213 Comments »

• frosh says:

  May 20, 2010 at 10:05 pm

  Hi Gary,

  Thank you very much for sharing your story.

  Given the wholesale destruction of Jewish communities and support for Nazism in Catholic areas (e.g. Croatia) during WWII, one must conclude that if Pius XII did try to counter Nazism, then he, and more poignantly, his office, is grossly overestimated in terms of its power.

  I’m curious as to why you think that Pius XII’s efforts were so ineffective.
• GAry Krupp says:

  May 20, 2010 at 11:02 pm

  Through our research we learned how Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) despised Hitler, and vice versa, from Hitler’s very beginning and condemned him publically and privately. The archives show numerous documents proving this. In 1930 the German Bishops excommunicated anyone who joined the “Hitler Party” wore the uniform or flew the flag. To join the SS a candidate had to renounce Christianity to join the new order. The pope literally had no influence on the German military and was publicly made the subject of ridicule and disdain. The political leaders in Catholic many countries also in many cases responded negatively to papal requests especially when the Vatican asked these countries to accept Jewish refugees and they were denied. On July 26, 1942, the Archbishop of Utrecht made a powerful condemnation of the arrests and deportation of the Dutch Jews. The German response was to accelerate the arrests and to further punish the church by arresting the Jews who converted first. This was also a direct violation of the Concordat signed in 1933, which provided that Jews who converted would be considered Christian. This provision in the concordat enabled the church to save tens of thousands of Jews by giving them false baptismal papers.
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 21, 2010 at 3:43 am

  
  Mr. Krupp, I commend you for doing something you believe to be right. However, I think that Pave the Way Foundation is presenting research in a way that is misleading. For instance, recently PTWF announced it found new documents showing the Church opposed the Nazis. This is a half truth, because even though it is true that the church had a ban on membership to the Nazi Party, and that those who persisted in becoming members of the party even after warning them were to be denied admission to the sacraments, the ban was in effect only until shortly after Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and after Cardinal Pacelli, then to become Pope Pius XII, made overtures to Hitler which led to the signing of the Reichskonkordat shortly afterwards. Pave The Way Foundation is not making this all-important point on timing clear, and I think it’s appropriate they are asked why. So, the Foundtion’s Mr. Hasemann is technically correct when he states, “The documents clearly show an ideological war between the Catholic Church and National Socialism already in the pre-war decade. The German bishops and the Roman Curia considered the Nazi doctrine not only as incompatible with the Christian faith, but also as hostile to the Church and dangerous to human morals, even more than Communism.” Again, this was true before 1933 when Hitler took power. After that, the German Catholic bishops said,
  “Without therefore departing from the condemnation of certain religious and moral errors voiced in our earlier measures, the episcopate believes it has ground for confidence that the general prohibitions and admonitions mentioned above need no longer be regarded as necessary.”
  Once the German bishops had lifted the ban, that opened the floodgates to membership in the party and millions of Catholic Germans joined. From that point onwards the growth of the party and the pursuit of its evil policies went on unimpeded. The Church never saw fit to clearly denounce these policies, not even once the nature and extent of the genocide those policies led to became clearly understood. And as opposed to the swift and generalized excommunication of all Communists in the world in one stroke, which the Church had no qualms to do after the war, the Church never threatened to excommunicate nor excommunicated any Catholics who were part of the genocidal rampage against the Jews. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, and many others in the Nazi hierarchy died as Catholics.

  Sincerely,
  Gabriel Wilensky
  —————————————————————————————————
  Author
  Six Million Crucifixions:How Christian Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust
  http://www.SixMillionCrucifixions.com
  —————————————————————————————————
  
• Michael Hesemann says:

  May 21, 2010 at 6:23 am

  Mr. Wilensky,

  it is true that the ban was lifted after Hitler took over power, due to the fact that to keep it would mean to condemn a democratically elected government and therefore condemn the constitution of the Weimar Republic. Since the German Catholic Church experienced a “cultural war” with the Prussians just half a century before, they hesitated to repeat this devastating experience and suffer persecution again at that point in time when, on the other hand, Hitler offered a Concordate and everybody hoped that he would, once in power and controlled by the Weimar constitution, follow the laws.
  Although from the point of view of the post-war-generation and certainly in our opinion this was a severe mistake, it was still the only possibility to save the Church from an open persecution at that time and make it a safe haven for all others persecuted by the Nazis as well as, at a later point, the Anti-Nazi resistance.
   
  Only the Concordate “even with the devil, in order to save souls” (Pius XI) enabled the Catholic Church to survive the Nazi terror and support all in need, first of all the Jews.
   
  Still, the de facto-excommunication before 1933 shows clearly that the Church uncompromisingly opposed the Nazis from the very beginning instead of accepting them as a “lesser evil” or even an ally against Communism, as some authors claimed.  Therefore our research is not misleading at all, but correcting a popular error, spread by unscrupulous authors.
  You are absolutely wrong when you claim “the Church never saw fit to clearly denounce these policies”, since we have enough examples of German bishops, first of all von Galen, von Preysing and von Faulhaber, who, in hundreds of homilies, condemned the Nazi policy and racism. In unity and cooperation with these bishops, Pope Pius XI condemned the Nazi ideology in general in his encyclica “Mit brennender Sorge” (With burning worries) in 1937, only four years after the Nazis took over power (after Hitler, in 1933, pleaded: “Give me four years of time…”), the harshest text ever released by the Holy See in modern times to condemn a regime. 

  It is true that Pius XII, AFTER the war and the fall of the Nazi regime, used the same excommunication policy against the communists, to avoid a communist take over in Italy. Since the Communists never ruled this country, we do not know what would have happened in case they would form the government. 

  The Church condemned first of all the persecution of the Jews in Germany and Pacelli, as Cardinal Secretary of State, discussed the possibilities of a Papal ”intervention against the danger of antisemitic excesses in Germany” (Suo intervento contra il pericolo di excessi antisemitici in Germania”) as early as April 4, 1933, in the very first month of Hitler’s dictatorship (after the “Ermaechtigungsgesetz”). On April 13, 1938, in a official Papal Instruction to the Catholic Universities and Seminaries (later published in the Vatican organ “L’Osservatore Romano”), the Nazi racism was openly condemned as a “dangerous doctrine” and “absurd dogma … dangerous for the mind and against any true religion”. After the ”Kristallnacht” (progrome night) in Germany on November 9, 1938, when Mussolini introduced the “Nuremberg” racial laws in Italy, Pope Pius XI. protested openly and sent a telegraph to Mussolini, warning him it would casue “a violent crisis of the anger of the Pontiff”. As the New York Times reported on August 12, 1938, the “Osservatore Romano” already declared a few month before ”That (the) Church will defend persecuted Jews”.

  When Pope Pius XII followed in March 1939, his first goal was to prevent the War, which not only meant so much suffering for all Europe but also made the Holocaust possible. Still, in his first encyclica, “Summi Pontificatus” (of November 1939), “The Need and Errors of our time and their overcoming in Christ”, he condemned the “new errors”, first of all “theories denying the Unity of the human race”, what means: the Nazi racism. He repeated this appeal  “to love … those who are from another people or blood” in his encyclica “Mystici Corporis” of 1943. 

  Not any of the Nazi leaders died as a Catholic, since none of them received the sacraments during their political career. Himmler, as every SS man, had left the Church already in the 1930ies, and so did Eichmann, Heydrich and Hoess - long before the Holocaust! Indeed to leave the Church was the conditio-sine-qua-non for a career within the SS.  Bormann indeed never left the Church, since he was Protestant. Only Goebbels and Hitler died formally as Catholics with no affiliation to the Church. To excommunicate a head of state, especially of an ally of Italy, would have been a dangerous political act, especially since the neutrality of the Vatican was a condition of the Lateran treaty with Mussolini from 1929. It went wrong with Henry VIII, it went dangerously wrong with Napoleon, it certainly wouldn’t have worked with Hitler. To even think that this insane monster would have changed his policy of hate and delusion to avoid excommunication is indeed more than naive.

  Sincerely, Michael Hesemann
  PTWF Germany

   
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 21, 2010 at 6:52 am

  Adding to Michael Hesemann’s comments I would like to mention that your evaluation that “Once the German bishops had lifted the ban, that opened the floodgates to membership in the party and millions of Catholic Germans joined.” Is injecting ting your view, which is baseless, in order to make a point that is simply not true. The fervor of the Nazi movement is what opened the flood gates not reluctance to disobey the Catholic Church. The Germans who joined the SS had to renounce Christianity. The Church never had that kind of power that you suggest by your characterization. One simply needs to see the continuous anti Catholic and anti Pacelli political cartoons and propaganda of the era to realize this. I invite you to come to the Vatican Secret Archives, which are open up to 1939 where you will get a clear assessment of what was happening.
• Meredith Krupp says:

  May 21, 2010 at 12:49 pm

  Dear Mr. Wilensky, A s a Jewis women with a very basic and limited understanding of the workings of the Catholic Church allow me to state canon law 101. Once one is baptized, it can never be undone, in the Church’s eyes. The Church can severely discipline or even excommunicate a Catholic, which is employed as a severe warning to the state of their souls-i.e., one who announces he is a raging apostate or commits heinous crimes,
   Martin Bormann was NEVER a Catholic, he was PROTESTANT! Himmler left the Church in 1935.
  Only Hitler and Goebbels stayed as Apostates…(definition of Apostate: a person who forsakes his religion)
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 21, 2010 at 12:50 pm

  Thank you Mr. Hesemann and Mr. Krupp for your replies. When thinking of the reason of why the German Church thought it proper to lift the ban on membership in the Nazi Party one needs to think of what the church stands for. If the church felt that the Nazi ideals were not compatible with Catholic ideals, as was the stated reason for the ban, then one needs to think of what changed that prompted the lift of the ban. I don’t agree with you that the church was simply lifting the ban to protect democracy. The church was never interested in protecting democracy. Cardinal Pacelli had no qualms in prompting the disbanding of the powerful Catholic Center Party in Germany, who could have stood up and made a difference against the Nazis. But even if the church cared about democracy, it would not have lifted the ban unless it thought that it was the right thing to do. Imagine today that the Ku Klux Klan became an official political party in the United States, and began to have traction on a platform based on discrimination against Jews, blacks, gays, or anything else. What would the church advise the faithful to do? Would they support the KKK for the sake of supporting democracy and freedom of speech? It’s interesting you mention the Kulturkampf, because that is a perfect example of what the church should have done vis-à-vis the Nazis as well. The Church opposed Bismarck, and the Church eventually won, despite the many setbacks on the way. The church stood for what they believed was right in 1870. They could and should have kept the moral high ground and done the same thing against Hitler in 1933, even if that meant another struggle. The difference is that in 1870 Bismark opposed the Church, while in 1933 Hitler opposed the Jews. Even though the Concordat was not meant to mean an endorsement or support of Nazi policies, that was actuallay the way the German Church and German Catholics widely perceived it to mean. The reason why they joined the Nazi party in droves was not just because it was successful. They joined because they agreed with its ideals, and because once the Vatican signed the Concordat and the church lifted the ban German Catholics assumed that meant it was then all right to join, and that is precisely what they did.

  Also, when the Concordat was signed neither Cardinal Pacelli nor Pope Pius XI could have known what was coming, that they were making a pact with the devil (although they must have known Hitler and Nazi ideology were evil), that it would protect the church from a a coming Nazi terror (which in any case it didn’t and even then the church did not repudiate the pact), and even less, that it would help them protect all in need, especially the Jews. This is the first time I heard the latter claim.

  I am aware some authors believe Pope Pius thought of the Nazis as an ally against the communists. I don’t subscribe to this point of view, although I do believe Pius thought of the Nazis as not only the lesser evil but also the only possibly bulwark against the communists. Irrespective of what Pius may have felt toward communists and communism, there’s no question he understood that atheistic communism was a direct, open threat to the church. I think his actions before and after the war reflect this.

  When I said “the Church never saw fit to clearly denounce these policies” I was referring to the Nazi anti-Jewish policies. I am glad you mentioned the example of von Galen, because that is a perfect case of what the church could do and did to oppose policies they felt were wrong and/or incompatible with Catholic teachings. Of course, as is well known, there were no consequences to von Galen or the many other Catholics who opposed the Euthanasia Program, which should have been a clear indication to the church hierarchy—including the Pope—that if they felt that the anti-Jewish measures were equally as bad as the Euthanasia Program then they could have opposed it. History shows they didn’t feel this way, and they did not act in even a remotely similar way. Sure, von Preysing truly opposed the Nazis and their anti-Jewish campaign, and he was one of the few that did talk about it. He also implored the pope many times to do something about it, only to be either ignored or to be told that what the German Church had done already to protect the Jews was enough. We all know this was not the case, as the German Church (with the notable exception of von Preysing, and a handful of others) not only did not protect the Jews, but rather they materially helped the Nazis identify who were the Jews among the German population.

  I am not sure in what way you feel Cardinal Faulhaber opposed Nazi anti-Jewish policies. Sure, he opposed the Euthanasia Program, but we are not discussing whether the church opposed the Nazis in general, but rather their attitude vis-à-vis the Jews. In a 1933 sermon he declared “that with the coming of Christ, Jews and Judaism have lost their place in the world.” This of course was the typical supersessionistic attitude the church had had for centuries, and was a message that resonated with the German population who was being bombarded with propaganda that said pretty much the same thing. He also declared the same year that the Church did not have “any objection to the endeavor to keep the national characteristics of a people as far as possible pure and unadulterated, and to foster their national spirit by emphasis upon the common ties of blood which unite them.” This is not exactly opposition to racial ideology. Moreover, he also declared in a 1937 sermon that “At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on Earth, through the Concordat, expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad.” This affirms what I was saying earlier about church support for the Nazis after the Concordat, despite their opposition prior to it. I do recognize however that at the height of the German genocidal campaign Cardinal Faulhaber approached his colleague Cardinal Bertram and proposed they compose a manifesto protesting the murder of Jews. Bertram’s response however reflected the typical Catholic attitude toward the subject, namely that the Church should limit its influence to matters “of greater importance in the long term.”

  Mit brenneder Sorge condemned racial ideology, which is a good thing. However, I don’t think it was a condemnation of the regime, as is usually presented. In it, Nazism was never mentioned by name. This document was written years after the Jews had been persecuted in Germany and subjected to a dehumanizing process. The encyclical objected to violations of the Concordat and treatment of religion in Germany. In only six sentences among forty-three paragraphs it objected to the doctrine of race, not because it was false or inherently pernicious, but rather because some would have it take precedence over the teachings of Christianity. There was no mention of antisemitism or the persecution of the Jews.

  Cardinal Pacelli might have been concerned about excesses against Jews in Germany, and even discussed it. But actions speak louder than words, and he said very few words and acted even less. Pope Pius XI might have warned Mussolini that the racial laws might make him angry, perhaps even violently so. Yet, the racial laws stood, the pope never got past that and didn’t do anything about it other than complain about the treatment of Jews who had converted to Catholicism. The Osservatore Romano may have declared that the Church would defend the Jews, which of course surely looked good on the New York Times, but they had also declared at about the same time (June 1938) that the Jews “usurp the best positions in every field, and not always by legitimate means,” cause “the suffering of the immense majority of the native populations,” hate and struggle against the Christian religion, and favor Freemasons and other subversive groups. Father Rosa in the article called for “an equable and lasting solution to the formidable Jewish problem,” but counseled to do so through legal means. But there was a long history of antisemitism in this publications. Previously they had declared that “Antisemitism ought to be the natural, sober, thoughtful, Christian reaction against Jewish predominance” and, according to the paper, true antisemitism “is and can be in substance nothing other than Christianity, completed and perfected in Catholicism.”

  Mr. Hesemann, it’s disingenous to say that none of the Nazi leaders died as Catholics because they did not receive the sacraments during their political career. The point is that these people were not expelled from the Church, and thus it is correct to state, as I did, that they died as Catholics. Hitler even received a solemn requiem after he died. The Nazis, and particularly the SS may have tried to push Germans away from the church but the reality is that despite their strongest efforts, in December 1938 22.7% still remained in the Catholic faith and by 1940 over 95% of the German population were still tax-paying members of their respective Protestant or Catholic churches.

  Excommunicating a head of state might have been a dangerous thing to do, but it was the right thing to do, particularly after 1942 when the extent and nature of the genocide became known to the pope and some members of the curia. The Vatican was not concerned about neutrality, even though this is what they claimed. They actually breached this when they felt it was the right thing to do. Lastly, I agree with you that excommunication would not have changed Hitler or his policies, but that, combined with the threat of excommunication to any Catholics involved in the business of mass murder, and combined with strong, specific, and clear instruction to Catholics to refrain from denouncing, deporting and murdering Jews because it was a crime and a mortal sin, may have worked toward the goal of creating a moral revolt against genocide. And even if it had failed, it would have at least cemented the Church’s moral standing.

  Sincerely,
  Gabriel Wilensky
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 21, 2010 at 4:18 pm

  Ms. Krupp, excommunication would have been good enough, particularly for the men in the factories making Zyklon B, or the train engineers taking Jews to the death camps, or the members of the Einsatzgruppen or Ordungspolizei and their helpers in Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, etc. killing hundreds of thousands of Jews in forests and ravines. Or SS guards in the camps. These were not strongly anti-religious men like Bormann or Hitler. These were men who were going to Mass on Sunday and murdering Jews on Monday.
  By the way, I must admit I am not 100% sure, but I think Bormann was indeed a Catholic. His son even studied to become a Catholic priest.
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 22, 2010 at 12:36 am

   
  Thank you Mr. Wilensky for you question and please allow me to respond. You questions are certainly reasonable today in the 21st century but are written to enflame emotion, and sell books rather than seek the truth. I often ask a question when I hear such statements. If you had the chance to put a bullet in the head of the young man who was hanging wall paper in your home in Bavaria in the early 1900’s you would probably have been jailed. No one would ever know that you might have saved the lives of millions of people. Monday morning quarterbacks are always very smart as hindsight is 20/20.
  Excommunication has in reality never worked. It has only created mortal enemies and set a fertile ground for new religions. Based on documented evidence and testimonies we discovered, the Vatican was surrounded by hostile forces, and was without question going to be invaded, The pope would be kidnapped and killed, the curia killed and the buildings would be seized. Mindful of this, Pius XII knew that if this occurred thousands of innocent people would be killed because of massive riots throughout Europe. The Vatican would lose its neutrality endangering the lives of all of the protected refugees and their clergy caretakers. We have evidence and testimony that every time the Vatican condemned Nazi atrocities (of which there were many through Vatican Radio, L’Osservatore Romano, and papal messages) concentration camp inmates would suffer through increased punishment and cutting of rations. People died every time the Vatican  made statements. Now imagine if they excommunicated everyone you suggest. Ask yourself how many would die with this grand public act? This is the same logic with the flaming public denunciation all of the critics wanted from Pius XII. What would be cost in human life? All of these measures where proven counterproductive and ineffective gestures? The Vatican learned very quickly in Holland, Poland and elsewhere how many would die. Burning his speech after the example of Holland, Pius XII said if they killed 40,000 Jews with the remarks of an Archbishop they will kill 200,000 with the remarks of the pope. Don’t forget that over 25% of the Catholic Clergy from Poland and Germany where executed and imprisoned and they were also at risk.
  I would rather have you ask why Roosevelt didn’t bomb the tracks leading to the concentration camps or the Crematorium. Why didn’t he allow the St. Louis to land in the US in 1938 sending over 1000 Jews back to the horrors of Europe? Why didn’t he allow Jewish immigration to the US? Why were there no marches and protests all of the Rabbis of the US to force the president to act to save Jews? What about a flaming condemnation by the Archbishop of Canterbury, living the relative safety of London or the Orthodox Christian clergy? We have proof of Pius XII’s direct intervention to save tens of thousands of Jewish lives secretly and effectively. These actions are always minimized by his critics and only attributed to the individual clergy rather than the Pope who ordered these actions. I compare this to saying that my dad, who liberated two concentration camps and was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, is the one who won the war … Eisenhower had nothing to do with it.
  Mr. Wilensky, as one who was fortunate to be born in the US long after the war ended and probably never really experienced looking into the eyes of death as they all had to do, try walking a mile in their shoes.
• Michael Hesemann says:

  May 22, 2010 at 2:59 am

  Mr. Wilensky,

  you might re-invent the life of Martin Bormann, but you can read in any biography that he indeed was a Protestant. His son, disgusted by the deeds of his father, converted to Catholicism and indeed became a priest which was his form of penance and compensation for his father’s crimes.

  There simply was nobody who “heard mass on Sunday and murdered Jews on Monday”, as you claim, since the KZ’s were run solely by the SS and only the most ideologically fanatic, “trustworthy” SS men were chosen, to avoid disruption in the murder machinery by any acts of compassion. SS man had to leave their Church, to enter the “Black Order” (exceptions were only allowed in the Waffen SS, the troops engaged in the war, which were not part of the “Endloesung”). That’s a matter of fact which you can’t debate. Indeed, the SS invented neo-teutonic ceremonies for their troops to replace the Christian sacraments, following the instruction by Goebbels: “We (the Nazi party) must became a Church ourselves, in order to replace the (Catholic) Church”.  So nothing is further away from the truth than your scenario.

  Your question what changed that prompteds the lift of the ban is simply answered: The election of Adolf Hitler by the German people. In the very moment the Nazis formed a democratically elected government, any a priori opposition would mean to oppose the political system of the German nation. This, the church could not afford to do, especially after the experience with the Cultural War half a century before, from which it still had not fully recovered. Its position was just too weak in a country which was (and still is) divided in a Catholic and a Protestant part with equal strength and number of population.  As Nuntius in Germany, Pacelli appreciated the Weimar Republic and certainly preferred it to the protestant-dominated Kaiserreich, since it guaranteed equal rights for Catholics. He was in best terms with some of the leading politicians of the first German democracy and appreciated them. This experience caused his definite plea for a democratic Europe after the War and his support for democratic parties all over. In this aspect, Pacelli was very modern and distanced himself from the scepticism towards democracy still demonstrated by Pius X. 

  In 1933, the Church faced the situation that a majority of the Germans supported Hitler. To fight against him in such an early state would mean to fight against the majority of the nation and therefore suffer consequences. Since the Church had no success with their very eloquent and drastic fight against the Nazi party in 1930-33, they had to realize that a continuation would end in its own extermination. Therefore it decided to secure its rights through the Concordat and remain a safe haven for the political opposition, to fight the system from within.

  Pacelli and Pius XI were fully aware that it was a pact with the devil, but Pius XI had already stated that he would certainly sign apact with the devil if it would mean to save souls. 

  Certainly Pacelli never considered the Nazis a “lesser evil” in any way. Indeed, already in 1925, in a handwritten document which you find in the Vatican Secret Archives as well as on our website, he calls Nazism “certainly the most dangerous heresy of our times” – six years after a communist gun was pointed towards him. ”The most dangerous” means even more dangerous than communism. This explains why, when the US entered the war, he did not oppose the alliance with Stalin, which caused great worries and concerns among the American Catholics, but justified it with the formula “since their homeland was invaded, they just defend their country, which is legitimate”. As you certainly know, only the alliance with Russia made the victory in Europe possible.  Only Hitler dreamt of an alliance with the Western powers against Communism, but faced the harsh opposition of Pius XII. 

  You obviously still believe the myth that von Galens homilies stopped the Euthanasia program, but it didn’t. The program was continued by the Nazis, but in secret. And still, you can’t compare it with the Holocaust. From the beginning, the extermination of the Jews was covered up. The German public did not learn about it, at least not from any official source. The deportations, officially, were re-settlements in the newly conquered territories. This is the reason why the Jews themselves did not stand up in fight, but just packed their suitcases, believing in a future. Only after they were “resettled” in the Polish Ghettoes, the transports to the death camps begun. Also the situation was a different one. The Euthanasia program started in peace times, the deportations (and following Holocaust) during the War. In the War, the Nazis had more powerful means to silence any opposition.  And last but not least, the Euthanasia program was considered a “necessity” by Hitler, but with a lesser degree of importance. The extermination of the Jews was the goal of his fanatic delusion, it was the mission he lived and was willing to die for.  It was nothing he would ever compromise. Indeed, even his testament is nothing but a tirade of antisemitic hate, ending with the words:

  “Vor allem verpflichte ich die Führung der Nation und die Gefolgschaft zur peinlichen Einhaltung der Rassegesetze und zum unbarmherzigen Widerstand gegen den Weltvergifter aller Völker, das internationale Judentum.”
  “First of all I oblige the leadership of the nation and their followers to carefully keep the racial laws and to mercilessly resist the world-poisoner of the peoples, the international Jewry.”

  Not any homily, not any excommunication, nothing would have ever stopped him in his rage but would only have infuriated it, bringing even mre suffering to his victims, speeding up the rate of murder. 

