“I Think It Would Take Not 3,000, But 300,000 Visas!!”: New Questions and Perspectives on the Holy See’s Brazilian Visa Project Arising from the Opening of the Vatican Archives for the Pontificate of Pius XII [„Ich glaube, es wären nicht 3.000, sondern 300.000 Visa erforderlich!!“ Neue Fragehorizonte und Perspektiven zur Brasilienaktion des Heiligen Stuhls nach Öffnung der vatikanischen Archive für den Pontifikat Pius XII. ]

Wolf, Hubert; Haack, Jana; Hinkel, Sascha; Richter, Elisabeth-Marie; Schepers, Judith; Schüler, Barbara;

Abstract

Not 3,000, but 300,000 visas were required to comply with all requests for emigration, Angelo Dell’Acqua, a member of the Roman Curia, said summarizing the so-called Brazilian Visa Project in 1940. Many people persecuted as Jews sought refuge in South America; thousands of them asked the pope and the Roman Curia for help with their emigration. The Brazilian government granted 3,000 visas on a singular basis. The new sources made accessible by the opening of the archival holdings pertaining to the pontificate of Pius XII allow us to reconstruct these cases in a detailed manner. Based on thousands of petitions written by Jewish people (which shall be published in a critical online edition at http://www.askingthepopeforhelp.de) as well as internal regulations, here analyzed for the first time, the inner-curial decision-making process is documented as a hermeneutic process reconstructing the fate of individuals, on the one hand, and providing answers to overarching questions on the other. The influence of antisemitic stereotypes about Jews and the behavior of the pope and the Curia during the Shoah are discussed. The focus of this article is on Catholics of Jewish origin, and on the question of their belonging to the Church, a subject that has been entirely underrepresented in research until today.