The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: An Interview with Rabbi David G. Dalin

Woods: What do you think students of history should make of the Vatican’s 1933 concordat with Germany? Was that agreement in any way an endorsement of National Socialism?

Rabbi David:  The Vatican’s 1933 Concordat with Nazi Germany is one of the issues that critics of Pius XII have used to attack him. Critics of the Reich Concordat, as the Vatican’s 1933 concordat with Nazi Germany has come to be known, claim that it silenced German Catholics who otherwise might have openly opposed Hitler and held him in check. Students of history need to know that such criticism is historically false and misleading. On the contrary, as historian Jose Sanchez has pointed out, the concordat was a pragmatic and morally defensible diplomatic measure to protect German Catholics and the relative freedom of the Catholic Church in Germany. “The Germans had proposed the concordat,” Sanchez reminds us, and for the Vatican “to have rejected it out of hand would have been prejudicial to the rights of Catholics in Germany.” It was morally defensible from the vantage point of German Jews as well, as it had been signed in July 1933, well before Hitler had enacted any of his anti-Semitic legislation or decrees.

Contrary to what Pacelli’s critics have alleged, the concordat did not precipitate the collapse of Germany’s Catholic Center Party. The Vatican wanted the concordat “primarily to protect German Catholics in political situations in which their traditional protector, the Catholic Center Party, no longer existed.”… The Center Party’s influence had steadily declined during the last years of the Weimar Republic. By 1933, it was hardly a political factor at all. In fact, on July 5, 1933, two weeks before the concordat was signed, the party membership decided to dissolve. As even the papal critic James Carroll reluctantly concedes, “Even before the concordat was formally signed, the Center Party had ceased to exist.”

Critics of Pacelli argue that Hitler pressed for the concordat in order to give his Nazi regime moral legitimacy. As Sanchez points out, however, the concordat gave no moral approval to Hitler’s regime. Indeed, when Hitler tried to make this claim, hailing the Vatican’s “recognition of the present government,” Pacelli specifically denied it in two articles in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. All the Church had done was to negotiate a treaty and nothing more, Pacelli argued. Students of history need to be reminded that, contrary to what Pius XII’s critics have falsely alleged, the concordat did not imply a moral endorsement of Hitler or National Socialism.

Professor John Conway of the University of British Columbia, while not uncritical of Pius XII, says,

The conclusion of the Reich Concordat with the new Nazi regime in 1933 is…not to be seen as a sign of the Vatican’s approval…but rather as an attempt to control [the regime’s] unpredictable revolutionary fervor within some legally binding framework.