analyzes this massacre, and gives insight into the
parallels with the Holocaust and Pius XII's actions during the war.
ZENIT: Could you give a little information about yourself and your studies on both the Armenian genocide and Pius XII?
Hesemann: For the last 10 years, I worked on Pope
Pius XII and tried to understand the motives for his alleged “silence”
during the Holocaust and his numerous actions to save as many Jews as
possible at the same time, which, may initially sound contradictory.
There is no doubt that the Jews were dear to his heart and important
for him, but why didn’t he protest when he learned of their fate? This
was a question I wanted to solve.
As a matter of fact, before he became Pope, Eugenio Pacelli had a
long history serving in Vatican diplomacy, beginning with his career in
the Secretariat of State, his 12 years as nuncio in Germany and his nine
years as cardinal secretary of state under Pope Pius XI. When I, as a
historian, received permission to study his files in the Vatican Secret
Archives, I came across several documents dealing with the Armenian
genocide of 1915-16, which piqued my interest. To learn more, I started
to dig deeper into this subject and eventually located about 2,000 pages
of hitherto unpublished documents on the biggest crime of World War I.
ZENIT: Could you please briefly explain the Armenian Genocide and what happened?
Hesemann: Under close scrutiny, the “Armenocide”
appears like a model for the Shoah. Obsessed by a racist and nationalist
worldview, the Young Turks, a political movement which came to power
just before World War I, intended to transform the multinational
and multireligious Ottoman Empire into a homogenous “Volksgemeinschaft"
[literally "people's community," a term which referred to Hitler’s
vision for an ideal German society]. Since racial characteristics were
difficult to determine in the mixed population of Turkey, religion
became the indicator of “true Turkishness:” A “true Turk” had to follow
Sunnite Islam. Only homogenous “purity,” they believed, would save
Turkey from “inner microbes” and “parasites” and make it strong enough
to fight for the Pan-Turkish vision of this movement.
As “microbes” and “parasites,” the Young Turk ideologists
recognized the Christian minorities: Armenians, Greeks and Syriac
Christians. When the Germans dragged Turkey into World War I, when the
Sultan, backed by the Sheikh-ül-Islam, the highest Muslim authority in
Turkey, declared the djihad (“Holy War”) in November 1914, the
Young Turks saw the opportunity they had been waiting for to solve their
“Armenian problem” by eliminating the Armenians.
On April 24, 1915, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders in
Constantinople were arrested and deported to the interior of the
country, and most of them were murdered afterwards. To justify their
actions, the Young Turk government accused the Armenians of a conspiracy
with Russia and the preparation of a revolt, although it was never able
to present any evidence for this claim. At this point, most male
Armenians already served in the Turkish Army and were suddenly forced to
do slave labor or got massacred. Beginning in May 1915, nearly the
entire remaining Armenian population (of 2.1 million, before the war)
was, province by province, town by town and village by village,
deported. On foot, with nearly no bread and not even water, old men,
women, children and those Armenians who were wealthy enough to avoid
military service, were sent to Der Zor in the Syrian desert. On
those death marches, hundreds of thousands died of exhaustion,
starvation or diseases. Those who survived the miserable conditions were
forced into concentration camps, starved there or died from cholera,
typhoid and dysentery during the following months, became victims of
massacres or were sent even deeper into the desert where local tribesman
slaughtered them.
ZENIT: How did the Vatican learn about it?
Hesemann: By mid-June 1915, the apostolic delegate
in Constantinople, Msgr. Angelo Dolci, learned about “rumors of
massacres,” as he wrote in a telegraph to the Holy See. About a week
later, he received confirmation that indeed a “persecution” with the
purpose “to remove the element of the Christian Armenians from the
entire province” took place. Among the victims were many Catholic
Armenians, too. Even the Catholic bishop of Mardin, Msgr.
Ignatius Maloyan (who was canonized by John Paul II), and several of his
dignitaries were slaughtered after their deportation by mid-June. After
learning the details of this massacre, [Msgr.] Dolci sent a written
protest to the Grand Vizier, the “Prime Minister” of the
Sultan, requesting the immediate stop of those deadly deportations at
least for the Armenian Catholics. He did not even receive a reply. When
the massacres continued, the Armenian-Catholic Archbishop of Chalcedon,
Msgr. Peter Kojunian, sent an emotional letter to Pope Benedict XV,
stating that “a systematic extermination of the Armenians in Turkey” was
taking place.
ZENIT: Did the Pope react to this letter?
Hesemann: Immediately! Benedict XV wrote a
handwritten letter to Sultan Mehmet V, appealing to his “high-hearted
generosity” and requesting his compassion for the innocent Armenians.
The papal initiative was made public and reported by newspapers all over
the world. At the same time, Secretary of State Cardinal
Pietro Gasparri contacted the nuncios in Vienna and Munich, ordering
them to promote the Holy See’s initiative to Turkey’s allies and urging
them to interfere so that “these barbaric acts should immediately be
stopped.” At the same time in Constantinople, Msgr. Dolci desperately
tried to get the papal autograph to the Sultan but was refused several
times by the Sublime Porte (Ottoman Porte). Only when the German
ambassador interfered, Msgr. Dolci was received by Mehmet V on Oct. 23,
1915, after nearly six weeks. One month later, he was invited to pick up
the sultan’s reply, justifying the deportations by the claim of an
Armenian conspiracy.
ZENIT: Did the deportations, did the massacres, stop?
