Between March 1942 and the liberation of France from Nazi rule, some 80,000 French and foreign-born Jews, including 11,400 children, were deported from France to their deaths in the concentration camps, mainly Auschwitz.
They included Jacques Heilbronner, president of the Israelite Central Consistory, the country’s leading Jewish body, the Chief Rabbi of Lyon Bernard Schonberg and many other leading members of the Jewish community who had been desperately negotiating with the Germans in the occupied zone and the authorities in the Vichy zone on behalf of France’s Jews, who were being slowly squeezed of all their rights.
But they had also been appealing for help from the country’s leading Catholics, notably Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon, and Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard, archbishop of Paris. Despite the Catholic Church’s huge importance as a moral guardian, both preferred to sympathise privately with the Jews while avoiding public protests at the appalling tragedy unfolding in front of their eyes.
Yet from the moment Hitler had taken over in Germany in 1933 and started subjecting Jews to the worst forms of persecution, Suhard’s predecessor Cardinal Jean Verdier had been outspoken in his opposition to Nazism, as indeed had Pope Pius XI in Rome. But by 1940 both were dead and had been replaced by more cautious leaders, Suhard and Pope Pius XII.
In her well-written and meticulously documented new book, Aliza Luft, an American academic, has set herself the task of asking why the Church’s French leadership changed its stance and by its silence helped to condemn so many Jews to death.
The main reason that emerges from her account is that the Church saw Petain’s Vichy government as a tremendous opportunity to reassert itself at the centre of French life after a century and a half of secularism and anti-clericalism since the French Revolution. Add to that the antisemitism that had grown up since the end of the 19th century, most spectacularly demonstrated in the Dreyfus Affair of 1894, which had infected sectors of the Church as well as the wider public, and you have a potent mixture.
And of course there was plain fear. In 1940 the Germans arrested Cardinal Suhard and detained him for three days. After that he was reluctant to criticise the Nazis in public and urged his fellow bishops to do the same. He clearly wasn’t cut out to be a martyr. Luft notes: “Suhard chose accommodation as a strategy of institutional survival.”
In the Vichy zone, Gerlier went much further. In a sermon at a service in his cathedral attended by Petain, he declared: “Petain is France, and France, today is Petain!”, a statement that was to haunt him for the rest of his long life. For it came just after Petain had enacted the infamous Statut des Juifs which excluded Jews from French society and would pave the way for their eventual mass murder.
Even after the deportations began, the cardinals stayed silent. It took a braver man, Archbishop Saliege of Toulouse, who had been a constant public opponent of Nazism, to issue an impassioned protest in defence of the Jews, read out in 400 pulpits: “They are part of the human race. They are our brothers and sisters like everyone else.”
Luft writes that his words “ignited a fire”, being widely published abroad and finally prodding Gerlier into a similar statement. It worked, briefly. The authorities halted the deportations, terrified of a public backlash. And then the cardinals and bishops retreated into reaffirming support for Petain and the deportations resumed. Luft rightly wonders how many Jewish lives might have been saved had the Catholic leadership maintained its public criticism of the Nazis.
Not all Catholics shared the cardinals’ cowardice. Many young priests and laypeople risked – and sometimes lost – their lives to rescue and hide Jewish children.
It wasn’t until 1997 that the French bishops issued a public apology for their wartime stance: “Silence was the rule and words in favour of the victims the exception… Today we confess that silence was a mistake.” And fatal.
Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust by Aliza Luft is published by Harvard University Press
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