The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The most important book ever written about the Catholic Church and its conduct during World War II. . . . The best nonfiction book of the summer.”—Daniel Silva on the Today show Based on newly opened Vatican archives, a groundbreaking, explosive, and riveting book about Pope Pius XII and his actions during World War II, including how he responded to the Holocaust, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Pope and Mussolini When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him. In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were finally opened, and David I. Kertzer—widely recognized as one of the world’s leading Vatican scholars—has been mining this new material ever since, revealing how the pope came to set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church’s power. Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents not only from the Vatican, but from archives in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, The Pope at War paints a new, dramatic portrait of what the pope did and did not do as war enveloped the continent and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The book clears away the myths and sheer falsehoods surrounding the pope’s actions from 1939 to 1945, showing why the pope repeatedly bent to the wills of Hitler and Mussolini. Just as Kertzer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Pope and Mussolini became the definitive book on Pope Pius XI and the Fascist regime, The Pope at War is destined to become the most influential account of his successor, Pius XII, and his relations with Mussolini and Hitler. Kertzer shows why no full understanding of the course of World War II is complete without knowledge of the dramatic, behind-the-scenes role played by the pope. “This remarkably researched book is replete with revelations that deserve the adjective ‘explosive,’” says Kevin Madigan, Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard University. “The Pope at War is a masterpiece.”

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Go to YouTube.com for just Chris Voss, Goodreads.com for just Chris Voss, all those places on the interwebs, the big LinkedIn group, the big LinkedIn newsletter, and all that good stuff. Today we have a Pulitzer Prize-winning author on the interwebs, the big LinkedIn group, the big LinkedIn newsletter, and all that good stuff. Today, we have a Pulitzer Prize winning author on the show, an amazing multi-book author. He's written so many books, he couldn't even count them for me because he ran out of fingers. That's how many books he has. We'll be talking to him about his amazing new book that came out this year. It is called The Pope at War, The Secret of pious uh that would see that would be

12 pious 12 pope pious 12 uh mussolini and hitler came out june 7 2022 and we're gonna be talking to him about his instant new york times bestseller that he's on the show with us here today david i kurtzer is the paulupuy University Professor of Social Science at Brown University, where he is the Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies, and from 2006 to 2011, served as Provost. His book, The Pope and Mussolini, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, biography and has been published in 11 languages. I'm going to have to learn 10 more. I don't have the first one down, but I'll have to learn 10 more to read his books.

Among his many other books, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a finalist for the 1997. Wow, I'm definitely flunking. I need to learn English first before I learn the other 10 languages. National Book Award for Nonfiction and has been published in 18, count them, foreign editions. He co-founded and served for many years as a co-editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. In 2015, he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he's among the first scholars having access to the newly opened Vatican archives for the papacy of controversial Pope Pius XII. I think I have that correctly. Based on research here, as well as archives in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the U.S., his new book tells a story of relations with Mussolini and Hitler during the Second World War.

Welcome to the show, David. How are you? Great. Good to be here. It's wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming, and we're excited to have you. Man, you've done so many different things with your amazing books. Give us a.com or wherever you want people to find you on those interwebs in the sky the magic ones well i've got a website which is www david kurtzer written together dot com and my handle on twitter is at david kurtzer written together that's about it i haven't gone into uh tic-tac or other things i guess tic-tac i love that dude i'm gonna keep that i always make fun of tic-tac

uh tic-tac I always make fun of TikTok. TikTok. I always make fun of Snapchat, too. I always tell people, you know, go see the show wherever we're at, but we're not on Snapchat for the most obvious of reasons. There's kind of an inside joke there, but we won't get into it. So anyway, you've written a lot of books. How many books in in estimate, are you willing to admit to under oath? Well, this is the 13th that I've written, but it's hopefully the quality of the book, not the quantity that matters. So there are people who've written 40 books, but someone who's written one good book probably has more to brag about.

