“Fascism is invincible only with us”: The Church and Acquiescence to Fascism

Whenever I go to a used bookstore, I typically find a book I have never heard of and pick it up. On one such trip, I saw a copy of Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, A Christian Tragedy (1963) for 0.75¢. The description on the back of the book intrigued me because it points out that the play caused a controversy when it premiered because of its “treatment of Pope Pius XII . . . and the Church during the Nazi persecution of the Jews.” This summary stood out to me, especially since I have been researching the intersections between the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany, and Christianity. I have not, as of yet, done much on the role of Christians during the Holocaust, so I knew I had to pick up this book, not merely for the play itself but also for Hochhuth’s appendix where he details the research he conducted for The Deputy.

Throughout The Deputy, countless Church leaders, resistance figures, and Nazis argue that Hitler did not go after the Church because, even if he disagreed with them, he felt that they had the power to move the masses against him. As well, the Church, in Rome, did not move against vociferously against Hitler because they saw him as a beachhead against Soviet expansion of Communism into the West. As Hochhuth notes, “In 1940 Hitler, after a talk with Mussolini, expressly forbade [Alfred] Rosenberg to commit any…