A Day of great historic Importance

Of all days in the year, September 1st is one of the most significant, if not the most important in history.
I am of course referring to the outbreak of World War II, which happened on this day exactly 70 years ago.

It is amazing how fast time passes, and how much we know of events we have not even experienced ourselves. I am meanwhile over fifty, but I cannot remember even one year of my life when there were not new books about World War II published, and new films about it produced.
Many of them are quite informative, but there is also a lot of rubbish, especially the sick and brainless attempts to make the war look 'funny'. For some strange reason the British are most eager on that (e.g. Hallo, Hallo or Dad's Army), which seems to appeal especially to the lesser educated elements of their society (and even to some people here in Ireland).

The British were the cause for many laughs of a different kind on the battlefields, where their poorly trained soldiers and their inferior equipment were rarely a match for enemies, especially the Germans and Japanese. (Only when the British used ever more American equipment, their performance improved slightly.) But this was not only the case during World War II. In fact, there was in the last three centuries not one major war Britain fought or won on its own, and it always had the same problems: poorly trained soldiers, with bad weapons and equipment, and not enough of either.

On a day like this, one is likely to reflect: on history, the world and on oneself. Had I been born just one generation earlier, I would most likely have fought in World War II. My father, who was five weeks away from his 13th birthday when the war began, was drafted for military training at the age of 17 and served - as an 18-year-old - for the last year of the war with an anti-aircraft artillery regiment.

My paternal grandfather, who was born in 1889, had fought already in World War I as a cavalry officer, from the first to the last day, and ended that war as a Captain with the highest decoration for bravery and several other medals.
After 1918 he lived a quiet life as a civilian, running the family estate in Bohemia (which had been Austrian for centuries, but was by then part of the first Czechoslovak republic).
When Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in 1938, my grandfather and his family became over night German citizens. It was neither their choice, nor had anyone bothered asking them for their opinion. It just happened, and both Britain and France sanctioned it.
A few months later my grandfather - at the age of 49 - was "re-activated" for military service, because of his "excellent war record from 1914 to 1918".

70 years ago he was one of the oldest Majors - perhaps even the oldest - in the German Army and in charge of a light squadron of (still mounted) cavalry in East Prussia.

His regiment was among the first German troops ordered to cross the border and advance into Poland (photo above left), where they met - and defeated - a regiment of Polish cavalry. This was one of the last battles in history with mounted cavalry on both sides.*

Earlier that day - beginning at 4.45 am - the German Airforce had started bombing raids on Polish towns and military positions (photo right), and shortly after daybreak the old German pre-dreadnought battleship Schleswig-Holstein (photo below left), which had been launched in 1906 and was a veteran of World War I as well, fired the first shots of World War II at the Polish garrison on the Westerplatte, an area at the outskirts of Danzig (Gdansk), an old Hanseatic city on the Baltic Sea which had been German for centuries, but was then a 'free city' under the neutral administration of the League of Nations.

Hitler had only days before signed a secret pact with Stalin, which brought the two worst dictators of the 20th century into an unexpected alliance against Poland, on whose territory both Russia and Germany had historic demands.
Poland had earlier received diplomatic guarantees from both Britain and France, but neither country was in a position to give any real - and especially military - support in case of war. They knew that only too well, but Poland believed that it had allies.
In fact, it was an isolated country, surrounded by potential enemies. The Polish army was quite strong and highly motivated, but on the technical level of World War I and thus no match for the well-equipped modern forces Germany and the Soviet Union sent against it.

Knowing that Britain and France were in no position to assist Poland militarily, Hitler - well known to be a political gambler - took the risk and invaded Poland, against the advice of many of his political aides and senior generals. And being also a life-long Anglophile (a fact that is often ignored by historians and commentators), Hitler did not believe that Britain would declare war on Germany "over a small and unimportant Eastern province like Poland".

He was wrong, of course, as we now know. And hindsight is always easier than making decisions on the day and under pressure.

When the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (right), who had tried long and hard to come to terms with Hitler and accommodate his various demands (the return of the Rhineland and the Saar province to Germany and later the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland), eventually declared war on the morning of September 3rd, he felt that he had no other choice left.
With hindsight, he was wrong as well. But this is of course only an academic point.

Neither the British Army, nor the Royal Air Force (RAF) were ready for a war. Their numbers were low, and most of their equipment was either old and obsolete, or of inferior quality when compared with the German forces. Only the Royal Navy was of a superior strength and able to go to war at a moment's notice. But even in Britain's 'senior service' there were shortfalls (in particular a lack of modern submarines) that became soon only too visible.

