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Unsealed Vatican Archives Give Fresh Clues to Pope's Response to Holocaust


(New York Times) Elisabetta Povoledo - When the Vatican opened its sealed archives from the World War II-era pontificate of Pius XII in March, Brown University historian David I. Kertzer was among the first in line. In an article published in the Atlantic last week, Dr. Kertzer revealed a memorandum advising Pius against making a formal protest when the Gestapo rounded up 1,000 of Rome's Jews on Oct. 16, 1943, for deportation to Auschwitz. He also found a trail of documents revealing that Vatican officials directed clerics in France to resist turning over two Jewish boys who had been put in the care of local Catholics - despite rulings by French courts ordering that the boys be given to their aunt. Kertzer's book The Pope and Mussolini, about Pius' predecessor, Pius XI, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2015.
2020-09-03 00:00:00
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