SOURCE: "Tragic Dilemma," in National Review, New York, Vol. XVIII, August 23, 1966, pp. 843-44.

In the following excerpt, Wall faults Friedländer for his possibly biased selection of documents in Pius XII and the Third Reich and for "rushing" to publish an admittedly incomplete account of the Vatican's policies toward Nazi Germany.

Friedlander's [Pius XII and the Third Reich], despite its title, is not the story of Pius XII and the Third Reich. It is a collection of quotations from documents and other books, interspersed with the author's comments and conjectures. What is particularly valuable about the work is that some of the material reproduced is hitherto unpublished diplomatic correspondence between Nazi ambassadors at the Vatican and the Wilhelmstrasse Foreign Office in Berlin during the period 1939–1944. The documents that survive from those ruined archives are interesting in themselves. They are, however, incomplete and the reader is placed in the...