  Sorry, but you are completely wrong in your comment on Mit brennender Sorge. First of all, if it was not condemning the Nazis, why was it written in German and read in every German Church? It condemned the sheer concept of race, it condemned racism, therefoire it also condemned antisemitism, calling it “an idolatry”. Wasn’t the Nazi racism the cause of the persecution of the Jews? Wasn’t it wiser to condemn the cause than the effect?

  On September 6, 1938, Pius XI stated during an audience: “Spiritually, we are all Semites” – a statement of solidarity towards the victims of antisemitism. He struggled against the Racial Laws in Italy, but still had to keep the political neutrality, according to the Lateran treaty, which, unfortunately, made the Holy See in some way a hostage of Mussolini. The personal opinionm of a Fr. Rosa in no way reflects the position of the Church. And no, there never was a Catholic Antisemitism, because the concept of race is foreign to the Catholic doctrine. Indeed there was a sad Catholic Antijudaism in some circles, as there was a Catholic Antiprotestantism, based of religious questions and far away from an racial discrimination. 

  Sure, Pius XII had every reason to excommunicate Hitler in 1942 (the performers of the genocide, the SS, already excommunicated themselves by leaving the Church), but he knew about the consequences. Still the Church was able to function in Germany and the occupied countries and gave shelter to hundred thousands of Jewish refugees. The excommunication would have been considered a “declaration of War” by Hitler and caused most severe countermeasures, from the arrest of the Bishops up to the confiscation of monasteries and convents. All the infrastructure which was efficient in helping and saving so many Jews would have been lost from one day to the other. No, Pius XII was not willing to buy the applause of future generations for the price of hundred thousands of Jewish lifes. Would you?

  Instead of a strategy of risky, unsuccessful provocations and the danger of an escalation, he cooperated with both, the German military opposition in their attempted coup d’etat (resulting in several assassination attempts on Hitler) and the suport of the allies, especially in form of his “nihil obstat” to an alliance with Stalin. He underwent a “martyrdom of silence” to be able to save Jewish lives. He was rather successful, since about 850.000 escaped the holocaust due to this policy. And at the end, actions are stronger than words and gestures.  

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann
  PTWF Germany
   
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 22, 2010 at 3:08 am

  Mr. Krupp, I don’t think that what I am doing, or the questions I am asking are unfair and are not taking into consideration the geopolitical situation of that time. As I said previously, I realize neither Cardinal Pacelli nor Pope Pius XI could really envision what the Third Reich would turn into just a few years after the Concordat, for example. But these men were very smart and savvy. Pacelli was the consummate diplomat, and understood the ways of the world. Besides, after 1939 the situation changed and nobody was under any illusions about the nature of the Nazi regime. In any case, to give these men the benefit of the doubt, maybe we can focus on what transpired after 1942, that is, after there was no doubt of what was happening to Jews on the Eastern front or what the Nazis stood for.

  Regarding excommunication, I personally think that for true believers in the church, who clearly had been saying since the 15th century that there is no salvation outside the church, it was an effective threat. If you truly believe in the teachings of the church, then you must believe that if you are excommunicated and die, you won’t go to heaven. This must be a frightening thought to a true believer, and in 1942 there were a lot more true believers in Europe than there are today. Sure, this would have been a laughable matter to Hitler but I seriously doubt it would have been taken that way by the guy driving the train to Auschwitz. In any case, I think that what matters is not whether it ultimately worked or not, but rather in what way it was used by the church. As you know, the church used this weapon before and after the Nazi period. The church never stopped using it because of fear.

  You mention the concern that any such action would have made things worse for the Jews. Please, Mr. Krupp. The reality is that millions of Jews were mercilessly murdered, including over 1000 from the pope’s neighborhood, while the Vatican looked the other way. It’s disingenuous to claim that the Pope was afraid that by speaking out on behalf of the hounded Jews things would become worse. There was no way things could have been worse; the Germans were killing about 10,000 Jews in Auschwitz every day—and that was just one of the death camps. They were not killing more because they did not have the capacity. Nothing the Pope could have done or said would have made that hell worse. The example of what happened in Holland is misleading, for two reasons. First, because those were Jews that had converted to Catholicism, that is, no longer Jews from Judaism’s perspective, and second because the Germans would have killed those converted Jews anyway. To the Germans a baptized Jew was still a Jew, so the fact that the Church spoke out did not precipitate their deportation: their ancestry did.

  The church is the self-avowed protector of morals. Instead, they proved to be the self-avowed protector of Vatican interests. Maybe if the pope and the curia were so concerned with their well-being and/or the consequences of them being killed or kidnapped they could have moved to the relative safety of London or NY and broadast and directed the faithful from there. They would not have been the first government to do that, and it would not have been the first time the papacy moved its seat elsewhere when things got uncomfortable in Rome. But the pope was obsessed with protecting Rome from bombardment. There’s a reason why the British ambassador to the Holy See, Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, wrote: “I am revolted by Hitler’s massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand and, on the other, the Vatican’s apparently exclusive preoccupation . . . with the possibilities of the bombardment of Rome.” Pope Pius was not in good standing with the British Foreign Office in general, actually, as after his meeting with Ante Pavelic in 1941 the Foreign Office described the pope as “the greatest moral coward of our age.”

  So, sure, if the Vatican had done the right thing and acted morally it would have forfeited its ability to protect the Vatican and its treasures, its interests in Germany, its chance to be a peace broker, and its ability to protect people, in what I believe was their priority order. But the concept of charity and sacrifice is not new to Christianity. I think there were thousands of Christians across Europe, including many nuns, priests and other members of the clergy, who displayed Christian caritas and helped Jews, sometimes even putting their lives at risk. I realize you believe, as many other apologetics for the pope, that all this was done at the behest and under direct instruction of Pope Pius, but as far as I know (and of course I could be proven wrong) there is no evidence of this. No, these people acted out of motu proprio. Sure, he may have opened the doors of Castel Gandolfo and given shelter to 2-3 thousand Jews, but what about the other thousands of other church properties scattered around Europe, including his 1000+ room palace in the Vatican? What about the other six million who were killed by men who never heard from their pope, ther bishops, their parish priests, or even by their military chaplains, that murdering Jews was a crime and a mortal sin?

  I think the question of why the Roosevelt administration did not bomb the railways to Auschwitz or the gas chambers there is a legitimate one, although perhaps irrelevant to this discussion. There were powerful antisemitic forces within his administration, particularly in the State and War Departments, forces that limited immigration quotas and preventing American bombers from destroying the gas chambers and crematoria in Birkenau. But Roosevelt only had a military option, and as he knew and said many times, there was so much he could accomplish without having boots on the ground. To him winning the war was clearly the priority. Roosevelt was in charge of soldiers and of fighting a war. Religious figures, on the other hand, were in charge of protecting souls. I do not think your comparison with your dad fighting in Europe is valid, because Eisenhower did not need to tell him to shoot a German soldier or liberate a concentration camp. Just like a soldier knows what to do at this level, a regular individual, let alone a priest or nun, knows what is the right moral thing to do without needing the pope to tell them.

  By the way, you mention the Archbishop of Canterbury as an example of another religious figure that was quiet in the face of genocide. Not so. The loudest and clearest Pope Pius spoke about the Holocaust was in his December 1942 radio address, when he spoke of “the hundreds of thousands who, without personal guilt, are doomed to death or to a progressive deterioration of their condition, sometimes for no other reason than their nationality or descent.” The Archbishop of Canterbury, on the other hand, in conjunction with the Anglican archbishop of York and of Wales, proclaimed that same month:

  “The bishops of the Church of England state that the number of victims of the cold blooded policy go into the hundreds of thousands, that Hitler himself revealed that he plans to annihilate the Jews which means the end of six million Jewish humans. The bishops of England declare that the suffering of these millions of Jews and the announced plan to kill them place upon humanity an obligation which nobody can shirk.

  There must be no delay in saving them. The bishops believe that it is the duty of the civilized nations, whether Allied or neutral, to provide havens to these victims. Therefore they appeal to the British government to take the leadership for the whole world by declaring its readiness together with the dominions and all Allied and neutral governments to provide havens within the British empire and elsewhere for all those who are threatened with annihilation and can escape from the Axis countries, as well as for those who already have escaped so as to provide space to those who so far could not escape.”
  
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 22, 2010 at 3:30 am

  I wish to respond to the continuous charge of the inaction of Pius XII with the arrest of the Roman Jews on October 16, 1943. These facts are provable and documented with sworn testimony from multiple sources
  When the early morning arrests began October 16, 1943, Pope Pius XII was alerted to this by Princess Enza Pignatelli Aragona Cortes. He immediately took multiple steps to force the Germans to stop the arrests. He summoned Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione and instructed him to launch a vehement protest against the arrests. Cardinal Maglione warned von Weizsacker that same morning, that the pope could not remain silent as they arrested the Jews under his very windows, in his own diocese. Pius then sent his nephew, Carlo Pacelli, to meet with a German sympathizer, Bishop Alois Hudal, to instruct him to write a letter to his German contacts to immediately stop the arrests. This too proved ineffective. Pius XII’s last effort, the most successful, was to send his close confidant, Salvatorian Superior General Father Pankratius Pfeiffer, to meet directly with the military governor of Rome, General Stahel. Father Pfeiffer warned Stahel that the pope was going to launch a loud and public protest against these arrests if they were not stopped. Fear that this public protest would result in Hitler’s ordering the invasion of the Vatican prompted Stahel to act.
  General Stahel immediately telephoned Heinrich Himmler, and fabricated military grounds to stop the arrests. Trusting Stahel’s assessment, Himmler advised Hitler to stop the arrests. The order to stop the arrests was issued at noon October 16, resulting in its implementation by 2 PM on the day they began.
  This sequence of events was independently confirmed by General Dietrich Beelitz, the liaison officer with Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s office and Hitler’s command. Beelitz personally heard the Stahel – Himmler conversation. When Stahel’s deception later became known, Himmler punished General Stahel by sending him to the Eastern front.
  It was known that the Vatican was infiltrated with spies. The pope could only send trusted priests and confidants throughout Rome and Italy with verbal and written papal orders to lift cloister, allowing men and women to enter Catholic convents and monasteries, and ordered all ecclesiastical institutions to hide the Jews wherever they could. According to famed British historian Sir Martin Gilbert, the Vatican hid thousands of Jews in literally one day. Once hidden, the Vatican continued to feed and support their Jewish “guests” until Rome’s liberation on June 4th, 1944.
  Documents from Berlin and the Eichmann Trial in Israel also show that the 8,000 Roman Jews that were to be arrested were not supposed to go to Auschwitz, but were to be sent to the work camp at Mauthausen and held as hostages. This order was later countermanded by persons unknown and 1,007 Jews were sent to Auschwitz to their death. Sadly only 17 survived. While there are those who repeatedly criticize Pius XII for not saving the 1,007, they remain completely silent on his direct actions, which saved this 3000 year old Jewish community of Rome.
  It was recently discovered, in the American archives, that the allies had broken the German codes and knew almost a week in advance of the intended arrests of the Roman Jews. The allies decided not to warn the Romans since this might alert the Germans to this intelligence breach. This “military decision” left Pope Pius XII alone, without advance notice, to try to end the arrests.
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 22, 2010 at 3:47 am

  Mr. Krupp, the imminent deportation of the Jews of Rome, and the meaning of said deportation, was known to the Jewish community there. Thus, most managed to go into hiding ahead of the deportation. This, and not Pope Pius’ actions, is what explains that about 7000 of them avoided the deportation. The pope may have threatened with a public denunciation of the deportation of the Jews of his dioceses, but the reality is he didn’t. As the German ambassador Weizsäcker reported to his superiors, “Although under pressure from all sides, the Pope has not let himself be drawn into any demonstrative censure of the deportation of the Jews of Rome.”
  I know you will think this to be just idle speculation, but I think that the Pope could have stood in front of the train carrying Rome’s Jews as it was departing Rome toward Auschwitz, as even if the Germans had forcibly removed him from the tracks the impression this symbolic gesture would have had would have been so powerful that it would have, if not halted the machinery of destruction, certainly saved many lives and firmly and honestly cemented the Church’s moral standing.
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 22, 2010 at 4:17 am

  The reality was that the Jewish community of Rome thought that since they paid the demanded ransom of 200 KG of gold to Col. Herbert Kappler, that they believed they were safe and they did not in mass leave Rome as you suggest. As far as Von Weizsäcker’s cables to Berlin are concerned throughout this period Ambassador von Weizsäcker sent deceptive positive messages about the pope to Berlin to calm Hitler, not to justify an order to invade. Some critics of Pope Pius XII have erroneously based their theories of papal complicity and collaboration on these intentionally misleading cables—what Weizsäcker’s assistant, Albrecht von Kessel, later called “tactical lies.” We have additional testimony from Lieutenant Nikolaus Kunkel, a German officer from the headquarters of the military governor of Rome, which corroborates documented evidence and testimony of exactly how Pius XII directly saved the Roman Jewish community and that they were expecting the  order from Berlin to invade the Vatican any day.
  Denying the Vatican did not hide any Jews as you suggest is in direct disagreement with the Israelite communities of all of Italy, which erected a marble placard honoring Pius XII for this very act in 1946. This placard has mysteriously disappeared but we do have pictures of it. Again the people who erected this placard and actually lived through the war obviously wanted to thank Pope Pius XII in some way for something. They could have done nothing if they felt differently. But then they also did not have the convenience of commenting on what should have be done 66 years later.
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 22, 2010 at 4:35 am

  Please note I did not suggest the Jewish community left Rome en masse or that none were hidden in the Vatican. I am aware that about half of them hid in the numerous monasteries and houses of religious orders in Rome and a few dozen were sheltered in the Vatican itself. The point I am arguing is that most, if not all, those monks, priests and nuns who did this did it out of motu proprio and not under the pope’s instructions. This of course is not to say they did it behind the pope’s back. I am perfectly aware that the pope must have known and approved of this. But there is a difference between approving and ordering, and it’s not a subtle and trivial one.
  I am not convinced by the argument Weiszäcker was lying to his superiors. Why on earth would he do such a foolish thing?
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 22, 2010 at 5:32 am

  Hopefully the links I am sending will come through. You suggest that these religious people all acted independently without the pope’s knowledge is in direct contradiction to recently unearthed documents and testimonies of how Pope Pius XII sent priests around Italy with written and verbal orders to take in and protect the Jews. There were thousands of Jews and other refugees housed in the summer residence of the Pope in Castelgandolfo. We have on our website the copy of a diary from Augustan Nuns from 1943 where they state they received papal orders to take in the Jews and then names their Jewish guests. Here is the Hebrew testimony of Michael Tagliacozzo, who is an Israeli historian and archivist of the Holocaust center of the war in Italy in northern Israel he testifies that it was Pius XII that saved his life. We have notarized testimonies to the same actions from other religious in Rome. We have signed testimony from priests who physically went to the papal palace to get cash and Vatican Passports for Jews escaping Germany and Poland for Switzerland. Here is the Placard from the Italian Jewish community thank Pius XII in 1946. Here is the telegram sent by Pius XII to stop the arrest of the Hungarian Jews. Here is the interview of a 98 year old priest who physically deciphered  double encrypted telegrams sent twice a year directly from Pope Pius XII to General Trujillo of the Dominican Republic requesting at least 1600 visas for Jews leaving Europe every year from 1939-1945 that is over 10,000 that Pius XII saved directly.
  As one who was not even a twinkle in your mother’s eyes, it is really hard to accept that you are not convinced that a man who was physically present, to question that the von Weizsäcker cables from  were lies.
  If these links do not come through please go to http://www.ptwf.org and research the document and interview pages. All I ask is for you and other critics to simply show me the documented proof supporting your theories. Not assumptions based on what you think happened, documents proof. Mr. Wilensky I am personally inviting you to come to Rome with us where you will be shown all of the proof you need to see to change your mind.
• Ron Rychlak says:

  May 22, 2010 at 6:35 am

  As for futile gestures to send a message, I have two thoughts. For one thing, the Nazis would have limited the spread of that message. They controlled the press, and they would have sent forth a counter-story, just as: “Jewish partisans killed the pope.” To the extent that Italians saw what happened, they may have rioted. They would then have been slaughtered and the cover story would have been put forth.
  Regarding the thesis that Catholic rescue activity took place without papal support, Author Antonio Gaspari says: AThis is a thesis that is impossible to defend.@ His book, Gli ebrei salvati da Pio XII, recounts several instances of Pius XII intervening in his personal capacity, through the Vatican state secretariat, to save Jews. In one case, 1,000 German Jews wanted to emigrate to Brazil, and the Pontiff paid out of his own pocket the $800 each needed for the trip. In 1939, Pius organized special operations inside the Vatican Information Office to help Jews persecuted by Nazism.
  The argument that Pius knew of but did not play a role in rescue efforts, despite so many witnesses testifying that he did, was set forth by papal critic Susan Zuccotti. Of course, time and time again she discounted or dismissed the testimony of people who were there. In so doing, she denied the legitimacy of the gratitude of the Jewish victims and, as Rabbi David Dalin wrote, she denied Athe credibility of their personal testimony and judgment about the Holocaust itself.@
  On Page 264 of her book Under His Very Windows, she discusses a bishop who claimed to have been holding a letter from Pius in his hands, but she suggests that the bishop falsified this claim because he Amay have considered it useful to make his assistants believe that they were doing the Pope=s work.@
  On page 193, Zuccotti suggests that nuns who credited the Pope for having ordered their convents opened to Jewish refugees were Aeager that Pius XII receive credit for the work of their order.@ (She does, however, concede that Pius probably knew these nuns were sheltering Jews.)
  On page 143, she discusses a letter from A. L. Eastman, of the World Jewish Congress, thanking the Pope for helping free imprisoned Jews. Zuccotti however, dismisses this testimony by saying, AEastman must have known better.@
  On page 103, she quotes the papal nuncio in Vichy, praising Pope Pius XII for condemning the persecution of Jews and others. Zuccotti accuses him of fabricating the papal responses.
  On page 301, she discusses gratitude from Jewish people to the Pope following the war. She attributes their attitude to Abenevolent ignorance.@
  On page 302, in an even more disturbing analysis, she suggests that Jewish chaplains simply lied because they were Aanxious to protect and preserve the fragile goodwill between Jews and non-Jews that seems to be emerging from the rubble of the war in Italy.@
  At other points along the way she dismisses letters of thanks from Jewish people because AThe Holy See had done nothing more for the Jewish Internees than for non-Jews@ (p. 85). Favorable accounts of the Pope=s efforts to help Jews are dismissed as Aless than honest@ (p. 272). Testimony from the future Pope Paul VI is dismissed because, according to Zuccotti, he Aknew perfectly well@ that his statement was wrong (p. 169). Zuccotti does not show a lack of papal involvement in rescue efforts. All she has shown is that she does not believe the limited amount of evidence that she has reviewed.
  At the end of the day, we have Zuccotti on one side arguing that there is no evidence of papal involvement. On the other side we have a mountain of testimony from rescuers, victims, Germans, Jews, priests, nuns, the New York Times (and other papers), seven cardinals, and two Popes. We also now have the written, archival confirmation of papal involvement in the rescue of Jews that Zuccotti thought did not exist. In other words, the evidence all weighs in favor of Pope Pius XII. To ignore that evidence is to deny history. With this subject, that is a very dangerous thing to do.
• Michael Hesemann says:

  May 22, 2010 at 8:34 am

  Mr. Wilensky,
  I don’t want to rule out that one or the other Parish priest saved Jews just because he felt that’s the right thing to do. Of course the human conscience is an important factor, and thousands of Germans or Poles, for example, saved Jews just because they opposed the Nazi crimes or just felt human compassion. Thanks God, not everybody just obeyed authorities.

  But this is not what we are talking about. Our subject is the greatest humanitarian campaign to safe victims of a religious or ethnic persecution in history. It started right after the pogrom night in Germany (“Kristallnacht”) on Nov. 9, 1938 and manifested, first of all, in the request of Visa for Jews from literally all governments of the world who held diplomatic relationships with the Holy See. This campaign was initiated and coordinated by Cardinal Pacelli. Although the outcome was meager – the biggest offer was 3000 visa for Brazil, limited to “non-aryan Catholics” = Jewish converts – it demonstrates the willingness to help at a rather early phase, predating the war, predating the deportations, predating the Holocaust.

  Pacelli continued this policy after his election as Pope Pius XII. To fulfill the criteria of the governments, even thousands of false baptism certificates were issued to turn Jews into pseudo-”Non-aryan Catholics”. In several instances, Pacelli/Pius XII financed to hire ships under Vatican flag to bring these Jews safely to their destination. One documented case (we recorded his testimony) is the cooperation with Santo Domingo, when Pres. Trujillo offered to issue 800 visa for Jews every half a year. In this case, the assistant of the Nuntius, Msgr. Ferrofino, personally went to Europe each time, collected money from the Pope, distributed the Visa among the Jews, hired a ship from the Papal funds and delivered the Jews in person to the Santo Dominican authorities. More than 10.000 Jews survived because of this action.

  During the War and after the beginning of the deportations, all major efforts which indeed saved a high number of Jews, were directly ordered by Pius XII.

  * In France, Pius XII personally protested at the Vichy Government (Hitler’s puppet government) when the deportations begun in September 1942. With the help and support of Rome and the French bishops, more than 200.000 Jews were saved.
  * In Slovakia, another ally of Hitler, Pius XII protested not only againstthe introduction of the Racial Laws in September 1942, but also sent protest notes to President Tiso (a Catholic priest) each time a deportation was ordered, namely in March 1942, April 1942, and early 1944. With the exemption of the tragic deportation of 10.000 Slovak Jewish women,  no further deportations took place and the majority of the Slovak Jews were safe until, in August 1944, the Germans took over control in Slovakia and started with the deportations. In this case, a Papal protest had no success, but at least 25.000 Jews were hidden in Catholic monasteries.
  * In Romania, another ally of Hitler,  Nuntius Cassulo, ordered by Pius XII, arranged that Catholic Jews were exempt from the racial laws in 1941. Afterwards, thousands of false baptism certificates were distributed among the Jews and in 1942, the Romanian representative at the Holy See protested against the high number of  “conversions”. Still, the “baptized” Jews were not deported, when most Jews were deported to Transnistria in 1942. To help an dsupport them, Pius XII handed over large amounts of money to his Nuntius Cassulo – according to his secretary, Fr. Leiber, the private fortune of his family which he had inherited, being a Pacelli. Furthermore, in 1944, 4000 Jewish orphans were evacuated and brought to Palestine. At the end, 250.000 Romanian Jews survived. Nuntius Cassulo was honored as a “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem, although he just followed the orders and distributed the money of the Pope. Also Nuntius Roncalli, who arranged the transport of thousands of Romanian Jews to Palestine, issueing false birth certificates and hiring ships, was honored at Yad Vashem, when he stated to the Israel Consul in Italy, Pinchas Lapide: “In all these painful affairs I contacted the Holy See and also later I simply followed the orders of th Pope: first and above all to save human lives.”
  * When the Germans took over control in Hungary in March 1944, Eichmann requested the deportation of all 800.000 Hungarian Jews. Immediately Pius XII sent a telegraph to the Head of State, Admiral Horthy (which is preserved), dated May 25, 1944, which stopped the deportations. Only when in October 1944, Horthy was replaced by the Nazis by a right-wing-extremist regime, the deportations continued. Still, about 200.000 Jews were saved in monasteries.

  As you can see from this examples, the Papal policy always was, first of all, to win time, since Pius expected a coup d’etat against Hitler as it was planned by the German military opposition which kept him informed and collaborated with him since the fall of 1939. 

  Still, a single Parish priest could surely act out of his own, but the situation was a different one in the case of cloistered monasteries. Only a direct Papal order could lift cloister. And this is exactly what happened in Italy (not only in Rome), and yes, we have evidence in the form of the diary of the cloistered Augustinian Nuns at the monastery SS. Quattri Coronati in Rome, an entry of November 1943:

  “In this horrible situation, the Holy Father wished to save his sons, also the Jews, and ordered that the convents should offer refuge and hospitality to the persecuted and also the cloistered monasteries should follow this wish of the Pope.”

  And no, we do not have a written order by the Pope, the order was delivered orally. We only have the testimony from the parties who followed it. Does it mean that the order did not exist? Of course not; it just means that it was a secret action and nobody wanted evidence fall into the hands of Hitler’s Gestapo.

  But keep in mind we also don’t have a written order by Hitler to perform the Holocaust, the “Endloesung der Judenfrage”. Does it mean that Hitler didn’t know or wasn’t allowed? This is a favorite claim of the Holocaust deniers, but as a historian I have to flatly refuse it: Of course he was responsible, nobody would have done it without his order.

