 During the Second World War , after Nazi Germany commenced its mass executions of Jews in occupied Soviet territory , Pius XII employed diplomacy to aid victims of the Holocaust and directed his Church to provide discreet aid to Jews . Upon his death in 1958 , among many Jewish tributes , the Chief Rabbi of Rome Elio <unk> , said : " Jews will always remember what the Catholic Church did for them by order of the Pope during the Second World War . When the war was raging , Pius spoke out very often to condemn the false race theory . " This is disputed by commentator John Cornwell , who in his book , Hitler 's Pope , argues that the pope was weak and vacillating in his approach to Nazism . Cornwell asserts that the pope did little to challenge the progressing holocaust of the Jews out of fear of provoking the Nazis into invading Vatican City . 
