Father Peter Gumpel, S.J., PhD., was asked numerous times by Pope Pacelli to check his quotations for his sermons and addresses. His closeness to Father Gumpel soon made him an important collaborator of the Vatican. Father Peter Gumpel was known to be the leading expert world wide on matters concerning the Pope of World War II at the time.

In 2019, Mr. Gary Krupp of Pave The Way Foundation made arrangements for me to meet and interview Father Gumpel twice (who was 95 years old at the time). I was eager to meet with the only Catholic scholar alive who personally knew Pius XII. I asked him if he was in Rome or Germany on October of 1943.

He (Father Gumpel) said that he did not learn about the deportation of 16 Oct 1943 because he was not in Germany in that year, but in Nijmegen/Netherlands, visiting the Jesuit school there. Only after the war he was allowed to return to Germany.

Gumpel wanted to make clear to me that Pius XII had saved many Jewish lives, including a number of Roman Jews, and the opening of the Vatican Archives in March of 2020 will confirm the existing data. In addition, Father Gumpell showed me a copy of Michael Hesemann’s (2009) book that he kept on his desk “Pio XII: Il papa he si oppose a Hitler,” in which he wrote the foreword. He immediately showed me an image of an important marble plaque that read: (English translation)

“The Jewish to His Holiness Pius XII: The Congress of Delegates of the Italian Israelite communities, held in Rome for the first time after the Liberation, is obliged to pay tribute to Your Holiness, and to express the deepest sense of gratitude from all Jews, for the demonstration of human brotherhood by the church during the years of persecution and when their lives were put in danger by Nazi-Facist atrocities. Many times, priests endured prison and concentration camps and even sacrificed their lives to help the Jews. Such proof that the sense of goodness and charity still drives the just has served to lessen the shame of the indignities endured, the torment of the losses millions of human beings suffered. Israel has not finished suffering: the Jews will always remember what the Church, under orders from the Pope, did for them in that dreadful time.”

The image of the plaque can be found in the picture part between pages 152 and 153 of Michael Hesemann’s book.

I did not bother to mention this information in my earlier Independent Project essay because Father Gumpel mentioned that the plaque no longer exists. There is also an image of this plaque in Gary Krupp’s (2012) book “Pope Pius XII and World War II—The Documented Truth: A Compilation of International Evidence Revealing the Wartime Acts of the Vatican,” page 146. I searched to locate this marble plaque and have not yet been able to locate it anywhere in Rome.

I interviewed Father Gumpel a second time with Gary Krupp’s assistance, hoping that he may share some new insights into the modern day scholarship concerning Pius XII and the Jews of Rome on October 16, 1943. Father Gumpel once again confirmed that he was in the Netherlands during the deportation in October of 1943. He (Gumpel) had also strongly suggested that I enter into a doctorate program so that I can meet with one of the leading Vatican experts on Pius XII, Vatican Archivist Dr. Johan Ickx. Gumpel also suggested I meet with Michael Hesemann and interview him once I am in an academic program.

It was an exciting time for me to begin my independent research and begin to meet and interview renowned Vatican scholars regarding Pius XII and the Holocaust. This was at the precise time when scholars from all over the world were coming to Rome, waiting patiently for the Vatican Archives to open up on the morning of March 2, 2020.

As these scholars prepared for months and months of research, the world stopped—Covid closed the doors of all archives world wide.

Fast forward now to 2024, I have followed the advice of Father Gumpel, and I am now in a Doctorate of Science in Jewish Studies Program at the Spertus College in Chicago, Illinois. I am looking forward to renewed research and to interviewing both Jewish and Christian scholars on the topic of Pope Pius XII and the Jews of Rome. On the advice of Father Gumpel, I am honored to have Michael Hesseman answer some questions:

It has been suggested that Pius XII saved 6,400 out of the 8,000 Jews after the deportation of October 16, 1943. What documents give these exact numbers of the Jews in Rome before and after deportation?

