Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, but of limited scope
Review: This book does an excellent job of detailing the inadequate response of Pius XII to the Holocaust. The best thing that could be said about him is that the courage of the martyrs and saints was not his.
What would be useful, though, is a more extensive treatment of the intellectual background of Fascism, especially as it relates to Roman Catholicism and "conservative" movements of the early 20th century. It seems astonishing to -us- that intelligent and creative people were ever drawn to Fascism; but Gabriele d'Annunzio and Ezra Pound surely were, and many more of their contemporaries admired aspects of it.
Without the context supplied by:
-Quanta Cura- and the Syllabus of Errors, which condemned democracy, secular education, and the modern world in general;
-Rerum Novarum- and -Quadragesimo Anno-, which attempted to respond to the challenge of Marxism by advocating a corporatist state organised around military lines, and governed by a strong executive leader who orders the economy and adjudicates differences between class and ethnic groups;
the intellectual foundation behind Pius XII's apparent sympathy with Nazi Germany is incomplete. These Papal documents were in fact cited in the constitutions of Falangist Spain and Vichy France.
Of course, the book that covered all these subjects would not be as focused on the Holocaust or World War II, the subjects which the author here chose to address. It would be a general history of authoritarian right-wing movements in 20th century Europe. But without this background, Pius's indifference astounds, but seems unprecedented. With it, you can see more clearly why authoritarian governments appealed to an authoritarian Church. And with this background, we can update the lessons of history as they apply to cultural conservatism and nostalgia for an allegedly virtuous past today.
Rating: 
Summary: Suspicions Confirmed
Review: Excellent writing, class A research: read this book for a clear understanding of the complexities of the era that spawned the Third Reich and solidified the powers of the Vatican. This book is not just about Pius XII and Hitler; it's about greed, power lust, flawed genius, religious and ethnic hatreds and much, much more. Next we'd like to see Mr. Cornwell apply his extraordinary abilities to researching and writing about the role U.S. industrialists and banks played in helping bring Hitler to power and keep him there. Some very familiar names will crop up, and there will be howling for sure--but the facts are the facts. The truth hurts, but not knowing the truth hurts more in the long run.
Rating:
Summary: Would Make A Great Movie!
Review: This book tells a great story of wartime complicity - how the Pope Pius XII served the Nazis in Berlin in their quest for world domination and extermination of the Jews. It is a story of treachery and betrayal, replete with bad guys (Nazis, Pope Pius XII), good guys (Jews). It's all true and accurately researched - Cromwell had access to the Vatican archives. I think it should be made into a movie so that millions of people around the world can know what actually transpired during those dark days.
Rating:
Summary: Pacelli is no saint
Review: Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell is a tightly constructed work containing well thought out arguments. It is a very readable work of history. As with any work of this type, I try to keep in mind that the subject (in this case Pacelli) did not know what was going to happen next. With this in mind, I must conlude that Pacelli was certainly no worse than many other prominent and powerful religious and political leaders of the time who chose appeasement over confrontation, which, of course, makes him no better. Pacilli acted as most would have confronted with the complexities of the international situation. He did do some very worthwhile things. But he did not go above and beyond the norm, which, as Cornwell graphically demonstrates, means that he didn't really do anything that should qualify him for sainthood. From reading this account, one gets the impression that it would be much to Pacelli's chagrin to learn just how "human" history has revealed him to be. It should chagrin the Catholic hierarchy as well.
Rating:
Summary: Deftly Researched and Beautifully Written
Review: Cornwell has written a cogent, well-researched account of the wartime relationship between the Vatican and the Third Reich. Far from an unscrupulous attack on Pope Pius XII, Cornwell is very thorough and explores his subject (Pacelli) in all his complexity. I recommend this book highly to anybody who approaches the subject with an open mind.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing, Informative
Review: This wonderful book tells the true story of the betrayal of the Jews by the nefarious pope Pius XII whose real name was Pacelli. It is a factual non-fiction book every word in it is true. I learned so much from reading it. For example, I did not know before I read this book that the Third Reich meant Germany. It's full of historical goodies like that. Those people who trash this book are trying to cover up for crimes committed by this Pope.
