How the KGB Created the Myth of Pius XII as "Hitler's Pope"

This email came today from an Inside the Vatican Newsflash:

Inside the Vatican has followed the debate over the war-time role of Pope Pius XII with great attention for almost 15 years. Now, the former head of Romania's Foreign Intelligence under the Communists (who later defected to the West) has written an article describing how he duplicitously got access to the Vatican Archives and copied a host of documents (none of which incriminated Pius XII) used by the KGB in the creation of the play The Deputy, published with Rolf Hochhuth as the supposed author. To read this very important article, published on January 25 in the online edition of National Review, please click here.

Here are some critical paragraphs from the National Review Online article:

Moscow's Assault on the Vatican

The KGB made corrupting the Church a priority
By Ion Mihai Pacepa

...In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approved a super-secret plan for destroying the Vatican's moral authority in Western Europe...

The Deputy saw the light in 1963 as the work of an unknown West German named Rolf Hochhuth, under the title Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy). Its central thesis was that Pius XII had supported Hitler and encouraged him to go ahead with the Jewish Holocaust...

Before writing The Deputy, Hochhuth, who did not have a high school diploma (Abitur), was working in various inconspicuous capacities for the Bertelsmann publishing house. In interviews he claimed that in 1959 he took a leave of absence from his job and went to Rome, where he spent three months talking to people and then writing the first draft of the play, and where he posed "a series of questions" to one bishop whose name he refused to reveal. Hardly likely! At about that same time I used to visit the Vatican fairly regularly as an accredited messenger from a head of state, and I was never able to get any talkative bishop off into a corner with me -- and it was not for lack of trying...

In 1974 Andropov conceded to us that, had we known then what we know today, we would never have gone after Pope Pius XII. What now made the difference was newly released information showing that Hitler, far from being friendly with Pius XII, had in fact been plotting against him...

Over the past 16 years, the freedom of religion has been restored in Russia, and a new generation has been struggling to develop a new national identity. We can only hope that President Vladimir Putin will see fit to open the KGB archives and set forth on the table, for all to see, how the Communists maligned one of the most important popes of the last century.

-- Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.

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