In 2020, Pope Francis ordered that letters and documents from Jews persecuted under National Socialism be made accessible to scientists. Since then, the church historian Hubert Wolf has gained insights that take your breath away. Also on the stage.
Some of the letters to the Pope begin with “Your Majesty”. Because the people who write to the Pope during World War II desperately asking for help simply don’t know how to approach him. But they are quite sure that if anyone can help them, it will be the Pope. The vicar of Christ on earth. He is the only one who can save them, the Jews, from deportation to the extermination camps and certain death. What a tragic mistake.
The Vatican archives store up to 15,000 letters that Jews wrote to the Holy See during the Nazi era. To Pope Pius XII himself, the Cardinal Secretary of State or just to the Curia. Hoping that if the Catholic Church only knew of the Nazi plans for the so-called “Final Solution,” they would use their influence and rescue them. Or at least cry out this injustice to the world. That didn’t happen. There might have been a whisper here and there, a soft furtive word. But there was no outcry that could have been heard in America.
For decades, the Vatican kept these letters under the strictest seal. And yet could not prevent the public from learning about it. As early as 1963, the playwright Rolf Hochhuth in his play “The Deputy. A Christian Tragedy” posed the question of the complicity of the Catholic Church in the persecution and murder of the Jews in Nazi Germany. In his play, he lets Pope Pius XII, the “diplomat” among the popes, say: “A diplomat has to see things and be silent.” Hochhuth accuses him of not having campaigned for the Jews despite his knowledge of the Holocaust, but certainly not enough. In addition, Pius was silent when he should have informed and roused the world public with his authority as head of the Catholic Church.
After Hochhuth’s “deputy” more than half a century would pass before the Vatican archives would open. In March 2020, Pope Francis ordered the letters and thousands of other documents to be made available to scholars. One of them is Professor Hubert Wolf. Since then, the church historian from the Westfälische Wilhelmsuniversität Münster has had access to letters to the Pope. Letters that take your breath away. Letters like that of a very young Berlin Jew:
“Holy Father, save us! I’m a rabbinate candidate, 19 years old. I haven’t had a single good day in my life. I was born in Berlin, then I had to flee when the Nazis took power. First I went to Warsaw, then to Amsterdam, to Paris, then to Toulouse and now I’m sitting in Toulouse at the end of 1942 and deportation to an extermination camp is imminent. Save us! Save me and my family! We know that there is only one Creator in heaven. He will thank you. Talk to the Swiss Tourist Police so we can get a visa so that my brother, my parents and I can be saved. Save us!”
The Ilse Holzapfel Foundation, named after Rolf Hochhuth’s mother, brought five of these letters to the stage on the eve of the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Iris Berben and Thomas Thieme, two of the most renowned German actors, read from the original letters in the “Berliner Ensemble”. No evening at the theater like any other, no engagement like any other. For Iris Berben it is “an opportunity to participate with my own questions, with my own uncertainty, with my own search for answers, so that the topic is not shelved”.
Thomas Thieme, like Iris Berben a star in the world of film and television, sees his work above all in taking himself back as an actor and letting the letters speak for themselves. “It’s much more important that you go into the texts authentically and that you bring these emotions, which come out of these letters so incredibly intensely, to the audience without coloring them or inflating them again, and in doing so also emotionalize the audience.”
Church historian Wolf assumes that it could be another 10 or 15 years before an academic assessment can be made at all as to which of the letters actually reached the pope or at least those close to him, and whether it might have reached one point or another but there was a reaction.
As a teenager, Berben spent a few years in a Catholic nunnery. This time, she tells ntv.de, shaped her. Her own relationship to the Catholic Church is still ambivalent today. As a girl, around ten or eleven years old, she stood with her mother on St. Peter’s Square in Rome and received the Pope’s blessing in a general audience. “I was fascinated, impressed. It was such a dramatic experience to see the Pope so close. And all of that turned into the opposite the older I got, the more questions I had and the fewer answers I got. That’s maybe the initial situation, why I am very critical, very skeptical about the church – also on topics such as women, homosexuality or the very hesitant clarification of cases of abuse.”
At the Sacre Coeur boarding school, the students were asked to obey unconditionally, no questions were asked, the girls were supposed to believe. As a young woman, she questioned all the questions she wasn’t allowed to ask and the answers she didn’t get. In the post-war period, when the public learned about the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the concentration camps and the young Iris was confronted with the Holocaust for the first time, she began to wonder how the church actually behaved during this time: ” There were two answers at the time. There was the attitude of the Pope and I very quickly adopted it, made it my own answer, so to speak. And of course there were exactly the opposite. It was my own struggle with the Church, with faith , with an institution that had been a very important, formative part of my development up to that point.”
