There was considerable concern that the Jews of Palestine would meet the same fate as the Armenians. Pacelli
obtained guarantees from the German government that the Jews would be protected even if the use of arms
was necessary.
In 1915, then aged thirty-nine, he (Eugenio Pacelli) helped draft Pope Benedict XV’s powerful papal
denunciation of anti-Semitism in Poland, which insisted that the Christian law to love one another “must be
observed and respected in the case of the children of Israel.”
– Sir Martin Gilbert
In May 1922, Pacelli warned the Jewish politician Walter Rathenau of an assassination plot by German anti-
Semites. A month later, Rathenau was murdered. In November 1923, fi ve days after Hitler’s failed attempt
to seize power in Munich, Pacelli wrote critically to the Vatican about the Nazi movement and noted with
approval the public defense of Munich’s Jews by the city’s Catholic archbishop.
– Sir Martin Gilbert
Source: Pope Pius XII and World War II: The Documented Truth
