'His silence was a horrific crime in history'

A new film reopens the debate about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. By Stephen Applebaum

Constantin Costa-Gavras is used to making films about hot-button issues, but few have come hotter than the question of Pope Pius XII's silence on the Holocaust, addressed in his latest film, Amen. Why the Pope said nothing is a subject that has been vexing and dividing scholars, theologians and historians for 40 years. Now that he is being considered for beatification, the first step towards sainthood, the need to know the truth is more urgent than ever.

Costa-Gavras based Amen on Rolf Hochhuth's polemical play, The Representative, which opened to a storm of protest in Berlin in 1963. At issue was Hochhuth's portrayal of Pius XII, who at the time had a virtually unblemished reputation. A mere five years later, Hochhuth characterised the late pontiff, says John Cornwell, author of Hitler's Pope – The Secret History of Pius XII, as a "callous, money-grubbing hypocrite", indifferent to the suffering taking place, in the case of the Roman Jews, on the very doorstep of the Vatican. Outrage was inevitable: radical Catholics picketed the theatre; the actor playing the pope was assaulted; and questions were asked in the German parliament. The Representative became a succes de scandale, and quickly opened in London and New York, kick-starting the debate about the Pope's conduct that rages still.

His critics say the Pope's silence gave Hitler the opportunity to pursue the Final Solution. His defenders claim it protected and facilitated the efforts of Vatican diplomats working quietly behind the scenes and helped save the lives of thousands of Jews.

Throughout the film, Costa-Gavras's pontiff remains a shadowy character who exudes an air of serene detachment. He speaks in generalisations, never once mentioning the Jews, Hitler or even the Nazis by name.

"The stupendous architecture of St. Peter's is like a safety curtain that shuts out the world," wrote Sir d'Arcy Osborne, British Minister to the Holy See, when he moved into the Vatican on June 14, 1940. "The effect is like living in an embalmed world." Under such conditions, suggests Susan Zuccotti in Under His Very Windows, the Pope's imagination may have failed when confronted with initial reports of mass exterminations. Horrific eyewitness accounts continued to pour into the Vatican (the Holy See was better informed than most governments), however, and still the Pope only made two ambiguous, public references to people being killed because of their national or ethnic origins.

Hochhuth is in no doubt about what the Pope could have achieved: "Hitler saw the Vatican as a neutral body, the only body in the world that he respected and feared. Forty-five per cent of his soldiers were Catholics. For the Nazis," he says, "it would have been utterly impossible to continue with the Final Solution if Pius XII had said one single word against it in public. But Pius XII was neutral. He was a coward. And his silence was a horrific crime in world history." The Pope was not the only one who did not speak out, adds Costa-Gavras, a point he makes clear in Amen.

"Everybody knew from the beginning and yet nobody did anything. Now we find ourselves, in a sense, in the same position. There are dramatic situations all around the world and there's silence everywhere."

The Vatican angrily denounced Amen as "ridiculous"; bishops in Stuttgart issued a statement claiming that the film was an "outright defamation and a distortion of history"; a Versailles cinema removed it from its programme.

Amen's poster, designed by arch provocateur Oliviero Toscani, the man behind Benetton's most notorious advertising campaign, features the powerful image of a swastika superimposed on a cross, with a Nazi on one side and a Catholic priest on the other. In France, an alliance of church associations tried to have the poster banned but the French court threw out the lawsuit.

Costa-Gavras was astonished that the poster was even considered controversial. "During the war, the Catholic Church was the only non-Nazi institution in constant contact with the people. When it was informed of the existence of death camps, it said nothing except, 'Amen'."

Such is the ambiguity of Pius XII that, even within the Jewish and Catholic camps, attitudes towards him are mixed. A less obfuscated picture of the man and the truth about his silence will emerge when the Vatican, the only international institution yet to open its records on the Holocaust, gives the world unrestricted access to its war archives.

Costa-Gavras doesn't try to provide any answers in Amen. All one can hope for with a movie like this, he says, is that it creates a "debate around a subject. Movies can't change society or human beings, fortunately. People must see the movies, read the books and then decide for themselves."

'Amen' is released on Friday