Rescue of Jews by Catholics during the Holocaust

During the Holocaust, the Catholic Church played a role in the rescue of hundreds of thousands of Jews from being murdered by the Nazis. Members of the Church, through lobbying of Axis officials, provision of false documents, and the hiding of people in monasteries, convents, schools, among families and the institutions of the Vatican itself, saved hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Israeli diplomat and historian Pinchas Lapide estimated the figure at between 700,000 and 860,000, although the figure is contested.^[1]

The Catholic Church itself faced persecution in Hitler's Germany, and institutional German Catholic resistance to Nazism centered largely on defending the Church's own rights and institutions. Broader resistance tended to be fragmented and led by individual effort in Germany, but in every country under German occupation, priests played a major part in rescuing Jews. Aiding Jews met with severe penalty and many rescuers and would-be rescuers were killed including St Maximilian Kolbe, Giuseppe Girotti, and Bernhard Lichtenberg who were sent to the concentration camps.

In the prelude to the Holocaust, Popes Pius XI and Pius XII preached against racism and war in encyclicals such as Mit brennender Sorge (1937) and Summi Pontificatus (1939). Pius XI condemned Kristallnacht and rejected the Nazi claim of racial superiority, saying instead there was only "a single human race". His successor Pius XII employed diplomacy to aid the Jews, and directed his Church to provide discreet aid. While the overall caution of his approach has been criticised by some, his 1942 Christmas radio address denounced the murder of "hundreds of thousands" of innocent people on the basis of "nationality or race" and he intervened to attempt to block Nazi deportations of Jews in various countries.

Catholic bishops in Germany sometimes spoke out on human rights issues, but protests against anti-Jewish policies tended to be by way of private lobbying of government ministers. After Pius XII's 1943 Mystici corporis Christi encyclical (which condemned the killing of the disabled amid the ongoing Nazi euthanasia program), a joint declaration from the German bishops denounced the killing of "innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped, incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages, and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent".^[2] Resistor priests active in rescuing Jews include the martyrs Bernard Lichtenberg and Alfred Delp, and laywomen Gertrud Luckner and Margarete Sommer used Catholic agencies to aid German Jews, under the protection of Bishops such as Konrad von Preysing.

In Italy, the popes lobbied Mussolini against anti-Semitic policies, while Vatican diplomats, among them Giuseppe Burzio in Slovakia, Filippo Bernardini in Switzerland and Giuseppe Angelo Roncalli in Turkey rescued thousands. The nuncio to Budapest, Angelo Rotta, and Bucharest, Andrea Cassulo, have been recognised by Yad Vashem. The Church played an important role in the defence of Jews in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, encouraged by the protests of leaders such as Cardinal Jozef-Ernest van Roey, Archbishop Jules-Géraud Saliège, and Johannes de Jong. From his Vatican office, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty operated an escape operation for Jews and Allied escapees. Priests and nuns of orders like the Jesuits, Franciscans and Benedictines hid children in monasteries, convents and schools.^[3] Margit Slachta's Hungarian Social Service Sisterhood saved thousands. In Poland, the unique Żegota organisation also rescued thousands and Mother Matylda Getter's Franciscan Sisters sheltered hundreds of Jewish children who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto. In France, Belgium, and Italy, Catholic underground networks were particularly active and saved thousands of Jews, particularly in central Italy where groups like the Assisi Network were active, and in southern France.^[4]