  The same I say in the case of Pius XII: Of course he was responsible, nobody but him could lift cloister!
  Yes, you are right. The Holocaust is the biggest, most horrible crime in human history. It is a shame that it could happen in the 20th century and that nobody was able to prevent or stop it from the very beginning. We can only kneel down and kiss the ground of Auschwitz, holding the ashes, the physical remains of uncountable innocent victims. It is just unimaginable what happened, how human beings were able to perform such a barbaric deed.  The murder of six millions in the factories of death is unique in the human history. Nothing what ever happened in human history is more tragic. But, theoretically, what would be more tragic, more horrible than the murder of six million Jews? The holocaust with seven million victims.

  It was up to Pius XII that this did not happen. It was up to him that in so many cases the speed of murders was slowed down, that deportations were stopped, that potential victims were smuggled out of Hitlers allied nations, were shipped to South America, the Carribean and Palestine, were hidden in monasteries and Catholic insitutions, received false passports and baptism certificates, to have a future, to start a new life wether in Israel or on the American continent or, after the terror was over, in Europe.

  You might compare the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury who lived in the safety of a strong Great Britain with the words of the Pope, a hostage of Hitler’s ally Mussolini, and find them insufficient. But tell me, how many Jews did the Archbishop of Canterbury save?

  Deed count, not words. Human lives count, not rhetorics or pointless provocations.
  Whoever saved a human live, saves the whole world, the Talmud states. How many Jewish worlds were saved, due to this great Pope? 

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann
  PTWF Germany
• Michael Hesemann says:

  May 22, 2010 at 9:42 am

  Mr. Wilensky,
  I don’t want to rule out that one or the other Parish priest saved Jews just because he felt that this was the right thing to do. Of course the human conscience is an important factor, and thousands of Germans or Poles, for example, saved Jews just because they opposed the Nazi crimes or just felt human compassion. Thanks God, not everybody just obeyed authorities.

  But this is not what we are talking about. Our subject is the greatest humanitarian campaign to safe victims of a religious or ethnic persecution in history. It started right after the pogrom night in Germany (“Kristallnacht”) on Nov. 9, 1938 and manifested, first of all, in the request of Visa for Jews from literally all governments of the world who held diplomatic relationships with the Holy See. This campaign was initiated and coordinated by Cardinal Pacelli. Although the outcome was meager – the biggest offer was 3000 visa for Brazil, limited to “non-aryan Catholics” = Jewish converts – it demonstrates the willingness of the Holy See to help at a rather early phase, predating the war, predating the deportations, predating the Holocaust.

  Pacelli continued this policy after his election as Pope Pius XII. To fulfill the criteria of the governments, even thousands of false baptism certificates were issued to turn Jews into pseudo-”Non-aryan Catholics” and allow them to enter the countries in question where, of course, they continued to follow their Jewish faith. In several instances, Pacelli/Pius XII financed to hire ships to bring these Jews safely to their destination. One documented case is the cooperation with Santo Domingo, when Pres. Trujillo offered to issue 800 visa for Jews every half a year. In this case, the assistant of the Nuntius, Msgr. Ferrofino (whose testmony we recorded and put on our website), personally went to Europe each time, collected money from the Pope, distributed the Visa among the Jews, hired a ship from the Papal funds and delivered the Jews in person to the Santo Dominican authorities. More than 10.000 Jews survived because of this action.

  During the War and after the beginning of the deportations, all major efforts which indeed saved a high number of Jews, were directly ordered by Pius XII.

  * In France, Pius XII personally protested at the Vichy Government (Hitler’s puppet government) when the deportations begun in September 1942. With the help and support of Rome and the French bishops, more than 200.000 Jews were saved.
  * In Slovakia, another ally of Hitler, Pius XII protested not only against the introduction of the Racial Laws in September 1942, but also sent protest notes to President Tiso (a Catholic priest) each time a deportation was ordered, namely in March 1942, April 1942, and early 1944. With the exemption of the tragic deportation of 10.000 Slovak Jewish women,  no further deportations took place and the majority of the Slovak Jews were safe until, in August 1944, the Germans took over control in Slovakia and again started the deportations. In this case, a Papal protest had no success, but at least 25.000 Jews were hidden in Catholic monasteries and survived.
  * In Romania, another ally of Hitler,  Nuntius Cassulo, ordered by Pius XII, arranged that Catholic Jews were exempt from the racial laws in 1941. Afterwards, thousands of false baptism certificates were distributed among the Jews so that in 1942, the Romanian representative at the Holy See protested against the high number of  “conversions”. Still, the “baptized” Jews were spared when the Jews were deported to Transnistria in 1942. To help and support them, Pius XII handed over large amounts of money to his Nuntius Cassulo – according to his secretary, Fr. Leiber, including the private fortune of his family which he had just inherited, being a Pacelli. Furthermore, in 1944, 4000 Jewish orphans were evacuated and brought to Palestine. At the end, 250.000 Romanian Jews survived. Nuntius Cassulo was honored as a “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem, although he just followed the orders and distributed the money of the Pius XII. Also Nuntius Roncalli, who arranged the transport of thousands of Romanian Jews to Palestine, issueing false birth certificates and hiring ships, was honored at Yad Vashem, when he stated to the Israeli Consul in Italy, Pinchas Lapide: “In all these painful affairs I contacted the Holy See and also later I simply followed the orders of the Pope: first and above all to save human lives.”

  * When the Germans took over control in Hungary in March 1944, Eichmann requested the deportation of all 800.000 Hungarian Jews. Immediately Pius XII sent a telegraph to the Hungarian Head of State, Admiral Horthy (which you find on our website), dated May 25, 1944, which stopped the deportations. Only when in October 1944, Horthy was replaced by the Nazis and a right-wing-extremist regime took over power, the deportations continued. Still, about 200.000 Jews were saved in monasteries.

  As you can see from these examples, the Papal policy always was also to win time, since Pius expected a coup d’etat against Hitler as it was planned by the German military opposition, keeping him informed and collaborated with him since the fall of 1939. 

  Still, a single Parish priest could surely act out of his own, but the situation was a different one in the case of cloistered monasteries. Only a direct Papal order could lift cloister. And this is exactly what happened in Italy (not only in Rome), and yes, we have evidence in form of the diary of the cloistered Augustinian Nuns of the Monastery SS. Quattri Coronati in Rome, entry of November 1943:

  “In this horrible situation, the Holy Father wished to save his sons, also the Jews, and ordered that the convents should offer refuge and hospitality to the persecuted and also the cloistered monasteries should follow this wish of the Pope.”

  And no, we do not have a written order by the Pope, the order was delivered orally. We only have testimony from the parties who followed it. Does it mean that the order did not exist? Of course not; it just means that it was a secret action and nobody wanted any evidence to fall into the hands of Hitler’s Gestapo, with devastating consequences.

  But keep in mind we also don’t have a written order by Hitler for the Holocaust. Does this mean that Hitler didn’t know what happened, that he was not involved at all? This is a favorite claim of the Holocaust deniers, but as a historian I have to flatly refuse it: Of course he was responsible, nobody would have done anything without his order.

  The same I say in the case of Pius XII: Of course he was responsible, nobody but him could lift cloister!
  Yes, you are right. The Holocaust is the biggest, most horrible crime in human history. It is a shame that it could happen in the 20th century and that nobody was able to prevent or stop it from the very beginning. We can only kneel down and kiss the ground of Auschwitz, covered by the ashes, the physical remains of uncountable innocent victims. It is just unimaginable what happened, how human beings were able to perform such a barbaric act.  The murder of six millions in the factories of death is unique in the human history. Nothing what ever happened in is more tragic. But, theoretically, what would be more tragic, more horrible than the murder of six million Jews? The holocaust with seven million Jewish victims.

  It was up to Pius XII that this did not happen. It was up to him that in so many cases the speed of murders was slowed down, that deportations were stopped, that potential victims were smuggled out of Hitlers allied nations, were shipped to South America, the Carribean and Palestine, were hidden in monasteries and Catholic insitutions, received false passports and baptism certificates, in order to have a future, to start a new life, whether in Israel or on the American continent or, after the terror was over, in Europe.

  You might compare the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury who lived in the safety of a strong Great Britain with the words of the Pope, a hostage of Hitler’s ally Mussolini, and find them insufficient. But tell me, how many Jews did the Archbishop of Canterbury save?

  Deed count, not words. Human lives count, not rhetorics or pointless provocations.
  Whoever saved a human live, saves the whole world, the Talmud states. And how many Jewish worlds were saved, due to this great Pope!

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann
  PTWF Germany
• Ittay says:

  May 22, 2010 at 8:23 pm

  think this interview may be of interest here
  To most people he is best known for his failure to speak out clearly on behalf of Jews during the Holocaust, but he has regularly been defamed as a supporter of Hitler and an antisemite. On the 50th anniversary of his death we take another look at the wartime record of Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli – with Dr. Paul O’Shea, the Australian author of a new book about Pius, A Cross too Heavy.
  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2378841.htm
  extract:

  Stephen Crittenden: Well let’s come to the other key issue, and that is, was the Pope he an anti-Semite?
  Paul O’Shea: The answer again is No, he wasn’t. The evidence is overwhelming that he was not a racial anti-Semite. He was anti-Jewish inasmuch as most Catholics of the time had a negative picture of Judaism, if they thought of Judaism at all. He was the inheritor of 1500 year Augustinian tradition of contempt towards Judaism as a superceded religion that had no validity in the world, the Christ had come, therefore the religion of the Jews is now invalid. But Pius XII himself, person-to-person, was definitely not a racist of any description, the evidence doesn’t support that.
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 22, 2010 at 11:07 pm

  
  Again, the slander of Pius XII being an anti-Semite or a “classic “anti-Semite is completely wrong based on the documents we have uncovered. He was not anti-Jewish as most other Catholics may have been. In fact the opposite is true. Eugenio Pacelli was a passionate lover of the Jewish people and in fact a great admirer of Jews from his youth. His closest childhood friend Guido Mendes was an Orthodox Jewish boy whose family would invite young Pacelli for Shabbat meals. Pacelli learned to speak Hebrew and borrowed the books of the great rabbis. When he became nuncio in Germany in 1917, he passionately tried to help the chief Rabbi of Munich obtain the release of the palms used for Sukkoth. In his letters he stated this is a wonderful opportunity to forge closer relations with the Jewish community. This failed since they palms were held up by the Italians and Italy and the Holy See did not have diplomatic relations. Nachum Sokolow president of the World Zionist Organization approached Pacelli also in 1917 to request that he intervene to protect the Jews of Palestine who feared they would be massacred as the Armenians were by the Ottoman Turks. Pacelli got Germany to warn the Turks that the Jews would be protected even with the use of arms. In 1925 Sokolow came back to Pacelli to discuss the notion of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Pacelli was so excited about this he personally arranged an audience with Pope Benedict XV for Sokolow. In 1926 he urged all Catholics to join the Pro-Palestine organization in Germany. In 1938 as Secretary of State Pacelli approved of the opposition of a proposed anti-Kosher slaughtering law in Poland and defeated it. He stated that this would cause great persecution for the Israelite community. In 1945, when he was pope, he greeted 80 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who came to thank him for his great work, and he said soon you will have a Jewish homeland, this three years before the creation of Israel. In November 1947 Pacelli encouraged the 17 out of 33 states to vote in favor of the UN resolution to partition Palestine. We have numerous inter action as well up until his death showing his love for the Jewish people including his encouragement for Spain to recognize the State of Israel in 1950 and many other instances. As a Jew I can assure you that anti-Semites or anti-Jewish “classically” or otherwise do not act like this. When Catholics comment on who is anti-Semitic and who isn’t their view point and agenda must be scrutinized.
   
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 23, 2010 at 12:47 pm

  Thank you again for all your responses, and welcome, Mr. Rychlak. Between the three of you you make a formidable team, and making a complete point by point response to everything you have said would make this response very long and probably tedious to read. So you’ll have to excuse me if I generally address some of the points raised.

  Mr. Hasemann, as you know the murder of Jews occurred in many places and in many ways. Not all were commited by SS, and not all occurred in concentration and death camps. Many members of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, the Ordungspolizei, the Waffen SS, the Wehrmact and thousands of auxiliaries in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, Croatia, etc. killed Jews (including in the death camps as well), and many of these men attended church or religious service. Many of them were even priests. Over a thousand military chaplains, both Catholic and Protestant, tended the souls of the perpetrators in the field. Franz Stangl, commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps, found solace for his role in mass murder from the involvement of Christian clergy during the assault on the Jews. And as I said earlier, almost a fourth of all SS men remained in the Catholic faith despite all efforts to make them leave it. Think of Spain in the 15th century for another example of pressure—and failure—to make people abandon their faith. Again, as I mentioned earlier, by 1940 over 95% of the German population were still tax-paying members of their respective Protestant or Catholic churches.

  You brought up again the point of the lifting of the ban of membership in the Nazi party. I do not think I need to repeat what I wrote earlier, but I would like to say though that the Catholic Church was not weakened by the Kulturkampf. They won that battle (even though they had losses at the time) but by the time Hitler came to power and the Konkordat was signed the church was at its strongest. The Catholic Church prospered greatly under the Weimar Repub-lic, increasing the number of priests to over 20,000 for 20 million Catholics, as opposed to sixteen thousand pastors for 40 million Protestants. Catholic organizations of every kind multiplied; new monasteries were built, new religious orders were founded, new schools were established. As the historian Karl Bachem said in 1931, “Never yet has a Catholic country possessed such a developed system of all conceivable Catholic associations as today’s Catholic Germany.”

  I disagree with you that in 1933 the majority of Germans supported the Nazis (the elections notwithstanding), and I disagree even more that fighting the Nazis would have been tantamount to suicide. The Catholic Center Party was very strong and in a coalition would have actually defeated the Nazis. We have Cardinal Pacelli to thank for the dissolution of the Center Party and for making Hitler’s absolute takeover of power possible. Even after Hitler came to power the strength and potential of the Church cannot and should not be underestimated. Just as the Catholic Germans were supportive of the Church’s admonition to stay away from the Nazis before the ban was lifted, they would have remained that way if the Church had continued to keep the ban in place or at the very least advised the faithful clearly, repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that the Nazi ideology was evil and incompatible with Catholic teachings. By not doing this the Church in essence told the flock that “Thou shall not kill” or “Do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you” did not apply to Jews.

  I am aware that the von Galen “revolt” only led to a suspension of the Euthanasia Program. The point I was making is that that was a good example to show that people, including members of the church, could and did oppose the Nazis when they felt it was the right thing to do, and faced no consequences. The Rosenstrasse Protest is another example that also illustrates this point. Just imagine if the Pope, in conjunction with the leaders of the various Protestant churches, had instructed tens of thousands of “von Galens” to “revolt” against the “Final Solution”. That is at the heart of what I am saying, that the Pope had the ears and hearts of hundreds of millions of Catholics, including many tens of thousands involved in the business of mass murder, and they would have listened. Once again, I agree with you that no amount of religious indoctrination, cajoling or excommunication would have swayed men like Hitler or Himmler, but it would have influenced the accountant killing Jews in the ravines of Poland or Ukraine, the blue collar workers in German factories making poison gas, the men driving the trains to the concentration camps, and perhaps most enlisted men (with the exception of the most rabid and fanatical SS men, I agree, but that was only a few thousand who by themselves would have been unable to carry the extermination in such vast scale).

  Regarding Mit brennender Sorge, I did not say it was not condemning the Nazis. I said it did not mention the Nazis by name. Sure, it briefly addressed the issue of racism and condemned it, but at the time racism was not a generic, abstract concept. This was a time in which the Germans had committed very serious human and civil rights violations against Jews. The problem the church was addressing was antisemitism, which is a form of hatred directed specifically toward Jews. Yet there was no mention of antisemitism or Jews. If you think it’s wrong that a priest rapes a little boy, then you should complain that the “priest” “raped” the “little boy”, not that “there are some cases of misconduct in the clergy and that’s bad”.

  Mr. Hasemann, you know L’Osservatore Romano is a Vatican publication that is very close to the pope and nothing is published in it without his knowledge and approval. This is as close to an official papal publication as it gets. To claim that the opinions of Father Rosa were his own and that it did not reflect the position of the Church is simply wrong, not true and misleading. First of all, both L’Osservatore and Civiltà Cattolica both had a horrible and long record of publishing antisemitic rants. Second, if Pope Pius XI had felt this kind of writing was innapropriate (as it would have been at any time but particularly after the anti-Jewish laws in Germany and Italy), he could have rebuked the good father and ordered him to retract it. Yet, that did not happen in that occasion, or any other of the many other occassions in which these Vatican publications published antisemitic rants.

  I think you may be underestimating the loyalty of people to the Nazis, and underestimating the loyalty to the Church and god. I agree that excommunicating Hitler would have infuriated him, but I don’t think he would have done any of the things you said. He could have easily taken over the Vatican and kidnapped the pope, but didn’t. Hitler was evil, but not stupid. Just like the Nazis did not do anything against von Galen because Goebbels knew it would turn ito a public relations disaster and would mean losing Münster, the Nazis would not have risked alienating tens of millions German and Austrian Catholics and hundreds of millions of Catholics in the occupied countries. If he had acted against the Church before winning the war, he would have found himself with a massive, uncontainable revolt. And as history shows, the faithful are quite capable and willing to fight and to die for their religion. German soldiers swore allegiance to Hitler, but they went to war with the inscription “God with us” on their belt buckles. So, to answer your question of whether I would have risked a few thousand Jewish lives in exchange for some future applause if I had been the pope, I think it’s the wrong question. If I had been the pope I would have acted much more forcefully in alliance with any other people of good faith and morals, I would have forcefully admonished the millions of people who listened and revered me, I would have clearly denounced the extermination in no uncertain terms, clearly, repeatedly and through every means of communication available to me, I would have threatened all Catholics with excommunication if they persevered in the exterminatory campaign against Jews, I would have stood in front of the train taking the Roman Jews to Auschwitz, and I would have instructed all and any cleric all the way to the lowliest parish priest or military chaplain to admonish the flock repeatledly in clear terms that killing Jews was murder and a mortal sin. If that risked my (i.e. the church’s) ability to do further good under Nazi occupation, if it meant losing monasteries and other church property, or the vast holdings and investments in Germany, then so be it. This would not have been an unsuccessful provocation. There are quite a few examples, like the Euthanasia case we discussed earlier, the Rosenstrasse protest, the actions of the Danish and Norwegian Lutheran cases, the actions of Bishop Saliège and others to show that you could successfully oppose the Nazis.

  Mr. Hasemann, I realize the Church made humanitarian efforts to save people, but it’s misleading to say they did this specifically to save Jews. As you yourself acknowledge the visas they secured were for converted Jews, that is, Catholics and not Jews. The protests against the racial laws, to the meagre extent they complained about them, were about the rights of converted Jews, that is Catholics and not Jews. I am not aware that Pope Pius issued false baptismal records, so I don’t dispute it. I do know Msgr. Angelo Roncalli did this, though.

  Mr. Krupp, please note I am not saying the pope or the church did not save any lives whatsoever. Of course in a titanic confrontation like WWII you will find people on any side and of any persuasion that will have something positive or something negative to say about anything. I don’t dispute that thousands of Jews were saved by members of the clergy, although I am skeptical about the role the pope played on that. But irrespective of the testimony of those that claim they acted on behalf of the pope, I must say that ultimately it’s irrelevant if some, or even a lot of people claim this. I realize Mr. Rychlak dismisses Zuccotti because of her refutation of several of these cases, but I must say that one needs to look at these cases carefully. It’s easy to misconstrue what they mean, and not necessarily for any nefarious reason. For instance, those that found refuge in monasteries would surely be grateful to the Church, and it stands to reason to think that in an organization like the Catholic Church this was done at the command of the Pope. But that is not necessarily so and, in any case, the fact that some were saved and some expressed gratitude should not be made to sound as “the Jewish people expressed gratitude”. You cite the telegram Pius sent Horthy asking him to stop the deportation of Hungarian Jews, but you fail to mention that the deportations were halted only after Horthy had received a deluge of protests from many countries including an ultimatum from Roosevelt, followed by an unusually heavy bombing raid on Budapest, and that the Vatican waited until that time to make a protest to halt the deportations. By then most of the 430,000 Jews the Germans would eventually deport had already been deported. However, the papal nuncio in Budapest, on conveying the message to Horthy, took advantage of the opportunity to clarify that the Vatican’s protest was not at all due to a “false sense of compassion” for the Jews. So, it’s important to be cautious with how you talk about these things, because those that do not know the entire historical context will read statements like Mr. Hesemann’s “Immediately Pius XII sent a telegraph to the Hungarian Head of State, Admiral Horthy, dated May 25, 1944, which stopped the deportations.” and think that (a) the Pope reacted immediately, which he didn’t and (b) his action stopped the deportations, which it didn’t do either. You present many examples and cases, but they may have a different meaning than the one you convey.

  For instance, Mr. Hesemann mentions the case of Jews saved in France. Well, first of all as you know, the Vichy ambassador to the Vatican reported back to the French leader Marshal Pétain in reference to the anti-Jewish racial laws in France that “there is nothing in these measures that can give rise to criticism, from the viewpoint of the Holy See.” He also said that Vatican officials “have no intention of quarreling with us over the Jewish statute.” Second, no one told the Catholic French police who willingly collaborated with the Germans in rounding up France’s Jews that that was the wrong thing to do. No one from the Vatican, that is. A few individual French clerics spoke against the anti-Jewish measures, in terms much clearer and forceful the Vatican ever said (not to mention the French bishop’s much more honest and forthcoming mea culpa after the war). So, to say that this was done “with the support of Rome” is misleading because it suggests that Rome was behind it organizing or promoting it, which is not the same as what really happened, which is they just did not oppose it and thus tacitly approved of it.

  Sure, the Vatican made a protest to Slovakia’s Father Tiso, but they didn’t necessarily do this out of compassion for the Jews impacted by the racial laws or the deportations from Slovakia. They did it because they understood the public relations disaster that could turn into, given the government was led by a Catholic priest who believed the deportations were a Christian act because Slovakia had to free itself of “its pests”, and many members of the government were clerics as well. Why didn’t the pope excommunicate Fr. Tiso? Was he concerned of retaliation in Slovakia as well? No, the admonishment to Slovakia was done publicly because, as a Vatican internal memo explains, it was important to make it look as if the Vatican cared. As the memo states, “it would not be out of place to discreetly make known to the public this diplomatic note of the Holy See (the fact of its being sent and the content of the document rather than the text). This will make known to the world that the Holy See fulfills its duty of charity.”

  Mr. Hesemann, the pope was not concerned his written orders fell into the hands of the Gestapo. The Church had means of communication that was not monitored by the Gestapo. Besides, if the church was truly worried about this, then why do you have all these notes and testimonies showing that the church was doing, namely conspiring against the Germans?

  Mr. Rychlak, please note I am not saying that rescue efforts by priests and nuns were performed without papal support. I am sure the pope knew and approved of this. But again, there is a difference between giving an order to do something, and simply approving an action one of the pople under your command does out of their own volition. You dismiss Zuccotti, but just like to you each of the cases you cite is evidence of papal rescue efforts, someone else (including her, obviously) interprets that action, or the narrative of the action, in a different way. Ultimately I think it’s counterproductive to discuss the individiual merits of each of these cases, if only because it would take forever and it may not be conclusive. It seems to me it would be better to look at the big picture. Instead of discussing whether this or that nun received a message from ther pope or not, I think it would be more productive to look at overall church efforts, both in intention and final results, to see how the church felt toward the plight of the Jews. It is from this point of view that we see a church indifferent, at best.

  Mr. Krupp, I do not believe Pope Pius was an antisemite in the racial sense of the term, although I would argue that racial antisemitism was not alien to the Church. But I think it’s a stretch to say he was a friend of the Jews and that he loved them. He couldn’t even mention them by name in the few rare instances he actually spoke out against the genocide! When he addressed the International Eucharistic Congress held in Budapest in 1938 he mentioned the Jews, “whose lips,” according to him, “curse [Christ] and whose hearts reject him even today.” Also, you mentioned that Pacelli was excited at the prospect of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This is a jarring contradiction with the track record of previous Vatican officials who had opposed just that in the most callous ways. Also, as you know, the Vatican refused to recognize Israel when the state was founded in 1948 and Pope Pius was in command of the secretariat of state and in a position to do this. As a matter of fact, the Vatican would shamefully continue in this refusal until 1993, 45 years after its founding and 14 years after its greatest foe, Egypt, had recognized its right to exist in 1979. The Vatican was one of the last states in the world to do so.

  Regarding the invitation to come to Rome with you Mr. Krupp, maybe I’ll take you up on the offer sometime.