Hesemann: Not at all! The Turks promised all sorts
of things, they promised to spare the Armenian Catholics … They promised
that all deported Armenians would be home for Christmas, but these were
all lies and false promises. The deportations and massacres continued
until late 1916. Far away from being spared, at the end, 87% of the
Armenian Catholics were murdered, an even higher percentage than that of
the Orthodox Armenians, of which “only” 75% were killed. The
papal protest not only had no success, it turned out to be
counterproductive!
ZENIT: How did the Pope react?
Hesemann: Well, Benedict XV continued to try his
best. In an allocution to the consistory on Dec. 6, 1915, he
explicitly mentioned “the unlucky people of the Armenians who are nearly
completely sent to extermination.” In 1918, when the Russians withdrew
their troops from northeastern Turkey and new massacres occurred against
the surviving Armenians, Pope Benedict sent a second letter to the
Sultan; once again without any success. He had to learn that public
protests just did not work and were even counterproductive, triggering
the anger of the aggressor even more. Eventually, Msgr. Dolci, the
apostolic delegate, wrote to – yes, indeed! - Msgr. Eugenio Pacelli: “By
defending the Armenians, I lost the grace of Caesar, the Nero of this
unlucky nation. I mean the Secretary of the Interior, Talaat Pasha,
Grandmaster of the Masonic Orient. He must have learned of the great
pressure which followed after the intervention of the Holy Father in
form of his autograph, by the other embassies. Since then, I receive
only malevolent looks from him.”
ZENIT: What does that mean for Pius XII and the Holocaust?
Hesemann: Well, all historians agree that his
experience during World War I and especially the papal policy of
neutrality and peacemaking, followed by Benedict XV, highly influenced
the performance of Pius XII during World War II. Of course it did,
since Pacelli already served in key positions during della Chiesa’s
[Benedict XV’s] pontificate, first as secretary of the Congregation for
Extraordinary Affairs of the Secretariat of State, then as nuncio. I
discovered that nearly all information on the Armenian genocide went
over his desk. The document I just quoted was only one example. So he
also learned that all papal protests were not only useless, but even
turned out to be counterproductive.
Pacelli, when confronted with the Holocaust, knew that Adolf Hitler
would never react any better. Keep in mind that he knew Hitler for 19
years at that time; as nuncio in Munich, Pacelli had followed even the
earliest footsteps of the Nazi dictator, describing National Socialism,
in a memorandum sent to the Holy See already on May 1, 1915, as “the
most dangerous heresy of our times.” In a conversation with the American
consul in Cologne, reported to the [US] State Department
in 1939, Pacelli's views on Hitler, to quote the reporting
diplomat “surprised me by their extremeness… He regarded Hitler not only
as an untrustworthy scoundrel, but as a fundamentally wicked person …
not capable of moderation.”
He knew that an open protest, which didn’t work in 1915, would never
work in 1942, when he dealt with an even more evil, uncompromising and
unscrupulous leader. He knew a protest would not help the Jews at all
but only cause Hitler to turn against the Church and destroy the only
infrastructure able to help and save many Jews.
ZENIT: Pope Francis is going to Turkey this month. Should he address this subject?
Hesemann: Indeed, it is a shame that the Turkish
government still denies the Armenian genocide, using the very same lies
and excuses as they did in 1915 in their reply to the papal initiative.
Pope Francis experienced this on his own, when in June 2013 he called
the events of 1915 absolutely, correctly “the first genocide of the 20th
century.” Ankara immediately protested, called back its ambassador
from the Holy See and called the Pope’s remark “absolutely
unacceptable.”
But Pope Francis was right ... Every neutral historian would support
his view. I am very proud that this great Pope did not give up, but
remembered the martyrdom of the Armenian nation again on May 8, 2014,
when he received the Armenian Orthodox Patriarch Karekin II in the
Vatican. And I am sure he will not ignore this subject during his visit
to Turkey, since the Turkish attitude is just unacceptable.
Next year, on April 24, the world will commemorate the
100th anniversary of the beginning of that genocide. Don’t you think it
is eventually time to admit that it happened? I mean, look, I am German.
My nation has committed the biggest crime in human history, the Shoah.
We can’t bring 6 million Jews back to life, unfortunately. But we can
regret, we can try our best to reconcile, we can learn from our history
and prevent it from repeating. Isn’t it an originally Catholic concept
that God will forgive you any sin when you only sincerely regret it,
confess it and do penance? Nobody would blame modern-day Turks for what
their ancestors did. But we blame them for denying it today, since any
denial of a crime makes you an accomplice, a partner in that crime, a
protector of murderers!
ZENIT: Do you think the Pope should also travel to Armenia?
Hesemann: That would be wonderful, since it would be
a sign of fraternal solidarity with a suffering nation, a nation of
martyrs. A sign against the silence, covering up so many endless
chapters of human suffering, and a victory of the truth! I pray that he
will visit Armenia in 2015, without any fear of diplomatic consequences.
And I trust he will, since he fears only God, not men. But even more
important would it be to reconcile those two nations. This can and will
only happen when Turkey admits what happened a century ago. Only the
truth makes us humans free to forgive.
ZENIT: How do you believe this visit can happen, or these steps toward reconciliation be achieved?
Hesemann: Well, who am I to recommend anything to
the Successor of St. Peter? I trust in the intuition, the empathy and
the genius of Pope Francis. Look what he did on his trip to the Holy
Land, establishing a dialogue and the first step towards a
reconciliation of Israelis and Palestinians, inviting them to a common
day of prayer in the Vatican? This was so wonderful! Maybe such a
gesture, bringing both, victims and ‘committers’ together, presenting
the facts and inviting them to reconcile, would be the right sign for
2015. I have full trust in the Holy Father, that he will find the right
words and gestures, once again.
zenit.org, November 13, 2014
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