SOURCE: "Diplomatic Decisions," in The New York Times Book Review, May 22, 1966, p. 6.

Laqueur is a German-born American historian and novelist who is widely considered an expert on modern German and Israeli history. In the following review of Pius XII and the Third Reich, he describes Pius XII's diplomacy toward the Nazis as "masterly inactivity," judging it "tragically inapplicable in an extreme situation."

The policy of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church during World War II has during the last few years been the subject of several historical studies, of plays, polemical essays and theological disputations in various countries. Needless to say, there was in the Catholic Church no uniform reaction to Hitler and Nazism; if the great majority of German bishops collaborated, quite a few of the lower clergy resisted and were incarcerated. In France, especially after the Occupation, the clergy took on the whole a patriotic...