Historical judgments and eternal verities

H istorical truth is not, of course, truth in the sense of eternal verity, absolute and unqualified. The pursuit of historical truth entails the obligation to construct the past with the utmost accuracy, without misreading the documents, without misrepresenting the events of the past, without falsification. In brief, the historian assigns historical responsibility for the events of the past as he searches for the "smoking gun." The controversy swirling around Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy has not ebbed during the twenty years since the play was first performed. Hochhuth charged that Pius XII had failed publicly to protest the extermination of the Jews during the war and that his silence was motivated by the Church's self-interest. If we ignore Hochhuth's unsupported conjectures of motive, we find massive evidence of the pope's knowledge of the extermination and of his failure to notify the world and publicly oppose the annihilation of the Jews. Hochhuth himself, however, admitted that he had not produced a work of historical scholarship in the strict sense, but that he tried to bind the available facts into a truthful whole. It has taken twenty years to unearth more relevant facts, open archives, and examine as well as analyze the available evidence. Nevertheless, even with the data available to him, Hochhuth could have reached quite different conclusions; but he selected documents appropriate to his thesis and then developed unwarranted conclusions from the facts used. His statement, "Perhaps never before in history have so many human beings paid with their lives for the passivity of a single statesman," probably cannot stand in so unqualified a fashion. The German version of the "Sidelights on History" originally differed, for example, from the English version. Hochhuth omitted and then, after extensive criticism, restored the sentence: "No doubt the occupying forces were able to bring irresistable pressure to bear, no doubt the silence of the Pope and his Cardinals was a most terrible duty; the important thing being to avoid even worse misfortunes." The lack of emphasis on this consideration--that is, of the avoidance of even worse evils--is sustained throughout his work; it gravely weakens the play as well as distorts history by making Pius XII not the victim of a cruel dilemma but a coldly calculating politician, a most unattractive and unsympathetic figure. In the end, a variety of motives, pressures, and issues determined the pope's conduct. The evidence indicates that the issue lay constantly upon the papal conscience, whether or not, in the actual reality of the political situation, such a protest would have caused more evil than good. If he chose to remain silent, it was for reasons of deep conviction reached through a painful searching of his conscience. As he wrote to Bishop Preysing of Berlin in 1933: "In constantly striving to find the right balance between the mutually contradictory claims of his pastoral office, the path ahead for the representative of Christ is becoming daily more overgrown, beset with difficulties, and full of thorns." In essence, the real-life drama was probably more exciting than Hochhuth's play. In 1964 Hochhuth supported his dramatic offering by citing facts obtained from Der Spiegel and other media products and insisting they must be true since the Vatican had not obtained a retraction. Such reasoning would suggest that any hostile story for which the Vatican did not obtain a retraction must be true--a ludicrous and misleading approach in attempting to substantiate the validity of source material. Three foci may be initially analyzed in evaluating The Deputy, or more specifically the "Sidelights," as history: first, the conclusion and maintenance of the 1933 Concordat; second, the possible effectiveness of an open and unmistakable denunciation of the Nazi extermination measures; and third, the personality of Pius XII.