  Sincerely,
  Gabriel Wilensky
  —————————————————————————————————
  Author
  Six Million Crucifixions:How Christian Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust
  http://www.SixMillionCrucifixions.com
  —————————————————————————————————
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 23, 2010 at 5:07 pm

  Mr. Krupp says that it would have been useless and counterproductive for the Vatican to condemn Nazi party membership or to condemn the enslavement and/or murder Jews.  

  He offers the same lame excuse we have been hearing for years, the claim that the Vatican was reserving its strength so as to be able to help more Jews.

  This is nonsense.  Almost all of Europe’s Jews were murdered, and almost every single one of the tens of thousands of shetlach (little Jewish villages in the countryside) were wiped from the face of the earth, their homes and synagogues burnt to the ground (often with the people in them), their cemetaries uprooted and the memorial stones uprooted and used to line latrines. The Catholic faithful of Poland and Ukraine eagerly assisted in the shooting of the people who lived in the shtetlach and in cities such as Kiev and Uman…we’ve all heard of Babi Yar.  The people of those regions were at first buried in shallow graves, and later burnt to ashes. If any few extended families had a single surviving relative, any such survivor would be unable to visit the graves of those they lost to pay them respects.  Nothing was done to indicate to the people of these almost entirely Roman Catholic regions that they were committing a sin, much less a mortal sin, in helping to shoot the three million Polish Jews and the hundreds and thousands of Ukrainian Jews, or in transporting them to concentration camps and slave labor camps and death camps. 

  But there were men and groups which, in various small ways, did successfully resist the Nazis’ demand that their regions “give up its Jews”.  Small Protestant towns in France who knew the perils of belonging to the ”wrong” religion and successfully, at the risk of their lives, hid hundreds and hundreds of Jews in their homes in the French countryside.  Vatican orders or threats of mortal sin or impediment to receiving communion would have been sent forth to give pause to good Catholics who took communion on Sunday and murdered a few thousand Jews each on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., and took communion again on Sunday, and so on through the weeks and months and years of the “Final solution of the Jewish Problem”.  The solution was enacted; there is no more Jewish problem in Europe. 

  When Topol was filming the movie, “Fiddler on the Roof,” he reported that when the local peasants asked where he was from and he said “Isarel,” they were puzzled so he said, “I am a Jew.” At that they smiled wisely, gestured negatively, and, “Oh no; we know about THAT; we took care of all of THEM,” they told him.  These good Catholics, over 20 years later, still regarded their murderous behavior as acceptable to GD and man; they told without hesitation or shame of their part in slaughtering the Jews in their midst.  How does it happen that so many good Catholics had no idea that murdering Jews was a sin, much less a mortal sin?  Who was assigned the chore of letting them know that little detail?  Herre’s FrOITR

  There WERE men and women on the ground who had 20/20 FORESIGHT but who ALSO had the COURAGE to ACT as if other people’s lives mattered. 

  Some Catholic clergy helped hide Jews in monasteries and nunneries, but many more, perhaps thousands more, would have done so if this had received open, public, official Vatican approval and encouragement, which were lacking. 

  Bulgaria’s courageous refusal to give up its Jews succeeded.  No Bulgarian cities were bombed because of this refusal. 

  The wearing of the yellow star by “all loyal Danes” and the appalled faces of the Danes at the very idea of what the Nazis were doing, produced shame in the Nazis there and impeded Nazi efforts to round up Danish Jews, most of whom thereby were enabled to escape.   
  When done openly, such an attitude made a real difference.
  It introduced doubt.
  It introduced shame.
  It introduced confusion into previously arrogant Nazi minds.
  It confused and disempowered the death machine.
  It saved many thousands of lives.
  All these except the Bulgarians’ were individual efforts.

  There were owners of munitions factories using Jewish slave labor, whose consciences were numb, as well as the personnel within the camps, who might have been roused to refuse to commit murder if the Vatican had officially reminded its faithful that “murder” applies to the murder of Jews the same as to anyone else, since Jews are humans to be respected and even cherished, rather than insect pests to be exterminated with insecticide. 

  Could the Vatican have made a difference? 

  Of course it could.  Even individuals made a difference, and some made a fair-sized difference.

  So since all these others had the wisdom and the COURAGE to do what needed to be done, cries of innocence and complaints against “20/20 hindsight” mean nothing.

  I have read the posts above.  Rather than the evidence I am looking for as to t0he Vatican’s heroic officially instigated resistance to the Nazi murder macine, I only see excuses for Pope Pius XII’s having failed to attempt any such public proclamation, and the claiming of papal credit for courageous rescues performed, without papal authorizatin or encouragement, by individual priests and nuns.  

  Pope Pius XII failed miserably.
  He was far from saintly.

  There WERE men and women on the ground who had 20/20 FORESIGHT but who ALSO had the COURAGE to ACT as if other people’s lives mattered. 

  I read that entire post and saw only excuses, without any evidence of the Pope’s having “helped” tried to help,  anything like the number of Jews who would have lived to produced children and grandchildren had he issued a public proclamation.

  He failed miserably.
  He was far from saintly.

  * * *

  One other little detail.  One of the posts above claims that Pope Pius’ subtle efforts saved three million Jews. 
  Say what?  That’s 45% of Europe’s Jewry. 
  But fewer than 10% of Europe’s Jews survived. 

  Obviously the claim that Pope Pius II saved three million Jews doesn’t fit the numbers on the ground.

  Obviously someone’s credibility is severely in question. 
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 24, 2010 at 12:19 am

   Dear Ms. Vise and Mr. Wilensky, Please tell me what damning evidence and horrific events was discovered after 1963 to change the world’s opinion of Pope Pius XII from admiration and gratitude to turning him into a despicable anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator. Those, who actually lived through the war and were in some way touched by the church in its efforts, thanked Pius XII universally. These include Israelis, Jewish organizations, and Jews worldwide. What happened that enabled the baby boomer critics of today to strip him of all of the benevolence credited to the Catholic institutions and individual Catholics who were encouraged to reach out to Jews? The current belief is that Pius XII did absolutely nothing but all of the lifesaving work  is only in the name of each priest, nun, and individual. There are hundreds of sworn testimonies from these wonderful lifesavers including 3 Popes, that all state that they acted under the direct orders of Pope Pius XII. Please tell me what is the “smoking gun” you all found in your research to prove these witnesses are not telling the truth.
  Before Pave the Way initiated our document retrieval project, I went on line to the archives of the NY Times and the Palestine Post (Jerusalem Post) and using the search words of Pope Pius, Jews, Vatican, I examined every article I could find from 1939-1958. I could not find one negative article. How do you dear Ms. Vise and Mr. Wilensky explain this? I did find many articles, which reported the exact opposite of the known perception where the Vatican spoke out on numerous occasions against the deportations and persecutions. Strange, isn’t it?
  Actually, may I suggest, that it appears that most of the research that has been  done and quoted today is really in reading the books of the other critics. Mr. Wilensky do you speak Italian, German and French the languages necessary to read the Vatican Documents? I was also informed that no one with your name has ever been on record for research in the Vatican Secret Archives, which are open to 1939. Don’t you think this would be a bare minimum requirement to writing and defending your book about the Vatican actions during this era? You also have not accessed the main Vatican document registration page on our website. We have to date collected thousands of pages of original Vatican documents. We have the summaries of the 5125 documents from the closed section to 1945 ( with a search engine to research for the 9000 pages of the Acts and document of the Holy See during the Second World War)and those of many other countries. We have posted  all 24,000 pages of every L’Osservatore Romano news paper from 1938-1945. Please site these damning anti-Semitic articles from L O you wrote about. Where did you get the evidence, as an example, that one quarter of the SS kept their religion? Please send me these documents and I will post them.
  The problem with many of the critical statements that are made by many today, is that the only research they have done is to read the books of the other critics. Mr. Robert Katz critical book earned him a lawsuit by the family of Pius XII in Italy, which he lost and was forced to pay a large sum of money and barely averted a jail sentence. By the way the official court records of this case were torn from the official court record books but we do the have the microfilm. Yet people still quote statements from this discredited book.  Rolf Hochhuth (Author of The Deputy) was also sued when he accused Churchill of ordering the murder of a Polish General as stated in a subsequent play where he was now going after Churchill years after his death. He also lost that suit and was forced to pay a large sum by a British court. John Cornwell retracted his basic theories in Hitler’s Pope in his following book Pontiff in Winter, but no one really knows this. He also was caught with flagrant inaccuracies in not just the photo-shopped cover but with his claim of his visits and access to the Vatican Secret Archives.
  All Pave the Way Foundation has tried utilize our access and level of trust to gain access to and post on the World Wide Web as many documents and video testimonies as possible and to allow the everyday person to examine these and come to their own conclusion. For this we have been criticized by those whose theories and statements have been proven wrong. Like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Many of the legitimate archival historians, however have praised our effort since we have literally spoon fed this information through search engines and complete access to these very telling documents. In fact many now admit, based on newly discovered evidence, they are changing their views on the secret actions of Pope Pius XII (please see the article in Yad Vashem’s quarterly magazine for 2010). It is our goal to end this controversy which impacts over one billion people, one way or the other. If Pius XII appears guilty of these accusations by documents and testimonies we will state this, but absolutely nothing we have found supports this notion.
• Michael Hesemann says:

  May 24, 2010 at 3:18 am

  Mr. Wilensky,

  ironically, as stubbornly as you misspell my name, you repeat much more serious errors.  Your scenario that good Catholics spent the weekdays murdering Jews and went to Mass on Sunday, to receive the body of a martyred Jew in form of the Blessed Sacrament, is just absurd and far away from the truth. Gott Catholics, first of all, did not follow the Nazi party. They knew about the excommunication ban, they listened to “Mit brennender Sorge” in 1937. Sure there were Catholics who joined the Nazi party for  opportunistic reasons and of course Catholics were forced, as every German, to serve in the Wehrmacht. In this case they had to follow orders or were flatly executed. But the Nazis were clever enough to know that Churchgoers are never loyal to their ideology. That’s why they created lists of Churchgoers, that’s why Himmler made it a condition for an SS career to leave the Church. Yes, there were some simple SS man who still officially belonged to a Church, but as soon as they intended promotion to a higher rank they had to leave the Church. In 1937, Himmler proudly announced that he already has six SS divisions which were “completely Churchfree”. This “SS Elite” was ordered to work on the “Endloesung”.

  It is a known and documented fact that the coordination of the genocide was a Top Secret Matter (“Geheime Reichssache”) and that all parties involved were under an oath of secrecy. Only the higher ranking SS officers and their contacts within the Wehrmacht and the Party were fully aware of what was going on. Not one of them was a practising, church-going Catholic. Certainly the chemical worker who participated in the production of Zyklon B or the railway worker in charge of the trains had no idea that they were a part of this satanic plan. Most of them just followed orders without considering the consequences anyway. It is not known that any of the SS murderers at the KZ’s or their Polish or Ukrainean hands was an active Churchgoer and indeed there was noi Catholic Church for Germans in or near any of the death camps; you can be sure that SS men in uniform did not go to Mass in a Polish Church. To claim that “many of them even were priests is more than absurd, excuse me.  They did have field chaplains for the Wehrmacht, the common soldiers, but NOT for the SS (the only exemption were German national volunteers of the Waffen SS which was not part of the holocaust machinery; they were allowed to have chaplains)!

  Why should the Vatican excommunicate President Tiso of Slovakia, when he ordered to STOP the deportation of the Jews three times, following a Papal appeal. Only after the Germans took over control in Slovakia, the deportations begun. Therefore, it was good and helpful to have a Head of State of a Nazi ally which was open for Papal pleas!

  Yes, the Church did have means of communication that were not monitored by the Gestapo: VERBAL communication! Therefore, we have affidavits as evidence, but only a few written instructions or protest notes. For the conspiracy with the German military resistance, our only pre-1945 document is the Kaltenbrunner report, written by the head of Gestapo in November 1944 after the members of the resistance were arrested, tortured and interrogated. Still, we do have the first protocol of an interview of the middleman of this conspiracy, Josef Mueller, by the American O.S.I. in June 1945. And we have the affidavits of the involved personalities from the post-war era.

  Mrs. Vyse, please reflect what you are saying:
  “Some Catholic clergy helped hide Jews in monasteries and nunneries, but many more, perhaps thousands more, would have done so if this had received open, public, official Vatican approval and encouragement, which were lacking.”
  Do you really think the Jews would have been safe in the monasteries and nunneries if the Vatican would have publicly stated where they are? Excuse me, but I can’t imagine a more absurd scenario. Do you know what Hitler would have replied on a Papal appeal to all Catholic institutions to hide Jews? “Thank you, Papa Pio, for letting me know where they are – we already missed them!” When you are hiding something, isn’t it the trick not to tell that publicly?

  Regarding Rome you are all right. Yes, the Pope should have left the Vatican, sit down on the trainlines and block the train with the 1007 Jews. He did not do that. Instead, he negotiated a deal with General Stahel to spare the other 7000 Roman Jews who afterwards hidden in 155 Roman monasteries and convents (ca. 4200 of them), the Vatican and Castelgandolfo. The “deal” was not to resist and indeed he was assured (and this was the original order and we have a copy of it on file!) that they were just sent to Mauthausen in Austria as hostages, which was not a death camp. He could not know that Eichmann changed the order when he learned what had happened and sent the train to Auschwitz. 

  I agree that anyway it was a deal with the devil. Who of us ever wants to be in this situation to decide what to do? Save 7000 and sacrify 1000? Or resist and experience that all 8000 get deported? I pray to God that I will never be confronted with such a decision. Pius XII. certainly suffered from it. Eventually, he decided to save the 7000.
  Was this decision wrong? Whoever replies in the positive should know that he would be personally responsible for the death of 7000 Jews. But it was even more in danger. He knew about Hitler’s order to march into the Vatican and arrest the Pope. He did not care for his own life, he already had a signed declartation of resignation in his desk: “They would only arrest Cardinal Pacelli, not the Pope”, he stated. The Cardinals were ordered to go to Portugal and elect a new Pope. BUT it would also mean that the network of help, which he built up and coordinated, would immediately collaps. The victims in this case would not be “mere” 7000, but several hundred thousands of Jews! Can you really say he made the wrong decision?
   

   
   
• Michael Hesemann says:

  May 25, 2010 at 2:05 am

  (Edited, mistakes corrected)

  Mr. Wilensky,
  ironically, as stubbornly as you misspell my name, you repeat much more serious errors.  Your scenario that good Catholics spent the weekdays murdering Jews and went to Mass on Sunday, to receive the body of a martyred Jew in form of the Blessed Sacrament, is just absurd and far away from the truth. Good, faithful Catholics, first of all, did not follow the Nazi party. They knew about the excommunication ban, they listened to “Mit brennender Sorge” in 1937. Sure there were Catholics who joined the Nazi party for  opportunistic reasons and of course Catholics were forced, as every German, to serve in the Wehrmacht. In this case they had to follow orders or were flatly executed. But the Nazis were clever enough to know that Churchgoers were never loyal to their ideology. That’s why they created lists of Churchgoers, that’s why Himmler made it a condition for an SS career to leave the Church. Yes, there were some simple SS man who still officially belonged to a Church, but as soon as they intended promotion to a higher rank they had to leave the Church. In 1937, Himmler proudly announced that he already had six SS divisions which were “completely Churchfree”. This “SS Elite” was ordered to work on the “Endloesung”.
  It is a known and documented fact that the coordination of the genocide was a Top Secret Matter (“Geheime Reichssache”) and that all parties involved were under an oath of secrecy. Only the higher ranking SS officers and their contacts within the Wehrmacht and the Party were fully aware of what was going on. Not one of them was a practising, church-going Catholic. Certainly the chemical worker who participated in the production of Zyklon B or the railway worker in charge of the trains had no idea that they were a part of this satanic plan. Most of them just followed orders without considering the consequences anyway. It is not known that any of the SS murderers at the KZ’s or their Polish or Ukrainean hands was an active Churchgoer and indeed there was no Catholic Church for Germans in or near any of the death camps; you can be sure that SS men in or without uniform did not go to Mass in a Polish Church. To claim that “many of them even were priests” is more than absurd, excuse me.  They did have field chaplains for the Wehrmacht, the common soldiers, but NOT for the SS (the only exemption were German national volunteers of the Waffen SS which was not part of the holocaust machinery; they were allowed to have chaplains)!
  Why should the Vatican excommunicate President Tiso of Slovakia, when he ordered to STOP the deportation of Jews three times, following a Papal appeal. Only after the Germans took over control in Slovakia and overthrew Tiso, the deportations begun. Therefore, it was good and helpful to have a Head of State of a Nazi ally which was open for Papal pleas, as long as he was in office!
  Yes, the Church did have means of communication that were not monitored by the Gestapo: VERBAL communication! Therefore, we have affidavits as evidence, but only a few written instructions or protest notes. For the conspiracy with the German military resistance, our only pre-1945 document is the Kaltenbrunner report, written by the head of Gestapo in November 1944 after the members of the resistance were arrested, tortured and interrogated. Still, we do have the first protocol of an interview of the middleman of this conspiracy, Dr. Josef Mueller, by the American O.S.I. in June 1945. And we have the affidavits of the involved parties from the post-war era.
  Mrs. Vyse, please reflect what you are saying:
  “Some Catholic clergy helped hide Jews in monasteries and nunneries, but many more, perhaps thousands more, would have done so if this had received open, public, official Vatican approval and encouragement, which were lacking.”
  Do you really think these thousands of Jews would have been safe in the monasteries and nunneries if the Vatican would have publicly stated where they were? Excuse me, but I can’t imagine a more absurd scenario. Do you know what Hitler would have cynically replied on a Papal appeal to all Catholic institutions to hide Jews? “Thank you, Papa Pio, for letting me know where they are – we already missed them!” When you are hiding something, isn’t it the trick not to tell that publicly?
  Regarding Rome you are right. Yes, the Pope should have left the Vatican, sit down on the trainlines and block the train with the 1007 Jews. He did not do that. Instead, he negotiated a deal with General Stahel to spare the remaining 7000 Roman Jews who were afterwards hidden in 155 Roman monasteries and convents (ca. 4200 of them), the Vatican and Castelgandolfo. The “deal” was not to resist and indeed the Vatican was assured (and this was the original order and we have a copy of it on file!) that they were just sent to Mauthausen in Austria as hostages, which was not a death camp. He could not know that Eichmann changed the order when he learned that Himmler stopped the razzia and sent the train to Auschwitz. 
  I agree that anyway it was a deal with the devil. Who of us ever would want to be in this situation to decide what to do? Save 7000 and sacrify 1000? Or resist with the consequence that all 8000 get deported? I pray to God that I will never be confronted with such a decision. Pius XII certainly suffered from it. Eventually, he decided to save the 7000.

  Was this decision wrong? Whoever replies in the positive should know that he would be personally responsible for the death of 7000 Jews. But it was even more in danger. He knew about Hitler’s order to march into the Vatican and arrest the Pope. He did not care for his own life, he already had a signed declartation of resignation in his desk: “They would only arrest Cardinal Pacelli, not the Pope”, he stated. The Cardinals were ordered to go to Portugal and elect a new Pope. BUT it would also mean that the network of help, which he had built up and coordinated, would immediately collaps. The victims in this case would not be “mere” 7000, but several hundred thousands of Jews! Can you really say he made the wrong decision?
   
  Sincerely, Michael Hesemann
  PTWF Germany
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 25, 2010 at 5:02 am

  I named several individuals and organizations that saved more Jews than the Vatican did. 

  Obviously the Polish Jews failed to benefit from whatever secret “help” the Vatican offered.
  Hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews, possibly even most of the pre-war Polish Jewish population of three million, would probably have been saved if the faithful Polish Catholics had had any reason to believe that their Pope disapproved of their helping the Nazis to expose and hunt down Polish Jews and confine them in the Warsaw ghetto and elsewhere. 

  Are you under the misimpression that the Nazis accomplished their great murdering job entirely on their own?  On the contrary; good Catholics in many lands assisted in the job, unimpeded by any sermons suggesting that murdering Jews was as much a sin as murdering Poles and Ukrainians.  Why, some of those Catholics might even have been willing to sell guns and bullets to Jews who were desperate to pay any amount for weapons with which to defend themselves, but could scarcely obtain any at all at any price.  And when Jews tried to join the Polish resistance, they were usually shot–but if the Pope had issued instructions not to murder Jews, and if priests had preached as much in the churches, the Polish resistance might even have permitted the Jewish fighters to join in their fight, instead of murdering them. 

  So did the Ukrainian Jews, a vast number of whom were murdered by devout Ukrainian Catholics.  Let me tell you what I know about the Ukrainian Catholics. 

  The Ukrainian Catholics had long been accustomed to invade shtetlach (little Jewish countruyside villages) and shoot up some of the people.  During his childhood they came through my father’s shtetl time and time again, until the day when my father saw his beautiful and loving young mother murdered by Ukrainian Catholics in 1918 because they regarded Jews as children of the devil, exactly in accord with what they were taught in church.  My father fortunately was spared the sight when in 1922 they murdered his grandmother as well.  The same churches continued to teach them the lie about Jews being children of the devil so that the Ukraininans during WWII felt very happy about the opportunity to murder the devils.  This eager participation by Ukrainian Catholics appears in a document called The Black Book.  If only the Ukrainian Catholics had heard that the Pope thought that they were wrong to shoot the Ukrainian Jews! 

  And you expect me to weigh the fewer than ten thousand Jews that Pope Pius saved against these many millions of Polish and Ukrainian Jews on whose behalf Pius spoke not a word?  The Polish Catholics and the Ukrainian Catholics had for centuries been taught by the Catholic church to demonize and hate the Jews.  When they heard NOTHING from Pope Pius XII to counteract that message, or to dissuade them from helping the Nazis, THEIR ASSISTANCE in pointing out Jews, tracking down Jews, shooting Jews, and otherwise cooperating with the destruction of Polish and Ukrainian Jewry enabled the Nazis to indeed destroy almost all of Polish and Ukrainian Jewry, not to mention the Jews of other Catholic countries where the local officials and population cooperated, such as supposedly liberal France. 

  But in Protestant Denmark, the scathing looks on the faces of local Danish officials cowed the Nazis such that a relatively small percentage of Danish Jews were caught and murdered.  Alas, there were few Jews IN Denmark, but had the officials and population in Poland, the Ukraine and other Catholic nations looked so scathingly at the Nazis, those Jews, too, would have been hidden in greater numbers, and a significant percentage there, too, might have been saved.

  Thank GD for the Bulgarian government, which simply said NO to its German ally and refused to hand over the Bulgarian Jews. 

  You address me by name (which you misspell!) yet fail to acknowledge the power of goodness, which was utilized by the Japanese consul, by Schindler, by the Bulgarian nation, and by the Danes.  

  And how cleverly you twist my words.  I never said anything so idiotic as to suggest that the Pope should issue a public order for nunneries and monastaries to hide Jews there.  I said that the Pope should merely make it known that murdering Jews was a mortal sin, or at least a sin as grave as any other murder. 

  I said, and say again, that if the Vatican had issued a blanket condemnation of the murder of ANYONE, INCLUDING JEWS, that there would have been hundreds of thousands of Catholic lay people who, instead of murdering as many Jews as they could and helping the Nazis to identify and hunt down Jews, would have abstained from participating in the murders or in assisting the murderers.  And of those who did nothing, more would have helped to hide Jews, hoping to store up treasure in Heaven.  And that the minds of the priests, nuns, and monks would have been useful in thinking of ways to achieve this.  Instead, we had a paltry few brave and sacred souls who did hide a few Jews, but not the massive QUIET effort which could have saved so many more and might indeed have cowed the Nazis into shame as the Danish contempt cowed the Nazis in Denmark. 

  If Pope Pius XII had issued a ban on murdering Jews, the officials of the church would have known that it was a good work to find ways to hide Jews or to resist deportation of Jews or to preach in the churches to the peasants and townsfolk who participated in the murdering of Jews.   Many more such officials would have found ways to save the lives of many many many more Jews. 

  Contrast the poor record of the Catholic Church during those difficult days with the relatively impressive achievements of a very few individuals. 

  Powerless people totally lacking in official backing saved many entirely on their own.  Schindler, backed by nothing more than his own chutzpah, saved over one thousand Jews.  Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara, with the backing of his wife Yukiko, risked their own lives and the lives of their small children. Sugihara, over the course of a few weeks, and without permissoin from his own government, took it upon himself to do whataever he could.  He spent 16 hours/day at it; he hand-wrote over 2000 transit visas and thereby saved over 6000 Jews, including all the students and teachers of a yeshiva, without making any deals with the Nazis.  

  Yet the one man who commanded the decency and the heavenly reward of millions of Catholic faithful and the backing of all the officials of the church in many many nations was able to save no more than these two men together, and fewer than a handful of officials in the government of Bulgaria?  