Thomas Thieme, who reads next to her on the stage of the “Berliner Ensemble”, describes his attitude towards the church as far less emotional: “If I have to answer honestly, I have no attitude towards the church at all. I was baptized and confirmed in the GDR , it was almost a bit of a rebellion. My parents insisted. But then I kind of let it slide. The church was never one of my interests. I read Church Fathers, I read Augustine. I loved doing that because you learn a lot about people. But the church as an institution? I can’t even say that I reject it. Because I don’t understand it at all. I see it as a theater, where the Catholics are world champions, but the German municipal theater is one boring event. Church, that’s really something. I see it all. But in the end I have to admit, deep down I don’t understand it.”
In preparation for the reading in the “Berliner Ensemble”, both of them delved into Hochhuth’s “Deputy”, in Hubert Wolf’s comments and objections. The outrage remained, but it had changed. Maybe it’s not so uncompromising anymore, says Berben: “I tried to understand that with the hardness that you had, not everything could and can still be answered. What was the Pope’s attitude really like? Was it was tactics because it enabled the church to then act in a different framework? Was it the possibility of the church itself maintaining its position in which the pope did not want to get involved in state affairs? Are these personal experiences that he had? Because he was considered an insanely diplomatic person.”
Thieme also has more questions than answers: “If you read the ‘deputy’ correctly, Pius is not the focus at all. The focus is on nuncios and people like that. I’m not the type who doesn’t hit it when it’s disgusting. Here I am This text made me think a bit more. I thought there was a letter coming from a Jew from Germany who was fleeing, and it is addressed to His Holiness and His Holiness will, like Franz Beckenbauer, not all the autograph letters in his life probably didn’t see these letters either. And then it really depends on how you deal with it. How do we deal with it. And I have to honestly tell you that I haven’t done enough for the world in my Living to set myself up as a judge now I’m reading this with empathy and that’s it I’m not the smartass to know what could have happened Of course it’s highly unfortunate that nothing happened and e There will also be culprits.”
He has no doubts about that and one of the culprits is definitely the Pope. “But the whole thing seems more complex to me than poor, persecuted people on the one hand and asshole Pope on the other. That would not go far enough for me. Maybe that’s a weakness of my age. 30 years ago I would have hit it. Now I am “I’m 74 and understand everyone. I don’t think it’s particularly decent how it went. But how it went in detail and which third-class churchman replied, we can’t do anything, after so many years that’s not finally over follow.” Thieme is somewhat at a loss when faced with the question of whether the Pope really didn’t know what was going on in Germany, what was happening to the people there. “He should at least have set up a commission to read the letters, actively deal with them and help people. And he obviously failed to do that. What you can certainly accuse him of is a high level of lack of instinct.”
Iris Berben and Thomas Thieme are actors who have never shied away from difficult subjects. But both had respect for this reading, also because the response to it is unpredictable. Real letters, not fiction. Even if the author Alexander Pfeuffer contributes interim texts, they remain real fates. Months in advance, a small team gathered around the two actors to consider what this evening at the theater could look like. An evening that Iris Berben describes as an “uncertain journey”. The man who sat next to her on stage gave her security: “Thomas Thieme is such a great man by my side. I love him. We have done so many different readings together, we enjoyed working together refer to my boyfriend and I’m really, really careful with that word. Thomas knows that.” And he is happy to return the compliment: “Of course I’m looking forward to it. Not about what happened back then. But I’m looking forward to the opportunity to read these excavated texts with my great colleague. It’s not a play, as you know it knows. They’re real letters and they’re just so powerful, so emotional.”
For decades, letters from Jews to the Pope were sealed before Pope Francis opened the archives for research. An “Eldorado” for scientists like Professor Wolf from Münster. Critics of the Curia believe the move is an attempt by the church to clear itself of guilt. To prove that help was given back then. After all, bit by bit more and more will come to the public. And then? When suspicion becomes certain, what then?
Iris Berben: “I’ve been able to get to know extremely clever representatives of the Catholic Church and I think it’s the same in the Church as everywhere in our society: There are open-minded people who stand up and also have arguments. For and against. And there are People who don’t want to get out of a comfort zone and who don’t want to turn this discussion into a discussion. I can imagine that both representatives are present in this church. To what extent they then comment publicly on this question, that’s of course entirely possible don’t say it. Ignoring is also something the Catholic Church is really good at. I’m really excited. I’m excited, will an evening like this do something, will it initiate something, possibly in a good direction. It will be for all conservatives, like when Hochhuth went out with his deputy, there will still be an outcry, and then there will be a few people who might say it i It’s good when we try to recognize things with the greatest meticulousness.”
5 of 15,000 letters gave Alexander Pfeuffer’s play its name: “Five Substitutes”. The proximity to Hochhuth’s drama is certainly no coincidence. “Save us! Have pity!” are the last words of two letters and the last words that Iris Berben and Thomas Thieme read. After that it’s so quiet in the “Berliner Ensemble” that you could have heard the proverbial needle drop before applause breaks out. An impressive and at the same time depressing evening in every respect in the “Berliner Ensemble”.
