‘My wife and I grew up hating Pius XII’
But today Gary Krupp devotes his life to debunking the wartime pontiff's persistent critics. He tells Simon Caldwell why
8 May 2009

Gary Krupp: 'My past impression of Pius was completely wrong. I was then angry because I was misled by those who call themselves historians'

Flicking through images on his BlackBerry, Gary Krupp shows me a picture of himself embracing Pope John Paul II. "I loved him!" he exclaims.

"He is the guy who knighted me," he continues, in reference to his admission to the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St Gregory the Great, then moving on to an image of himself with Pope Benedict XVI, he adds: "And this is the guy who promoted me [as a Knight commander of the same order]."

Flight delays made our meeting in the bar of a London hotel very late and Krupp and his wife Meredith were tired. We had been talking about Pope Pius XII for nearly two hours and were about to call it a day after none of us could recall the name of Pius's Secretary of State (Cardinal Luigi Maglione) who, on his orders, protested to Ernst von Weizsacker, the German Ambassador, against the deportation of Rome's Jews by the SS.

In spite of the grim subject matter the conversation lightens as fatigue begins to kick in. Krupp is a sociable man, a New Yorker who exudes the charm and quick wit that make many East Coast Americans so likeable. It is easy to have a drink with men like him; you don't feel a stranger for very long.

He is in London because a British television firm is making a documentary about his work on Pius. He is an interesting enough figure to warrant such attention. He is proudly Jewish, a Zionist who, after a successful career fitting hospital suites with new imaging technologies, is spending his retirement battling to restore the reputation of a pontiff maligned as a Nazi sympathiser. Correcting this revision of history is a "Jewish issue", argues Krupp, because Pius was a man who "in just one day hid 7,000 Jews from the Nazis" - nearly six times more than Oscar Schindler saved during the entire war.

The Pave the Way Foundation, the organisation the Krupps founded in 2002 to help to remove non-theological obstacles between faiths, has identified the role of Pius as the biggest stumbling block in Catholic-Jewish relations for the last 46 years when in fact it should be a reason for closer unity.

"Merry and I grew up hating Pius XII," Krupp explained. "I did two years of personal research before we decided that we should tackle this project. With further research, I was 100 per cent convinced that my past impression of him was completely wrong. I was then angry because I was misled by those who call themselves historians."

He believes that Pius will eventually be exonerated. All most people know about him is that he was "Hitler's Pope", says Krupp: "But if you go to an average person with the information that we have found they can only come to one conclusion - that this guy was the greatest hero of World War Two. We can prove it. We have something on our side - documented proof - where the revisionists haven't a scrap of paper to support their theories."

To find such proof the foundation has commissioned the German historian Michael Hesemann to search the Vatican archives opened two years ago by Pope Benedict XVI. These cover the period from 1922 to 1939, the years when Eugenio Pacelli served as nuncio to Bavaria and then as Pope Pius XI's "Jew-loving" Secretary of State, as he was referred to by the Nazis.

Krupp says he was surprised to learn that "literally none" of the "Monday-morning quarterbacks" who criticise Pius have visited the archives. Yet the same critics, he says, continue to wrongfully dismiss each new finding as either old or irrelevant as they "defend their theories at the expense of historical accuracy".

Some of the new evidence is hard to ignore, however. One piece, discovered in the diary of a Rome convent, revealed that Pius directly ordered the religious houses of Rome to hide the city's Jews on October 16 1943, the same day his protest at their deportation was ignored.

When I met Krupp he was buzzing about a separate project the foundation was due to begin in cataloguing the private archives of Fr Robert Graham, a Californian Jesuit who until his death in 1997 was considered to be the world's leading expert on the wartime role of Pius.

The collection of 25,000 documents contained photocopies of wartime papers from the Vatican's Secret Archives which will not be released until 2013. "It's as though the Vatican archives have opened as of today," said Krupp. But after the project became public, permission to publicise the documents was denied.

It would represent the second setback Krupp, 61, has suffered recently. Last September he sponsored a symposium on Pius in Rome. He invited Pius's most trenchant critics to attend, but they not only refused but also then attacked the symposium as one-sided, which was "comical", according to Krupp, because they were complaining about a situation of their own making.

Pope Benedict used the symposium, however, to express his own conviction that, when "free from ideological prejudices", Pius could be seen as a "noble pope" who "spared no effort in intervening" on behalf of the Jews, "either directly or through instructions given to other individuals or to institutions of the Catholic Church". Those rabbis who attended the event went away convinced that Pius was one of the unsung heroes of the Holocaust, says Krupp.

Not all Jews approve of what Krupp is doing. There is a substantial body of opposition among them to the beatification of Pius XII, leading to claims that Krupp does not represent the views of the Jewish mainstream and that he is something of a maverick. Yet he fits neatly into a long line of prominent Jews to defend Pius. These date to at least 1940 when Albert Einstein vigorously defended the Catholic Church as the only institution in Nazi Germany that "stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth".

Throughout that decade tributes to Pius came from Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president; Moshe Sharett, Israel's first foreign minister, and Isaac Herzog, the chief rabbi of Israel. Pius granted an audience to 80 concentration camp survivors who wanted to thank him personally for helping to save lives. The chief rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, became a Catholic and took as his baptismal name Eugenio in tribute to the Pope. When Pius died in 1958 Golda Meir, Israel's foreign minister and future prime minister, praised him for raising his voice "when fearful martyrdom came to our people".

Since the Sixties most of the evidence in defence of Pius has been unearthed by Jewish historians, most notably by Pinchas Lapide who used Yad Vashem's records to show that the Church under Pius saved up to 850,000 lives - more than all the international agencies put together.

Most recently, the American professor David Dalin, a rabbi, has used historical evidence to demonstrate that the attacks on Pius are ideologically motivated, largely emanating from "lapsed and angry Catholics" intent on damaging the papacy, and which, he argues, in reality amount to a form of Holocaust denial because they disparage the testimonies of survivors. Sir Martin Gilbert, the world's leading authority on the Holocaust, is among those who believe Pius should be considered as a Righteous Gentile.

In this light, the restoration of Pius's reputation is an issue of truth and justice. But to Krupp it remains principally a Jewish issue because it has the potential to alienate his people from a billion Catholics whom they should consider as historic allies. "Today, with the dangers to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel, we need to do everything possible to eliminate these obstacles when they are simply not based on facts," Krupp explained. "We really need every friend we can get."

In this respect his work is a deadly serious venture and is as much concerned with the future as the past. It should be seen by Christians and Jews alike as a mitzvah - a Jewish good deed.