The French army was much stronger than the British, and better equipped. But France had the problem that its - mostly elderly - generals were still thinking in a 19th century way and their strategy was at best of World War I vintage.

None of the French strategists - with one single exception - could see the tank as a modern offensive weapon. They used it mostly as fire support for the infantry.
The one exception was a young and bright Colonel called Charles de Gaulle (left).
He had written a book about modern armoured warfare in the 1920s, but was widely ignored by his superiors. Ironically, this book was read by the German General Heinz Guderian (below right), who agreed with de Gaulle's ideas and made them the core of his own 'Blitzkrieg' (lightning warfare) strategy.

September 1st, 1939 was the first day this strategy was used for real (and not just for exercise), and it worked even better than all optimists in the German General Staff had expected.

By September 17th most of the Polish forces were beaten, destroyed or in retreat, and the Germans controlled much of Poland's territory. On that day, seeing that all went according to their secret plan, Stalin ordered his 'Red Army' to invade Poland from the East and to occupy the areas Hitler had conceded to him previously.

The rest, as the often used phrase tells us, is history. This weblog is not the place (and has not enough space) to list all events of the war, not even those of September 1939. And most of them are well-enough known anyway, perhaps with the exception that the war ended on this day as well, after exactly six years, with the official surrender of Japan on September 1st, 1945.

But I like to mention a number of other historic events that also took place on this day, making it even more significant than it would be if only World War II had begun on this date.

• Way back in the year 69 (CE) Jerusalem was - after a long siege - finally captured and destroyed by Roman legions.
• In 1482 a Tatar army from the Crimea captured and plundered Kiev.
• On September 1st, 1661 the first recorded yacht race took place in English waters. The only two competitors were King Charles and his brother James.
• Five years later, in 1666, the Great Fire of London began on this day in Pudding Lane. When then flames were put out eventually some days later, 80% of London was in ruins.
• On September 1st, 1715 King Louis XIV of France died after a reign of 72 years - the longest time any European monarch was ever in power.
• In 1752 the famous 'Liberty Bell' arrived in the city of Philadelphia.
• In 1859 the first Pullman (railway) sleeping car was put into service.
• In the USA a federal tax on tobacco was introduced for the first time on September 1st, 1862.
• In 1870 - during the Franco-Prussian War - the famous Battle of Sedan took place. It ended with a spectacular defeat of the French main army, and Emperor Napoleon III was captured by Prussian troops. (From 1871 to 1918 the day was subsequently celebrated in Germany as 'Sedan Day', a public holiday in commemoration of the great victory. It is quite possible that Hitler was influenced by the 1870 victory at Sedan when he chose the day for the invasion of Poland in 1939.)
• In 1918 US troops landed in the Russian city of Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast of Siberia. (They stayed there until 1920.)
• The modern state of Lebanon was created by France on this day in 1920 as a mandate territory.
• In 1923 a major earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter Scale, devastated parts of Japan. In Tokyo and Yokohama alone 142,000 people were killed, and many more injured.
• In 1961 the 'War of Independence' in Eritrea began on this day as well.
• And in 1969 - 40 years ago - a bloodless coup d'etat, led by Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, overthrew and deposed the ageing King Idris of Libya. (The day is a national holiday in Libya ever since, and today a special celebration - including a major military parade - takes place in Tripoli to commemorate the revolution.)

This is only a selection, of course, and there are many more minor events that happened on this day. As they happen almost every day, all year round. But I think the information above will show you that September 1st is indeed special and perhaps the most significant single day in the modern calender of the Western world.

The Emerald Islander


* Later my grandfather was transferred to a regiment of mechanised cavalry, which was equipped with light tanks and armoured cars. With them he took part in the campaigns in France, North Africa (photo), Italy and eventually Russia.
He was wounded several times, but - amazingly - he survived and ended the war as a Colonel, commanding a regimental task force.
Neither he, nor anyone in our family, ever liked or supported Hitler, or joined his party. In fact, since 1942 my grandfather was part of the Anti-Nazi dissident group within the German officers' corps. Only the fact that he was in a frontline position in 1944 - when Hitler's assassination by staff officers failed - prevented him from being discovered and shot by the SS.

