Introduction - The Outrage
There are some lines you do not cross. There are some names you do not rehabilitate. And there are some stains on history that no amount of spin or revisionism can ever cleanse. Among these, none is darker than that of Pope Pius XII — Eugenio Pacelli — the wartime pope who signed Hitler’s first international treaty, who remained silent while the Jews of Europe were gassed and burned, and who presided over a Church that refused to return Jewish children to their surviving families after the Holocaust.
And yet, in a move that beggars belief, the Daily Wire has attempted to whitewash the man who was called “Hitler’s Pope.”
At a time of surging antisemitism, when Jews are once again assaulted in the streets of Europe and demonized in the universities of America, the Six Million are desecrated by giving cover to the man who abandoned them.
Let me be blunt: Pope Pius XII was complicit in genocide. His silence was a crime. His inaction was an endorsement. His legacy is one of cowardice, betrayal, and antisemitism.
The Concordat with Hitler - Vatican Complicity from the Start
The road to Auschwitz was paved long before the cattle cars rolled. In 1933, while the world was still grappling with Hitler’s rise, Eugenio Pacelli — then Secretary of State of the Vatican, the future Pius XII — negotiated and signed the Reichskonkordat, a treaty between the Holy See and Nazi Germany.[^1]
This was Hitler’s first international treaty. It granted his murderous regime legitimacy on the world stage. In exchange, the Vatican secured protections for Catholic schools and organizations — while abandoning Jews, Protestants, and other minorities to their fate.
Pius’s defenders claim this was merely “diplomacy.” That is a grotesque lie. This was collaboration. It was a signal to Hitler that the moral voice of Christianity would not oppose him — not when the Jews were targeted, not when dissent was crushed, not when the machinery of extermination began.
As John Cornwell has shown in “Hitler’s Pope”, Pacelli knew exactly what Hitler stood for.[^2] He had read “Mein Kampf”. He understood Nazi antisemitism. Yet he chose appeasement and treaty, not condemnation and confrontation.
The ink of that Concordat dried in 1933. By 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. The Pope who had once extended his hand in diplomacy would now extend his silence to mass murder.
The Silence During the Holocaust
The most damning fact about Pius XII is also the simplest: never once, not in a single sermon, encyclical, or public pronouncement, did he condemn the Holocaust or name the Jews as its victims.[^3]
Six million Jews were exterminated — babies gassed, mothers shot into pits, fathers burned in crematoria — and the Pope of Rome never uttered the word “Jew.”
His Christmas addresses spoke vaguely of the suffering of “so many” and the killing of “hundreds of thousands” for their “race or descent.”[^4] But his words were deliberately coded, evasive, bloodless. The Jews were not named. The perpetrators were not named. The Nazis were not condemned.
Contrast this with the courage of the Dutch Bishops, who in 1942 issued a pastoral letter explicitly condemning Nazi deportations of Jews.[^5] The Nazis retaliated by seizing Dutch Jews, including the great philosopher Edith Stein, a Catholic nun of Jewish birth, and sending them to their deaths. The Dutch Bishops risked and sacrificed. Pius XII hid behind silence and calculation.
His defenders argue silence was “strategic” — that speaking would have worsened matters. That is an insult to truth and morality. Silence in the face of genocide is complicity. Silence in the face of Auschwitz is betrayal.
Pius XII’s Antisemitism
Why was he silent? The answer is as ugly as it is undeniable: Pius XII was an antisemite.
His writings reveal a man steeped in contempt for Judaism. As Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli described Jews as spiritually “blind” and “ungrateful” in the Church’s internal correspondence.[^6] He trafficked in the poisonous theology that had, for centuries, depicted Jews as cursed and guilty of deicide.
This mindset explains his refusal to defend Jews as Jews. He would mourn “victims” in the abstract but not the Jewish People in particular. To name the Jews was to defend them as a people with dignity, rights, and divine image. He would not grant them that honor.
And his antisemitism did not end with silence. It shaped Vatican policy during and after the war.
The Postwar Kidnapping Scandal
After the Holocaust, as shattered Jewish survivors searched desperately for their families, many discovered their children had been sheltered by Catholic institutions during the war. Some had been baptized. And here, in an act of cruelty that defies comprehension, the Vatican ruled that any child baptized during the war could not be returned to their Jewish family.[^7]
Imagine: a Jewish mother survives Auschwitz, returns to reclaim her child, and the Church tells her, “No. Your child is now ours.”
This was not mercy. This was not faith. This was kidnapping. It was spiritual theft, sanctioned by the very Pope whose silence had enabled genocide.
The kidnapping scandal is one of the most shameful chapters of Catholic-Jewish history. And it lies at Pius XII’s feet.
Why Pius XII Will Always Be ‘Hitler’s Pope’
The historical record is overwhelming. Pius XII’s defenders can shout revisionism from the rooftops, but facts remain stubborn.
• He signed Hitler’s first international treaty.
• He never condemned the Holocaust or named the Jews.
• He viewed Jews through the lens of contempt and theological antisemitism.
• He presided over the kidnapping of Jewish children after the war.
This is not the profile of a saint. This is the profile of a collaborator, an appeaser, a betrayer.
As long as history is written, Pius XII will bear the name he earned: "Hitler’s Pope".
An Attempted Whitewash
Which brings us back to The Daily Wire.
For years, this network, and its founder, Ben Shapiro, have been defenders of Israel and opponents of antisemtism. Ben Shapiro's image is of the “tough Jew” who calls out haters.
Candace Owens, a woman whose Jew-hatred is now so vile it includes mocking Holocaust victims and promoting antisemitic tropes, had a daily show on his network, but he eventually severed ties with her because of her embrace of antisemitic rhetoric and after I launched a public campaign against him until he did.
Now, he has announced a documentary series rehabilitating “Hitler’s Pope” — whitewashing his complicity, sanitizing his silence, and erasing his antisemitism. Why?
This is desecration of memory, a betrayal of the Six Million.
The Danger of Historical Revisionism
Why does this matter? Why should Jews care if a series defends Pius XII?
Because history matters. Memory matters. The Holocaust is under assault from every corner — from open denial by neo-Nazis, to trivialization by leftist activists who equate Gaza with Auschwitz, to revisionism by “scholars” who sanitize perpetrators.
Whitewashing Pius XII is not a neutral act. It chips away at the clarity of Holocaust history. It blurs guilt. It dilutes responsibility. And in a world where antisemitism is rising, it hands ammunition to those who wish to say the Jews exaggerate, that the Church was innocent, that silence was prudence.
We cannot allow this. We must defend memory with ferocity.
Conclusion - A Call to Remember and Resist
Pope Pius XII failed the Jews in life. We must not fail them in memory.
The Six Million cry out not only against their murderers but against those who stood silent. Pius XII’s silence was a crime. His antisemitism was a betrayal. His legacy is a stain.
And the Daily Wire, in choosing to whitewash him, seems to have aligned itself with the desecrators of memory.
We Jews must never be silent in return. We must resist this whitewash with the same ferocity we resist Holocaust denial itself.
History will record Pope Pius XII as “Hitler’s Pope”. And history will record those who chose to scrub his crimes.
There are some names you do not rehabilitate. Pius XII is one.
References
[^1]: David Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini (2014).
[^2]: John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (1999).
[^3]: Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (2000).
[^4]: Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (2000).
[^5]: Robert Katz, The Battle for Rome (2003).
[^6]: Saul Friedländer, Pius XII and the Third Reich (1964).
[^7]: David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (1997); Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War (2008).