(This takes six minutes to read.)

Quoting Angelo Nicolaides’s ‘Anti-Semitic Propaganda and the Christian Church in Hitler’s Germany: A Case of Schrödinger’s Cat’:

Hitler signed a Reichskonkordat (Reich Concordat) in 1933. This was in essence an accord with the Vatican that obligated the [Third Reich] to respect the independence of Roman Catholic institutions and simultaneously barred clergy from participating in political affairs (Evans, 2005: 234–235).

The Vatican stated in its newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the concordat should not by any means be viewed in the light of any kind of acceptance of Nazism (Carroll, 1999). It was rather aimed appeasing a régime whose leader, Adolf Hitler strove to portray himself as a Messianic character sent from G-d to save Germany.

In this regard, the leading German philosopher in Germany at this time, Martin Heidegger, who had condemned various Jewish and left wing associates in 1933, supported [Fascism] and viewed Hitler as a Nietzschean superman. He called for “synthesis between science and the power of the will, between workers and thinkers” (Eatwell, 1995: 117) in a “Third way”.

In 1933, Hermann Goering banned all Catholic newspapers in the city of Cologne, mentioning that “political” Catholicism would not be endured but eventually the ban was lifted. In February of the same year Adam Stegerwald, who was a conspicuous politician, was confronted while speaking at a public meeting orchestrated by Christian trade unions and the Catholic Centre Party, and numerous priests were hurt in the mêlée which followed (Gajewski, 1999).

Hitler as part of his Kirchenkampf (church struggle) sought to attempt to unite the forces in Germany and made a public petition for the Church to negotiate the terms of a new Concordat (Church-State covenant) as he knew the Vatican would find it difficult to decline it, as Catholics would be compromised if they did.

Pope Pius XI and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli were thus confronted with a quandary. If they did not negotiate with Hitler, he would definitely publicise his terms and claim that the Vatican was anti-Nazi and filibustering. Pacelli opted for an agreement since he believed such an action would provide a better basis for the protection of both civil and religious rights for Catholics.

The Reichskonkordat detached the Roman Catholic Church in Germany and this was considered to be an important move in the fight against the Jewry. There was in fact very remote possibility of not agreeing with [Berlin’s] plans as thousands of Catholic Center Party campaigners were in concentration camps by the end of June 1933.

The anticipated Concordat was signed in July 1933 and indicated that various undertakings such as for example, education, youth associations and Church rallies would be guaranteed by laws in the Reich. The Church was forced to no longer support the Centre and the Bavarian People’s Parties (Gajewski, 1999).

Quoting David I. Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, pg. 201–2:

In July, Cardinal Pacelli escorted the German vice chancellor Franz von Papen into his Vatican apartment. The concordat they signed there guaranteed the German Church the right to manage its own affairs and offered various protections for priests, religious orders, and Church property. But much of its language, particularly that dealing with Catholic associations and schools, was vague.¹³

Heinrich Brüning, the Center Party leader who had served as Germany’s chancellor from 1930 to 1932, was irate. The Vatican, he fumed, had sold out the Catholic party and cast its lot with Hitler. He blamed Cardinal Pacelli, who, he charged, misunderstood the nature of Nazism. Pacelli’s faith in the “system of concordats,” Brüning later wrote in his memoir, “led him and the Vatican to despise democracy and the parliamentary system.”¹⁴

The pope soon realized that his “pact with the devil”—as the Church historian Hubert Wolf has described it—was not going to turn out the way he hoped.¹⁵ At the same time they signed the concordat, the [German Fascists] introduced their Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which mandated the forced sterilization of those deemed defective—in clear contrast with Church doctrine.

Hitler also began moving against the Church’s dense network of parochial schools. The [German Fascists] wanted a church [that] they could fully control. In early fall the Vatican secretary of state office produced an alarming analysis of these efforts; it included the text of a song popular in the Hitler Youth, calling Hitler their “redeemer.”¹⁶

In October the editor of Italy’s most prominent Catholic newspaper, L’Avvenire d’Italia, warned that the [German Fascists] were working toward “a German national church in which Protestants and Catholics are to be mixed together.”¹⁷ In December, in his annual Christmas address to the cardinals, Pius XI voiced his disappointment with the [Third Reich’s] government. Pacelli and von Papen had signed the concordat only five months earlier.¹⁸

While the pope’s doubts about Hitler were growing, those closest to him were trying to keep relations as harmonious as possible. In early 1934 both Cardinal Pacelli and the papal nuncio in Germany, Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo, cautioned the pope against saying anything that would anger Hitler, lest it further undermine the Church’s position.¹⁹

In Berlin, Orsenigo had help in his efforts, having retained Pacelli’s personal assistant from his time as nuncio, the German Father Eduard Gehrmann. As one Vatican observer put it, Father Gehrmann “believed more in Hitler than in Christ.”²⁰

The fact that Pius XI chose Cesare Orsenigo as nuncio to [the Third Reich] reveals much about the pope. Other than the nuncio to Italy, there was no more crucial, or complex, diplomatic assignment in the Vatican, yet Orsenigo was a man of limited intelligence and even more limited worldview.

Pg. 207:

In July 1933, when Dollfuss had learned that the Vatican was about to sign a concordat with Hitler, he became angry, convinced it would undermine Austrian resistance to a [German Fascist] takeover.

Knowing that Dollfuss had written a document expressing this view, Pacelli asked the Austrian ambassador to the Holy See for a favor. It would be good, said Pacelli, if Dollfuss’s account could be removed from the Austrian diplomatic archives.⁴⁰

In a pitiful attempt to exonerate the Pope, John Rodden & John P. Rossi authored a piece titled ‘Was Pius XII “Hitler’s Pope”? The Concordat of 1933’ in 2014. The complete absence of formal citations makes their research look amateurish at best, and some assertions are downright laughworthy, like German Fascism being a ‘new menace to Western civilization.’ Other assumptions are plausible, like the Vatican struggling to maintain its power and influence in an increasingly secularised world, and it is undeniable that all ‘neutral’ régimes (Vatican City included) during the Fascist era had to put on a balancing act to avoid being excessively friendly with and dependent on the Third Reich. Yet it is precisely the concessions that make their exculpatory piece so unimpressive. For example:

Pacelli also believed that German and Italian fascism could function as an effective bulwark against Marxism-Leninism. Most [pseudo]democracies harbored similar views about the choice between fascism and Communism. Hitler ingeniously exploited this belief in the years leading up to World War II, and the appeasement policy of European governments owed much to a perception of Hitler’s non-negotiable anti-Communism.

[…]

Nonetheless, it is unhistorical and one-sided to hold the Vatican and Pius XII guilty of inaction regarding [German Fascism] when they did speak out by 1937 against the evils of racism and rampant nationalism. Vituperations against the Vatican because it did not take a stronger stand against [German Fascism], did not expressly condemn the Reich, or didn’t excommunicate Hitler: the shrill denunciations amount to ex post facto thinking.

One may contend that a clear condemnation of [German Fascism] was part of the church’s duty as a teacher on faith and morals. And yet, just as plausibly, one can argue that saving lives by not provoking a monomaniacal dictator like Hitler was more judicious than delivering a grand moral gesture.

(All emphasis added.)

Nearly every anticommunist apologist will tell you that the world’s liberal régimes, and even ultranationalist ones, had no choice but to appease the Third Reich, lest they invoke its wrath. Apparently, all of these régimes that agreed on this one principle never thought to form an alliance for containing the Third Reich. Funnily enough, the Soviet Union did think of it, yet London and Paris rejected Moscow’s offer. The notion that liberal collaboration with the Fascists was always a matter of self-defence is even harder to believe in cases like Switzerland and North America, both of which would have been very difficult to successfully invade because of geography, but I’m rambling.

In any case, given that Vatican City officially received its independence in 1929 thanks to Fascist Italy, and it would be difficult to argue that the Vatican’s pre-1960s relations with Jewish communities was ‘good’, the Reichskonkordat should be unsurprising.