Rating:
Summary: Going far beyond the stereotyped debate over the silence of
Review: Going far beyond the stereotyped debate over the silence of Pius XII, Cornwell adops a strong version of the collaborationist hypothesis, succinctly formulated even before the war by German Industrialist Thyssen: Pius XII as Nuncio helped Hitler to power. Rarely though has this view been given any mention in the mainstream debate about the culpability of Pius XII. The thesis is sufficiently surprising that the reviewer for the New York Times reframed Cornwell's account in terms of the silence debate in order to evaluate its merit. While Cornwell does discuss the issue of silence, his real contribution, as he notes in his introduction, is to base his evaluation of Pacelli's wartime actions on what Pacelli did and said in the years prior to the war, especially those actions that lead up to the signing of the Reichskonkordat. By giving a detailed account of the actions and personality of Pacelli prior to the war he is able to decisively show that Pius XII's reticence to speak out about the Holocaust was rooted in religious bigotry and a narrow concern with maintaining and expanding the temporal power of the church at any price. In his introduction he claims to have reached this conclusion only reluctantly, having initially set to vindicate Pius XII but being forced by the weight of evidence to reverse his initial view. Perhaps this is accurate. As it stands though, the book has a manifest agenda: to attempt to persuade the church (after John Paul II) to return to the liberalizing tendencies of Vatican II. How the memory of Pius XII is handled is symbolic of this struggle in as much as his canonization, already well underway, would help solidify the ultramontanist tendencies in the church. This agenda also expalins his sometime peculiar selection of source material in the later chapters and his failure to give due credit to non-Catholic historical sources. He fails for example to cite an number of key Jewish sources, especially on the fate of Rome's Jewish community, and cites Anthony Rhodes criticisms of Hochhuth's historical accuracy at length without considering Rhodes own glaring shortcomings in that area. He discusses Tiso, Salazar Hudal, support for the Vichy regime, and the Vactican role in helping fleeing Nazis only in passing. While some of these omissions may be justified by authorial discretion in limiting the focus of the book, there is an underlying pattern that points to an evasion of a discussion of how deeply the church beyond Pacelli was implicated in collaboration with totalitarianism. In short, Cornwell falls short of fully appreciating how Pacelli's policies were symptomatic a broader ideological development in the Church: a flirtation with clerical fascism.
Rating:
Summary: Pius XII was not Hitler's Pope, but...
Review: One must remember that the publisher and not the author usually picks a book's title. The choice of --Hitler's Pope-- for this particular work leaves much to be desired. It implies that Pope Pius XII had to explicitly align himself with Hitler in order to do incredible harm to Europe's Jews. On the contrary, John Cornwell believes that traditionalist Catholic theology perceiving Jews as Christ killers resulted in a lessening concern for these unfortunate victims. The Jews were only receiving what they truly deserved according to this ultra-conservative Catholic mindset. Cornwell's thesis is that Pius XII possessed ambivalent feeling towards the Jews. The Pope should have done more, and failed to do so because of an inability to transcend the intellectual and psychological formation of his anti-Semitic Catholic training. It is logical to conclude that Pius XII would inevitably have a difficult time overcoming the pervasive ideology of his milieu. Almost certainly, the Pope considered Nazi Germany to be the lesser of evils compared to Communist Russia. The Nazis were the enemy of the Church's foremost enemy and thus a certain degree of compromise and working relationship seemed desirable. Many also conveniently ignore Cornwell's overwhelming evidence that the Pope was a racist. Pius XII himself requested that the U.S. military authorities not allow Afro-American soldiers into Rome because they might rape white Italian women. Moreover, even the Vatican spokesman Jesuit Peter Gimpel conceded this point to Ed Bradley of the "Sixty Minutes" TV news program. Why should a fair minded person find the central theme of --Hitler's Pope-- so hard to believe? Pope Pius XII, in many respects, was merely a creature of his era. Past Catholic hostility towards the Jews is a solidly established fact. The Nazis were admittedly an atheistic movement, but their vociferous anti-Semitism did not come out of a vacuum. It is absurd to argue that such anti-Semitic theological contempt did not contribute greatly to the holocaust. I have no problem in highly recommending Cornwell's book.
