This is a sober and sobering book on one of the most controversial topics in modern history—Pope Pius XII's role in the Holocaust and the Cold War—written by Michael Phayer, a distinguished scholar of modern German, Holocaust, and Catholic Church history. Unlike several passionate recent studies of Pius XII (born Eugenio Pacelli in 1876 in Rome), Phayer makes every effort at scholarly restraint and caution. But, in the end, his careful effort produces powerful evidence that will likely add significantly to the controversy surrounding the pope, whose canonization process has already been set in motion. Certainly anyone interested in this fascinating, important, and disturbing topic must read this book.

On the second page of his preface, Phayer poses the question “Was Pius XII saintly?” (p. x). Immediately after this, however, he informs the reader that he is not going to answer it, for his book focuses on “the political Pope Pius, not the spiritual Pope Pius” (p. x.). Though Phayer does stay faithful to his mission throughout the twelve chapters of his book, anyone who reads it will find ample evidence that often reflects poorly on the pope's activities during World War II and the Cold War.

Some not previously well-informed readers about this subject might wish to learn more about Pius's career before he became the 260th pope in March 1939 than Phayer provides. Others, who are better informed, might wonder why the author chooses not even to mention some of the most prominent recent books on his subject which often stress Eugenio Pacelli's early career as being formative for his eventual papacy. During those years, Pacelli developed a long and close relationship with Germany, serving as Papal Nuncio to Bavaria and later Weimar Germany from April 1917 to 1929, when he returned to Rome to be made a cardinal, and then serving as the Vatican's Secretary of State for ten years before he followed Pius XI as pope. During his years as Secretary of State, Pacelli continued to have a cordial relationship with Germany. For just one example, he took the lead in crafting the Concordat with Hitler's Third Reich in July 1933. But, to be fair, he also took the lead in developing similar papal agreements with many other countries in those years.

Phayer's choice to focus on Pacelli's years as pope from 1939 until he died in October 1958, however, does not mean that he has any intent to cover over the contested aspects of Pius XII's papacy. Indeed, after reading Phayer's book, one wonders how this pope has had so many ardent supporters over the years, many of whom insisted that he had saved enormous numbers of Jews and other victims of Nazi and Fascist oppression. Basing his book on archival evidence from the American, British, and other countries' governments and governmental services as well as a strong grounding in the voluminous secondary literature surrounding his topic, Phayer remains restrained and modest, and he frequently makes disclaimers that until the Vatican's archives are opened for this period, many of his arguments can only be suggestive. Nevertheless, using the ample evidence he has at his disposal, Phayer makes a strong case that Pius XII did far more to protect and often save Nazi and Fascist war criminals than he did to save and protect Jews and other enemies of Nazi Germany and its allies.

The pope did this, according to Phayer, because he hated communism and wanted to protect the Catholic Church and the world from its evils. Many readers, however, will not find this to be a convincing explanation either for the pope's generous stance toward the Nazi regime and its allies both during World War II and the Cold War or for the weakness of any attempts he made to protect their victims or even to protest against the victims' plight.

To begin with, the pope failed to speak out against the murder of the European Jews even though he was well informed about the genocide and beseeched on a number of occasions by highly informed Jews as well as by leading Catholic clergymen from a number of countries to speak out against the ongoing mass murder. The only time that Pius XII publicly mentioned the slaughter of Jewish victims came in the form of a feeble and vague Christmas message he delivered in 1942 that did not even directly mention the Jewish people of his or any other country. Not only did Pius XII not speak out against the mass murder of the Jews broadly, but he also did virtually nothing to help to prevent it even in his own country and city. When the Jews of Rome were being deported to death camps in October 1943, the German ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsäcker, basically offered him a roadmap about how he could protect the Jews of Rome. Despite this, the pope chose to not lift his finger, and the Jews were sent off.

After the war, the pope's actions continued to be biased in favor of the right. In one well-documented chapter after another, Phayer demonstrates the pope's direct role in harboring (often on Vatican grounds), financing, and enabling Nazi and Fascist war criminals to elude justice after the war by setting up several so-called “ratlines” that escorted them out of Europe to safe havens such as Argentina and other Latin American countries. Among the war criminals the pope helped to save were some of the most notorious Nazi henchmen of all, such as Adolf Eichmann, who spearheaded the Nazis' mass murder of the European Jews; Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor at Auschwitz known as the “Angel of Death”; and Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka death camps where “about 1 million Jews were murdered in gas chambers” (p. 204). Phayer argues in a separate chapter that in addition to all of this, the pope enriched the Vatican and helped to finance the ratlines through large amounts (perhaps literal truckloads) of stolen gold and valuables that had been looted from Jewish and other victims coming from Croatia, Germany, and many other European countries.

Many readers sympathetic to Pius XII will be uncomfortable with this book despite the author's laudable attempt at fair-mindedness. But other readers, who are more open to persuasion through the use of credible evidence, will have yet more reason to wonder why so many people have chosen to honor and praise this pope over the years. As Phayer explains, many people immediately after the war ended believed that the pope must have been responsible for the kind and sometimes heroic actions of many individual Catholics during the war who humanely endeavored to help and save Jews and others threatened by Nazis and other Fascists. To this reader at least, this book demonstrates with much fresh evidence that Pope Pius XII probably did more to hamper those efforts than to encourage them.