All right. According to the judges, that is the correct answer. So David, are most of your books about the Pope? Am I seeing a theme here? Well, a number of them, especially recent ones, have been. I've been interested in the relationship of politics and religion in Italy. And if you're interested in politics and religion in Italy, you're interested in the Vatican and the Catholic Church. So quite a few of them have dealt with Vatican politics from both, not just 20th century, but also 19th century. Yeah, there you go. So what motivates you want to write this particular book, The Pope at War? Well, there's been a huge controversy now for many decades about the silence of the Pope during World War II, especially his failure to denounce the Holocaust, the Nazi attempt to exterminate all

the Jews of Europe. And there'd been decades of pressure on the Vatican to open its archives for the warriors for that reason, so that we could shed some light on what actually happened, why the Pope did what he did. And finally, they opened them about two and a half years ago. But it was up to the current Pope, Pope Francis, to make that decision. And I kind of bet when he became Pope that he would do that. So I began working on this in archives that were open, including the Italian State Archives, the Fascist Archives, the German and Nazi archives, the British American, French archives. So when they finally opened these archives two and a half years ago, I had already gotten maybe tens of thousands of pages of archival material from those other archives ready. And this was the last, last piece of the puzzle.

And you, you've called it the secret history. Is it, what's the secret? Are you going to tell us, David? You can tell me. Well, you know, academics don't usually like to use terms like secret history, but it is secret in that a lot of this has been kept from the public. Certainly, the Vatican didn't want everything to be known about what was going on behind the scenes. But this is true of any government as well.

So it's nothing unusual about the Vatican in that way. But now, it's not just the papers, the Vatican themselves, but each of these other countries I mentioned, Germany, France, Britain, the US, Italy itself, had ambassadors or envoys in the Vatican throughout the war years. And they were sending daily reports of their conversations with the Pope, with the people around the Pope. And so it's really by triangulating all those that we can really put together what was going on behind the scenes very interesting you know we've had a few people on the show who've written good great books about fascism uh and the rise of it and it's always interesting to me when it comes to wars fascism the rise of uh you know the right wings around the world and stuff how much religion and religious leaders are tied into, you know, the right wings around the world and stuff, how much religion and religious leaders are tied into it.

You know, we see that right now with, with Russia, you know, there's the, um, I think the Russian Orthodox billionaire, uh, I'm not sure the correct term preacher or whatever over there. Um, he's, you know, endorsed the war, the archbishop and, uh, uh, clearly I funded my deacon school. And so, you know, and I could probably say, you could probably say better than I, you know, different ways that these sort of endorsements or looking sideways and letting, you know, like the morals of a war go by. Talk to us a little bit about that and how that played out with Hitler and Mussolini. Well, I think that's true that many authoritarian regimes, including fascist regimes,

have had very close relations with churches, with the religious organizations. And that was certainly true in Italy, where Mussolini basically made a deal early on in order to come to power, even though he himself had initially been an anti-cleric. In fact, he was, of course, a left wing. He came out of the left wing of the socialist movement before he made his change, essentially during World War I, to become leader and inventor of fascism. He made a decision that, gee, his anti-clericalism, his criticism of the church wasn't going to get him very far. He needed, in a country like Italy, which was 99% Catholic, the support of the church. He wanted to come to power and retain power.

So he basically made a deal with the pope, who realized Mussolini didn't have a religious bone in his body. But he basically, the pope decided at the time, this is a predecessor now of Pius XII, Pius XI, who was Pope in the 20s and 30s, that in exchange for having Mussolini grant various privileges to the church, many of which they had lost in the 19th century. There had been people states. The Pope used to be king in Rome for a thousand years until 1870. Restoring those privileges, the Pope was willing to swing church support to fascism and to Mussolini. So how soon was January 6th after that? You see what I did there? There's a lot of parallels in the tying of history, isn't there?

Well, there's certainly parallels, I think, with our previous president of ours, who you have to think religious leaders believe has not a religious bone in his body yet, kind of made a deal with him, but perhaps we don't want to get into that here. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements. If you'd like to hire me, uh, training courses that we offer and coaching

for leadership, management, entrepreneur ism, uh, podcasting, corporate stuff, uh, with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show. And be sure to check out chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show.