Rating: 
Summary: Hitlers Pope
Review: John Cornwell is a Roman Catholic, with very limited intellect about World War II. especially about Eastern Europe, it is cliche to write about the Holocaust, however, there was another genocide going on and today 56 years later it is equally cliche not to mention it, the War was over, then why allow it...! Vladimir Dedijer a Serb Stalinist an associate of Tito (Josef Broz)wrote a book 435 pages almost identical to Cornwell, I decided to call both books 'garbage literature' I feel, Cornwell and Dedijer must have agreed to write this...(!!!) I would challenge Mr Cornwell to write a book on real facts and not cliche, also where was Mr Cornwell et al after the War when 15.5 million Silesia Germans, Sudeten Germans and 2 million Donauschwaben were exterminated, driven or killed from their expropriated homes stripped of citizenship and birthrights, no, these people were not Nazi Transplants, they lived Poland and Sudetenland more than 600 years, what Irony. Many were deported to Russian slave labor camps "Stalin was slave Riich", I am a survivor of this untold insanity at thirteen years of age I saw 'Hell on Earth many Times over' the war was over, then why ? My ancesters settled in southern Hungary 1740 hardly Nazis, in 1944 we were driven from our home and never compensated all others were compensated and made whole. I was in three extermination camps in the Serbia actually there wer 50 concentration camps in Yugoslavia most in the Voivodina, Tito and his council should equally made guilty of War Crimes in absentia with Hitler and Stalin, our church did try to oppose... I am still reminded about Cardinal Stepinak of Zagreb who was totured to say what Tito and the partisans wanted to hear. Only blaming the catholic church does History Injustice, we are people too, we have the same Pains... I willing to dicuss this subject intellectually with anyone, we are the "Others" this is not a one sided History, especially, the blaming of the catholic church to that extend is senseless shame on you Mr Cornewell!!! Thank you.
Rating: 
Summary: A Modern Tragedy
Review: The ancient Greek poets wrote tragedies to teach moral lessons, and to expound on the relative futility of all human efforts when befuddled by the powers of the cosmos. Although the author attempts to paint Pope Pius XII as a Machiavelian character, what he accomplishes is to outline one of the great tragedies of our time. Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) grew from childhood to maturity at a time when the Church was under siege. Living in a family of conservative, lay canon lawyers, the young Pacelli witnessed the loss of the Papal Territories and the declining secural powers of the papacy. He also saw the anti-modern, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic backlash inspired by those defeats. From the time that he was a young man, Pacelli was DESTINED to become a conservative Catholic, placing his hopes for the future of the Church on an authoritarian, centralized bureaucracy and papacy. As an up-and-coming member of the Curia, and as the Papal Nuncio to Germany in the 1910s and 20s, Bishop Pacelli witnessed much of the revolutionary chaos and violence of the twentieth century. He was DESTINED to fear Communism as a threat to the Church, and his flock. As the Cardinal Secretary of State for the Vatican in the 1930s, Cardinal Pacelli concluded a much-criticized concordant with Hitler, that mirrored the appeasment policies of France and Great Britain prior to World War II. His was a politic informed by his abiding fear of Communism, and his geographical location within facist Italy. Within the limits of an harsh reality, he attempted to negotiate the best possible position for the Church and millions of Roman Catholics in an openly hostile Germany. He was DESTINED to act naively before a cynical dictator. Pope Pius XII's times were complex and dangerous. To be portrayed accurately, those times must be painted with great delicacy. Instead, the author paints with too wide a brush. The author is openly hostile to his subject: even after his coronation as Pope Pius XII, the author simply (and offensively) refers to him as "Pacelli." The author is informed by a fataly defective theology. Rather than understanding that Christianity is the faith that worships and proclaims the risen Christ. He describes Christianity as "a religion based on the concept of agape, the love that accords each individual irrespective of difference, equal respect..." (p. 280). Perhaps, this tendency to reduce the beauty of theology to mere social action explains, in part, the author's open hostility to his subject. Perhaps, he wished to make the Holy Father into a courageous social worker, rather than one of the chief defenders of the faith. The author approached his task with an historic bias, describing the Nazi holocaust as "the greatest crime in human history" (p. 293), and soundly criticizing the Pope for not doing more to stop it. Somehow, the author makes his claim, despite the fact that slavery and the black diaspora impacted more lives and has lasted longer than the holocaust. Somehow, the author makes his claim, despite the virtual elimination of native people from North America. Surely, Hitler's crimes were horrible, but not necessarily the most awful that the world has ever seen. Too often in this text, history descends into rumor. Too often, biography becomes innuendo. Despite all of its flaws, this book gives us a glimpse into two tragedies. That, in itself, is as instructive for us as it was for the ancient Greeks. First, we see the tragedy of Pope Pius XII: a mere mortal DESTINED to lead his denomination in "interesting times." Secondly, we see the tragedy of John Cornwell: an author unable or unwilling to understand his subject.
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