„Heiliger Vater, helfen Sie uns!" Die Bittschreiben jüdischer Holocaustopfer in den Vatikanischen Archiven

About the event

Thousands of Jewish people wrote letters to Rome during the Nazi regime asking Pope Pius XII and the Vatican for help. These letters were not accessible until the Vatican archives were opened in March 2020. The Münster-based church historian Professor Hubert Wolf and his team have been analysing thousands of these petition letters to the Pope for several years as part of the "Asking the Pope for Help" research project. In a speech at the Academy in Erfurt, Wolf will report on the findings and the academic work on them.

The letters from Jews to the Pope reveal, among other things, what first-hand information ended up in Rome and how people reacted to it. The studies by Wolf and his team shed a special light on the time of the Shoah. They provide a special insight into the relationship between the Vatican and National Socialism and the Holocaust. Wolf not only asks why the Pope remained silent, but whether he did so at all and what he knew about the Shoah. The lecture will provide an insight into current research, which draws on files that have not been accessible for many decades.

Hubert Wolf is Professor of Medieval and Modern Church History at the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Münster. He has been awarded the Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He was also awarded the Communicator Prize in 2004. For his research on the letters of Jewish Holocaust victims, he was accepted into the long-term programme of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities in 2025.