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Hitler's Pope is a book written by the Catholic writer John Cornwell that is very sharply critical of Pope Pius XII. Conrwell was granted access to the Vatican archives to review the records of the conduct of Eugenio Pacelli, both as Nuncio to Germany and as Pope. His objective had been to find evidence defending Pope Pius XII from claims that he was guilty of moral errors and of failure to do enough to prevent or mitigate the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews under Adolf Hitler. Cornwell reviewed the documents, and concluded, on the contrary, that Pope Pius XII had, without intent, become "Hitler's Pawn" and so "Hitler's Pope".
Anti-Semitism
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John Cornwell writes of the deep motivations behind Pacelli's temporisation with Fascism. Pacelli is specified as outstandingly representative of the recent (since 1870) drive within the Catholic Church towards the autocratic absolute leadership principle of dictatorial and centralised papal power. In contrast to collegiality of councils or bishops thereto, this centralisation progressed during the 20th century, stimulated by the threatening factors of marxism, materialism, sexual liberation and rational scepticism.
The underlying anti-semitism of the Bavarian and later German Nuncius Eugenio Pacelli is traced by Cornwell from as early as 1917, and it is the case that this scholar was given access to the mid-thirties and later archives by the Vatican authorities specifically to counter accusations of anti-semitism against Pope Pius XI and Pacelli when Pope Pius XII. The scholar's studies resulted in a completely contrary documentation confirming a deep-seated and ingrained anti-semitism.
The connection to Hitler's own anti-semitic mass murder is Catholicism's own age-old blame upon the Israelites but the extra-ordinary calm over-coming the previously hyper-active Hitler in December 1941 (when the Russian counter-attack revealed to him the likely failure of the War) reveals the true deep mass-murderer's joy at the destruction of his chosen victims. Hitler is surmised as accepting the eventual German defeat, and of inviting it even more surely, by declaring unprovoked War upon the USA, principally because he foresaw at least the destruction of European Jewry as being assured. Documentation by Cornwell of the old Papal anti-semitism shows that the anti-semitism of Hitlerism, publicly notable through-out its history, was an active mirror of that deep passive aversion to Jewry.
The controversy of this conclusion has not been successfully stilled as it parallels the public rapprochement undertaken by Pope John Paul II towards Israel. Whilst many Jewish figures accepted that overture, its lack of clarity and focus upon the actuality of the Church's Nazi approbation in 1933 and the specific silence thereafter by the Holy See concerning maltreatment of Jews by name, remains a virulently contested historical topic. Jewish Holocaust organisations generally confine themselves to a timeline listing the evidence of each notable event and personality, with no active accusation more than that evidence itself. The opposite Catholic defence is rather more active in strong denial, but generally skips the earlier trade-off between these two forces, to settle on the later, relatively vapid (to the Holocaust researcher's) 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, as well as upon Pope Pius XII's factual wartime assistance to certain confined numbers of Jews.
Dispute even exists as to whether Cornwell really saw all the relevant Vatican documents or those of the relevant years, or whether he accurately recorded or analysed them; however there exists a generalised historical reference to the approbation of Nazism by the church at and following the signing of the Reichsconcordat with the Catholic church. Papal connections to Nazi or Widerstand intermediaries in 1940 were assiduously oral in nature, and equally solely oral concerning intermediaries during a papal push for restoration of the German Monarchy in the 1920's. Thus it remains in question whether any documentation was ever made or ever kept, apart from reference to a letter sent to Berlin in 1932 by the then Vatican Secretary of State Pacelli advocating Catholic Zentrumspartei Centre Party condonation of Hitler. The word condonation is the historically usual to describe this catholic party's eventual (and crucial) promotion and acceptance of Hitlerism in March 1933.