But my family has paid a heavy price for Hitler's ambitions and adventures. In 1946 we lost our estate in Bohemia (where the family had lived for 300 years) and everything in it, were expelled from there (then the second Czechoslovak republic) and became penniless refugees.
It was only shortly before I was born that the family had managed to gain a proper house and farm again. But the war with all its terror, and also the day when it began, are engraved forever in the memory of every family member.
And even though I am too young to have lived through World War II, it has shaped - in a distant and indirect way - my own life and will always be there in the background. Without it, I would perhaps not even exist in the way I do. And I would most certainly not live and work in Ireland.

The last of the aristocratic Popes

50 years ago - on October 9th, 1958 - Pope Pius XII died at the papal summer residence Castel Gandolfo aged 82. With his death an era in the history of the papacy and the Catholic Church ended, and he is rightly seen as the last of the 'traditional' Popes.

Born in Rome on March 2nd, 1876 as Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, he came from a wealthy aristocratic family with very close ties to the Vatican.
Marcantonio Pacelli, his grandfather, was Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Finances and then the Papal Secretary of the Interior under Pope Pius IX from 1851 to 1870.
He also was the founder of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's newspaper, in 1861.
Eugenio's cousin, Ernesto Pacelli, was a key financial advisor to Pope Leo XIII; his father, Filippo Pacelli, a Franciscan Tertiary, was the dean of the Sacra Rota Romana; and his brother, Francisco Pacelli, became a lay canon lawyer and the legal advisor to Pope Pius XI, in which role he negotiated the Lateran Treaty in 1929, bringing an end to the 'Roman Question'.

At the age of twelve, Eugenio announced his intentions to enter the priesthood instead of becoming a lawyer.

After completing state primary school, he received his secondary classical education at the Visconti Institute, which was dominated by an anti-Catholic atmosphere popular at that time.

In 1894, at the age of eighteen, he entered the Collegio Capranica seminary to begin studying for the priesthood and enrolled at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Appolinare Institute of the Lateran University. From 1895 to 1896 he studied Philosophy at the University of Rome La Sapienza. In 1899 he received degrees in Theology and in utroque iure (civil and canon law). At the seminary, he received a special dispensation to live at home for health reasons.

Eugenio Pacelli was ordained a priest on Easter Sunday, April 2nd, 1899 by Bishop Francesco di Paola Cassetta - the vice-regent of Rome and a family friend - and received his first assignment as a curate at Chiesa Nuova, where he had served at mass as an altar boy.

In 1901 he entered the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, a sub-office of the Vatican Secretariat of State, where he became a minutante at the recommendation of Cardinal Vannutelli, another family friend.

In 1904 Pacelli became a papal chamberlain and in 1905 - at the tender age of 29 - a domestic prelate. From 1904 until 1916 he assisted Cardinal Pietro Gasparri in his codification of canon law with the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.

In 1908 and 1911 Pacelli turned down professorships in canon law at a Roman university and The Catholic University of America, respectively.
He became the under-secretary in 1911, adjunct-secretary in 1912 (a position he received under Pope Pius X and retained under Pope Benedict XV) and secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs in 1914, succeeding Cardinal Gasparri, who was promoted to Cardinal Secretary of State.
As secretary he concluded a concordat with Serbia, just four days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo.

During World War I Pacelli maintained the Vatican's registry of prisoners of war. In 1915 he travelled to Vienna to assist Monsignor Scapinelli, the apostolic nuncio to Austria-Hungary, in his negotiations with Emperor Franz Joseph regarding Italy.

Pope Benedict XV appointed Pacelli as papal nuncio to Bavaria on April 23rd, 1917, consecrating him as titular Bishop of Sardis and immediately elevating him to archbishop in the Sistine Chapel on May 13th, 1917, the very day Our Lady of Fatima is believed to have first appeared to three shepherd children in Portugal.

As there was no nuncio to Prussia or Germany at the time, Pacelli was, for all practical purposes, the nuncio to all of the German Empire. Once in Munich, he conveyed a papal initiative to end the war to German authorities.
After the war, during the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919, Pacelli was one of the few foreign diplomats to remain in Munich.
In 1920 archbishop Pacelli was appointed nuncio to Germany, and after completion of a concordat with Bavaria the nunciature was moved to Berlin in 1925.

