The two books under review offer very different perspectives on the Holocaust. Abraham Ascher, himself born in Breslau, Germany (today Wrocław in Poland), offers a detailed and intimate account of the fate of the Jews in this Silesian town from 1933 to the point in 1943 when the process of deportation was virtually complete. His focus is on the reactions of the organized Jewish community to their increasing isolation, humiliation and subjugation, adopting an approach with which readers of Marion Kaplan's book Between Dignity and Despair. Jewish Life in Nazi Germany will already be familiar. In Ascher's case, however, the emphasis is very much on the triumph of dignity over despair, as seen, for instance, in the determined maintenance of schools, welfare organizations, synagogues and other facets of Jewish cultural life in the face of “insuperable” odds. In this sense, he is very critical — perhaps excessively so — of Hannah Arendt's thesis regarding the alleged passivity of the Jews in the face of their own destruction. In his view, “the leaders of the Breslau Jewish community coped with Nazi persecution better than could have been expected” (p. 279). Even so, he admits that until 1938 “many Jews deluded themselves into believing that Nazism was a passing phase” and therefore adopted a “wait-and-see” policy, hoping that things would improve (p. 276).

Not only Kristallnacht, but the increasingly violent atmosphere of the preceding twelve months, were important developments in this regard, helping to dispel previous wishful thinking about Hitler's ultimate intentions. Now the dilemma was not deciding whether to emigrate or not, but finding a country that was still willing to take Jews. Here, in fact, Ascher agrees with Arendt that one of the more insidious effects of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda was to deter many foreign countries from accepting refugees from racial persecution (p. 110; cf. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 269). Even so, more than half of the 23,000 Jews living in Breslau in 1933 had somehow managed to leave Germany by 1939 (p. ix), a remarkable testament to their tenacity in dealing with officialdom, learning new skills and mastering new languages, all in the space of a very short time.

What of the remainder of Ascher's argument? Readers looking for an explanation as to why Breslau, formerly a liberal town with a long history of toleration toward outsiders (and indeed the headquarters of a leading Jewish Theological Seminary, founded in 1854) should have “turned into one of the more ardent centers of Nazi power” after 1933, will be disappointed (p. 21). Rather, the author resorts to more general arguments, noting that greed as well as racist beliefs drove local Nazis and their helpers to commit barbaric and inhumane acts (pp. 22–3). This is doubtless correct, but it is a point which would apply to the whole of Germany — and indeed more broadly to Axis-dominated Europe in the 1940s — rather than to Breslau in particular. Whether Nazi officials here were more greedy or more ideologically committed than their counterparts elsewhere, and if so, why, remains unclear.

However, Ascher more than makes up for this omission through his moving and detailed accounts of the individual Jews who fought back against the attempts by the Nazis to destroy their community. Particularly striking in this respect are the memoirs of Siegmund Hadda, chief surgeon of the Jewish Hospital of Breslau and a man who was deeply committed both to his religion and his country (Germany). In spite of constant threats and ward closures, Hadda continued to perform his medical duties until as late as June 1943, when he and the last remaining members of the Breslau community were deported to Theresienstadt (p. 259). At the same time, as in the case of the Klemperer diaries, we also catch glimpses of the reactions of ordinary Germans to the persecution of their fellow Jewish citizens. Cases of indifference and outright hostility are mixed in here with remarkable acts of individual generosity and good will, something that Ascher himself also found in London after his arrival there as a ten-year old refugee in July 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war.

Breslau's Jews had very little power to shape events, but what little influence they did have they used to uphold their honor and self-respect. An altogether different set of dilemmas confronted Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the man who reigned over the Vatican as Pope Pius XII during the crucial years of the Second World War and the early Cold War period (1939–1958). Pius XII's principal concern in the arena of world politics, according to this latest study by Michael Phayer, was to stop the spread of communism, but lacking an army of his own, he could not do this single-handedly. This explains why he chose Nazi Germany over the Soviet Union. Thus, as Phayer shows, he refused to condemn Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 and, after initial protests, also fell oddly silent on the persecution of Catholics there. In June 1941, he was positively delighted by the start of Operation Barbarossa which held out the prospect of destroying communism once and for all. Closer to home, while he denounced Marshal Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia as enemies of the Church, he offered support to the puppet fascist regime in Croatia run by the violently anti-Serb and anti-Semitic Ustaša movement (and later provided shelter to its notorious war-time leader, Ante Pavelić, who hid from Allied prosecutors in Rome between 1945 and 1948, before escaping to Argentina). And while he spoke out against Soviet interference in the domestic affairs of Eastern European states after 1945, he repeatedly intervened in Italian politics, most notably at the time of the 1948 elections when he gave extensive support to the Christian Democrats as the only political force capable of defeating the communists. On top of this he urged the Americans to re-arm Italy for the coming war with the USSR. He was indeed “the world's first Cold War warrior” (p. 134).

None of these facts are particularly new or surprising. Where Phayer does offer an original line of argument is in regard to Pius's Christmas message of 1942, which he now interprets as a deliberate, if somewhat vague condemnation of the genocide then taking place against the Jews and other innocent peoples (p. 53). In this sense, he argues, there can be no more talk of “Hitler's Pope,” or of Pius as a puppet of the Nazi regime. At one point, near the beginning of the war, he even seems to have approved of a German army officers' plot to oust Hitler from power (p. 177). Yet in Phayer's account, Pius's moral opposition to the Holocaust makes his subsequent political actions appear in an even worse light. By 1945 the tiny number of European Jews who had survived were, in the Pope's eyes, no longer in immediate danger, but communism — in the shape of Stalin's Red Army, Tito's partisans and Palmiro Togliatti's PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) — was an even greater menace to the Church than it had been previously. Such “Cold War paranoia,” Phayer suggests, led Pius to advocate a more lenient treatment of (West) Germany by the Allies, so long as the people there chose an anti-Soviet path. More worrying still, it drove him to sponsor the “ratlines” which allowed notorious and lesser-known Nazi and Ustaša war criminals to escape Allied justice by emigrating via Spain and Italy to South America (originally these “ratlines” had been intended to help Catholic emigrants rather than Nazis on the run). At the same time, Pius was remarkably insensitive toward requests for help in identifying missing Jewish children rescued in Catholic orphanages, and toward Jewish attempts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust more generally (pp. 253–5). It remained for his successors in the 1960s and beyond, notably John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, to try to right past wrongs by building new bridges to world Jewry and to the state of Israel.

Admittedly parts of Phayer's argument are a little labored. For instance, he constantly feels the need to alert the reader to the “wacky,” “loopy,” “hare-brained” or “scatterbrained” nature of some of the right-wing schemes dreamed up by pro-Nazi Catholic bishops and Argentine diplomats in the 1930s and early 1940s, whereas I would have thought that this was rather self-evident. I would also have liked more on Pacelli's early reactions, as papal nuncio in Munich between 1917 to 1925, to the short-lived Bavarian and Hungarian Soviet Republics of 1919. On the other hand, the author's overall conclusions are convincing and important. Fear of communism, not fondness for Nazi Germany or hatred of the Jews, dictated Pius's diplomatic stance during the Holocaust and early Cold War periods. This also led him to make policy decisions which were “clearly on the wrong side of the ethical borderline” (pp. 267–8).