Sure, yeah but uh it is interesting to me because you wrote a beautiful book of course that won the uh pulitzer prize uh uh the pope and mussolini mussolini um mussolini what the hell mussolini um and you know i thought it was very interesting because you know it talks about uh the rise of fascism everything else you wrote it in 2015 and it's it they're interesting parallels you know like what i always say on the show this is a quote of mine the one thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history thereby we round around we go so uh give us some teasers or some tidbits that people are going to find in the book or maybe some story scenarios that people can look forward to

that can entice them? Well, one of the perhaps the most kind of clamorous and amazing discoveries that I made in these newly opened archives, I got to be, I was there the first day they were opened, February 2020. And within a few months, I have a collaborator who's actually Italian and Roman, historian Roberto Benedetti. And we discovered an incredible cache of documents, which showed that Hitler, within just a few weeks, four or five weeks of Peisthope becoming Pope, so now we're in early 1939, just before the war begins, Hitler decides he sees an opportunity with the new pope to end the criticism that the previous pope had directed toward Nazism and toward Hitler and sent a secret envoy who was a Nazi prince to enter into secret negotiations with the pope. And these were essentially unknown before my discovery.

Wow. And even more incredible, the Pope, unbeknownst to, apparently, to this Nazi prince who was Hitler's emissary, kept a German prelate, German priest nearby, hidden, because they were conducting these negotiations in German. The Pope had spent 12 years in Germany as a papal nuncio or ambassador to Germany. So he was fluent in German. And this hidden German priest

wrote down the conversation. So they're basically a transcript of the conversations, these secret negotiations the Pope entered into with Hitler's Nazi prince emissary, who himself, by the way, was the great grandson of Queen Victoria of England.

And not just that, he was married to the daughter of the king of Italy. So it's just this incredible cloak and dagger story. Kind of incestuous. Yes. Well, the aristocracy. Politically. Yeah. Well, politically, too.

The aristocracy of Europe was very intermarried. This is wild. I mean, you know, too. The aristocracy of Europe was very intermarried. Mm-hmm. This is wild. I mean, you know, people don't realize some of these things. And you were able to get there the first day and cash in on this cache of documents, if I can use cache twice in a sentence in two different spellings. Those of you who are millennials and Gen Zs can look up what that means. Anyway, so let me ask you this, because there's kind of been this, I've been watching what I perceive to be, and you're the professional here,

this kind of apology tour that the Catholic Church has been on for a lot of different ills. Recently, he was up in Canada apologizing to Native people up there, probably not picking the right term, but just like we had here where we did ugly things when we came to America. So is this part of the Catholic Church opening up these archives, trying to kind of cleanse themselves of maybe some bad PR? I'm going to call it bad PR. You tell me what it is. Yeah. I mean, that's a good question.

It's not entirely clear what motivated Pope Francis. So it's up to the current pope to decide when to open the archives for the next papacy whose papers haven't been opened. And so Francis made that decision. Why he did, Pius XII, on the one hand, is not necessarily a friend of Pope Francis. He's the hero of the conservatives in the church. He was the last pope before the Second Vatican Council, which from the point of view of many conservatives in the church is where the church went wrong, where it liberalized.

And so those conservatives have been trying to make Pius XII declared a saint. So anything that would come out that would diminish that possibility is not welcomed by that segment of the church. The other thing is that the Vatican has, in the past, tried to address the question, did the church play any role in the demonization of Jews that would have made the Holocaust possible? And where the church, the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, for example, most recently, but also some other countries, has asked for forgiveness, essentially, for saying that during the war, the clergy supported the war. For example, the Roman Catholics, along with the Protestants, too, churches supported the war during the war and did not protest the Holocaust.

The Vatican has not done that. The Vatican and, for that matter, the Italian church has not admitted that it bore any relation for the kind of demonization of Jews that could have led to the Holocaust or that the clergy could have played any role. So there's been basically a pretty staunch denial of responsibility in that sense so you what what is it like could you talk about this in the book if not this is one of those questions i'd have to ask people on the show what's it like to go i mean you're getting access to something i'm sure you know the depth of it but what's it like to you know be able to access

these documents that are were held secret and what's it like to go there and just feel those documents and your passing over history that probably very few people have had a look at? Yeah, no, for, I mean, it's not to everybody's taste probably because there's also a lot of tedium involved. But when you come across a document, I mean, I remember working in the 19th century, a document written to the Pope at the time by Prince Metternich, you know, who was just a figure I learned about in history books to actually see a handwritten letter and his signature is kind of exciting. I mean, working in these archives, you know, for example, you know, discovering those those papers involving the Pope's secret negotiations with Hitler's envoy. I mean, it is just very exciting having having that in your hands. involving the Pope's secret negotiations with Hitler's envoy.

