Ein christliches Trauerspiel), also published in English as The Representative, is a controversial 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth which portrayed Pope Pius XII as having failed to take action or speak out against the Holocaust.

The Encyclopædia Britannica assesses the play as "a drama that presented a critical, unhistorical picture of Pius XII"[2] and Hochhuth's depiction of the pope having been indifferent to the Nazi genocide as "lacking credible substantiation.

[5] Within the same year, the play was produced at additional theatres in West Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Great Britain, Denmark, Finland and France.

A condensed version prepared by American poet Jerome Rothenberg opened on Broadway on February 26, 1964 at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre with Emlyn Williams as Pius XII and Jeremy Brett as Father Fontana (replaced on May 24 by David Carradine).

[7] This possibility troubled Hochhuth to such an extent that he later wrote "In choosing a Jesuit for my tragic hero I strove to condemn the sin and not the sinner - that is, not the Church but its silence - and to exemplify, after a Kierkegaardian fashion, the enormous difficulty of living up to the Catholic creed and the immense nobility of spirit of those who are capable even of coming close.

A character in the play is Kurt Gerstein, an official at the "Institute of Hygiene" of the Waffen-SS, tried to inform the international public about the extermination camps.

[17]) The play opens with a discussion between Gerstein and the Papal Nuncio of Berlin over whether Pope Pius XII should have abrogated the Reichskonkordat to protest the actions of the Nazi government of Germany.

A number of German aristocrats, industrialists, and government officials (including Adolf Eichmann) spend an evening in an underground bowling alley.

Despite the commonplace setting the scene is rather macabre: conversations alternate between lighthearted pleasantries and equally dismissive discussions of the treatment of Jews.

Pius verbally reiterates his commitment to help the Jews but states that he must keep silent "'ad maioram mala vitanda" (to avoid greater evil).

Unfortunately in the end they are found out, and Riccardo momentarily loses in faith and violates his vow not to take up arms in order to shoot the maleficent Doctor, but is himself gunned down before he can pull the trigger.

The play ends with a quotation from German ambassador Weizsäcker: Since further action on the Jewish problem is probably not to be expected here in Rome, it may be assumed that this question, so troublesome to German-Vatican relations, has been disposed of.

The encyclopedia notes "though Pius's wartime public condemnations of racism and genocide were cloaked in generalities, he did not turn a blind eye to the suffering but chose to use diplomacy to aid the persecuted.

He was appointed to a Pontifical commission where he assisted Nazi war criminals like Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Franz Stangl, Eduard Roschmann, and many others to escape justice.

[31] In 2007 a high ranking intelligence officer and defector from the Eastern Bloc, Ion Mihai Pacepa, stated that in February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev authorized a covert plan (known as Seat 12) to discredit the Vatican, with Pope Pius XII as the prime target.

[32][33][34][35] As part of that plan Pacepa alleged that General Ivan Agayants, chief of the KGB's disinformation department, created the outline for what was to become the play.

[32][34][36][37] Pacepa's story has not been corroborated; the national paper Frankfurter Allgemeine opined that Hochhuth who had been an unknown publisher's employee until 1963 "did not require any KGB assistance for his one-sided presentation of history".

"[39] English historian, Michael Burleigh, stated "Soviet attempts to smear Pius had actually commenced as soon as the Red Army crossed into Catholic Poland", noting that the Soviets "hired a militantly anti-religious propagandist, Mikhail Markovich Sheinmann" - "Hochhuth's play...drew heavily upon Sheinmann's lies and falsehoods..."[40] Rowohlt Verlag sold the worldwide rights for a film adaptation for 300,000 Deutsche Mark in April 1963 to the French producer Georges de Beauregard and his production company "Rome Paris Films".