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"Holy Father, help us!" – Jewish Holocaust victims write to the Pope

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 research project "Asking the Pope for Help". In a speech at the Academy on Wednesday 21 January in Erfurt, Wolf will report on the findings and the academic work on them. His lecture is entitled "'Holy Father, help us! The letters of petition from Jewish Holocaust victims in the Vatican Archives". The public event, to which the "Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt" in cooperation with professors from the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Erfurt cordially invites you, will take place at 6 p.m. in the Coelicum, Domstraße 10.

The letters from Jews to the Pope reveal, among other things, what first-hand information reached 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.

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