EXC 2060 A3-37 - Pope Pius XII. and baptized Jews in Romania and Brazil

During the times of the Nazi regime, about 15,000 Jewish people from all over Europe asked Pope Pius XII and the Vatican for help. The petitions submitted were authored by women and men, by children and adolescents, who belonged to various Jewish denominations, social classes and generations. They were written in German and Italian, in French and Romanian, in Yiddish and Hungarian.

These letters were hitherto unknown. They were found in the holdings of the Vatican archives (the “secret archives”) pertaining to the pontificate of Pius XII, who was pope from 1939 to 1958. These holdings were only made accessible to researchers on March 2, 2020. This collection of ego-documents written by Jewish victims of the Shoah is unique in its density and allows us to trace what each individual person went through. In a research project funded by the EVZ-Foundation, these letters will be made available to the public in a critical digital edition.

The sub-project funded by the Cluster of Excellence deals in particular with the situation of baptised Jews in Romania and Brazil.

In her PhD thesis, Lorena König will examine the special position Romania held, analyzing the processes that helped to protect numerous converted Jews from deportation to an extermination camp as well as the role the apostolic nuncio Andrea Cassulo played here.

In the Brazil sub-project, Alessandro Grazi will spend the next two years reconstructing the procedure for granting visas and researching the possibilities and limitations of the so-called Brazil Action. In particular, he will focus on the group of Catholics of Jewish origin and the problem of their affiliation. On the basis of the new sources, a differentiated reconstruction is possible for the first time, which not only focuses on the individual fates of the petitioners, but also allows statements to be made about how Pius XII and the Roman Curia dealt with Catholics of Jewish origin.