As president, the priest, Jozef Tiso,a ruled the Nazi protectorate of Slovakia throughout the war (1939-45). Pius wrote “Monsignor” Tiso that he had hoped that the Slovak government and people, “Catholic almost entirely, would never proceed with the forcible removal of persons belonging to the Jewish race,” and the fact that “such measures are carried out among a people of great Catholic traditions, by a government which declares it is their follower and custodian,” distressed him greatly.​—April 7, 1943.²

But how could any form of cooperation with the Nazi racial extermination program even be considered among a people who the pope himself said were ‘Catholic almost entirely and of great Catholic traditions’? Surely the moral teachings of the Church would make it unthinkable for “Msgr.” Tiso and his flock to have any part in genocide! History shows whether they did.

In fact, when the Vatican’s Berlin correspondent for the official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, once asked Pius XII whether he would protest the extermination of the Jews, the pope told him that he could “not forget that millions of Catholics serve in the German armies. Shall I bring them into conflicts of conscience?”⁹