WORLD WAR II - On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland: this is the start date of the Second World War. France and England immediately intervened alongside the attacked power: Italy and Russia, respectively bound to Germany by the so-called Pact of Steel and by a non-aggression treaty, did not move. The German army, having occupied Poland as far as the Vistula and the San in a lightning campaign, remaining inactive during the following winter, resumed the offensive in the spring of 1940 and occupied Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France.
After the capitulation of the French army (armistice of Compiègne, June 21, 1940) and Italy's intervention alongside Germany (June 10, 1940), the German military initiative broke against the resistance of the British Empire. In 1941 the Axis Powers occupied Yugoslavia and Greece and in June of the same year, supported by Finland, Hungary and Romania, declared war on Russia. In Dec. 1941 Japan too, an ally of Germany and Italy, intervened in Asia against the United States (which then entered the war) and against the democratic Powers, and occupied the Philippines, Indonesia, Indochina, the Malay Peninsula and Burma. When the German attack against Russia failed in 1942, the opponents of the Axis passed to the counteroffensive: the battles of el-Alamein (Oct. 1942) in Egypt and of Stalingrad (July 28, 1942-Feb. 1, 1943) in Russia mark the beginning of this new phase of the conflict. The landings in North Africa, in Sicily, on the Italian Peninsula (July-Sept. 1943), in France (June 1944) and the Russian offensives of 1944 and 1945, as well as the systematic bombing of enemy industrial centers by Allied aviation, decided the fate of World War II. Germany too (Italy had already signed the armistice on Sept. 8, 1943) was forced to capitulate unconditionally on May 8, 1945. In the Far East the war against Japan dragged on until Aug. of the same year.
On the news of the German denunciation (Apr. 28, 1939) of the Treaties with Poland and with Great Britain, the Holy See began a feverish diplomatic activity in the various European capitals with the aim of persuading the Powers concerned to settle the disputed points by common agreement and to renounce the scourge of a new world conflict. Pius XII's attempts at mediation nevertheless met with the intransigence of Germany and Poland, the former determined at all costs to unleash the conflict if it did not obtain satisfaction in the Danzig question, the latter equally unwilling to make any concession to the other side. Thus the words spoken by the Pontiff in his radio message of Aug. 24, 1939, fell on deaf ears: « It is with the force of reason, not with that of arms, that justice makes its way. And empires not founded on justice are not blessed by God. Politics emancipated from morality betrays those very men who so will it... Nothing is lost with peace. Everything can be lost with war. Let men return to understanding one another. Let them resume negotiations. By negotiating with good will and with respect for mutual rights they will realize that sincere and constructive negotiations are never denied an honorable success ». Every exhortation was in vain. Once war had broken out, the Holy See immediately set up an information office on prisoners of war and requested from the respective governments the transmission of the lists of prisoners. Only Germany, alleging the fact that such lists were already being communicated to the International Red Cross of Geneva, did not grant this request. This is one of the many indications of the policy unfavorable to the Holy See carried out by the government of the Third Reich. Between the National Socialist conception and the Catholic one there was an irreconcilable contrast of principles, a contrast that during the conflict grew sharper day by day. The having abandoned the law of truth and of the love of Jesus Christ, the having preferred to it religious and moral agnosticism, not only in Germany but throughout the world, these were the moral causes of the outbreak of the new conflict, analyzed by Pius XII in his first encyclical Summi pontificatus of Oct. 20, 1939. The Holy See, unable to put an end to the slaughter, nevertheless sought to alleviate in some way the lot of the peoples and of individuals particularly stricken. Spiritual and material assistance (sending of food and medicines) knew no hesitation. The task was particularly difficult because, as the Pope said in an allocution of June 2, 1942, to the Sacred College, «the prolonging of the armed conflict, the feverish growth of the instruments of war, the progressive worsening of the methods of warfare, mean that the Church's supernatural and pacifying mission meets with clashes, difficulties and misunderstandings unknown and unsuspected to such a degree in past times, and which become dangers for her and for her work». Although relations with Hitlerian Germany became day by day more difficult because of the evident measures of hostility toward the Catholic Church, implemented under the pretext of the state of war, the Holy See never desisted from its strictly neutral attitude. Solicitous above all for its mission of charity, Pius XII benevolently received the news of the arrival of a personal envoy of the President of the United States at the Vatican «to favor and to direct our common efforts for peace and for the consolation of the afflicted» (letter of President F. D. Roosevelt to Pius XII, Dec. 23, 1939). The strictest neutrality did not, however, exclude fidelity to the doctrines of the Church and of Catholicism, and in the course of the conflict the Pontiff never abstained from condemning certain political conceptions contrary to these dictates. The Italian armistice of Sept. 8, 1943, and the subsequent German occupation of Rome did not modify the international status of Vatican City. The Germans respected it as the Allies respected it afterward. Political refugees found safe refuge there, even though on the night between Feb. 3 and 4, 1944, units of the Republic of Salò forcibly penetrated into the buildings of the basilica of St. Paul and violated the rights of extraterritoriality guaranteed by the Lateran Treaty. This was an isolated fact, as isolated remained the dropping of bombs, carried out by an aircraft on March 3, 1944, on zones adjacent to Vatican City. Meanwhile the charitable action of the Holy See was intensified ever more through the institution of the Pontifical Commission of Assistance, which extended its activity indiscriminately to all categories of the destitute victims of the war. As during World War I, in this conflict too the missions were particularly tried, especially those of eastern Asia.
The end of the conflict left behind it an immense field of ruins. Spiritual and material ruins, which laid bare in all its crudeness the profound crisis of human society: the world awaiting an economic and social renovatio, which without a spiritual and religious revival remains a flatus vocis; man placed at a crossroads between spirit and matter, between the consciousness of himself and the dispersion of his own self in the amorphism of the mass. This is the present crisis of civilization, powerfully depicted by Fr. Delp on New Year's Eve of 1944, while, awaiting death, he was confined in the Nazi prisons. And at the end of World War II the mission of the Church is that indicated by Fr. Delp: to solve the problems of man concretely, to help all humanity to find again the way indicated by Christ.
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Silvio Furlani