The Papacy: Pius' Silence

THE PAPACY

In 1963, Historian Saul Friedlander, 34, was researching the archives of the German Foreign Office for his doctoral thesis on Hitler and the United States when he came across a misfiled memorandum on German relations with the Vatican. In his mind it raised the question of the failure of Pope Pius XII to protest Hitler's extermination of Jews—and the possibility of compiling official German documents on the subject. From these and other sources—but not from Vatican documents, which were not available to him—Friedlander wrote Pius XII and the Third Reich (Knopf;...