Speech on driver in fancy dress competition
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Everyone who was anyone felt compelled to weigh in.
Hochhuth himself faded away when he tried to extend his censure to Winston Churchill, penning a play in 1967 that claimed Churchill had ordered the murder of the Polish General Wladyslaw Sikorski and, later, the murder of the pilot who had crashed Sikorski’s plane. Unbeknownst to Hochhuth, the pilot was, in fact, still alive, and he won a libel judgment that badly damaged the London theater which had staged the play. Thereafter, Hochhuth found it harder to get a hearing”although, interestingly, the current notoriety of Pius XII seems to have resurrected the playwright to some degree, and in 2002 the Greek filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gravas released a movie version of The Deputy with the English title Amen (or Eyewitness , in other copies).
Even without Hochhuth, the wide discussion about Pius XII he initiated in 1963 went on for several years. It produced some overheated journalistic attempts to cash in on the public interest, such as Robert Katz’ Black Sabbath and Death in Rome (the latter being the target of a successful libel suit, this time brought by Pius XII’s niece, Countess Elena Pacelli Rossignani). But the era brought forth as well three more serious and scholarly”indeed, by today’s standards, quite moderate and thoughtful”attacks: Guenter Lewy’s The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (1964), Carlo Falconi’s The Silence of Pius XII (1965), and Saul Friedlander’s Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation (1966).
The brouhaha also prompted the Vatican to begin releasing material from Pius’ pontificate, which appeared from 1965 to 1981 as the eleven-volume series