  You expect us to believe that this was all the Catholic Pontiff was capable of achieving?

  Look at the numbers.  Look at the percent of European Jewry destroyed.  And you have allowed yourself to be convinced that the Pope was simply UNABLE to save more than the 7000 lives saved by Schindler and Sugihara?  

  And you expect us to be similarly convinced?  

  Think again.  
      
    
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 25, 2010 at 5:39 am

  Mr. Wilensky,
  Regarding the pope’s actions with Hungary, the allies did in deed threatened Admiral Horthy, regent of Hungary, with retaliation but it was only Pope Pius XII that offered and granted asylum to protect the family of Admiral Horthy. I have an interview with a Jewish man who was sheltered there and who physically opened the door to allow the family of Horthy in for protection and then turned the Nazis away when they came to collect the family. Your quote “curse [Christ] and whose hearts reject him even today.” was as usual taken out of context by Pacelli’s critics. This speech was delivered in an International Eucharistic Conference, which took place in Budapest, Hungry in 1938. The speech was focusing on “the Godless  Nazi and Communist regimes”. This was never meant to refer to Jews and was only recently construed to mean the Jews since it was intentionally and conveniently taken out of context. As for your opinion of the passionate relationship that he personally had for the Jewish people you actually need to read original Vatican documents of his intercession in multiple areas of Jewish concern that anti-Semites would never give a moment’s thought. Read the book of Israeli ambassador Meir Mendes and son of Pacelli’s best friend an Orthodox Jewish boy Dr.Guido Mendes to see the real relationship. You need to read the opinion of those who knew him personally. Just today we spoke to the son of a Jewish man who was personally saved by Pius XII. He physically met him twice and was sheltered in the Vatican for over one month when he was then sent to the Dominican Republic with Vatican help.  Stating that this is relationship is in jarring contradiction with other Vatican officials simply a statement that simply makes no sense since we are only talking about Pius XII not other Vatican officials. No one said there weren’t anti-Semites in the Vatican.

  His non-recognition of Israel had to deal with political, diplomatic issues and safety issues of Christians in Arab countries, which remained obstacles until 1993 with Pope John Paul II. Even in 1993 there was much opposition within the Vatican to recognize Israel. But it was Pius XII that encouraged the Catholics states to vote for the partitioning of Palestine in November, 1947. Even with the diplomatic normalization of relations in 1993 Israel promised the Holy See they would finalize the legal and Fiscal relationships between the two states that to this day remain unresolved. Even Pope John XXIII would not recognize Israel and yet you wouldn’t call him an anti-Semite, would you?
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 25, 2010 at 7:53 am

  One of the many websites documenting the achievement of Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara’s singlehandedly, without backing from his government or from anyone else, in saving over 6000 Jews from the Shoah by issuing them transit visas is the following: 

  http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/sugihara.html

  If that is what one unassisted man can do, qol vchomer, how much more can a man do with the entire network of the Catholic Church to back him up?  Very little more, it seems.  But of course Sugihara had the will, the courage, the determination to do all he could. 

  That must be why Sugihara saved almost as many lives, alone on his own, as Pope Pius XII.
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 25, 2010 at 12:54 pm

  Dear Ms. Vise,
   Since you brought up Japan and all it did for the Jews. I would like to enlighten you to documents, which clearly show that these efforts were requested by the Apostolic Delegate to Japan, Archbishop Paulo Morella, who requested visas for Jews traveling through Japan. We have the reference of such intervention in the Acts and Documents of the Holy See during the Second War for the case of 460 Rabbis the Vatican was rescuing October 1943. Consul Sugihara saved 6000 Jews , sorry Pius XII saved over 12,000 with just the action  in the Dominican Republic. This is one out of dozens of separate secret acts, which saved thousands of Jewish lives.  As usual the critics easily praise those who may have implemented these requests but conveniently omit the action for the Vatican who may of initially made the appeal to help. We also see this same phenomenon in the case of the Jews rescued in the Dominican Republic. Here is the interview of the 98 year old priest Msgr Giovanni Ferrofino, who physically went to see General Trujillo to request visas in the name of Pope Pius XII, every time they could get a ship to rescue Jews from Portugal and Spain many times per year from 1939-1945.
  Also since you are keen to send links to the Jewish virtual library and if you want to know how many Jews Pius XII saved through his actions please read 860,000 Jews saved the truth about Pius XII and the Jews and please read A question of Judgment by ADL Director Dr. Joseph Lichten.
  Now I grant you may not wish to believe these articles since they were written by people who actually lived through the war and had to look into the eyes of death daily. They didn’t have the same 20/20 hindsight that all of the baby boomer critics have today
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 25, 2010 at 2:48 pm

  Mr. Krupp, how interesting that you find it necessary to bring out the cannons against me. 

  It is hardly necessary to use cannons against a mouse.  I did not discuss everything that Japan did.  I named the achievement of ONE man, acting alone without the support of his government or of ANY organization, who in three weeks of tireless labor singlehandedly produced 2,000 transit visas, thereby saving an entire yeshiva and a total of over 6,000 Jewish lives.  

  OF COURSE Pope Pius XII, with all the weeks and years and manpower and resources at his command, should have been able to save many, many, many times more Jews than Consul Sugihara.  If in three weeks one man, Consul Sugihara, saved six thousand, then in 30 weeks he could have saved sixty thousand.  (Indeed, Raoul Wallenburg saved tens of thousands of Jews, again acting strictly on chutzpah, without an organization behind him.)  If one man would have been able in 30 weeks to save sixty thousand, then ten men in 30 weeks could have saved 600,000 and 20 men in 30 weeks could have saved 1,200,000.  But Pope Pius XII had many, many more than 20 men whom he could call upon to help him, and he had many more weeks than 30 for them to work in.  Yet he saved only 860,000?  That is pathetic. 

  If the Pope had merely gotten word to the Catholics of the Ukraine that murdering Jews counted against their souls as the murder of human beings, most or even almost all of the 900,000 Ukrainian Jews murdered by the local population might have been spared.  Similarly in Poland, if the Polish Catholics had merely refrained from helping the Nazis, 1.000,.000 or possibly 1,500,000 of the 3,000,000 murdered Polish Jews might have been spared.  The threat of excommunication would have meant a great deal to the Polish and Ukrainian Catholics who had formerly been taught by the Chuch to demonize their Jews.   

  It is insufficient to show that some Catholics and some priests helped save some Jews.  It is necessary to show that Pope Pius XII achieved significant numbers in proportion to the 6,000 men, women and children which one man, Consul Sugihara, without any organization of any kind behind him, saved in three short weeks.  IF we accept your figures, Pope Pius XII saved perhaps a million Jews overall–which is to say, according to you, he gets credit for ALL of the Jews who escaped, including those saved by Wallenburg and Sugihara. 

  But if he had done ALL that he could have done, he should have been able to save close to 2,000,000 in Poland and the Ukraine alone, simply by the refusal of those Catholics to cooperate with the Nazis.  AND he would also have saved others throughout the rest of Catholic Europe. 

  So according to your figures, Pope Pius XII could easily have saved at least twice as many murdered men, women, and children as he is claimed to have saved, simply by putting out the word that murdering Jews is a sin the same as murdering anyone else. 

  And he could have saved even more beyond those, if he had called on priests to help find hiding places and/or to provide visas to smuggle Jews into Latin America, as so many Nazis were so easily smuggled into Latin America by the Vatican after the war ended.  

      
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 25, 2010 at 3:43 pm

  Dear Mr. Krupp, you surely understand the very human need for an authority figure, someone to admire, to revere, and even worship. During a time of war, and particularly when information was not so readily available, one should not be too surprised if a newspaper wrote a laudatory article about the pope. What else did you expect the NYT to do? Who wrote those articles? It’s not like today, when it’s acceptable to make open criticism.

  There was no new damning evidence against Pope Pius XII after 1963. But a number of things changed: first, the war was over. In a time of war, people rarely make serious criticism of a world leader, even if they feel the leader’s behavior was lacking, unless of course the leader is the enemy. Second, the pope was dead. A pope, as opposed to a secular authority, is revered by hundreds of millions of people who would not dare to criticize as they believe the pope to be holy, and is typically respected by millions more outside the faith who typically refrained from criticism, if anything out of respect (or fear) of the millions who did revere the pope. Pius’ death may have made it easier for critics such as Hochhuth and others to finally speak up. Third, Pope Paul VI was truly antagonizing many people at that time, and those who felt some modicum of respect for the Church and/or the papacy may have felt it was too much and it was time to speak up. Fourth, all those Israelis and Jews generally who publicly thanked Pope Pius, many of them with the political intent of currying Catholic favor for the Jews and Israel (which was vital at the end of the war and in the first decades of the State of Israel when it needed all the support it could get), may have began to change their minds regarding their attitude toward the wartime pope as they realized their public acknowledgement was not paying off as the Vatican continued to shamefully refuse to recognize Israel. Fifth, religion generally began to lose adherents during the hippy and subsequent years, when issues like contraception, abortion, free love, etc. were becoming more important to a growing swath of the population, who increasingly felt the Church was out of thouch with them and reality. Sixth, many historians began to move past platitudes and individual testimonies, some of which may have been questionable in any case, and began scrutinizing the public record of the papacy during the war, and the churches generally before, during and after the Holocaust. The record was dismal. No one should be surprised at the stream of scholarly works excoriating the pope’s moral cowardice or the behavior of the churches during the war. Seventh, the postwar period was a time in which the Holocaust was rarely discussed, and that included the role any world leader may have played in it. And eight, as society becomes more open, and as the power of the Church to silence dissidents continues to diminish, one should not be surprised at more people willing to criticize the Church. One can only imagine what they would have said about the Church during the Middle Ages if the Church had not had such overwhelming power to crush (sometimes literally) opponents.

  I have to say that I am not surprised to see you have the testimony of many Catholic faithful, and particularly members of the clergy, who would say they acted under instruction of Pope Pius. What else would they say? Really. Especially if this testimony was recorded after Hochhuth and subsequent criticism of the pope, what did you expect this people would say? Of course they would come to the pope’s defence and say the pope instructed them to save Jews. Mr. Krupp, the Catholic Church is not exactly a paragon of free speech, or an organization that promotes free thinking, or that tolerates dissent or criticism from within. This is the reason why publicly you would hear this laudatory testimony, but privately the same cleric may say something different. For instance, Angelo Roncalli publicly declard that his work to save Jews was done under instruction of the pope, however, as Chaim Barlas (an emissary of the Jewish Agency in Palestine sent to Europe to save Jews in the 1940s and who worked with Roncalli toward that end) wrote in his memoirs, Roncalli had told him privately that he was filled with resentment toward his superiors, “whose power and influence are great, but who refrain from action and resourcefulness in extending concrete help.” In France, Cardinal Tisserant also felt anger toward his superiors. He wrote privately to the Archbishop of Paris Cardinal Suhard, that “our superiors do not want to understand the real nature of this conflict.” Tisserant had futilely pleaded with Pius XII to issue an encyclical clearly stating that Catholic individuals had an obligation to follow the dictates of their conscience rather than blindly executing all orders, no matter how powerful the source. He added in that letter, “I fear that history will reproach the Holy See with having practiced a policy of selfish convenience and not much else.” So, these men saw that criticism would come, and for good reason. They would not be surprised at anything that happened after Hochhuth, and neither should you.

  Many of those people whose testimony you cite may have not remembered whether the pope specifically told them to save Jews or not, but assumed (logically, but tragically probably not really) that the pope did that. After all, that was the charitable thing to do, and one would expect that and more of the pope. So many may have added color to their recollections because of that. Don’t underestimate the allegiance to someone the faithful calls “Holy Father” and “Vicar of Christ”, and who not consider these figures of speech. But even if, for the sake of argument, the pope had in fact instructed all clergy to help hounded Jews, everywhere and in any way possible—which I don’t think he did—one must question why such an order was so widely ignored as the evidence of members of the clergy helping Jews is meagre (to put it charitably), and the results of any such action in any case, assuming it was taken, was so pathetically ineffective. And please, don’t tell me again of a bunch of Jews that may have found refuge here and there. Six million died at the hands of Christians, and even if a few thousand helped, many millions did not.

  Mr. Krupp, even though I can read Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, English and French, I am afraid I cannot read German beyond a few dozen words. I confirm your assertion that I was never at the Vatican Secret Archives. Many other researchers had access to some of the documents there and in other archives, and as you may infer from my use of supporting quotations from the various players in the period under discussion, I have access to plenty of documentation and I know how to interpret and use it. I use many quotes from L’Osservatore Romano in Six Million Crucifixions showing the inherent antisemitism in that publication. No need to review them all here. Some of them are from even earlier periods than the ones you have, though, like during the Dreyfus Affair, for instance. In 1898, at the height of the infamous Affair, L’Osservatore had this to say, among other things: “Jewry can no longer be excused or rehabilitated. The Jew possesses the largest share of all wealth, movable and immovable. . . The credit of States is in the hands of a few Jews. One finds Jews in the ministries, the civil service, the armies and the navies, the universities and in control of the press. . . If there is one nation that more than any other has the right to turn to antisemitism, it is France, which first gave their political rights to the Jews, and which was thus the first to prepare the way for its own servitude to them.” Not content with this, they also said, “Antisemitism ought to be the natural, sober, thoughtful, Christian reaction against Jewish predominance.” In case you think this was a fluke and the Church of Pius XII was any different, please take a look at the June 1938 quote I posted earlier, or take a look at the January 1939 edition, for example.

  You asked me for the source for my claim that by December 1938 almost a fourth of the SS remained in the Catholic faith. It comes from an internal SS report, NA Washington, T-580, roll 42, file 245.

  I realize many people who criticize the Pope or the Church during the Nazi era regurgitate what they read in books. So do the defenders. You’ll have to excuse me for I am also guilty of learning about history from other historians, and not just from reading the documents in their original languages in the physical location where they are kept. To my defense however I hope I have considered the opposing view, even if I disagree with it, and at the very least in my book I let the players speak by themselves by quoting them extensively. So, even if I cite a document I found in another historian’s book (as opposed to having copied it from the actual document), the document is the document, irrespective of where I read it (unless you think the documents are misquoted, or maliciously corrupted, in which case that is a serious accusation and a different story altogether).

  I commend PTWF for the efforts to digitize and make the relevant documentation available. I hope that corpus of material will include all documents, even if they are counter to your position. Also, I hope your position of influence in the Vatican may speed up the process of opening the Archives for the period covering the entire Nazi era and beyond. I personally think that when the Vatican put forth 11 volumes of documents in an attempt to squelch criticism after “The Deputy” they may have done themselves a disservice, as one cannot be blamed to think that the Vatican would have released the clearest, most forceful exonerating documents to clear Pope Pius’ memory, yet as you know those 11 volumes only raised more questions that the Vatican refused to answer, further increasing the tidal wave of criticism. Now, about 40 years later, we learn that the Archives will remain closed for another four years at least… It’s hard to feel sympathy for the Vatican under these circumstances. Mr. Krupp, as far as I know no one criticizes PTWF for making documents available, as you claim. The two types of criticism I am aware of are of shoddy, amateurish research and what I have been complaining about, namely, the misleading of the layperson as I illustrated a number of times in this conversation. By the way, I am very happy we we are having it, and I thank you and Mr. Hesemann for taking the time to participate.

  In regards to your point about Admiral Horthy being offered and granted assylum by Pope Pius, I am going to answer by asking you a question: who cares? Horthy did not stop the deportations because the pope offered him assylum. He stopped because he believed Roosevelt’s warning that the Allies would pulverize Hungary, followed by a particularly damaging bombing raid on Budapest.

  Again you are twisting things in reference to my quote from the International Eucharistic Conference. Why do you feel you have to say the focus of the conference was on “the Godless  Nazi and Communist regimes”? Mr. Krupp, who cares if the conference was about atheist Nazis or the health benefits of eating spinach? The pope was talking about the Jews. The pope was not referring to Nazi lips that curse Christ and Nazi hearts who still reject Christ even today. He was referring to the Jews. You know this.

  Vatican non recognition for the right of the Jewish people to establish a homeland in their ancient land of Israel may have been influenced by concern with the safety of Christians in Arab lands, but given the number of Christians in Arab lands one must wonder if this was sufficient for the Vatican to delay recognition for so long. You mention political and diplomatic issues as well. I will tell you the actual reason. It began long before Pope Pius XII. In 1904 Theodor Herzl met with Pope Pius X with the intent of securing Vatican support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But Pope Pius X did not recognize the right of the Jews to exist as Jews: “The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people . . . The Jewish religion was the foundation of our own; but it was superseded by the teachings of Christ, and we cannot concede it any further validity.” And so he denied support. So did the Cardinal Secretary of State, who earlier also denied support by saying, among other things, “But in order for us to come out for the Jewish people in the way you desire, they would first have to be converted.” During the Nazi era, Undersecretarty of State Tardini (under Pius XII) also opposed Jewish emigration to Palestine, the only place where Jews could have been saved from the Nazi onslaught: “The Holy See has never approved of the project of making Palestine a Jewish home . . . [because] Palestine is by now holier for Catholics than for Jews.” Just in case you feel inclined to counter that this was a subordinate without much weight (he wasn’t, but anyway…), Secretary of State Maglione also opposed the posibility of establishing a Jewish homeland there, because Catholics had a right to the holy places, and their “religious feelings would be injured and they would justly feel for their rights if Palestine belonged exclusively to the Jews.” (!) And just in case you want to exculpate these individuals because perhaps they didn’t really know what was going on (they knew very well, but anyway…), after the horrors of the Holocaust became widely known and the State of Israel had been declared in 1948 your esteemed L’Osservatore Romano, which I remind you was the closest publication to the pope in the Vatican, felt necessary to declare “Modern Israel is not the true heir of Biblical Israel, but a secular state . . . Therefore the Holy Land and its sacred sites belong to Christianity, the True Israel.” So, please, Mr. Krupp, let’s call a spade a spade and recognize the real reasons why the Church and the Vatican acted the way they did vis-à-vis the Jews before, during and after the war.

  One last point: you made reference to an article referencing the number 860,000 Jews saved by the pope, which comes from Pinchas Lapide and as you know, or should know, has been widely discredited as voodoo math. In case you do not know, Lapide basically calculated that outrageously inflated number by “subtracting all reasonable claims of rescue made by the Protestant Churches … as well as those saved by Communists, self-described agnostics and other non-Christian gentiles” from his totally unverified and unsupported 1.3 million Jews that he believed survived the Holocaust. This is not credible, Mr. Krupp, and your use of this number is unworthy of you.

  Herr Hesemann, first of all I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for misspelling your name. Rest assured that that has more to do with typing in a cramped airplane than with any desire to offend. I meant no disrespect.

  Let me see if I understand you: do you mean to say that no Catholic perpetrators  received religious services, or do you mean no “good” Catholics received these services? Or do you mean to say they did receive religious services, but not in the form of going to Mass on Sunday? I agree with you many Catholics joined the Nazi party due to opportunistic reasons, but to believe they did not agree with the platform is naïve and does not correlate well with the fanatical fervor displayed by them (as everyone else). Or were the tens of thousands cheering Hitler in the party rallies only the ones that joined for ideological reasons while the opportunists stayed at home? Or maybe the opportunists were forced to cheer by the Gestapo? Sure, young Germans were conscripted into the Wehrmacht, but many joined voluntarily, and many joined other organizations, including the SS, because they believed in the platform. The men in the Order Police and the Einsatzgruppen were not coerced to kill, were not forced to pose for the camera while humiliating old Jews, were not forced to act in front of the cameras as they took pictures and movies of themselves and their comrades killing Jews. They were not forced to share the stories of their actions with their friends and families. No SS man was forced to kill if he didn’t want to, and they were given the option to opt-out if they felt they were not up to the task. Also, I mentioned Franz Stangl earlier. Was he a “simple SS man” too? You keep mentioning that the SS did no longer belong to the church. Even if that was so for the majority of them, that did not take away their heritage, their education, or their beliefs. This is not something you just switch off, Mr. Hesemann. As I mentioned earlier, it did not work on the Jews when they were forced to convert to Catholicism in the Middle Ages, it did not work in the Soviet Union, and it did not work with the Nazis.

  Please do not repeat the already debunked postwar myth that nobody knew back home, and that they were merely following orders, and that they feared for their own lives if they dared opt out of an Aktion. No, these men killed because they wanted to, they did it with gusto and pride, and very few of them asked their superiors to be relieved of their duties, and there is no record of any of them being shot because of it. Many men volunteered to work in the death camps; they even had waiting lists for the job. It’s absolutely true that the Endlösung was a top secret operation, but it’s absolutely not true it stayed that way. Everyone knew back home. Millions of soldiers sent letters and pictures from the East telling their families of their deeds, with pride and with nothing to hide. They spoke about it at home when they came back from the front, and their families largely approved of it as they had all been indoctrinated in the same miasma of hatred. As Stewart Herman, the Minister of the American Church in Berlin who remained in Germany until December 1941, corroborated: “It became definitely known through the soldiers returning from the front that in occupied Russia, especially at Kiev, Jewish civilians—men, women, and babies—were being lined up and machine-gunned by the thousands.”

  I can’t believe you really believe that the factory workers making Zyklon B thought all of a sudden the insect and pest population had grown so dramatically that they had to produce orders of magnitude more poison. Or that the train workers bought the official story that they were bringing thousands of Jews into the concentration camps every day to work, given that they were doing it every day. Even for a large camp like Auschwitz, even a very dimwitted train engineer would have realized that they were bringing too many people in, and they were never taking any out. At some point these people surely must have wondered about the brutality of the transportation process, the death of many of the people on arrival, the Selektion process which they witnessed as it was done next to their train, and the stench of death which was pervasive in these camps and they would not have been able to avoid. Surely these men smoked a cigarette and chatted with the guards while the trains were emptied before leaving to pick up another batch. You don’t think they would have asked what was going on there? Please, Mr. Hesemann. You surely know better.

  Look, maybe the German perpetrators did not have a German Catholic Church near the concentration camps, but they managed nonetheless. They celebrated Christmas, and they had access to priests. It’s misleading to say that field chaplains were restricted to the Wehrmacht, because even though the Order Police and the Einsatzgruppen were SS they were attached to the army and operated right behind the front lines, so the military chaplains tended the souls of both the foot soldiers (who by the way, also often merrily participated in the exterminatory actions) as well as the SS (and I even have photographic evidence of this). There’s one well documented case of priests who tried to obstruct a killing operation (unsuccessfully), and they report how the army and SS men in these battalions came to them for spiritual support.

  The Vatican would have excommunicated Father Tiso if it had believed that what he was saying and doing was not in agreement with Catholic teachings and Church policy. As I said earlier, instead all he got was a slap on the hand meant to show the Church disapproved of all of it, while clearly that was not the case. What they truly disapproved of was the embarrassing situation Slovakia was getting the Church into, because Slovakia’s president and part of the government was made of Catholic priests. When I said that many of the perpetrators were priests I meant in Croatia, where many priests were part of the Ustasha, many committed the most heinous crimes imaginable, and where the commandant of the concentration camp of Jasenovac, a place where the crimes committed made even the SS cringe, was a franciscan priest who had no qualms in cutting hundreds of throats of people in one night while wearing his franciscan robe. But this is just priests with literally blood on their hands. Many more were part of the genocide through the incitement of their sermons and writings, and the antisemitism they continued to spread throughout the war.

  Ms. Vise already responded, but let me just add that open appeals to the faithful and to the clergy does not necessarily mean giving shelter in a convent or church. I agree with you this would have actually helped the Germans. But the point is that the clergy could have clearly told the faithful that what was happening was very bad and very wrong, that it was incompatible with Catholic teachings, and that it was every Catholic’s responsibility to act in any way possible to help, from giving shelter in an attic or barn, to providing food or clothes to partisans and/or escaping Jews, or even by throwing a piece of bread over a concentration camp’s fence wherever that was possible. When there’s a will, there’s a way, as the saying goes. Clearly thousands of people found ways to help. What would the situation had been if instead there had been millions? What would the situation had been if the Polish, Lithuanian or Ukrainian neighbors denouncing a Jew had been told in Church that that was a sin, and that they not only should refrain from doing it but should provide help in any way possible? What would have been the situation if the priests had told the perpetrators in the forests and ravines of the eastern front repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that what they were doing was a crime and a mortal sin, and that they should refrain from doing it any more or face excommunication and going to hell?

