Around 10,000 petitions sent to the Pope by persecuted Jewish people as well as associated internal Vatican documents dating from the time of the Shoah are being digitally published and evaluated.

Those asking for help – women, men, and children – came from all across Europe and belonged to various Jewish denominations and social classes. Their letters, written in 17 languages, therefore represent a very broad spectrum of “Jewishness” before and during the Shoah.

The project’s aim is, on the one hand, to reconstruct the fates hiding behind the petitions and to give those asking for help a voice and a profile again. On the other hand, the project makes a significant contribution to researching the stance of Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) and his staff on the Shoah, as well as the complex decision-making processes within the Roman Curia.

The holdings in the Vatican archives pertaining to the pontificate of Pope Pius XII have only been made accessible to researchers in 2020. Apart from the petitions, they also comprise numerous documents that reflect internal processes and reactions within the Curia – as far as is known today, well over 50,000 pages in at least twelve languages. National and international online sources are taken into consideration as well. The source material is also evaluated with the help of state-of-the-art AI methods.

The documents, the data records for all persons mentioned, and the reconstructed cases will be made available on a multilingual, user-friendly website as part of a critical digital edition – intended for academics as well as for the general public and, in particular, for those who were persecuted and their families.

To start: 2026 

Locations: Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, University of Münster

The academy project “The Vatican and the Persecution of Jews in Europe” is supported by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts in close cooperation with the University of Münster. It is part of the Academies’ programme  funded by the German federal and state governments, which aims to preserve, secure, and raise awareness of our cultural heritage. The programme is coordinated by the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities .