Arguments over Pope Pius XII’s wartime record are unlikely to be settled by the opening up of the papal archives, says his controversial biographer, who argues that the major failure of his papacy was not his alleged anti-Semitism but a misjudged long-term strategy towards Nazi Germany

Opened on 2 March this year, the Pius XII archive was closed a week later by the threat of Covid-19. Yet by the end of April, Church historian Professor Hubert Wolf of Münster University announced that he had uncovered fresh evidence among the documents that Pius XII and his wartime aides had been guilty of anti-Semitic attitudes, and as a result had failed to act on information that hundreds of thousands of Jews were being murdered in Poland and Ukraine. Fr Wolf also claims that three decades after the war the Vatican had tried to bury that evidence.

The critical document, according to Fr Wolf, is an appunto (an office memo) written in the autumn of 1942 by Monsignor Angelo Dell’Acqua, then working as an official in the Secretariat of State, later becoming a cardinal. The appunto refers to separate reports of the massacre of Jews that summer: one from a Jewish-based source in Switzerland, the other from Andrey Sheptytsky, Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. On 27 September 1942 the White House had asked Pius for his opinion of the reports, adding that they hoped for his assistance in denouncing the Nazi regime for their persecution of the Jews of Europe.