  Herr Heselmann, those 7000 Roman Jews that went into hiding did not do it because the pope warned them. They went into hiding because the Roman Jews, as opposed to those of other countries, knew what deportation meant, and knew that deportation was imminent. To the great credit to Rome’s Catholic neighbors, many of them provided shelter. As I said earlier, also to the great credit of many religious people they also provided shelter in Church properties (with papal knowledge and approval, no doubt). But, please, stop saying the canard that the pope chose to sacrifice 1000 Jews to save 7000. The letter Bishop Hudal gave General Stahel warning him the pope might need to make a public protest was just a bluff. As Weiszäcker reported with relief, the pope did not let himself be drawn into any demonstrative censure of the deportation, and this included any writen protest, any announcement on Vatican Radio, and even less, standing in front of the train taking the Roman Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz.

  Gabriel Wilensky
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 25, 2010 at 10:29 pm

  Ms. Vise,
  I’m sorry that you aren’t getting this. I know exactly how you feel since my wife and I both came from the same place. You are not being attacked but if you hang on to old prejudices and beliefs that the new documents simply prove wrong. Now If you refuse to examine these documents and simply just hold on to these arguments than shame on you.
  Pius XII was about to be killed along with the entire Roman Curia. This we can prove with documents. So as effective as you think all of the man power , resources and power at his disposal he should have saved more Jews you don’t grasp the desperate situation he was in. Many of the heroes you site were simply not in the same imminent danger. When one is surrounded by hostile forces and he still acts to save as many Jews as he could he is to be commended not condemned. He was not head of the Jewish faith he was the head of the Catholic Church and had an obligation to try to save Catholics as well. To conclude this tell me what every other religious leader or political leader did to save Jews . No one comes close to helping our people then Pius XII.
  The Talmud says if you save one man it is as if you saved all humanity. Maimonides also said anonymous charity (Which is the way he saved lives) is the highest form of charity and finally the Rambam said just because the whole world believes something is true does make it true., and just because no one believes it true does not make it untrue.
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 25, 2010 at 11:51 pm

   Mr. Wilensky
  I do understand much of what you state. I also agree that the book we put together is not a scientific study but is a simple compilation of documents and articles, which evolved program the symposium program guide.  It is now being completely rewritten in the appropriate fashion.
  However, what I cannot understand is why in 2008, when PTWF organized a symposium in Rome where all of the noted scholars, institutions and historians where invited to come to Rome to debate this issue only the critics universally boycotted this event . If all you claim is such historical evidence, why then wasn’t any of this information presented by the critics at our forum?  We even said we would use teleconferencing or at the very least we asked that they send us a list of questions to ask the panel, again nothing. One had to wonder why they wouldn’t participate. The conclusion is that the critics simply have a bankrupt case that they simply can’t defend when confronted with documents and testimony. Then they had the Chutzpah of calling this effort a one sided symposium. It’s easy to criticize efforts to remove hatred, which is one of the greatest causes of anti-Jewish sentiments impacting over 1 billion people.
  
  
  The panel we invited are all recognized in one way or the other as experts. Professor Matteo Napolitano, Andrea Tornielli (both invited by Yad Vashem last March to a closed session of review of the new information) Prof. Ronald Rychlak, Dr. Eugene Fisher, Fr Peter Gumpel, William Doino and others. We invited Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Museum in Washington, Michael Marrus, Saul Friedlander, Paul O’Shea, Susan Zuccotti, and others. What would have been the harm in attending this event so that debates like this would not be in writing but verbal? You make your case and present your evidence and these defenders will make their case and present evidence. They objected to the presence of invited guests who are not historians. Prominent Rabbis and Jewish leaders from around the world attended. Are we to say that all of these people are stupid and not capable of grasping the highly scientific information being presented? Nonsense, this is what we in the civilized world call a trial by jury.
  This was very disappointing.
  There is one other point that I wish to make and ask you to guard against. To blanket dismiss testimony of deeply religious and honest people Catholic or Jewish and saying that one would expect Catholics to defend Pius is not fair, it is offensive and most definitely not true. It is a convenient catch all to try to delegitimize these people who aren’t liars or trying to curry favor in the church.
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 26, 2010 at 3:28 am

  Mr. Krupp, I think Ms. Vise is “getting” it all right. With all due respect, I think it’s you that is failing to understand. Why would Ms. Vise, myself, and millions of other people around the globe, including the world’s foremost Holocaust scholars and historians fail to be persuaded by your arguments and your documentation? Do you ask yourself this question? Are we all malicious, bigoted, or just plain stupid? You yourself were complaining that many of these historians refused to join you in your symposium. Why on earth would they do that? Historians go to symposiums and conferences all the time, and they would jump at the possibility to get exposure to new, juicy unearthed documents. But as you bitterly complain, they did not do that. Not even via teleconference. So, it wasn’t a financial reason. No, they simply did not want to attend. Why do you think that is, Mr. Krupp? Could it have something to do with their belief that your research is poor? Could it be that they believe your interpretation of the data is wrong? Could it be they suspect these affidavits you’ve got? Could it be they suspect your motives? Could it be they see an attempt to mislead the layman by presenting facts to mean things they don’t mean, and when exposed you persevere doing the same all over again? Again, I mean no disrespect by posing these questions. I am just trying to see if we can together understand the dynamics at work here.

  By the way, if the pope acted the way he did because he was concerend for his life and that of the curia, as I said earlier he could have moved to London and maybe then he would have been free to speak his mind and instruct the faithful in the same way or better than the Archbishop of Canterbury, which I quoted above. Instead, he felt it more important to protect the Vatican treasures and stayed put, and stayed quiet.

  Not all Christian leaders were so concerned for their well-being, though. And not all were speaking out on behalf of the Jews from the relative comfort of London, as Mr. Hesemann suggested. The leaders of the Danish Lutheran Church, when the Nazis (which had already invaded them) were about to deport the country’s Jews, movilized to prevent just that. In a letter of protest sent to the German authorities before the deportations began in October 1943, which was read from the pulpit in churches in Denmark, Bishop Hans Fuglsang-Damgaard, with the support of all the Church’s bishops, said:

  “Whenever persecutions are undertaken for racial or religious reasons against the Jews, it is the duty of the Christian Church to raise a protest against it for the following reasons:

  . . . Because the persecution of the Jews is irreconcilable with the humanitarian concept of love of neighbors which follows from the message which the Church of Jesus Christ is commissioned to proclaim. With Christ there is no respect of persons, and he has taught us that every man is precious in the eyes of God. . . .

  . . . race and religion can never be in themselves a reason to deprive a man of his rights, freedom or property. . . . We shall therefore struggle to ensure the continued guarantee to our Jewish brothers and sisters [of] the same freedom which we ourselves treasure more than life.

  . . . We are obliged by our conscience to maintain the law and to protest against any violation of human rights. Therefore we desire to declare unambiguously our allegiance to the word, we must obey God rather than man.”

  Mr. Krupp, I will tell you something. I think the world will change its mind about Pope Pius if you found that he did something like this, that he spoke plainly, clearly, from the pulpits of all churches so everyone would know, that he specifically instructed the faithful to act. Not just to save Jews, but to stop denouncing, hunting them down, deporting them, and murdering them. Not through veiled messages no one understood. Not through secret missions. Not through silence, which was interpreted as tacit approval. There was nothing “heroic” about the pope’s supposed behind the scenes work on behalf of the Jews. There was nothing “heroic” about his silence, and even less of his obtuse, vague messages. As a consequence of the pope’s inaction (or at least ineffective action), over 1000 Roman Jews were deported to their deaths. As a consequence of what Bishop Fuglsang-Damgaard and all the Danish Lutheran Church’s bishops did, the Danish people were movilized to save Jews, which was accomplished in a myriad ways by regular people, without vast resources, and in front of and in defiance of Nazi eyes. These people surely feared the Gestapo as much as anyone else. Yet the Danes spoke out, they told the faithful in no uncertain terms what was happening and what they should and should not do, they movilized, and as a result almost all Danish Jews survived the war. And the saddest part of this story? This happened two weeks before the deportation of the Jews of Rome. Pope Pius chose not to follow this example.
  
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 26, 2010 at 7:13 am

  Mr. Krupp says, I’m sorry that you aren’t getting this.

  Ms. Vise asks, What is it you think I am not getting?  I “get” that Pope Pius XII failed to issue any kind of statement indicating that murdering Jews is murder.  I get that Pope Pius XII failed to issue any kind of general warning that Jews should go into hiding to avoid being murdered.  I get that the Vatican failed to obtain visas to Argentina and other Latin American countries and failed to smuggle Jews out of Europe, although it did both quite handily for Nazis after WWII.  I get that any of these actions might have saved another two million Jews and possibly many more than that. 

  Do you have documents that prove that Pope Pius XII did any of these things, or that the Vatican did any of these things?  If so, please present them. 

  I am totally uninterested in the saving of a handful of Jews here and there, knowing as I do that individuals without any impetus whatever from the Vatican or from Pope Pius XII managed on their own to save from one to ten thousand Jews each, and that many more such individuals would have done so had such information been forthcoming from the Pope. 

  I know for a fact, from the Black Book of the Ukraine, published within the past five years, that a significant number of the murdered Ukrainian Jews were killed by Catholic Ukrainians who would not have done so if they had thought this act endangered their souls.   

  Mr. Krupp misleadingly says, You are not being attacked but if you hang on to old prejudices and beliefs that the new documents simply prove wrong.

  Ms. Vise
  You accuse me falsely.  I have not had the heart to read those old books that present those old prejudices and beliefs.  I come NEW to this discussion.  But it is easy enough to find what individuals managed to achieve on their own and to extrapolate from there what further such actions might have achieved if Pope Pius XII had been willing to let people know that it IS MURDER when you murder a Jew. 

  Mr. Krupp brings out his cannon, saying,
  Now If you refuse to examine these documents and simply just hold on to these arguments than shame on you.

  Ms. Vise responds
  I am indeed ashamed that despite having taken courses in German, French, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, I have not learned to read any of those languages, so my examination of those documents would be futile, even assuming I had the funds available to go read them in situ, which I am ashamed to say I do not have.

  So you can be happy now, having thoroughly shamed me for my linguistic block and my lack of largesse.   

  The record remains of the amazing achievements of the individuals who, singlej-handedly or with the help of 20 people at most, saved a thousand or six thousand or tens of thousands of Jews from certain death, and it is impossible to avoid extrapolating to the numbers of such individuals who would have done likewise with a modicum of notice from their church that it is MURDER to murder a Jew.

  Mr. Krupp says,
  Pius XII was about to be killed along with the entire Roman Curia. This we can prove with documents. So as effective as you think all of the man power , resources and power at his disposal he should have saved more Jews you don’t grasp the desperate situation he was in.

  Ms. Vise responds
  By all means, prove it. 

  Mr. Krupp says
  Many of the heroes you site were simply not in the same imminent danger.

  Ms. Vise retorts, Indeed they were.  They were in danger every minute while performing their rescue operations. 

  Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker in Warsaw who rescued 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, took them to live with Jewish families, and kept a list on tissue paper in a glass jar buried under a tree so that after the war she could retrieve the children.  99% of the parents had been murdered but at least the children could be reunited with the Jewish community. 

  Danger?  She was in danger every minute.  She changed her residence every night.  Each time she carried a gunny sack containing a baby past the guards and out of the ghetto she was in danger.  Eventually someone betrayed her location and she was arrested and beaten.  Her leg and her foot were broken.  She was slated for execution but someone rescued her and hid her.   

  She was in danger but she had incredible courage.  You can google her name and find many articles on the web documenting her courage.  Unlike the courage that Pope Pius XII lacked.
  She was surrounded by hostile forces and she still acted to save as many Jews as she could.  Others who did less are hadly to be commended.  Others who had more power and more help and who did proportionally less han she did are indeed to be condemned.

  She was not head of the Jewish faith, she was a member of the Catholic Church and she saw that the greatest danger was to the Jews, who were literally being extgerminated like insects.  But Jews ARE human, and she was humane enough, unlike Pope Pius XII, to notice that fact.  

  Mr. Krupp asks, Tell me what every other religious leader or political leader did to save Jews.

  Ms. Vise
  No government on record, except Denmark and Bulgaria, has ever yet stepped in to stop a Holocaust in progress, not in Rwanda, not in Cambodia, not in Armenia, and not now in Africa either.  Almost no government comes close to helping the victims of a Holocaust until the damage is done. 

  As for religious leaders, you are right, the other Christians, especially the European Lutherans, also hated the Jews.  And the Muslim Mufti of Jerusalem squelched a deal where by half a million Jewish children would have been spared.  Can you imagine?  As a result, instead of “only” one million murdered Jewish children, 1,500,000 Jewish childern were murdered in the Shoah.  So Pope Pius XII was no worse than the rest of them? 

  Yes, the Old World Clergy certainty come up short when it comes to saving Jews.
  I agree with you there, Mr. Krupp.

  Mr. Krupp says
  The Talmud says if you save one man it is as if you saved all humanity.

  Ms. Vise agrees that,
  Concomitantly, if you cause one death, it is as if had caused the death of all humanity. 
  And, in fact, the hundreds of thousands of children and grandchilden produced by the survivors indicate how many humanities could have been saved had Pope Pius XII merely let it be known as official church doctrine that JEWS  ARE PEOPLE and that the murder of a Jew is MURDER.

  Mr. Krupp notes that
  Maimonides also said anonymous charity (Which is the way he saved lives) is the highest form of charity and finally the Rambam said just because the whole world believes something is true does make it true., and just because no one believes it true does not make it untrue.

  Ms. Vise
  I have seen little or no evidence that Pope Pius XII saved a fraction of the number whom he could have saved merely by acknowledging to Catholics world wide that Jews are people and that it is a sin to murder a Jew the same as it is a sin to murder anyone else. 

  I also have seen evidence that rather than acting anonymously, Pope Pius XII made sure to publicize the non-lifesaving gestures he made so that he would receive credit for caring even if (note I say IF; I am not convinced but am continuing to gather what evidence is available to me) he did not. 

  Incidentally, I HAVE a book describing hundreds of individual acts of courage on the part of righteous gentiles, including Catholics AND Protestants, acts in which individuals saved thousands of lives.

  This book has always saddened me.  How easily could so many more Jews have been saved, if only a few more such courageous righteous ones had been encouraged to do their bit. 

  And now that I realize that Pope Pius XII could have provided such impetus simply by uttering a single sentence, of course I do blame him for his failure of the moral courage to speak that one senence.

  I will continue to publish the names and deeds of such individuals to give the reader an idea of how little it takes to accomplish so much, even without money or position.  But yes, it does require courage.  These people risked their own lives, the lives of their spouses, the lives of their little children.  And each one of them said, “How could I help but do it?” 

  Strangely, Pope Pius XII’s words fail to allow him the moral high ground from which to ask that same question. 

  I honor the achievements of the Catholic Church in recent years.  But the upturn comes many years after the death of Pius XII, who acted and spoke in accord with the hatred of the church that produced him and that continued to discourage Catholics from saving Jews. 

  Indeed, a recent article in “The CatholicKnight” STILL claims the church itself to be the true Israel and condemns Israel for existing.  It even says that the Jews don’t need Israel, since the Jews in America are “safe” and that Jews have always (ALWAYS!) had safe places to live, and that the Jews of “Palestine” were “safe” during WWII.  Of course I need not explain the falsity of all that to you, Mr. Krupp, but doesn’t it bother you that they still lie about us that way?  It sure as shooting does bother me, being lied about that way.   
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 26, 2010 at 7:17 am

  Irena Sendler took the Jewish children whom she rescued to live with CATHOLIC families.

  I typed in error above.  I am sorry.  My fingers got ahead of me. 

  CATHOLIC families, of course, not Jewish families.
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 26, 2010 at 1:38 pm

   Dear Ms. Vise,
  Please send me the proof that can substantiate the statement that the Vatican sent Nazis to South America (the rat line). I have begged all of the critics who state this to please send me some sort of proof that this happened and was not just a script writer’s fantasy. The fact is there was one Nazi Bishop Hudal who did send some Austrian Nazis to South America but not the Vatican. This Bishop was an outcast and not accepted in the Vatican because of his pro Nazi stand.
  I can prove the Pius XII saved tens of thousands of Jews by sending them to South America but you will now have to research this yourself on the pages I linked below. Pius XII also used his personal fortune to give money to Jews escaping to Switzerland from Germany and Poland and personally paid $800 per person of his personal funds to send Jews to Brazil. Pius XII died a poor man because he used his personal family fortune.
  I don’t think I can send you any more links proving the condemnation of Nazi Atrocities by the Pope or anything else since you are obviously didn’t download any of the links I already sent you. Let me simply advise you to go to this page and this page and after you have read everything contact me back and I will be happy to fill in any gaps based on documents and your responses, which indicate that you read and understood these documents. But you now must actually try to investigate this as I did.
  The Catholic Knight is not the voice of the Vatican and there are unfortunately lunatic fringe blogs that do not accept Nostra Aetate. Don’t believe everything you read on the blogs, because the church does not state they are the new Israel or condemns Israel for existing.  The Vatican recognized Israel in 1993 and actually has one of the only embassies in Jerusalem today.

  Mr. Wilensky the symposium we held was not based on any of our research most of which came after our symposium but on efforts of the experts who I previously named along with the documents that were recently retrieved. Just as you didn’t ever go to the archives that were opened the other critics did not go to the archives up to 1939. So no this is not why they didn’t come to Rome.

  With the imminent arrest of the pope and the killing of the curia the pope had absolutely no concern for his life he worried about the tens of thousands of innocent people who would be killed if the expected riots broke out upon his arrest. We have this from not yet published Vatican documents of September 6, 1943.
  You stated that the world would change their mind if we found that the church condemned the arrest and deportation of the Jews. This did happen July 26,, 1942 when the Archbishop of Utrecht vehemently condemned the arrest and deportation of the Dutch Jews. The Vatican very quickly learned their lesson when the Nazis punished the church by accelerating the arrests and then included all of the converted Catholics, which was a violation of the 1933 concordat.
  You also state that is was the Pope’s inaction, which resulted in the arrests of the 1007 Jews in Rome. Sorry but it was the pope’s deliberate and direct action that saved the 7000 Jews and stopped the arrest at 2 PM the day they started. We did previously mention this along with the fact that the allies knew of the arrests almost a week before they occurred and didn’t warn anyone.
  I might mention that since you are talking about all of the world historians who you have researched their findings and who do not agree with our statements, please let me tell you that you may not have looked at the few eminent Jewish scholars and experts who actually do believe that everything we have presented is accurate and true. Sir Martin Gilbert, who is acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest scholars and historians of the Second World War said “Hundreds of thousands of Jews saved by the entire Catholic Church, under the leadership and with the support of Pope Pius XII, would, to my mind, be absolutely correct.”, he also stated “To assert Pius XII was ‘silent’ about Nazi mass murder is a serious error of historical fact.” , Israeli historian Michael Tagliacozzo the leading expert on the Nazi raid on Rome’s Jews and archivist of the Beth Lohamè Haghettaot Holocaust center in western Galilee in Israel, stated how Pius XII and the Vatican saved his life October 16, 1943 and has a folder full of additional testimonies saying the same thing. Jeno Levai’s the worlds expert on the Holocaust in Hungary with his book, Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pius XII Did Not Remain Silent, Rabbi David Dalin in his book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, Deputy U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg trials Robert MW Kempner, Albert Einstein, Serge Klarsfeld, Joseph Lichten internationals director of the ADL, along with (Voo Doo master) Historian and Israeli Ambassador Pinchas Lapide, Dan Kurzman and countless others. These people all lived through the war and have a level of understanding and empathy that comes from this experience.
• Paul O'Shea says:

  May 26, 2010 at 11:11 pm

  I am not going to enter into this conversation, but I do want to set the record straight on two things.  I am named as one of the critics invited to The Pave TheWay conference in Rome in September 2008.  Gary Krupp kindly invited me to attend, but I declined because of work commitments.  I teach and the timing of the conference cut across the last period of classes for Year 12 and their final preparations for the NSW HSC.  I did not decline because I did not want to go – I was unable to go.  I was able to go to Jerusalem at the invitation of Yad Vashem in March 2009 because teaching obligations allowed me about ten days to fly to Israel and attend the symposium.
  Second.  Access to the Archivio Segreto Vaticano can be done via the internet.  I have not visited the ASV but I have several bulging files of copies sent to me from Rome by the very efficient and professional staff.  All I did was fill out the online request form, cite the relevant file numbers and they did the rest.  Cardinal Kaspar spoke on 25 May saying that the ASV will go digital within 6 years.  Physical presence in archives is fast becoming a thing of the past – perhaps not ideal, but it is a reality. 
  I will be in Melbourne speaking on some of the issues discussed here in the lively environment of Limmud Oz.
• Margaret Visser says:

  May 26, 2010 at 11:35 pm

   
  Thank you, Gary Krupp and Michael Hesemann.  I admire your courage.
  Only one pretty obvious point:  I (a Roman Catholic) know very well that killing is evil.  The Pope need not tell me that; I have the Ten Commandments, which are foundational to my faith – and that of the Pope.  I also know that somebody’s race is irrelevant to the prohibition.  However, if I were filled with hatred and determined to kill someone, the Pope telling me not to would probably not make the slightest difference.  Every human being has his or her own conscience – and responsibility.  Every person also has a responsibility to look at the facts, try to judge without partiality, and strive not to be blinded by hatred or by imagining that he or she would invariably act magnificently.
   
   
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 27, 2010 at 12:05 am

  Thank you Paul yes you are 100% correct.
  By the way our document page site, which you can get to by registering, now has all of the Vatican documents we retrieved so far along with the Acts and Documents of the Holy See during the Second World War with a spectacular search engine for the 9000 pages. We have the translated letters of Pacelli to the German Bishops from 1939-1945, which were translated by Mr. Robert Riebling. We have all of the L’Osservatore Romano news papers from 1938-1945. All of the Campagna documents and the Inter Arma Caritas 1939-1947. Enjoy
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 27, 2010 at 1:00 am

   Dear Mr. Wilensky,
  Here is the main text of the speech where you claim that Pacelli was cursing the Jews. Ron Rychlak sent me this where you can plainly see who he was talking about:
  In 1938, Pius XI sent Pacelli to the International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest. Pacelli, speaking for the Pope, said:                                                                

  “Face to face with us is drawn up the lugubrious array of the military godless shaking the clenched fist of the Anti-Christ against everything we hold most sacred. Face to face with us spreads the army of those who would like to make all peoples of the earth and every individual human believe that they can find prosperity only by receding from the Gospel of Christ.”[1]
  No doubt you drew your interpretation from critic Michael Phayer who tried to turn Pacelli’s comments all around. He reported that Pacelli was condemning not the Nazis but the Jews.[2] Nowhere in the speech did Pacelli mention “Jews.” He spoke of the “military godless,” and said that their “lips cursed Christ and whose hearts reject him even today.” No one at the time thought that he was speaking of the Jews. Jenö Levai, the esteemed Jewish author of Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pius XII Was Not Silent (1968), personally witnessed the speech. As the title of his book implies, he is a great supporter of Pacelli. He also noted the Pope’s early intervention following the occupation of Hungary. The anti-Jewish interpretation is pure post-Holocaust reconstruction.
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 27, 2010 at 3:32 am

  Mr. Krupp, first of all let me commend you again for the fantastic job of digitizing and making available so much of the pertinent documentation. You are doing a great service by doing this.

  The text Mr. Rychlak sent you is not the “main text of the speech”. It might be the theme of the speech, but in any case it’s not, as I said earlier, relevant to my point that elsewhere in the speech he spoke of the Jews and said what I quoted earlier. Just so you can see it in context, here it is in a more extensive quote:
  <blockquote>Jesus conquers! He who so often was the recipient of the rage of his enemies, he who suffered the persecutions of those of whom he was one, he shall be triumphant in the future as well. . . . As opposed to the foes of Jesus, who cried out to his face, “Crucify him!”—we sing him hymns of our loyalty and our love. We act in this fashion, not out of bitterness, not out of a sense of superiority, not out of arrogance toward those whose lips curse him and whose hearts reject him even today.”</blockquote>
  As you see, Cardinal Pacelli was not talking about atheist Nazis, Communists or “military godless” here (despite that that may have been the thrust of the rest of the speech). No, Mr. Krupp, the “foes of Jesus” who supposedly cried “Crucify him!” that Pacelli was talking about were not middle eastern Nazi ancestors, they were the Jews the New Testament and further Christian writings blame for killing Jesus, for persecuting him, for cursing him and for rejecting him, all false accusations Cardinal Pacelli had no qualms in repeating three years after the Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany, and in the same year they were passed in Italy and Hungary, where he was giving this speech and where he found no objection to raise.

  So, neither Michael Phayer nor myself are turning Pacelli’s comments all around. With all due respect, if anyone is doing that, that would be you, Mr. Krupp.
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 27, 2010 at 4:43 am

  “Jesus conquers! He who so often was the recipient of the rage of his enemies, he who suffered the persecutions of those of whom he was one, he shall be triumphant in the future as well. . . . As opposed to the foes of Jesus, who cried out to his face, “Crucify him!”—we sing him hymns of our loyalty and our love. We act in this fashion, not out of bitterness, not out of a sense of superiority, not out of arrogance toward those whose lips curse him and whose hearts reject him even today.”

