Michael Hesemann

Michael Hesemann (born 22 March 1964 in Düsseldorf) is a German historian, Vatican journalist and author. As a student he became known in Germany as an author of several books on UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors on Earth. Later in his career he turned to topics related to Catholicism, history and archaeology.

Life
When Michael Hesemann was around 14 years old, his father had a UFO sighting that (as Michael Hesemann would recall three decades later) inspired his son to look into the subject. Hesemann studied History and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen in Germany.

From 1984 to 1990 Hesemann published the German magazine Magazin 2000, which dealt with popular science, paranormal phenomena and religious topics. In 1990, he sold the Magazine and served as its editor-in-chief for the next decade. In 1995, together with his co-editor at Magazin 2000, Hesemann hosted a global ufology congress in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he presented an alleged video of an alien autopsy.

Since 1999, he is accredited to the Holy See Press Office. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal described him as "a religious historian who helps the Vatican date relics". He is German representative of the Pave the Way Foundation (PTWF), for which he did research at the Vatican archives in 2010.

He co-founded Deutschland pro Papa, a conservative Catholic initiative, which claims to represent the "silent majority of Rome-loyal Catholics". In 2013, he compiled an exhibition on the Turin Shroud for the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, touring through Germany and Austria as of 2015.

Together with Georg Ratzinger, Hesemann co-authored "My brother, the Pope".

In 2014, he claimed to have located 2000 pages of documents on the Armenian genocide in the Vatican Archives. For this, in October 2016, he received an honorary doctorate of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.

Vatican
In the Vatican, he investigated the history of the alleged relic of the inscription of the cross of Jesus, hidden in Rome for nearly 1700 years. It was dated by seven Israeli experts for comparative palaeography, the established method to date inscriptions, into the 1st century. The relic is exhibited in the Basilica di Santa Croce.

His book ''The Pope who Defied Hitler. The Truth about Pius XII'' (2008) led him to claim that pope Pius XII, sometimes referred to as the "Hitler Pope", was in fact responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of Jews. His book The Pope and the Holocaust: Pius XII and the Secret Vatican Archives (2022) makes another defense of the figure of Pius XII drawing from the recently published Vatican Apostolic Archive, arguing that the pope was a shrewd diplomat and a defender of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Hesemann's defense of Pius XII in The Pope and the Holocaust is critiqued by Tim Parks as contrary to the evidence from the Pope's actions and inactions, and the original documents about them in the Vatican archives. In a follow-up to Parks's review, Hesemann and Parks exchanged comments on the critical issues.

Court order against Hesemann
In January 2013, a court in Hamburg ruled that Hesemann would have to pay a fine up to €250,000 if he continued libelling the German theologian David Berger. According to the ruling Hesemann had falsely affirmed that Berger had been one of the authors of the extreme right-wing Catholic (now closed) web site kreuz.net. Indeed a different David Berger wrote those articles, Berger claimed. Hesemann challenged the claim.