How Vatican officials aided Nazi war criminals and undermined Allied justice after World War II
In the aftermath of World War II, the Nuremberg Trials promised a new era of international justice, holding Nazi leaders to account for their crimes. Yet beyond the courtroom, a very different struggle was unfolding, one that played out behind the walls of the Vatican.
Provocative and meticulously researched, The Pope Against Nuremberg uncovers how the Vatican shielded war criminals, challenged the principles of postwar justice, and facilitated ratline networks in which Church leaders played a central role in spiriting perpetrators to safety—what its defenders called Christian mercy. Drawing on newly opened Vatican archives, as well as government and intelligence records from Europe and the Americas, Gerald J. Steinacher reveals a campaign that would ultimately benefit some of the most notorious Nazi perpetrators by helping them avoid prosecution.
From papal diplomats to individual bishops, Church figures petitioned the U.S. president and other Allied leaders, submitted statements for the defense, coordinated public relations campaigns, resisted extraditions, and, in some cases, sheltered Nazi war criminals on Church property. Meanwhile, Pope Pius XII, long criticized for his alleged public silence during the Holocaust, urged the world to forgive Germany. Steinacher places these actions within the turbulent politics of early Cold War Europe, when fear of communism increasingly outweighed the pursuit of accountability for mass crimes. Combining groundbreaking research and compelling storytelling, The Pope Against Nuremberg provides new answers to decades-old questions about the role and motivations of church officials in the networks that helped Nazis escape postwar justice.