Leaders of the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Germany continually urged Pope Pius XII not to condemn the Nazis, according to newly-resurfaced documents published in part by Roberto Pertici in L’Osservatore Romano on Feb. 6.

At the center of attention is American diplomat Harold Tittmann’s memorandum to Myron Taylor, then President Franklin Roosevelt’s personal representative to the Pope, recounting his June 3, 1945, conversation with Josef Mueller.

Mueller, a Catholic lawyer politically active in the Weimar Republic, was deeply involved in resistance activities during World War II. While working for Germany military intelligence under secretly anti-Nazi Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, he was repeatedly in contact with the Vatican through the Pope’s personal secretary in order to inform the Pope of opposition plans to unseat Hitler and reconstruct a democratic Germany. Mueller sought and obtained Pius’ assistance in contacting the British government to inform them of a plot to assassinate Hitler, and later participated in the network of co-conspirators which inspired the Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie. Arrested in 1943, he escaped the fate of co-conspirators Canaris and Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed in April 1945, and was liberated by American forces on May 5.

When on June 2 the Pope spoke for the first time in public regarding the Church’s dealings with the Nazi regime, some wondered if Mueller, already returned to Rome, had helped write it. Mueller admitted to Tittmann having furnished some of the data on which certain passages of the Pope’s speech were based. And then, Tittmann’s memorandum continued, he kept talking:

“Dr. Mueller said that during the war his anti-Nazi organization in Germany had always been very insistent that the Pope should refrain from making any public statement singling out the Nazis and specifically condemning them and had recommended that the Pope’s remarks should be confined to generalities only. Dr. Mueller said that he was obliged to give this advice, since, if the Pope had been specific, Germans would have accused him of yielding to the promptings of foreign powers and this would have made the German Catholics even more suspected than they were and would have greatly restricted their freedom of action in their work of resistance to the Nazis.”

Mueller went on to say that the Pope had just begun for the first time to speak openly against the Nazis, since the consequences of speaking out had become so important as to trump any other considerations.

Tittmann sent his report to Taylor the very next day. Before certain passages were published in Tittmann’s memoirs Inside the Vatican of Pius XII: The Memoir of an American Diplomat During World War II (Image Books, 2004), the document was known to historians only through a book of U.S.-Vatican diplomatic correspondence published in Milan in 1978.

As Pertici observes, this document has languished in semi-obscurity despite its great relevance: Given its very early date, the report could not have been influenced by the work of later revisionist historians and those interested in perpetuating the myth of a “silent Pope.”

In his 1967 autobiography, Mueller confirmed Tittmann’s report: “Again and again I stressed in Rome that it would be of highest importance not to provoke the Nazis by any thoughtless action. … Firmly I warned not to give the Nazis any cheap reason to strike. The Pope wanted nothing more urgently and dearly than a Germany liberated from Hitler and Nazism. There is no other way to explain his brave support of the German Military Opposition.”

Mueller returned to Germany to help found the Christian Democratic Union — currently the political party in power under Chancellor Angela Merkel — and was its first chairman from 1946 to 1949.

As Tittmann reflects in his memoirs, “There was much inside information available to the Pontiff from secret sources. Who could have been more qualified than this Pope to decide under the circumstances?”