I mean, it is just very exciting having that in your hands. And you feel a kind of closeness. And in my book, what I try to do is communicate some of that, try to give readers the kind of fly on the wall of these meetings and what was going on behind the scenes. So you get that, too, from reading these documents. I mean, for a historian like you, who's written 13 plus books, you've been a historian all your life, an archivist, this must have been just a moment that just

is chilling, it's exciting. Do you get a lot of shaping in those meetings from the Pope's people, where they try to put a spin on it, like, here are some documents, and they're not as bad as you might think? Does there a PR push? There is some. When my book came out, my book came out in Italy pretty much the same time the Italian edition as it came out in the U.S. a couple months ago. And the Vatican Daily Newspaper devoted a full page to den out in the U.S. a couple of months ago. And the Vatican Daily Newspaper devoted a full page to denouncing the book. And then two days later, the Daily

Newspaper of the Italian Church Hierarchy similarly devoted a big page to denouncing the book. So there's certainly those who don't like this history to come to light. On the other hand, when I'm in the archives in the Vatican, in the bowels of the Vatican, a number of archivists will come and talk to me and tell me they're reading what I'm writing and agree with it. And we'll share stories and share discoveries. But they don't want to be quoted. So it's – yeah. So when people talk about the Vatican or even the Catholic Church, you have to realize these are very heterogeneous kind of institutions.

Yeah. And so they're very different kinds of positions about all this history. See, if I was in the basement of the Vatican, I'd be looking for those prices of gold things or something. I don't know. I've heard there's expensive stuff down there. I don't know. But whatever.

That's a joke. I think there is, though. So let me ask you this. Once you got a hold of these documents, where did you keep them in your estate at Florida Mar-a-Lago? Right. We have people that watch our videos from 13 years from now. For those of you who did, you'll have to Google what's going on right now in the news. So they didn't let you take them home, I guess, is a dumb question.

No, not just that. But, you know, if you work in many archives, including, for example, Italian state archives, you can bring your camera or your iPhone and take pictures of the documents. None of the Vatican archives, there are several, there are different Vatican archives, none of them allow you to take your own pictures. Wow.

And some of them, in fact, you can't get copies at all, like the Archive of the Inquisition where I work. But the main archive, you basically fill out a form, you request copies. It was costing me about $10 for the first page of copies from every group of documents that I was copying. So I spent thousands of dollars there just getting a material copy. But now you get digitized copies. So I end up with thousands of pages of archival documents from the Vatican on my computer.

So that's where I have them. I don't get to touch them once I get back home. Wow, that's pretty awesome. All right, guys, we need you to buy the book so David can get his money back, damn it. Anyway, no, this is really interesting. I mean, the study of history, and like I said before, the fact that, you know, so much of what man does repeats history, never seems to learn from it. And you see, you know, the more I've studied how authoritarians will wrap themselves in religious, in whatever the religion is, get the endorsement of that. You know, we've had a lot of authors on the show that have written about white nationalism, the rise of it, the history of it over time.

And it's just extraordinary because, you know, I mean, the Vatican is a government. It is a power, and power corrupts. I think what Carolina said to me one time, she said, there are always people in power, something to the effect, I'll butcher it, there is always people in power that do things that want ultimate power or they want to hide mistakes they made and there will always be reporters and journalists

to go after that. What are some other things maybe you can tease out that people find? And why did you choose the names of these characters in the book? No, I'm just kidding. That of these characters in the book no i'm just kidding that's what i asked novelist i'm just kidding um do you think was there anything that surprised you or stuck out at you that you were like holy moly well let me give i'll give you another example actually quite a lot of things that i found dramatic that are revealed in in my book but revealed in these archives. In October, the Germans take over Rome in September 1943,

after Mussolini is overthrown. The Germans have fled their troops down south. In July of 43, the Allies have landed in Sicily, and begin their move that would be quite slow, going up the Italian peninsula. So in September 43, the Germans occupy Rome. The next month, basically Hitler sends 350 SS to round up all of the Jews in Rome to deport them to basically to their death.

And so October 16th, these 350 SS go door to door in Rome with lists of addresses where Jews live that they've been given. And they end up seizing about 1,260 of them. And they put them in a holding area, a military college that's just outside the walls of Vatican City. And they keep them there for two days. Two days later, meanwhile, of course, this question of is the Pope going to speak out, is he going to protest, which is part of the drama. Two days later, though, they put a little over a thousand on a train bound for Auschwitz. They would arrive there, these Jews, a thousand Jews from Rome. They'd arrive there a week later, at which point Joseph Mengele, the famous Nazi doctor, was waiting to decide who was strong enough

to do slave labor. The rest, the older people, a lot of the women and all the small children, are sent directly to the gas chamber that same day and murdered. So one question is, how come they seized 1,260 Jews and only a little over 1,000, 1,017 perhaps, are put on the train? Who were the 250 Jews who were let go? And one thing that is now clear is they were either baptized Jews

or they were Jews married to Christians. And because the Vatican and the Pope was particularly concerned about these, who were of course regarded Catholic if they were baptized Jews, the Nazis didn't want to offend the Pope. They wanted to maintain amicable relations with the Vatican. And so they spent those two days checking their baptismal certificates, their baptismal credentials, and let those who could show they were baptized or married to Christians, let them free. So a lot of the records that we're now seeing in the Vatican have to do with attempts to show that people who are being treated as Jews were actually baptized and therefore should be

treated as Christians, not as Jews. And so most likely would the assertion be that, you know, if you married into Judaism, your husband, your wife, you were separated at that moment, left behind in Italy, and they were taken to their deaths. Well, I mean, the idea was that if, let's say, if you're a man who's Jewish and married to a Catholic woman, if you were married, and this is where they were also interested, married according to Catholic ritual, it's leaving these Christian wife and Christian children to starve to death or suffer terribly. So one shouldn't do that. Yeah, that's just the horror of it all. And did, I mean, so did you find anything about what the Catholic Pope and the church were talking about that time?

Like, should we let them do this? Should we protest? Should we, what should we do? Well, you know, one thing that happened that, you know, talking about discoveries, incredible documents that we discovered in these newly open archives, a few weeks later. So the end of, so this was October 16th,

43 when the Jews were rounded up in Rome initially at the, the end of the end of, this was October 16th, 43, when the Jews were rounded up in Rome initially. At the end of the next month, Mussolini's puppet government, because when the Germans occupied Italy, they reinstalled Mussolini. They freed him from prison, basically, and reinstalled him in a puppet government up north. That puppet government theoretically had control of most of the Italian peninsula at the time, backed by the German army. On November 30th, 43, so it's now about six weeks after the roundup of the Jews in Rome, the new puppet Mussolini government announces that all Jews in Italy are to be arrested and sent to concentration camps, all their property seized. So right after that, and this is where one you know, one of the other discoveries in the archives that I talk about in the book, one of the Pope's advisors dealing with Jewish questions

sends a long memo saying, really, you should do something to protest, not publicly. I'm not saying, you know, make a public statement, but at least give a kind of detailed protest to the German ambassador to the Vatican. So the Pope's undecided. He has another priest he regards as his main expert on matters of Jews. And so has the first memo sent to him, you know, should I in fact do something or should my secretary of state do something to protest? And that memo, it's a long memo filled with anti-Semitic language, which urges the Pope not to do anything of this sort, that it would be inappropriate. It would just help Jews and so on, would anger Hitler. So these are the kind of documents we now can find in these newly opened archives. Wow. And so you can see the attitudes and bias, prejudice of the people behind them.

You know, it's interesting because you have that, like I said, political incestuous thing where they give, you know, the Pope or the Catholic Church gives power to Mussolini or gives him a sign-off or endorsement or puts their backing behind him, and then here they've got this. I didn't study this in history, but is there any time during World War II where the Pope ever comes out and says, hey, this is not working out, this is a bad thing? Well, it depends what you mean by saying it's a bad thing. He did. His defenders point to a couple of sentences kind of buried on page 19 of a talk he gave, Christmas talk in 1942, where he said it wasn't right to persecute people based on their race and so on. He doesn't mention Jews. He doesn't mention Nazis or Germans. So he does say that. And of course, it's not that the Pope was happy about the fact that millions

of Jews were being murdered. And by the way, when Poland was invaded, one of the first things the Nazis do is they arrest hundreds of Catholic priests who were seen, this is now in the fall of 1939, the beginning of the war, because the Polish priests were seen as kind of fonts of Polish nationalism, local leaders of Polish nationalism. So when we talk about the silence of the Pope during the Holocaust, actually the whole kind of scandal or controversy over the silence of the Pope begins even before the Holocaust, and has nothing that's directly to do with Jews. It had to do with the Catholics in Poland and the Polish ambassador to the Vatican and so on,

urging the Pope to speak out to denounce the fact that hundreds of priests are being arrested and sent to concentration camps and Poland is being overrun by, you know, hundreds of thousands of German troops, and the Pope refuses to speak out against that. Maybe we've learned something from that, or the Pope or the papacy or the Catholic Church has learned from that. I think they've spoken out against the Ukraine conflict with Russia, haven't they?

