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Vatican's Nazi
secrets
By NICOLE WINFIELD in Vatican City 21feb03 THE Vatican has begun to release archival documents dealing with the Catholic Church's relations with Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II. They include a letter seeking papal intervention against the Nazis written by a famous Jewish convert to Catholicism, Edith Stein. The letter's existence has been known for decades – Stein wrote about it before she was killed in a Nazi death camp in 1942 – but its text was published for the first time yesterday in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. At the same time, other documents from the era are coming to light, including one that some historians say is proof the Vatican did intervene on behalf of the Jews: a document dated April 4, 1933, that shows the Vatican ordered its diplomats in Germany to warn Adolf Hitler's government not to persecute the Jews. The documents have become available following the Vatican's decision to open its pre-war archives to scholars years ahead of schedule in a bid to deflect criticism that it was silent in the face of the Holocaust. The archives available to researchers as of last weekend cover the Vatican's relations with Germany from 1922-39. During those years, Pope Pius XII – accused by some historians of failing to do enough to protect Jews – was the Vatican nuncio in Germany and later its secretary of state. On April 12, 1933, Stein wrote a letter to Pius XI, asking him to speak out against the "war of exterminating Jewish blood". In 2000, a commission of Jewish and Catholic scholars appointed by the Vatican and a Jewish group listed Stein's letter as one of the documents they hoped to see in order to reach conclusions about the Vatican's wartime record. Stein died at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942. She had sought refuge in Holland but later she and other Jewish converts to Catholicism there were shipped to Auschwitz to punish that country's bishops for having spoken out against Hitler. Pope John Paul II declared her a saint in 1998.
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