SOURCE: "The Vatican in WW II," in Book Week—Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, June 5, 1966, p. 7.

Mayer is a Luxembourgian-born American historian. In the following review of Pius XII and the Third Reich, he focuses on Pius XII's "hostility to Bolshevism" as a determinant of Vatican policy during World War II.

Anyone who does not literally interpret the claim that the Pope is God's Vicar will not be overly shocked by Pius XII's policies during the Second World War. After all, the man who was Pope never ceased to be a good Italian, a confirmed Germanophile, a punctilious elitist, an impassioned anti-Bolshevik, and a shrewd chief executive of one of the world's vastest institutional structures.

In this untendentious documentary history, [Pius XII and the Third Reich], Saul Friedländer, a professor of contemporary history at the Graduate Institute of International Studies at Geneva, quite properly suggests that as an Italian...