Well, yeah, they're too. The Pope's under some pressure and he's being criticized. He's expressed great sympathy for all the suffering, but he hasn't been willing to name either Russia or Putin specifically. And so it's not entirely different than the situation that Pius XII faced during the war. I mean, there are some important differences as well. Part of the explanation of Pius XII's silence through much of the war was he initially thought that Hitler was going to win the war, and he was worried about protecting the church in a Europe that was dominated by Hitler and his pal Mussolini.

Wow. That hit me like a ton of bricks because that makes sense. You know, it's survival. And you figure, well, might as well lay down with the devil. Wait, they're the church. The beast. They lay down with the beast. That's my rendition there.

But this is extraordinary. Wow. I never thought of that, though. What you just said is going to, like, haunt me as to how they actually thought he was going to win the war. And so they're like, well, we might as well make a deal. I mean, if you think of it, what was the early years of the war like? I mean, in the spring of 1940, France had presented their Maginot Line as this impregnable series of forts and trenches and so on that would stop any German attack. The Germans just spend a matter of a few weeks and go not only through,

you know, Belgium and Netherlands, Luxembourg, but then on to Paris and drive from Dunkirk and drive the British off the continent. So meanwhile, in North Africa, Rommel and so on was winning in the Balkans. They were taking over Yugoslavia and Greece without much trouble. So, yeah, there was pretty good reason to think that the Germans were going to win the war. Yeah, the Battle of Dunkirk. What a story that was. And then I think there was a lot of it that was – I'm trying to remember.

It's somewhere lost in history, but's a very important uh part of uh britain's fight uh so let me ask you this i had this in my head uh on we've had authors on the show who've written about sainthood in the catholic church and the internal lobbying that it takes to to bring someone to sainthood uh the amount of money is extraordinary that has to go on behind it the funding and craziness so do you is this a lot of that effort to bring sainthood to uh pious yeah i mean i don't know how much money has been spent uh and i'm not really an expert on you know what goes on behind the scenes there but yeah there is an office that deals with making saints and there's been a process now for many decades looking into making Pius XII a saint.

He was declared by a previous pope, he was declared venerable, which is kind of a first step along the way. So he's now referred to as venerable Pope Pius XII. But yeah, so being the, you know, a hero of conservatives, I mean, if you go on Twitter, if any of your listeners go on Twitter any day and put Pius XII in there, they will see many tweets which say Pius XII was the last pope. There has been no legitimate pope since Pius XII. And that Pope Francis actually isn't pope or isn't even Roman Catholic, according to some of them. Is this on True Social? Yes, it could be. Look that up if you're watching the video 10 years from now.

So this is really interesting, and I know there's a lot of money going to it. I was just wondering if you knew the figure. I've got my checkbook here. I've done some bad things in my life, and I'd like to see if I can't buy me a Saint Hood. Queen Elizabeth won't return my calls for knighthood so i know there are those who are going to say you know follow the money and i mean one thing i think people don't often realize is that um throughout the 20th century and certainly during world war ii the main financial support for the vatican was coming from Catholics in the United States. So although Pius XII is

famously was called Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell in the title of a book of 20 years ago, which I think is not really fair because he was not a fan of Hitler by any means. But the one reason why the Pope could not be seen publicly to be favoring the Axis cause was that he was dependent on American funds to support the Vatican. So he had to keep American Catholics happy as well. So at the same time, Mussolini, of course, is trying to use his good relations with the Vatican to get the Pope to influence the Catholics in the United States to stay out of the war or influence the Catholics in Latin America to be sure that their countries don't support the U.S. once it does join the war. What an amazing, you know, just the history of man, you know, money, power, government, war,

you know, just there's like a theme of it I hear over the last, you know, I don't know, trillion years that we've been humans. We're always up to something bad sometimes. I don't know. Does it ever get better, David? That's hard to predict. I mean, it's interesting. You know, we're talking about the Pope worried that, well, you know, if the Nazis are going to win the war, I've got to protect the church. But what about later in the war? I mean, later in the war, it was pretty clear by early 43, the tide of the war had changed. And now it's increasingly likely that the Axis, that the Germans were going to lose the war. But still, the Pope and many millions of Jews were being exterminated at the time.

