German scholars to digitize 15,000 desperate Jewish letters to the Vatican during Holocaust in €15M project focusing on victims’ stories, not papal blame.
Newsroom (01/12/2025 Gaudium Press ) A major new research initiative led by renowned Church historian Prof. Hubert Wolf at the University of Münster will systematically examine approximately 15,000 letters sent by European Jews to Pope Pius XII and the Vatican Secretariat of State between 1933 and 1945 begging for protection, visas, or intervention as Nazi persecution escalated.
The ten-year project, titled “Asking the Pope for Help: Jewish Petitions to the Vatican, 1933–1945,” has applied for roughly €15 million in funding through the German Academies’ Programme, the country’s most prestigious long-term humanities grant scheme. If approved, it would rank among the largest single awards ever made in historical research.
Rather than centering on Pius XII’s actions or alleged silence, the project explicitly aims to restore agency and voice to the victims themselves. “These are not footnotes to papal history,” Wolf said in a statement. “They are the life stories of 15,000 individuals and families whose names and fates were often erased by the Shoah. We want to give them back their faces and their voices.”
The letters – many handwritten in Yiddish, German, Italian, French, and other languages – range from formal petitions drafted by rabbis to frantic postcards thrown from deportation trains. Researchers plan to transcribe, translate, annotate, and publish the entire corpus in an open-access digital edition, linked to biographical data and archival records that trace what ultimately happened to each petitioner.
The team will also analyze Vatican responses: which cases received help (such as baptismal certificates, visas facilitated through nunciatures, or hiding in convents), which were forwarded to local bishops, and which went unanswered. The study stops short of broad moral judgment on the wartime papacy, focusing instead on reconstructing the bureaucratic and diplomatic mechanisms available to the Holy See.
The application is currently under review by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. A decision is expected in early 2026. If funded, work could begin as early as next summer, with the first volumes and the digital platform scheduled for release by 2028.
Historians have hailed the project as a landmark shift toward victim-centered research on the Church’s role during the Holocaust, made possible by the full opening of the Pius XII archives in 2020.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Infocatholica
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