Author Description

The first edition of Death in Rome was published in the United States on January 30, 1967. A few days earlier, a reporter in the Rome bureau of United Press International, having read an advance copy, defined what would become its central issue for a long time afterward. He sought a response from the Vatican to my contention that Pope Pius XII knew of the impending massacre and, for reasons adduced in the book, made no discernible attempt to prevent it. The Vatican spokesman, giving the journalist a story carried around the world, said the charge would be "simple to disprove because it is a vicious lie." The role of the pope in the events of March 23 and 24, 1944, was only one of the questions discussed in the book. All were of matching importance, I believed. The reader will find them presented at the outset, in my original introduction. There, I stated my intention to re-examine the events with a view toward understanding the larger issue of how totalitarian rule was confronted in a particular place and time. The truth was, however, that I had written my book and it was now appearing under the impact of the enduring passions stirred by Rolf Hochhuth's 1964 play, The Deputy. His work, along with the seminal research of Saul Friedländer, had dramatized for all the world the failure of Pius XII to protest Hitler's extermination of Europe's Jews. It was therefore hardly surprising that attention would focus on this aspect of Death in Rome. One result, I imagine, was that the book went on to be published in nineteen editions in thirteen countries and in ten languages, though the Vatican never fulfilled a public promise to respond in the Osservatore Romano "after the book was published."