The Pope still remained silent. And now there's something else that came to his mind, that is fear of communism. Wow. I mean, when we talk about allies, often what comes to, I think, Americans' minds are Brits and Americans standing together. But in fact, the third part of that tripod was the Soviet Union, which arguably was the most important force in defeating Nazism. So now the Pope was worried that Europe might be dominated by the communists, in which case it would be death knell for the

Catholic Church from his point of view, or certainly dire circumstances for the church. So he was eager to see Germany left standing. And so the Allied demand for unconditional surrender was something that he was not comfortable with. And we almost, I mean, we're living in what's the old Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times. I got that from Bobby Kennedy in his speech. What was it? Ripples of Hope in South Africa. May you live in interesting times. And I think he got it from an ancient Chinese curse. But, you know, we almost lived through something very similar with what was going on when the war first broke out in the Ukraine with Russia.

You know, you could, I think they even found documents from one of the soldiers that there was an intention to go in Lithuania or Moldova afterwards. And they thought that they would blitzkrieg across and maybe there was a chance that Finland or other places, you know, there's all the speculation that, you know, we could see something of that sort of nature. And then, of course, with a response from NATO causing, you know, us into a possible nuclear escalation. And you look at that history paralleled with, like I said, I was watching when Putin went and met with the Russian Orthodox leader and got this blessing, and he shows up to church with this candle, and you're just like, wow. It's just extraordinary, the parallels of history and, of course, what you've documented in your book. Anything more you want to tease out before we go?

I get so excited by this stuff because there's so much to learn. And, you know, as you peel back those layers and open up those boxes, I mean, what an extraordinary find. Well, you know, I think you're right that the question of larger lessons in this sort this story is religious leaders allowing certain kind of political leaders to use religion and use the backing of the religious leaders to justify warfare and other terrible things. In the case of the Holocaust and World War II, who were the enemies? The enemies that Hitler presented were basically two, the Jews and the communists. And so the United States was theoretically run by Jews, according to Hitler and the Nazis, and of course, the communists, the Soviet Union. So it was important for Hitler to show that he was actually supporting the churches, although he too could care less, I'm sure, you know, personally about Christianity.

But he presented himself. That's why he didn't, did people say, oh, the Pope was worried that the, Hitler was going to kidnap the Pope or occupy Vatican City or bomb it. He wasn't going to do any of those things because he was trying to present himself as the protector of Christian Europe against Jews and communists. Wow. So, you know, today when you see Archbishop Kirill, you know, the Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, also go along with Putin kind of portraying his war in Ukraine as a battle against the secular West and for protecting Orthodox Christianity. There are some striking similarities there.

There you go. And money, my understanding is he's a billionaire. Could be. That I couldn't say. Yeah. Of course, there's a lot of different places money's hidden in Russia. Well, this is just extraordinary. Like I said, I love history.

I dig history because there's so much to learn and there's always more to learn. Do you think that there's always more to learn do you think that there's uh any more boxes that they've got buried in the basement that you'll be able to get access to maybe in the future or do you think you were able to get into everything you you know is available well they uh there are a couple aspects there one they haven't processed all the material so there's some material still to be processed. There are some things they're not making available. For example, I've talked to the director of the main archive, and I asked, you know, are you making everything available? And what he said at the time was, well, we make everything available except for sensitive personnel files.

And after I heard that, I, you know, couldn't begin with all the sex abuse scandal in the church. I've never seen a study based on Vatican archives, even though clearly they have various investigations in the past of accusations against the clergy. And that's the reason that those files are not,

I haven't been able to see no other scholar as far as I know is allowed to see. So there are some things that aren't being revealed. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? You know, I've watched the whole, I think we had someone who's going to be on the show. It was a movie, but it was talking about the Boston case against the Catholic Church for sexual assault. And it's been interesting to watch, you know, the pushing and pulling of trying to get the church to open up about all that.

