Late Conversions: Requests of Pardon and Conversions to Catholicism of Nazi Criminals

On 9 September 1951 at the “Sacred Heart” Church in Zehlendorf, south of Berlin, father von Lübtow invited worshippers to pray for the soul of the late Oswald Pohl,5 who had been executed a few months earlier at Lands- berg Prison, after being sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Military Tri- bunal (NMT). During the Second World War, Pohl had founded and direct- ed the Wirtschafts und Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) of the SS, the office in charge of managing the production apparatus that gravitated around the Nazi concentration camp system (KL) and which, among other things, con- trolled the doctors employed within the KL. By virtue of this role, when the war was over, Pohl became the main defendant in one of the trials that was set up by the American military court and which aimed to bring to trial the institutions of the Nazi system. During his imprisonment at Landsberg, Pohl converted to Catholicism and, with the help of his father confessor Karl Morgenschweis, transposed his conversion path into a text that was printed shortly before his execution, Using Pohl’s conversion as a case study and making extensive use of the documentation recently made available by the publication of the papers related to the pontificate of Pius XII in the Vatican Apostolic Archive, the following article aims to open up a new path within the broad and complex issue that was the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazi movement. This relationship did not end in 1945, and developed, precisely for this reason, within the specific context of the Nuremberg trials that took place after the war.