There he was doyen of the Diplomatic Corps and active in diplomatic and many social activities.
He met many interesting and influential people, including Albert Einstein, Gustav Stresemann, Adolf v. Harnack, Clemens August Graf von Galen and Konrad von Preysing. (The latter two he would elevate to cardinals in 1946.)
He also worked closely with the German priest Ludwig Kaas, who was known for his expertise in Church-State relations and was politically active in the predominantly Catholic German Centrum Party.
While in Germany, he enjoyed working as a pastor, travelling to all regions, attending the Katholikentag (national gathering of the faithful) and delivered more than 50 sermons and speeches to the German people.

Nuncio Pacelli worked mainly on clarifying the relations between Church and State. In the absence of a papal nuncio to Moscow, he also worked on diplomatic arrangements between the Vatican and the Soviet Union. He negotiated food shipments for Russia, where the Church was persecuted. He met with Soviet representatives including Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, who rejected any kind of religious education, but offered agreements without the points vital to the Vatican. Despite Vatican pessimism and a lack of visible progress, Pacelli continued the secret negotiations until Pope Pius XI ordered them to be discontinued in 1927.

When he returned to Rome in 1929, praise was heaped by Catholics and Protestants alike on Pacelli, who by now had become more popular than any German cardinal or bishop, which he had largely excluded from his negotiations and dealings with the German government.

On December 16th, 1929 Eugenio Pacelli was made a cardinal by Pope Pius XI. Within a few months, on February 7th, 1930, Pius XI appointed him Cardinal Secretary of State and five years later he was also named Camerlengo (administrator of the property and revenues of the Holy See).

Secretary of State Pacelli signed concordats with a number of countries and states, including Baden (1932), Austria and Germany (1933), Yugoslavia (1935) and Portugal (1940). The Lateran treaties with Italy (1929) were concluded before his appointment.
Concordats allow the Church to organise youth groups, make ecclesiastical appointments, run schools, hospitals and charities, or conduct religious services. They also ensured that canon law would be recognised within some spheres (e.g. church decrees of nullity in the area of marriage).

He made many diplomatic visits throughout Europe and the Americas, including an extensive visit to the United States in 1936 where he met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed a personal envoy to the Holy See in December 1939, re-establishing a diplomatic tradition that had been broken since 1870, when the Pope lost temporal power.
Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli also presided as Papal Legate over the International Eucharistic Congresses in Buenos Aires in October 1934, and in Budapest in May 1938.

Pope Pius XI died on February 10th, 1939. Several historians interpret the conclave to choose his successor as facing a choice between a diplomat or a spiritual candidate, and they view that Pacelli's diplomatic experience, especially with Germany, as one of the deciding factors for his election on March 2nd, 1939, his 63rd birthday. The conclave lasted only one day, and there were just three ballots.
Eugenio Pacelli was the first Cardinal Secretary of State to be elected Pope since Clement IX in 1667. He was also one of only two men known to have served as Camerlengo immediately prior to being elected as Pope (the other being Pope Leo XIII).

Pacelli took the same papal name as his predecessor, and was quoted saying: "I call myself Pius; my whole life was under Popes with this name, but especially as a sign of gratitude towards Pius XI."
After his election, Pius XII listed three objectives as pontiff:

1. A new translation of the psalms, daily recited by the religious and priests. (It was completed in 1945)
2. A definition of the Dogma of the Assumption. This necessitated numerous studies into Church history and consultations with the episcopate worldwide. (The dogma was proclaimed in November 1950)
3. Increased archaeological excavations under St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, to determine whether St. Peter was actually buried there, or whether the Church subjected itself for more than 1500 years to a pious hoax. (The first results were published in 1950)

Only twice in his pontificate did Pius XII hold a consistory to create new cardinals, in contrast to Pius XI, who had done so seventeen times in seventeen years. Pius XII chose not to name new cardinals during World War II, and the number of cardinals had shrunk to only 38, with Cardinal Denis Dougherty being the last living US cardinal.
The first occasion on February 18th, 1946 - which is known as the 'Grand Consistory' - brought the elevation of a record 32 new cardinals, almost 50% of the Sacred College, and reaching the canonical limit of 70 cardinals.
While maintaining the maximum size, Pius XII named cardinals from China, India and the Middle East, also increasing the number of cardinals from the Americas. Thus he lessened the Italian influence on the Church. The two consistories of 1946 and 1953 brought in fact an end to over 500 years of Italians constituting a clear majority in the College of Cardinals.