  Do Catholics today actually believe that we Jews ”cried out to his face, ‘Crucify him!’”???

  I don’t think so.  Only Matthew claims it.  Mark is less inaccurate than the others, and even he wrote decades after the event.  It was customary in those days to invent dialogue for the sake of the story, and Matthew followed that custom.  Only hooligans, if anyone, could be standing around Pilate’s palace either on Pesach or on the day before Pesach.  And to present Pilate as having hesitated for a moment to crucify one more Jew is more than false; it is nonsensical, when the real Pilate was accustomed to crucifying so many Jews that even Rome complained against him.  I mean no disrespect to the sacred text of my neighbors, but my neighbor’s sacred text bears false witness against me, and I am called upon to say so. 

  Moreover, speaking as a Jew, I can testify that my lips do not curse him. He would never enter my lips or my mind except that I live in a world where his name and image are constantly placed before me in beautiful contexts.  Despite the temptation to join the others and be like everyone else, I remain faithful to the One Gd Who covenanted with me and the other Israelite souls at Sinai.  As I am loyal to Gd, I expect them to be loyal to their Saviour, and for their part, my Christian friends and acquaintances have never taunted me with accusations of crying out against him, or pressured me to abandon Gd to join their religion or to participate in their devotions.  Well, they have invited me to their weddings, baby baptisms, and funerals, but then I invite them to mine, and we do both attend each other’s times of joy and sorrow and visit one another in the hospital and bring each other meals when we are sick.  (They thoughtfully bring tuna casseroles, knowing that I keep kosher.) 

  It is shocking to realize how far from typical this mutual amity was in pre-WWII Europe.  It is devastatingly sad to realize that the men who perpetrated these horrors frankly said, “Jews are not human.  They are demons.  They are pestilential insects.  It is right to exterminate them like fleas or lice or rats or other vermin.”  Yes, I have seen quotes and heard videos in which ordinary people said one or more such things.  So, YES, I am happy to be reminded that good people today regard murdering a Jew AS MURDER, but during and before WWII, most Europeans unfortunately had been taught by the European churches to regard Jews as non-humans, and thus they did not regard the killing of Jews as murder.  Since they regarded Jews as subhuman, it WAS necessary for the Pope to remind the faithful that Jews ARE human and that murdering a Jew IS MURDER.  

  But that simple specific enjoinder was, alas! not forthcoming in a manner that the faithful could recognize.  

    
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 27, 2010 at 4:54 am

   
  A squadron of airplanes, in the form of a cross, roared over Budapest and the rippling Danube. The river, banded by bridges, the buildings and monuments on both its banks blazed with batteries of searchlights, neon lights, torches, candles. No less than 1,000,000 people thronged the Danube banks when down the river, six miles to St. Margaret Island and back, steamed a procession of ten vessels from which sounded trumpet and organ music. In the steamers were cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, monks, nuns and laymen of the Roman Catholic Church. One boat bore, in a golden monstrance in an illuminated, glass-enclosed chapel, the Sacred Host. When Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, Papal Secretary of State and Papal Legate to the 34th International Eucharistic Congress, held aloft the monstrance and pronounced the benediction, all was quiet along the Danube. A moment later boat whistles shrilled, church bells pealed, rockets burst in air and high on St. Gellert Hill a 60-foot cross sprang into light.

  Eucharistic Congresses, the mightiest demonstrations of public faith the Christian world affords, demonstrate also the Catholic Church’s talent for organized magnificence. Committees in charge take in their stride arrangements for such ceremonies as Budapest’s Mass last week for 100,000 children, with presents of candy afterward for every one. Yet the Budapest Congress was not the largest of recent years. Nazi truculence, in the form of special visa restrictions, kept Germans at home, held the number of foreign pilgrims to about 25,000, of whom 1,000 were U. S. Catholics.

  Host to the Congress was Justinian Cardinal Seredi, Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary. His opening speech to pilgrims, in Budapest’s spacious Heroes Square, where a 150-foot altar had been erected, contained no hint of the fact that he is firmly anti-Nazi. Said Cardinal Seredi: “How different would be the fate of humanity, created for happiness, wherefore it is ever seeking happiness, if the solidarity of all Catholics of the world could really be achieved.” Papal Legate Pacelli, without descending from the high religious plane of the Congress, was more specific about Catholicism’s enemies­”the lugubrious array of the militant godless, shaking the clenched fist of anti-Christ.” Cried he: “Where now are Herod and Pilate, Nero and Diocletian, and Julian the Apostate, and all the persecutors of the First Century? St. Ambrose replies: ‘The Christians who have been massacred have won the victory; the vanquished were their persecutors.’ Ashes and dust are the enemies of Christianity; ashes and dust are all that they have desired, pursued­perhaps even tasted for a short moment­of power and terrestrial glory.”

  Read more: http ://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,771110,00.html#ixzz0p3tJNfRd

  Note that they quoted him citing Herod and Pilate, Nero and Diocletian, and Julian the Apostate – Romans, not Jews. 
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 27, 2010 at 4:55 am

  I do not imagine that I would invariably act magnificently and I can hardly expect others to do so. 

  Have I ever acted magnificently?  Maybe three times.  Certainly far from invariably.  But then I am not the Pope.  And, some people DID act magnificently. 

  I expect any Pope to be human and to fall short of invariably acting magnificently.  He lived in a deeply divided era under enormous pressures.  We must be charitable.  But he WAS the Pope.

  I only wish Pope Pius XII had been able to say one clear sentence to induce the faithful to regard the Jews as humans, instead of leaving it to the few individuals who WERE magnificent and who realized Jewish humanity on their own despite the perennial teachings of the churches. 
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 27, 2010 at 5:01 am

  This note is not to Mr. Krupp but to whoever manages this web site. 

  What is all this gibberish?  Is it necessary?  Could we please just have our transparent messages? 

  [Eds: We are not sure why Mr Krupp's comments have been showing this html scripting, although we have been doing our best to clean this out of his comments. You should appreciate that, being in Australia, we live in a very different timezone to Mr Krupp, and so sometimes there will be delays. If Mr Krupp is first typing his comments in a word processing program, it might be worth trying to first paste them into a simple text editor such Notepad, and then pasting them from Notepad into our comments editor.]
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 27, 2010 at 5:46 am

  Mr. Krupp reminds me of the following:

  The Catholic Knight is not the voice of the Vatican and there are unfortunately lunatic fringe blogs that do not accept Nostra Aetate. Don’t believe everything you read on the blogs, because the church does not state they are the new Israel or condemns Israel for existing.  The Vatican recognized Israel in 1993 and actually has one of the only embassies in Jerusalem today.

  Thank you for the reminder.  I am aware of Nostra Aetate.  I very much appreciate the fact that the Vatican, unlike most nations, including the United States of America, has an embassy in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.  This indeed seems a huge turnaround from the church’s prior position.  

  This prior position is illustrated by the fact that, while Israel was recognized by most nations in 1948 or shortly after, the Vatican did not recognize Israel because, like The Catholic Knight today, it regarded the church as the “true Israel” and regarded neither the Jews nor Israel as entitled to be socalled; nor did it regard it as proper for the Jews to return there, since we Jews were supposed to remain in exile as long as we “failed” to abandon Gd and worship their deity instead.  Only years after Nostra Aetate, well after, not until 1993, did they finally recognize Israel,  And the then Pope, may his soul rest in peace, came to pray at the Kotel.  

  And yet it hit me like a slap in the face to hear that when Mel Gibson’s movie was shown in the Vatican–a movie which includes incidents from all four gospels, and which chooses to include the scene where “the Jews” cry out, ”His blood be on us and on our children,” I recall reading that Pope John Paul II, of all people, on seeing the film, said, “It is as it was.”

  To me, with those words, John Paul II, of all people, said, in effect, ”Yes, the Jews did take upon themselves for all time the guilt of being Christ-killers.” 

  If that is all that Nostra Aetate means today, if calling us “christ-killers” is today in accord with church doctrine in the eyes of the most generous pope in the past thousand years or more, how much more can we ascribe the “christ-killer Jews” attitude to an earlier Pope, prior to Nostra Aetate–such as Pope Pius XII?  

   
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 27, 2010 at 8:58 am

  Mr. Krupp, I am sorry but I do not have the entire speech Pope Pius gave at the International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest, nor do I have the original quotes in French. I assume you ask for the original in French for the sake of archival completeness, and not because you suspect the paragraph I quoted is mistranslated and/or is a misrepresentation of the original?
  In regards to the Time Magazine article, I found it to be really poetic, but completely irrelevant to the point in question.
• Kyriakos says:

  May 28, 2010 at 2:01 am

  Mr. Gary Krupp you are doing a great job and express my great admiration for your work. For a long time the truth of Pius 12’s relation to the Jews during the 2nd world war had been shadowed by junk history, sentimentalism, naive idealism, historical mistrust, bias and even wilful distortion. I have being reading some of the comments and your replies. It had been enriching. A certain amount of the above said problems still exists in some of the comments seen here. Well Gary, you might not convince people who want to simply hold on to what they believe should be true.

  Quoting parts of a speech without understanding Christian scripture is not professionalism. ‘Triumphant Jesus’ is a concept of the New Testament Bible and what Pius was saying in these quotations is based on the Christian scripture and are not anti-Semitic rants directed towards all Jews of all times but on the minority who opposed Jesus and the apostles and people(all people) who reject him today . How could Cathryn Vise interpret the quote ‘As opposed….. “Crucify him!” ’ as including especially today’s Jews? Why do Gabriel Wilensky and Cathryn Vise use this single quotation to prove that Pius was anti-Semitic and didn’t do much to save the Jews?

  How wrong to judge a man by a few quotes! True professionalism would be studying a lot of his speeches and coming to a conclusion rather than taking one or two quotes here or there and giving an interpretation to prove one’s part. It is this sort of sentimentalism among experts that I despise.

  But Gary, you courageously move forward. Truth shall at last shine out. Let the people of God by flesh the Jews and the whole world come to know the truth and rejoice about it.
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 29, 2010 at 6:47 am

   Dear Kyriakos,
  Thanks for the supportive words. I don’t blame Ms. Vise or Mr. Wilensky at all for their strong feelings. I came from the same place they come from. The difference is I have had the benefit of acquiring, posting and reviewing tens of thousands of original documents but more importantly met with and video interviewed many survivors and heroes of that terrible time. I also have something the critics obviously do not have. It is a full understanding of the unique way of how the Vatican operates and a special understanding of “VATICANESE”, the special unique language  that they always use. Without these tools one cannot really and accurately report what really happened. The critics have consistently made judgments and develop theories on pieces of information.
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 29, 2010 at 8:27 am

  Mr. Krupp, even if you call something “pieces of specially cut leather stitched together and glued to a piece of rubber”, it’s still a shoe. You are almost certainly right that you understand “Vaticanese” better than me, Ms. Vise and most other people in the world. As a matter of fact, “Vaticanese” is so oblique and opaque that in the handful of occasions that Pope Pius XII spoke about the extermination of the Jews during WWII no one outside the Vatican understood what he was talking about.
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  May 29, 2010 at 11:13 am

  I hope that I am mistaken, but I have begun receiving follow ups to this thread, and I believe that is because ehecked the box after I had posted a comment to this article a day or two ago.   But I can’t find that comment on this thread NOW.  So, please tell me whether
  a) my posts are not welcome here ?  or
  b) I am simply mistaken about having attempted to post here  ?

  [Eds: We have not deleted any of your posts, and your posts are welcome here. Sometimes our spam filter asks people to complete a CAPTCHA prior to allowing their post to be published, so please be aware of this. Sorry for any inconvenience].
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 29, 2010 at 6:08 pm

  Mr. Wilensky.
  The lack of direct verbal condemnation to meet your 21st century standards is the very reason you must,  as a scholar and historian, come to Rome to visit the open Vatican Secret Archives up to 1939 and to do some original research. You must meet and listen to the testimonies of real eye witnesses, who are still alive as we are doing and posting on our site. These are the people who directly experienced the efforts of Pope Pius XII. This is why all of the condemnations based on Pius XII’s “silence” is the height of chutzpah, when one compares it to the provable secret actions that he took to save Jewish lives.

  Please let me give you a glaring example. The head of the Jewish community in Rome, Ricardo Pacifici, recently protested the silence Pope Pius XII, while addressing Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the Great Synagogue in Rome this year. I am in possession of the 1 1/2 hour interview with his father, a Holocaust survivor, Emmanuel Pacifici, who states that it was Pope Pius XII who acted to save the lives of the Roman Jewish community. He also states that any protest from Pius XII would probably not have been at all effective.

  Please see the evidence we recently uncovered, which is reported in this news article  of how Pius XII had to use “his silence “  as the only tool he had to save the  3000 year old Roman Jewish community from certain death. http://www.zenit.org/article-29380?l=english.

  Mr. Wilensky, Pave the Way Foundation stands ready at any time to help you gain access to the Vatican Secret Archives or to meet any of these eye witnesses for this important effort to find the truth based on facts not speculation or theories.
  So my friend, when it looks likes a duck and quacks like a duck…….it’s a duck
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 31, 2010 at 7:19 am

  Mr. Krupp, it’s regretable you imply that what I am saying is invalid or wrong because I look through the optics of “21st century standards”. As I said here and have shown in my book, I make heavy use of documents and base my conclusions on documentary evidence. Not having physically visited the Vatican Secret Archives has not prevented me from doing this, and I dispute the benefits of going there at this time given that the war and subsequent years are not accessible. So far you have not shown my use and interpretation of any quotes I have posted here to have been flawed or skewed by “21st century standards”.  However, as you said, the material accessible in the archives only goes to 1939, so ultimately whether I’ve been to the Vatican or not is immaterial to the discussion of what the Pope and the Church did or didn’t do during the Holocaust.  

  With all due respect, I think you continue to fail to understand why the detractors of the Pope and of the Church say what they say. I think you confuse “silence” with “actions”. Even if the Pope did take the actions to save Jews you think he did—and I’m quite skeptical, the fact remains that the pope was indeed silent irrespective of what these actions may have been. He never publicly condemned the extermination of the Jews in language that anyone other than the curia, the Nazi hierarchy and you would understand. He never admonished the faithful and his entire Church network to save Jews. He never told the flock and his vast network of priests that denouncing, hunting down, and killing Jews was a crime and a mortal sin. He never instructed the German Catholic Church to avoid helping the German government in any way, and failed to reprimand them once they helped the Nazis identify the Jews. He never told the German Church, and thus never told the faithful, that obeying Catholic principles and being loyal to god was more important than obeying the authorities, particularly when those authorities were asking the faithful to do things that were contrary to the teachings of Christianity. He never threatened the faithful, or the Nazi authorities, with excommunication if they persevered with the “Final Solution”. He never told his priests to tell the flock to refrain from having any part in the exterminatory campaign. He never reprimanded or even less told Army Bishop Rarkowski to instruct his priests to admonish the troops to refrain from participating in any exterminatory actions. Mr. Krupp, if you do not see this as “silence”, then obviously you and I (and other detractors of the Pope and the Church during that period) have a different understanding of the definition of the word “silence”. I realize you have been countering, and continue to counter this by looking under the rocks for someone that can say the pope told them to save a Jew, or a Jew that is thankful to the pope for having saved him. But you are missing the point, because even if by his “heroic” behind the scenes actions the Pope was successful in saving tens of thousands of lives, he would still be a moral failure because he failed to do all the things I just mentioned, which could and most likely would have completely changed the course of history.

  The Zenit article you cited does not prove anything, other than just sheepishly report your claims. That Pacifici’s father was saved, and that he thought the Pope was responsible for saving the bulk of Rome’s Jews does not prove anything either. Of course he and many others who were sheltered by the Church would feel grateful and would assume the pope is to be thanked, but that does not mean he is. Nothing in that article shows that the 7000 Jews of Rome who went into hiding did so thanks to the Pope’s warning or at his instruction. No, those Jews went into hiding at the nick of time because they knew what was coming. Nothing even shows that about half of those that found refuge in Church properties in Rome and even the Vatican did so at the express orders of the Pope. And irrespective of how many hundreds of these cases you bring up, the fact remains that six million others were not the recipients of the Pope’s charity.
• Gary Krupp says:

  May 31, 2010 at 8:44 am

  Mr. Wilensky, I am curious what documents you base your theories on? In the past we have seen documents dealing with post war policies of the return of Jewish Children who were saved by the Catholics. We can prove that these were mistranslated from the original Italian, which set off a fire storm. My question is did you meet with survivors who were actually saved by actions of the pope? Did you meet with individual life saving heroes who will state exactly how the Vatican directed and financed their efforts to get as many Jews off the continent of Europe as quickly as possible? Did you watch the interview with Msgr Ferrofino on our website where he explains how Pius XII personally sent double encrypted telegrams to be hand delivered to General Trujillo to ask for as many as 1600 visas for Jews to enter the Dominican Republic as many as two times per year from 1939-1945 (that’s 12.000 Jews)? Is this man lying? Do you acknowledge that there was a real threat against the life of the pope and the curia with the imminent German invasion of the Vatican? Do you acknowledge that the fictitious play the Deputy was part of a major disinformation program of the KGB? Why didn’t anyone criticize Pope Pius XII from 1939-1962? If you never went to the Vatican archives what documents are you relying on formulate your theories? Do you really believe that the universal gratitude of the Jewish world paid to Pope Pius XII was only to curry favor for Israel? Please show me these documents.
  As Jews I can say that we desperately need to know the truth and if Pius XII was a hero to our people we must acknowledge this. I agree that I am not a scholar or an historian. However, after reviewing thousands of documents and meeting and video interviewing these heroes along with Jewish survivors, I am sure that if it were not for Pius XII’s secret efforts to save Jewish lives we would be mourning a lot more than 6 million Jewish martyrs.
  I put a challenge to our friend Prof. Paul O’Shea, which I will extend to you as well. We will sponsors another forum in Rome where the critics will face the defenders. Everyone must bring their proof and we will set a date at your convenience. Again this event will be public. If you are willing to attend this please email me privately so that we can move this forward. Email me at office@ptwf,org
• Cathryn Vise says:

  May 31, 2010 at 12:15 pm

  Kyriakos said the following: “Quoting parts of a speech without understanding Christian scripture is not professionalism. ‘Triumphant Jesus’ is a concept of the New Testament Bible and what Pius was saying in these quotations is based on the Christian scripture and are not anti-Semitic rants directed towards all Jews of all times but on the minority who opposed Jesus and the apostles and people(all people) who reject him today . How could Cathryn Vise interpret the quote ‘As opposed….. “Crucify him!”‘ as including especially today’s Jews? Why do Gabriel Wilensky and Cathryn Vise use this single quotation to prove that Pius was anti-Semitic and didn’t do much to save the Jews?”

  I will review Gabriel Wilensky’s remark here and perhaps I will join him in decrying this citation from Pope Pius XII.  However, I primarily wish to express dismay at the inclusion of this false charge, and its concomitant theology about Jews, in the gospel and in the millennia-long Christian message.  I am further dismayed how Passion plays in general perpetuate this falsehood and specifically about the vicious false portrayal of jews in the Gibson movie, “The Passion”. 
  This movie cherrypicked the worst bits and pieces from each of the four gospels; it chose the most vituperative depictions of Jews from amongst all four of them, including, among other verses, “Crucify him!….His blood be upon us, and on our children!”  That verse clearly seeks to falsely present Jews (rather than Pilate, whose sole responsibility it was) as the ones guilty of the crucifixion.  That verse seeks to indict, not only some flakey Jews of first century Jerusalem, but Jews forever, for all time, for the crucifixion.  The movie included many such verses, of which that one was “merely” one of the worst.  John Paul II had affirmed that the church no longer held all Jews guilty of the crucifixion, as the church historically HAD claimed until Vatican II. 

  And yet even John Paul II, upon seeing that movie, full of so many damning lines and full of such thoroughly damning portrayals of Jews, said of the movie, “It is as it was.” 
  In other words, even our hero, John Paul II, was saying he actually believed that there had been Jews hanging around Pilate’s palace on Pesach or on the Eve of Pesach, in order to impose mob rule on Pilate–and that such a mob would have been needful in order to enjoin yet one more crucifixion on the murderous crucifying tyrannical Pilate, whose reign was so harsh that even Rome recalled him for his cruelty.  Pilate was delighted for an excuse to crucify yet one more Jew, Jesus.  The scenario of he meek Pilae and the violent Jews, portrayed in the gospels, is so upside-down in relation to the facts on the ground as to be obviously simply impossible. 

  And yet it appears that the Vatican believes, even today, that this twisted scenario is accurate:  “It is as it was.”   The Vatican sees that as the scenario, and believes all the other instances of the movie’s (and the gospels’) falsely portraying ”the Jews” (even if “not all”) as thus guilty, even today, of the crucifixion.  I get this impression from reading a lengthy interview with a Vatican representative explaining why the Vatican was so enthusiastic in its delighted approbation of the movie.  The Vatican representative praised everything about the movie, including all such lines supposedly spoken by Jews (as falsely claimed in the gospels and in church teachings) and all such false portrayals of the Jews, as if any such scenes or trials had even occurred.  It is far more likely that Pilate’s soldiers arrested Jesus for sedition (hence the sign, “King of the Jews” posted over his head) and brought him on Pilate’s orders straight to prison and then on Pilate’s condemnation to be crucified, and that almost all Jews other than Jesus’ disciples, followers, friends, and kin, whether priests or laymen, were too frantically busy with the festival of Pesach to even note what had happened.  But the anti-Jewish fabrication of Jewish guilt falsely presented in the four gospels has a powerful half-life.  I saved the Vatican interview concerning the movie and can post the whole thing, if you like.  It is far more than one little quote.  The movie cherrypicks all the most vicious verses about Jews to be found in all four gospels, and Pope John Paul II gives this vicious smear a false reputation as historically accurate by his wrongfully saying, “It is as it was.” 

  These are the words of our beloved John Paul II, the very Pope who went to Jerusalem and prayed at the Kotel, and his words adulating the movie were spoken long, long after Vatican II.  In spite of Vatican II, the image presented in the gospel continued to ring true in Vatican ears.   

  If this was the attitude of Pope John Paul II, and of the Vatican representative in the interview, and of the Vatican as a whole, after Vatican II, we can only suppose that the attitude of the Vatican (and of Pope Pius XII), in the years following 1932, decades before Vatican II, was even more likely to view the Jews as the guilty ones, and was even more likely to be even more negative towards the Jews than Pope John Paul II could ever be.  If Pope Pius XII’s speech indeed mentioned those who said, “his blood be on us and on our children,” he certainly referred to the Jews of all time, including those of his time and those of today, and if he claimed that the Jews abstained from worshipping Jesus, he was correct.  Jews do abstain from worshipping Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Jupiter, Odin, and Thor, among many other deities absent from the worship enjoined by the Hebrew Bible.  
  Moreover, Pope Pius XII certainly would have disdained the fact that Jews abstain from worshipping Jesus, and, true to the claim of Justin Martyr in the third century, would have falsely accused Jews of “cursing” him.  Jews did and do faithfully resist being bullied into worshipping Jesus, whether he was human, divine, or whatever, but Pope Pius XII, along with the rest of the Vatican establishment, ignored the fact that this resistance is entirely out of obedience to the Second Commandments’ clear injunction to avoid worshipping any entity “in the heavens above or on the earth beneath”—and, assuming that Jesus lived at all, he was on the earth beneath and in the heavens above and thus did fall into the forbidden category (along with Jupiter, Saturn, Poseidon, Odin, Thor, Mercury, Krishna, and Buddha).  This prohibition is meaningless to Christians, since the NT claims the “old” covenant is abrogated and that these commandments no longer apply. 

  Can we conclude from the Paul’s claim that the “law” leads to sin and that Christians are free of the “law” that the Ten commandments fail to apply to Christians?  Or can we see Christians as holding themselves free of any obligation to keep the Ten Commandments, on the basis of the the murderous behavior of hundreds and thousands of the faithful during WWII?  In any case, the Ten Commandments, along with hundreds of other Torah commandments, are still binding for Jews, and the Ten Commandments do forbid Jews to worshp any entity not enjoined in the Hebrew Bible. 

  Note that Jews regard this commandment as applying specifically to Jews, and regard members of other nations as free to worship other gods, such as Jesus.   
  But anyone who imagines that Jews “curse” Jesus is mistaken.  Indeed, most Jews today are invited by Christian friends to attend baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and Christian friends are invited to attend Jewish baby-namings, weddings, and funerals.  There is little if any occasion for Jews to mention Jesus at all.   

