British Diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick reports to British Foreign Office that Cardinal Pacelli has told him how much he abhors Nazi antisemitism and totalitarianism and terror, and that he only signed the Concordat because he had a gun to his head, in the sense that failure to sign would have led to far worse Nazi outrages against the Church - Aug. 19, 1933
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Aug. 19, 1933 British Diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick reports to British Foreign Office that Cardinal Pacelli has told him how much he abhors Nazi antisemitism and totalitarianism and terror, and that he only signed the Concordat because he had a gun to his head, in the sense that failure to sign would have led to far worse Nazi outrages against the Church.
Excerpts from Kirkpatrick’s report
Aug. 19, 1933 Ivone Kirkpatrick’s report to the British Foreign Office, Aug. 19, 1933:
... Cardinal Pacelli equally deplored the action of the German Government at home, their persecution of the Jews, their proceedings against political opponents, the reign of terror to which the whole nation was subjected...
These reflections on the iniquity of Germany led the Cardinal to explain apologetically how it was that he had signed a concordat with such people. A pistol, he said, had been pointed at his head and he had had no alternative. The German Government had offered him concessions, concessions, it must be admitted, wider than any previous German Government would have agreed to, and he had to choose between an agreement on their lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich...
Source: Kirkpatrick to Vansittart, Aug. 19, 1933, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, 2d Ser. (1956), vol. 5, pp. 524-525.