You know, maybe Pope Pius had like, you know, he had a bad annual review in his history where, I don't know, he missed the performance of whatever, his annual turning his TPI reports or something, to quote the Office Space Show. I don't know. He missed the performance of whatever, his annual turning his TPI reports or something, to quote the Office Space Show. I don't know. There's a joke there somewhere, but I can't find it. Anything more you want to tease out about the book, David, before we go? It's been an honor to have you on, man. Well, I mean, one thing I try to do in the book is, although it's based on tens of thousands of pages of archival documents from, you know, five or six different countries, I tried to write in a way that would interest a broad public. So that's the trick to both, you know, reveal new things to other scholars,

but write in a way that's going to attract a large public. And because I think this is just not only important history, but also fascinating and colorful history. So, you know, that's at least the attempt. I mean, what a, I'm sorry. No, just let readers decide if, you know, if I was successful. Buy the book, check it out. I mean, it was extraordinary time in history. And one thing that's, to speaking back what I mentioned before, the historical nature of the money, the power, human nature,

all of this sort of stuff, ugliness, hatred, racism, bigotry, just the whole pool of it. You know, I think one of the reasons I love history and I want to entice people to read these types of books is the chess game of it, you know, the chessboard of it, seeing how the moves are interacting with each other and how they play out. And to me, I've always been a strategist. And, and, you know, you, you look at how some of these different, if the move would have went to this square or if something had changed in this way, or there was a manner, you know, like you say, maybe if they'd invaded Vatican city and cross that line of, you know, which is an important line to them of their sovereignty, I suppose. It's just extraordinary to think about.

What if this had happened or that? I'd give one example would be this, that Italians weren't eager to go to war on the side of Hitler. They just fought a war not that much before World War I against the Germans. Half a million Italians had been killed. Plus the whole rationale, Nazi rationale for the war of Aryan supremacy was not going to appeal to you if you were Sicilian or Neapolitan. So it was going to be difficult for Mussolini. He realizes this. We know this from various private papers.

Difficult for him to convince people that they should be enthusiastically backing this war when he decides to join in, which he didn't, by the way. Initially, the war is normally dated to the invasion of Poland in September 1939. He only joins the war in June, the following June, 1940. So what if the Pope at the time had denounced any attempt to join the Hitler in the war? And not only were 99% of the people in Italy Catholic, but there was this incredible network, capillary network of parishes and so on, parish priests around the country. But the opposite happened. The Catholic Church in Italy urged all good Catholics to join in the Axis war. And the head of the clergy as bishop of Rome is the pope himself. So the pope maintained official stance of neutrality as head of the church in Italy.

He obviously allowed this support for the Nazi war to take place in Italy to get involved in World War II. And you think of the horror of it, you know, 12 or 6 million Jews at the very least that they can count, and the extraordinary fallout and destruction of life, humanity, and just the horror of it all. But those of our audience mostly listen in audio, but the good ones, the ones we love the most, watch on YouTube. I know she has a guitar in the back there. You play guitar? I do, not terribly well, but

what you don't see are my electric guitars. Oh, you've got the electric guitars as well. It's better to have the classical guitar there. So could you play us the theme from The Godfather? No, I'm just kidding. Only if I join the union. Only if I join the union. Only if you join the union.

I love it. Well, David, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you very much for coming on and sharing your brilliant knowledge. Well, thanks for having me. Thank you for coming.

And give us your.com so people can find you on the interroads, please. Yes, this is my name written together, David Kurtzer, K-E-R-T-Z-e-r dot com and uh i have various information about my books and whatnot there and then twitter is at david kurtzer there you go there you go order up the book guys it came out june 7th 2022 the popet war the secret

history of pious the 12th is that right that right you say pious 12th? Right. Mussolini and Hitler. And what an extraordinary time in history. I mean, there's been nothing like it, and we hope that there's never going to be anything like it since. But, you know, like I say, I mean, I remember so many people were shocked when they're like, I thought we weren't having any more wars, and suddenly we're doing it with Ukraine. So, and hopefully that turns out good, although good and war is kind of a hard thing to say. Well, we hope it turns out good although good and war is kind of a hard thing to say well we hope it turns out good

it's awful in any case but pick up the book wherever fine books are sold remember stay on those alleyway bookstores I went into one last week and I've got to take a tetanus shot be good to each other, stay safe and we'll see you guys next time