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In the summer of 1938, Italy's Fascist regime announced its new 'racial' policy, soon to be followed by a series of draconian racial laws. The policy was based on the principle that Catholic Italians were of the Aryan race and Jewish Italians belonged to a separate race of non-Aryans. Previously the Vatican had made no such racial distinction. Yet, notwithstanding the frequent claim that the Church has never distinguished between Catholics and Jews on racial grounds, the Vatican quickly began to assimilate to the Fascist state's distinction of Jews as racially marked as non-Aryan. The opening in 2020 of the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XII (1939–58) has made available a huge trove of documents bearing on the way the pope and the Vatican secretariat of state dealt with Italy's racial laws and with the subsequent persecution of Italy's Jews during German occupation. As shown in this article, these documents make clear the Vatican's use of racial language and racial concepts as it dealt with the racial laws and the persecution of Italy's Jews from the time the racial laws were introduced in 1938 to the years of the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the war was going badly in early 1943, Mussolini took the dramatic step of replacing most of his government ministers. Of the men sacked, none drew more attention than Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, who had served as minister of foreign affairs since 1936. The announcement that Ciano would immediately be appointed as Italy's ambassador to the Holy See sparked much speculation in the diplomatic community, where it was viewed as a possible move by Mussolini to employ the Vatican to broker an Italian exit from the war. Others saw the appointment as a desperate move by Ciano himself to find a way out of the war. The recently opened Vatican archives for these years, along with archival evidence from Germany, Britain, the U.S., France, and Italy, offer new insight both into Ciano's attempts to ingratiate himself with Pope Pius XII and to how he in fact operated in his role as Italian ambassador to the Holy See in the months preceding the collapse of the Fascist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]