Hesemann: It is difficult to get exact numbers since there were many unregistered Jewish refugees in Rome. They believed to be safe, they could not imagine that the Nazis would deport them from the Pope's city. Nobody could imagine that, including the Vatican, until Oct. 16, 1943. The figure of 8,000 Jews comes from a Nazi document. On 9 October 1943, a telex was sent to the German Embassy in Rome in the name of the Foreign Minister of the Nazi Regime, von Ribbentrop. In the document, his "code" RAM ("Reichsaußenminister") is used. You find it reproduced in my book "The Pope and the Holocaust." It informs the Embassy that Hitler had ordered the 8,000 Jews who live in Rome to be deported to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria and asks the coworkers of the Embassy not to interfere in any way but completely leave this to the SS. In modern research, Dominik Oversteyn calculated that indeed 9,975 Jews lived in Rome instead of 8,000. So the realistic number is between 8,000 and 10,000.

According to the Nazis, 1,007 were kept on October 16 and sent to Auschwitz, some researchers give a slightly higher number of 1,016 or 1,023. According to Samerski and others, altogether 1697 Roman Jews were deported between October 16, 1943, and June 2, 1944. This means that between 6,300 and 8300 survived. Between 4,200 and 4,400 were hidden in the Vatican, in monasteries or Catholic institutions. 4,300 are mentioned in a list discovered in 2023, so that's a realistic middle figure. Others were hidden by friends, neighbors, family, civilians, or by DELASEM, which hid 1,680 foreign Jews (refugees) in 420 private apartments under the protection of the Swiss Embassy.

What document proves that there were specific orders coming from the Vatican to stop the Germans from arresting the Roman Jews at 2:00pm? Can you elaborate in detail with names and detailed orders?

Hesemann: 1. The Maglione-Protocol (reproduced in my book) proves that the German Ambassador to the Holy See, von Weizsäcker, was ordered into the Vatican in the morning of October 16 and that Secretary of State Cardinal Maglione told him that the Vatican would protest if the deportations would not stop immediately. Weizsäcker warned Maglione of the consequences and promised to do "something" to stop the deportations. Indeed, he did nothing.

  1. The protocol of Bishop Alois Hudal (reproduced in my book) proves that the Pope acted a second time, sending his nephew to the Austrian/German bishop in Rome, Hudal, director of the German national church Santa Maria dell Anima, with good contact to the German military (Wehrmacht) officers. Hudal contacted the German town commander, General Stahel, and warned of the consequences of a Papal protest. Stahel called Himmler and convinced him to order the stop of the arrests of the Roman Jews immediately. And indeed they stopped exactly at 12 AM and not, as planned, at 4 PM. Later, Stahel informed Bishop Hudal about his success.
It has been suggested that there were 550 placards sent to Roman monasteries, seminaries, and church institutions that prohibited SS officers from entering those buildings for the nine months of the German occupation in Rome? Can you elaborate?

Hesemann: This is another fact. We do have samples of the placards, and we have Bishop Hudals protocol about this in the Archives of Santa Maria dell Anima, which I again reproduce in my book. According to this protocol, Carlo Pacelli, the Pope's nephew and "personal agent," ordered Hudal to contact the German military again and get those 550 placards which made it possible to hide and protect Jews in Vatican institutions and monasteries which were declared “extraterritorial property of the Holy See” and therefore neutral ground, forbidden to be entered by German soldiers and the SS.

In one of the New York Times’s Reviews of Books—Tim Park’s critique of your book “The Pope and the Holocaust,“ he states that the author David Kertzer (“The Pope at War”) spent much of his life studying in the Vatican Archives and finds no evidence that Pius XII was active in saving Roman Jews. He goes on to say that no one disputes that many priests and nuns, and of course the church acted on their own initiatives to save Jews, but says evidence of Pius XII’s involvement is difficult to find. I find this very confusing because I myself have asked in person Vatican archivist Johan Ickx when and how many times the Pulitzer Prize author Kertzer and other authors actually set foot into the Vatican archives. (My forthcoming interview article with Johan Ickx will reveal his answer to my questions.)

Kertzer's book was published in July 2022. He was indeed, together with me, one of the first who were allowed to investigate the Vatican Archives on 2 March 2020, but just for 5 days, because of the COVID-lockdown. The Archives reopened for 2 weeks in June 2020, then again for a few weeks in October 2020, and a few weeks in 2021... and due to the long lockdown the waiting list got longer and longer... so for sure he did not spend more than a few weeks in the Archives, and indeed the number of documents he quotes in his book is rather small. "Much of his life" is an incredible exaggeration! But the most revealing documents are indeed the two Hudal memos, and they are in the Archives of the Anima, which were never entered by Kertzer.