Pius XII explained the Catholic faith in 41 encyclicals and almost 1000 messages and speeches during his long pontificate.
Mediator Dei clarified membership and participation in the Church. The encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu opened the doors for biblical research. But his magisterium was far larger and is difficult to summarise. In numerous speeches Catholic teaching is related to various aspects of life, education, medicine, politics, war and peace, the life of saints, Mary, things eternal and contemporary. Theologically Pius XII specified the nature of the teaching authority of the Church, gave a new freedom to engage in theological investigations and canonized numerous saints, including Pope Pius X and Maria Goretti.

The pontificate of Pius XII began on the eve of World War II. Earlier, in the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, drafted by him when he was still Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XI warned Catholics that anti-Semitism is incompatible with Christianity. Read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches, it described Hitler as an insane and arrogant prophet and was the first official denunciation of Nazism made by any major organization.

During the war, the Pope followed a policy of neutrality, mirroring that of Pope Benedict XV during World War I. In 1939 Pius XII turned the Vatican into a centre of aid which he organised from various parts of the world. An information office for prisoners of war and refugees operated in the Vatican under Giovanni Battista Montini (later to become Pope Paul VI), which in the years of its existence from 1939 until 1947 received almost 9,891,497 information requests and produced 11,293,511 answers about missing persons.

However, Pius XII has been accused by several historians of having not spoken out against the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy strongly enough. They also criticised his lack of support for the persecuted Jews in Europe, even though it is well known that the Vatican did whatever was possible under the circumstances.

After the war the Pope focused on material aid to the devastated countries of Europe, an internal internationalisation of the Catholic Church and the development of its worldwide diplomatic relations. Pius XII demanded recognition of local cultures as fully equal to European culture.

Continuing the line of his predecessors, he supported the establishment of local administration in Church affairs.
In 1950 the hierarchy of Western Africa became independent, in 1951 Southern Africa and in 1953 British Eastern Africa. Finland, Burma and French Africa became independent dioceses in 1955.

The last years of the pontificate began in late 1954 with a long illness, during which Pius XII considered resignation. Afterwards changes in his work habit became noticeable. The Pope avoided long ceremonies, canonisations and consistories and displayed hesitancy in personnel matters.

Pius XII often elevated young priests to bishops, and one of his last appointees in 1958 was a 38-year-old Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla (who would later become Pope John Paul II).

After the death of Pius XII in October 1958 the conclave would have liked to elect Giovanni Battista Montini as his successor. But as he was not a cardinal (yet), that was not possible. So the Sacred College chose a compromise candidate, a gentle 77-year-old Italian cardinal who would not have many years left to reign and to whom the elevation to the papacy came as a huge surprise.
His name was Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, and he was not expected to do more than hold the Holy See warm for Monsignor Montini (who was made a cardinal by him in December 1958).

However, the Curia was in for a series of surprises. First Roncalli, who had been Patriarch of Venice for the previous five years, did not take as his papal name Pius XIII, but John XXIII, thus signalling a clear break with the line before him.
And then he announced his intention to reform the Church and called the Second Vatican Council. The rest is history and well-known, and no Pope since was able to turn back the tide of change.
Today it would be unthinkable for any Roman pontiff - including the present Pope Benedict XVI, whom many see as conservative - to return to the structures and policies of Pius XII. He was indeed the last of the traditional and aristocratic pontiffs, and with him the old Roman concept of Theology, hierarchy and control died.

Pius XII's cause of canonisation was opened on November 18th, 1965 by Pope Paul VI and on September 2nd, 2000 - during the pontificate of John Paul II - Pius XII was given the title Venerable. There is a strong fraction in the Vatican that wants to see him as a saint, and the signs are not bad at present.
A special conference of scholars on Pius XII was held in Rome from September 15th to 17th by the Paving the Way Foundation. On September 19th Pope Benedict XVI held a reception for the participants and praised Pius XII as a Pope who "made every effort to save Jews during the war".
A second conference, to be held by the Pontifical Academy of Life, is scheduled for November 6th to 8th.

Yesterday, on the 50th anniversary of Pius' death, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated pontifical mass in his memory.
Shortly prior to, and after the mass, dialectics continued between the Jewish hierarchy and the Vatican, as Rabbi Shear Yeshuv Cohen of Haifa addressed the Synod of Bishops and expressed his disappointment towards Pius XII's "silence" during the war. But even though the bishops were listening, I doubt that the Vatican is yet taking serious advice from a Rabbi.

The Emerald Islander