Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy [Hardcover]

Dr. Susan Zuccotti (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 11, 2000

What did Pius XII do to aid Jews during World War II? This meticulously researched and balanced book examines efforts on behalf of Jews in Italy, the country where the pope was in a position to be most helpful. It finds that despite a persistent myth to the contrary, Pius XII and his assistants at the Vatican did very little.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy describes what the Vatican did--or did not do--to help Jews in Italy in World War II. Author Susan Zuccotti, who has written two other books about the Holocaust, demonstrates that little help of any kind came from Popes Pius XI and XII or their senior officials. She finds that the most significant gestures of help offered by the Church to Jews in Italy were made by clerics and believers--mostly nuns, monks, and priests--uninvolved in top-level Vatican discussions. By 1942, the pope "knew and believed a great deal about the exterminations." In 1943, when Germans took control of northern and central Italy and attempted to exterminate the region's Jewish population, the Vatican knew very clearly the magnitude of the genocide. The Vatican's silence, Zuccotti argues, still resonates in the Church's statements about the Holocaust today.

The Church has not yet completed the process of dealing honestly with its history during the Holocaust. It has not yet made clear whether popes and high Vatican officials are to be included among its sons and daughters in every age who sometimes committed regrettable errors.

Zuccotti's research ranges wide, from the anti-Jewish tone of Jesuit publications in the years leading up to World War II to contemporary interviews with Holocaust survivors. Her book is a significant addition to a chapter of Christian history that the Church has still to reckon with. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Booklist

Much has been written chronicling the pernicious role of Pope Pius XII regarding the Jews during the Holocaust, most notably Walter Laqueuer's book The Terrible Secret (1980) and John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope (1999). In Zuccotti's devastating indictment of Pius, who was elected pope in March 1939, she draws on a wealth of documents, archival material, published memoirs, and personal interviews to explore such themes as the history of the Vatican and anti-Semitism, Italian anti-Jewish laws during the papacy of Pius XII, and the pope's personal knowledge of the treatment of the Jews. Zuccotti insists that the pope knew enough about the Jewish genocide to believe and understand that it was a disaster of immense, unprecedented proportions and should have acted vigorously. Her previous books include The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (1987) and The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (1993); and like her other books, this one is meticulously researched, balanced, and free of bias. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 420 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (December 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300084870
• ISBN-13: 978-0300084870
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,331,426 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hard Truth, Hard Words, March 5, 2001

By 

Paul O'Shea - See all my reviews

This review is from: Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (Hardcover)

This is a tough book. Zuccotti presents tough arguments and asks equally tough questions about the role of the Vatican in Italy during the Holocaust. Her research work and her piecing together the intricate jigsaw puzzle of doucuments has created a text that is difficult to refute and damning in its conclusions. Zuccotti demonstrates convincingly that Pope Pius XII and many within the heirarchy of the Catholic Church were, at best, passive in the face of the rescue work done by so many Italian Catholics, or, at worst, hostile to rescue work. At the same time she suggests, again, with considerable force of documentation and testimony, that the Vatican was quite content to be seen as the inspiration of rescue when in fact the historical record demonstrates otherwise. Trawling through the Vatican's published archival material and linking it up with diocesean archives, Jewish communal sources as well as memoirs and published testimonies of the persecuted, the perpetrators and the rescuers, Zuccotti has given historians a valuable guide to understand some of the complex "why's" of the Vatican's silence and lack of activity during the Holocaust. It is precisely her dispassionate narrative and allowing the sources to speak for themselves that gives this book so much power. The defenders of Pius XII and the Vatican bureaucracy need to either demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt their claims that Pius did all he could or end what has become a re-hashing of old and tired chestnuts that rely on innuendo, suggestion and a mish-mash of attributed quotes. If Pius, or one of his subordinates directed the convents and monasteries of Rome to lift cloister, please show us. If he instructed bishops, even verbally, to assist efforts in rescuing Jews, please provide the references - surely someone must remember them. Zuccotti has done the academic world a great service in this fine scholarly work. For Catholics, and indeed for all Christians, this work is another challenge to seek the truth - even if that truth is unpalatable. Only then can the present Pope's words about reconciliation between Jews and Christians have the full force they deserve. (For the record the reviewer is a believing and practicing Catholic.)

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Drivel, June 26, 2011

By 

Anacreon - See all my reviews

This review is from: Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (Paperback)

Replete with unsupported speculation and bizarre hypotheses Zuccotti's book may be the worst and least helpful I've ever read on the subject. She clearly sets out to debunk Vatican claims of assistance to Jewish refugees but employs fuzzy, results oriented "thinking" to do so. A typical instance involves her acknowledgment that the Vatican supplied foodstuffs to a convent which sheltered Jews but she observes that there is "no way to know how much food was delivered" and "that any supplies were intended specifically for Jews". This type of dopey observation is found throughout the book. This is not a scholarly, well reasoned investigation of the issue but rather a collection of Zuccotti's oddball musings. One would benefit by reading just about any other treatment of the subject.

22 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Worse Than Hitler's Pope!, August 13, 2005

By 

Matthew Tan (Brisbane, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (Paperback)

I read this book as part of my Honours research project into the Vatican's diplomacy with Nazi Germany. I was told that John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope", despite the accolades and the best seller status, was a poor piece of academic work, a thesis which Cornwell himself eventually recanted (See the reference in The Economist, http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3471137).
Indeed it was so poorly researched that even critics of Pius XII did not take the book seriously.

Zucotti's work, the other hand, is a somewhat more valuable resource, as she has rather detailed references to primary documents in her endnotes. Indeed some have their contents spelled out quite extensively in the body.

However, such referencing, buttressed by her award winning status as a holocaust author, creates a veneer of credibility, a smokescreen behind which Zucotti expresses her obvious contempt for Pius XII. This is largely done through her highly selective use of quotes from the primary sources.

Zucotti commits the Cardinal (no pun intended) sin for all historians, begin with a conclusion, use the documents that prove that conclusion right, and either ignore or dismiss the rest. Such an approach runs right through the book.

Where a quote is used that is or can be construed to be critical of Pius XII, she would quote it to the fullest. Where primary documents mention the opposite (and my research showed there were plenty of them), she automatically dismisses the authors of said documents, many of which were eyewitnesses to the things that Zucotti keeps asserting Pius XII did not do, without any justification whatsoever. She uses absolute pearlers in dismissing those authors, such as the classic "He (the eyewitness) should have known better".

Zucotti also uses an artifically narrow criteria to determine the credibility of certain hypotheses put forward by defenders. She demands that documentary evidence be availabe, otherwise it did not happen. Normally it would be a fair criterion, but in the context of an occupation by the most deadly war-machine in the world, the existence of such documents would have placed the possessor and/or author of those documents, and anyone associated with them, in grave danger.

Does Zucotti accept this? Instead she demands that someone with the intelligence to forsee that decades ahead, someone would question the reputation of Pius XII, and accordingly safekeep any written instructions from him. This retrospective projection is by far, the most unreasonable claim for any Historian to make.

In sum, I would say, use Zucotti for her references (for they are quite good), but never subscribe to her silly dismissals, her retrospection and outrageous thesis. For something more balanced on the critical side of this debate see Guenter Lewy's "The Catholic Church and the Holocaust". For the contra, see Ronald Rychlak's "Hitler, the War and the Pope".