  It is Christians who keep mentioning Jesus TO Jews, and Jews try to receive with some courtesy this rude intrusion of a second (and third) deity into Jewish monotheistic worship.  Obviously this courtesy is a mistake.  Christians are left with the impression that Jews actually believe the claims made for Jesus and Christians imagine that Jews are “rejecting” the Christian deity out of sheer wickedness.  Christians are systematically taught a series of falsehoods about Jewish worship, based on the assumption that Jewish worship must be based, like Christian worship, on the concept of a world burdened by sin and saved from sin.  The Jewish worldview lacks this grim view of sin.  The third prayer a Jew sings in the morning is, “Gd, the soul that you have given me is pure” (Ke-lokai neshamah shenatata bee, tahora hee).    I.e., most Jews remain unaware—unless schooled by Christians–of the idea of original sin, originated by Augustine.  The Oral Torah says that everyone who tries to behave decently, and who repents and tries again when he fails, as destined to become a light in Paradise.  Jews lack any concept of any eternal damnation, whether for a sinful nature or for any reason whatever.  Thus there is nothing to be saved from, and any need for a Saviour is amply filled by our beloved Father in Heaven, Who, like the father of the prodigal son, lovingly and joyfully runs to meet all who attempt to return to Gd and eagerly forgives.       
  It could be logically inferred from the decrees and statements from the Vatican–and the evidence from the facts on the ground bears this out–that the church of the years from 1932-1945 retained all the same damning attitudes toward the Jews as it had for centuries, and that the Vatican falsely regarded Jews as guilty, evil, demonic, and inhuman.  Let us nonetheless charitably assume that, despite all that, the Vatican wanted to ameliorate the situation of the Jews.  After all, prior popes had also presented the Jews as evil but nonetheless tried to ameliorate the behavior of the peasants who absorbed that message.  Similarly during the Hitler years, the Vatican and the churches at large had strongly propagated the church’s falsely negative and inhuman image of “the Jew” and the concomitant attitude, among the faithful, of such righteous hatred as might perhaps be appropriate to feel about Satan.  This sort of preaching continued right up to the eve of WWII and this negativity was deeply ingrained in the faithful.  The church then merely permitted the faithful to continue regarding unconverted Jews, falsely, as an evil to be extirpated rather than, rightly, as fellow humans (albeit of a variant race or religion), to be treated humanely.  

  Thus, consider such a faithful Christian, thoroughly indoctrinated to see Jews as inhuman and demonic (which of course was false):  it would never have entered the mind of such a one, upon hearing vague injunctions such as “regardless of race or religion,” to apply this advice to Jews.  Such words obviously concerned fellow humans, and the faithful had been indoctrinated to regard Jews as non-humans.  The faithful would already have been trained to see Jews in a wholly other category, alas!–as the demonic verminous caricature that the church and then the Nazis had schooled them to categorize “the Jews”.   

  Pope Pius XII had received and promoted this evil image throughout his life, and had failed in any way to negate this image.  At this desperate juncture, the only thing that could have helped deter the faithful from joining in the murdering would have been a strongly- and clearly-worded injunction to regard Jews–specifically “the Jews”–as humans to be treated humanely.  Vague remarks about race and religion, remarks which failed to specify “the Jews” in particular, were bound to go unnoticed, since “race” and “religion” were about humans, and the faithful had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the false concept of Jews as other than human, first by the church and then, following in those churchly footsteps, by the Nazis. 

  Any complaint of mine about any quote made by Pope Pius XII falls into the overall theological framework of the church’s systematic and centuries-long demonization and dehumanization of Jews.  I have complained about the damningly dehumanizing statements about Jews occurring throughout the gospels (on nearly every page of text and often twice or more on a page) and then throughout church history up to the eve of WWII.  Roadside signs in Germany continued to portray crucifixes alongside caricatures of Jews.  Images of Hitler bathed in light shining from above, with a bird floating above, evoked earlier images of the Baptism of Christ and the descent of the Holy Spirit onto “my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”.  Such images took advantage of the ground prepared by Christian theology.  Thus I have complained that even after Vatican II, John Paul II is still reported as accepting the image that falsely damns the Jews forever, i.e., the fantasy portrayed in the gospels and doubly reemphasized in the movie:  “It is as it was.” 

  My complaint about Pope Pius XII, at least until now, is far from being about anything that he said.  My complaint is that he failed to make any statement to the faithful that they could recognize as clearly disclaiming the damning claims they had heard all their lives from their priests and pastors–the claims that falsely demonized the Jews.  The Pope permitted the continuance of such teachings, whether or not he expressed them himself.  So my complaint is that Pope Pius XII failed to urge the faithful to regard the Jews–and specifically “the Jews,” since Jews long had been, and remain today, the demonized group–failed to urge the faithful to regard the Jews–specifically “the Jews”–as human and deserving of humane treatment from fellow-humans. 

  And so the soldiers and other participants in the Shoah, the murderers, lacked any clear signal from the Vatican or from Pope Pius XII that urged them to ignore their lifelong training and instead to regard Jews as fellow humans.  A few of the faithful–the sensitive sorts who gently remove a roach or a spider or even a rat from the house and take it outside, rather than kill it–heroically acted to save thousands of Jews–while the rest of the faithful happily participated in machine-gunning or gassing many hundreds of thousands, and ultimately millions, of innocent fellow-humans–fellow Germans, fellow Ukrainians, fellow Poles.  And so the murderers could enjoy, without shame, guilt, or regret, murdering those whom they regarded as pests and as demons rather than as fellow humans to be treated humanely.  And so the path was eased, to exterminate millions of human men, women, elders and babies as if they were vermin. 
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 31, 2010 at 12:41 pm

  Mr. Krupp, in my book Six Million Crucifixions I list all the books I consulted, and I have about 500 endnotes documenting the source of pretty much anything I say there, and that includes documents. No need to bog down this conversation with this material.
  I see that you consistently pose questions to me, yet fail to address the ones I pose to you. When I counter your points, you simply ignore it and, to make matters worse, you bring up the same points again later in the conversation. For instance, you ask “Why didn’t anyone criticize Pope Pius XII from 1939-1962?”, and simply ignore the fact that I devoted an extensive paragraph to answer that very question on my May 25th post. You continue to ask if I met with rescued individuals, or rescuers, yet you seem to ignore my point that even hundreds of these testimonials are irrelevant in light of the silence of the Pope, as explained in my earlier post.
  If Pope Pius had a way to double encrypt messages to General Trujillo asking him for 1600 visas, where are the double encrypted messages you’d think he would have sent to all his bishops everywhere in the world ordering them to save as many Jews as possible in any way possible, as well as instructing them to admonish the faithful that killing Jews was murder and that they should in turn not only provide shelter in any way possible out of Christian caritas, but more importantly, to refrain from murdering Jews because it was a crime and a mortal sin? I think you need to use the same standard, and recognize that if the pope still retained his diplomatic immunity and network (as he did), and had the means to communicate through private means (as he did), then if he had indeed instructed everyone in the church to save Jews and refrain from participating in the business of mass murder, we would have a plethora of these documents. How do you explain we don’t seem to have them, Mr. Krupp? I don’t discount the Vatican Secret Archives might contain these documents—if the were indeed ever sent—but given that they were not part of Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale when it’s safe to assume they would have been the first documents the Vatican would have put forth in an attempt to “exonerate” Pope Pius’ memory, I think it’s also safe to assume they are simply not there.
  I do acknowledge the Pope knew he, the Vatican and the curia were threatened. I also addressed that point earlier. To recap, it doesn’t matter. The Pope surely knew Hitler would not have been so stupid to do such an act of folly, as Hitler’s underlings pointed out to their Führer. If the Pope had been more interested in saving lives and saving souls, instead of saving Vatican treasure, he could and should have gone to London.
  I dispute your contention that Jews were universally grateful to the pope. Some were. You would expect those saved by the Pope or members of the Church to be thankful, of course, and rightly so. But I think many of them just didn’t know any better. Many were motivated by political reasons. Albert Einstein is my hero, and very likely the greatest mind in the history of man, but he was a flawed man in some respects (like all men are). He was a brilliant physicist, but he may have not known about the true role of the Church. In any case, he is often quoted by the Pope’s apologetics as a notable Jew who supported the Pope and the Church, yet the fact that he defended the Church long before the Holocaust, and long after he had left Europe, is rarely mentioned. Einstein did not defend the Church after the Holocaust. Rabbi Zolli was very grateful to the Pope, of course, as the Pope saved him and his family. Yet a fact perhaps rarely discussed when mentioning this notable Jew is that he was ostracized by the Jewish community, who felt he went to the Pope’s palace to save his skin and left the rest of the Roman Jewish community to their fate.
  I think that at the heart of the problem is one of interpretation. Even if you are not a historian, you are making claims that can be very influential, and perhaps detrimental to the truth. I realize and actually don’t doubt that ultimately you’d like the truth to come to light, but I think that you are consistently twisting things to look a certain way, and that certain way may not correlate to the truth. You insistence on bringing up the cases of survivors has, in my humble opinion, colored your perception of what happened. You see so many cases of rescue that you jump to the conclusions that (a) the pope must have been responsible for them and (b) this was representative of the actions of the Church. Once the Vatican Secret Archives are opened I might be proven wrong on my opinion that the pope was not behind the vast majority of rescue efforts, but I seriously doubt we will find anything that will change the reality that, overall, the Church was—at best—passive as the Germans and their Catholic helpers murdered millions of Jews.
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  May 31, 2010 at 2:06 pm

  Mr. Krupp,
  When you and all the all apologists for Pius XII say ” I am sure that if it were not for Pius XII’s secret efforts to save Jewish lives we would be mourning a lot more than 6 million Jewish martyrs.”  do you ever stop to think about what the Jews needed to be saved from?  Was it not from the madness and cruelty of
  Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Rudolf Hoess, Julius Streicher, Fritz Thyssen (who bankrolled the Nazi rise to power), Klaus Barbie, and Franz Von Papen were all of whom were raised as Roman Catholics and were never DIVORCED from the church by its leaders if – as most of them chose to do – they wanted to remain Catholics?  The same is true of the heads of all of these NAZI countries : Leon Degrelle of Belgium, Emil Hacha of Bohemia-Moravia, Ante Pavelic of Croatia, Konrad Henlein of Sudetenland, Pierre Laval and then Henry Petain of Vichy-France. and the R.C. priest, Msgr. Josef Tiso, of Slovakia (who wasn’t even defrocked after the defeat of the Nazis). Although these were among the most visible Catholic lay people in their countries at the time, did Pope Pius XII excommunicate a single one of them? NO. How can anyone say that this pope did “all that he could”, when he failed to take this obvious measure so as to make it clear to the millions of Catholic faithful who were enabling the Nazis to carry out their campaigns of mass murder, not only against Jews, but against their fellow Catholics in Poland, that they should have no part in these monstrous of crimes and most mortal of sins? Apologists for Pius XII who claim that their crimes caused these people to be “automatically excommunicated” miss the point that excommunication isn’t intended to tell GOD who is a Catholic and who isn’t but to tell THE FAITHFUL whom to shun.
  On the other hand, after the Nazis were defeated and no longer posed any threat to the pope, the Vatican, or the Catholic Church anywhere, did Pope Pius XII allow the Vatican to be used to protect thousands of Catholic war criminals such as the above to escape punishment for their war crimes? YES. Whose side was the pope on?
  Here are some of the more infamous war criminals the Vatican protected from prosecution:
  Adolf Eichmann, “the architect of the Holocaust”, ,
  Alois Brunner , referred to as his “best man” by Eichman,
  Dr. Josef Mengele, “the Angel of Death” ,
  Franz Stangl, commandant of the SobibÛr and of Treblinka extermination camp ,
  Gustav Wagner assistant to Franz Stangl,
  Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon” ,
  Edward Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga”,
  Aribert Heim, Mauthausen concentration camp’s “Dr. Death”,
  Walter Rauff, believed responsible for nearly 100,000 deaths
  Andrija Artuković, “the Himmler of the Balkans”
  Ante Pavelić, head of Catholic Croatia, arguably the most murderous regime in relation to its size in Axis-occupied Europe.

  P.S. Even if you can knit pick around the edges of these facts, the overwelming point of these facts is that the Roman Catholic Church needs to be made to answer for creating all of these monsters in the FIRST PLACE and then explain why it did so little to DENOUNCE and OPPOSE these members of its church when they launch history’s most monstrous “MORTALLY SINFUL” campaign of mass murder of innocent human beings.
  .
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  May 31, 2010 at 2:16 pm

  Mr. Wilensky,
  I have enjoyed reading your book, and am looking forward to many more hours of enjoyment and enlightenment.  So far your findings agree with most of the research I have been doing on this important issue for years, and which I have been publishing on my http://CatholicArrogance.Org/RCscandal web site.
  For those who may be interested, I am a former R.C. priest who grew up in the shadow of Pope Pius, and even bore his name for a time as a Dominican monk.  I left the church as well as the priesthood 40 years ago when I became convinced that the higher up one progresses in the R.C. hierarchy, the more dishonesty, insincerity and  corruption one finds,  I never even witnessed any of sexual deviancy, and yet I was disgusted by the hypocrisy of men who were morally inferior to the average person trying to mass themselves off as “men of God.”
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  May 31, 2010 at 4:58 pm

  Ms. Vise, there’s yet another aspect of The Passion of the Christ that Pope John Paul seems to have missed too, and that is that the devil walks among the Jews, his people… (“You belong to your father, the devil…”)
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  May 31, 2010 at 11:48 pm

  Michael Hesemann, I’ve  just read your May 22, 2010 at 2:59 am in which you make such a big deal about Pius XII’s “saving”  relatively small numbers of Jews, whom you yourself point out were CONVERTS (i.e. not necessarily viewed by the church AS JEWS, but as CHRISTIANS.)
  Please read my pos above of May 31, 2010 at 2:06 pm which points out that the Catholic Church doesn’t deserve any credit for “saving” any Jews from persecution by OTHER CATHOLICS!  So what if the church gave the a “discount” of 860,000 Jews  on its mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews ?
  If I AS A CHRISTIAN CLERGYMAN can’t and won’t accept that, I can’t imagine how any Jewish person can be persuaded to do so.
  Isn’t it enough that the Catholic Church has 1 billion or so members to take its side, without family members of JEWISH SURVIVORS of the Holocaust (as I veiw all Jews to be)  taking up the cause of the perpetrators of the Shoah?
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 1, 2010 at 1:39 am

  Cathryn and Gabriel,
  It must take considereable fortitude for Jews like yourselves to even read “the New Testament”.
  For what it’s worth, let me tell you that even though I have been a great lover of the stories about Jesus in the Gospels for 60+ years, I don’t remember ever taking away from them contempt for the Jews  ”as Jews”.  Maybe I am wierd, but I always viewed all of the actors in the gospels (other than Pilate and a handful of incidental characters) as Jews, and I identified with the “good” Jews and only disliked the “bad” Jews, in very much the same way that I view myself as one of the good (Liberal) Christians in opposition to the bad (“Religious Right”) Christians.
  I’ve published my views on this topic at http://liberalslikechrist.org/whokilledchrist.html .
  ( I try to refer to Jesus as “Jesus” rather than “Christ” to avoid annoying Jews unnecessarily, but when addressing issues in which the term “Christ” has been used as in “Christ-killers”, or “Christian Right”,  I reluctantly refer to Jesus of Nazareth as “Christ” or “Jesus Christ”.)
   
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 1, 2010 at 3:34 am

  Gary Krupp said May 20, 2010 at 11:02 pm
  1) “Through our research we learned how Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) despised Hitler, and vice versa, from Hitler’s very beginning and condemned him publically and privately. The archives show numerous documents proving this.” and \
  2) In 1930 the German Bishops excommunicated anyone who joined the “Hitler Party” wore the uniform or flew the flag. To join the SS a candidate had to renounce Christianity to join the new order.”
  Re: 1) What is important regarding politicians isn’t whom they profess to like or dislike, but what they DO to affect the wellbeing or harm of various political groups, and where Hitler and “Hitler’s Pope” are concerned is that Pope Pius XI & XII publicly and officially AGREED WITH HITLER on the 1933 “pact with the devil” known as the Reich Concordat.  So what if Pius disliked Hitler SECRETLY! PUBLICLY he required all his German bishops to OBEY the following: Article 16

  Before bishops take possession of their dioceses they are to take an oath of fealty either to the Reich Representative of the State concerned, or to the President of the Reich, according to the following formula : “ Before God and on the Holy Gospels I swear and promise as becomes a bishop, loyalty to the German Reich and to the [regional - EC] State of . . .
  “I swear and promise to honor the legally constituted Government and to cause the clergy of my diocese to honor it. In the performance of my spiritual office and in my solicitude for the welfare and the interests of the German Reich, I will endeavor to avoid all detrimental acts which might endanger it.”
  How could the hierarchy have been expected to oppose Hitler’s policies when they had been required by their church to swear “before God and on the Holy Gospels” not to do so ?
  And as for 2), why are so impressed with the fact that the R.C. church excommunicated German Catholics for joining the Nazi Party when they were nothing but a noisy “Tea Party” prior to 1933, but LIFTED that ban when German Catholics were the only ones standing in the way of Hitler becoming the absolute dictator of Germany, never reinstated that excommunication after the Nazi Party demonstrated that there was no evil it wasn’t prepared to perpetrate in the persuance of the evil goals Hitler had been promulgating since publishing his Nazi bible, Mein Kamph – which may well have been ghost written for Hitler by a Jesuit Priest. -
  By the way, in all of the thousands of secret documents you have found in the secret archives, did you see one putting Mein Kamph on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books?

   
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 1, 2010 at 3:54 am

  Cathryn,
  Great points re: “I only wish Pope Pius XII had been able to say one clear sentence to induce the faithful to regard the Jews as humans, instead of leaving it to the few individuals who WERE magnificent and who realized Jewish humanity on their own despite the perennial teachings of the churches. ”
  In that connection, a Catholic social scientist who went to Germany to find evidence with which to defend his church instead ended up writing a book about how badly it had acted. One of his findings was that in the entire 12  year period of the Third Reich only 7 individual Catholics had refused to serve in Hitler’s armed services and far from being inspired by their church to do so, they were condemned and denied the sacraments (which WASN”T DONE for Catholics who carried out Hitler’s orders).
  See ”German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars“, by Gordon C. Zahn (a Catholic)(1989) { U. of Notre Dame Press, L.O.C.  62-9102 }
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 1, 2010 at 7:15 am

  Mrs. Vise,

  unfortunately your idea of the situation of Poland and the Polish Catholics during the German ocupation is, excuse me to be frank, rather naive. To put it into an adequate line, it was sheer terror. The Nazis treated the Polish as an “inferior race”, destined to be slaves and servants. They tried to exterminate the nation’s hierarchies and intelligentsia. They did not allow any outside communication, especially not with the Church and the Vatican. Then Vatican Radio reported about the Nazi terror in Poland in the winter of 1939/40, the Polish bishops asked the Pope to stop it since after every broadcast followed a severe retaliation measure. When Pius XII in July 1942, under great risk, sent a Pastoral Letter to the Polish Catholics, smuggled in Spaghetti Boxes into the residence of Krakow’s Archbishop Adam Sapieha, the Archbishop immediately burned it in his furnace out of fear, the Nazis could learn about it. Later he wote to the Pope in apology: “It tortures us that we were not able to read the letter of Your Holiness in public, but it would serve only as an excuse for a more severe persecution and we already had enough victims sentenced for communication with the Holy See.” According to Fr. Paganuzzi, who delivered the Pastoral letterof Pius XII. to the Archbishop, the letter also referred to the Jews, when Sapieha commented: “The worst is that we cannot help those unfortunate ones, since they are isolated from their surroundings. They die without a word of comfort. Not to shorten their days, we are not allowed to say anything. We experience this tragedy of these unfortunate ones and noone would like to help them more than we poles; but this is just not possible. There is no difference between Jews and Polish. The Nazis stole our bread and freedom. Let us save our life at least and the hope to experience the end of our Golgotha.”
  This, Mrs. Vyse, is the reality, not your scenario: “Millions of Jews wqould have been saved ifd the Pope would have disapproved of their helping the Nazis”. The Polish were VICTIMS of the Nazis who suffered tremendously, and certainly not their willing helpers!

  The same can be said about the Ukraineans. Only in the beginning, they considered the Germans their liberators from the terror of Stalin who nearly starved them to death in the “Holodomor”, the genocide by starvation, and were willing to become their “partners in crime”, considering many Jews as collaborators of the Communists.  The Vatican had no way to reach them anyway. Or do you think the Nazis would have allowed Papal pro-Jewish pastoral letters to be read in an occupied country?

  As I demonstrated above, Pope Pius XII did not save “fewer than ten thousand Jews”, but nearly A MILLION JEWS in Nazi-controlled Europe. He indeed saved 85 % or 7000 of the ROMAN Jews, but his actions also reached not only all Italy, but also Hitler’s allies, namely Vichy France, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, where help WAS possible.

  But there was just no way to reach the majority of Catholics in the areas occupied by the Nazis, since they controlled the mail and the media. Please keep in mind that it was a time when there was no internet, no television and only a limited number of radioes. To listen to “Enemy stations” in both, Germany and the occupied territories, was banned by severe punishments; Germans who were found listening to e.g. BBC or Radio Vatican were immediately sent to the Eastern front, subjects of the occupied countries were shot. So how could Pius XII reach the faithful when there were no free media, controlled mail and the Gestapo supervising the sermon of every Catholic mass held? 

  You might do any kind of mathematics to demonstrate that it was “pathetic” that the Pope saved only 860.000 Jews, but who saved more? You compare Japan with Germany, although it was just an ally, you claim that the Pope could have saved millions more when Consul Sugihara saved 6000, but you forget a very important point: It had to happen secretly! Don’t you think the Nazis had their eyes and ears everywhere? Don’t you know how many HIDDEN Jews were located by the Gestapo, arrested, sent to Auschwitz with their saviours killed? The higher the number, the higher the risk of getting caught!

  And this makes your math examples not only naive, but, forgive me, ridiculous. Oh yes, if the Polish would have had an order by the Pope, they would have hidden three million Jews! Dear Mrs. Vise, this sounds like a nice dream but is far away from reality: Believe me: If the Polish would have had the capacity, they would have never let the Germans invade and devastate their beloved home country, first of all! Then, indeed, also the Polish Jews would have been saved. But unfortunately the Polish were invaded by the Nazis, were terrorized by them and were often enough not able to save their own lives, not talking of protecting the Polish Jews! No, they did not help the Nazis, they hated the Nazis who occupied their country, killed their Intelligentsia, devastated their cities and looted their possessions, first of all. Yes, they were slave labours of the Nazis. If you call that “helping the Nazis”, well … they did not have another choice, with or without the threat of excommunication, because of the very real threat of extermination!

  Mr. Wilensky,

  sorry, can you please prove your claim that everyone in Germany knew about the holocaust during WW2, that German soldiers sent photos home etc.? Can you please name references to the letters, deliver any evidence? 
  Yes, German soldiers were eyewitnesses of mass executions of alleged “partisans” in the Ukraine, but not of what was going in the Concentration Camps. Keep in mind, their letters were censored anyway. So, sorry, but I can’t accept your claim.
  Railway workers might have had a suspicion what was going on. Many might have had suspicions. But there is a very strong force in the human psyche, which, in German, we call “Nichtwahrhabenwollen”, to refuse to believe what you don’t want to believe: “It can’t be real, so it is not real”.  Escaping into excuses: Well, they have food shortages in the camps, that’s why some “workers” died of starvation. Or “they must have had an epidemy of some kind” – all these excuses. Any claim of a planned extermination was refused as ”allied enemy propaganda”. The masses did not know and/or did not believe. Even for the Allies it was a shock when they learnt the full extent of the Holocaust. And certainly the Pope, too, could not believe in the numbers when he heard them first.

  Oh, yes, the SS celebrated Christmas – but this does not mean they were Catholics. First of all, in Germany today even atheists and muslims celebrate Christmas. It became part of the German mass culture, with or without its Christian background. Second, protestants also celebrate Christmas. The Nazis never tried to fight Christmas, they just paganized it, calling it a Winter Solstice Festival and claimed it had pagan origins. 

  Since Weizsäcker himself stated in his autobiography that he wrote Berlin whatever Berlin wanted to hear, his report re. the Papal reaction on the deportation of the Roman Jews is not only proven wrong by the facts, but also by his own testimony and that of his coworker Kessel (even under oath). And no, 7000 Jews were not already hidden. They believed that they were save, since they paid 50 kg of gold to the SS (Kappler). Read the memories of Rabbi Zolli: They did not even consider it necessary to hide the files of the Roman Synagogue with all the names and addresses of the members of their congregation! They laughed about Zolli who accepted the offer of the Vatican for an “asylum”! No, Pope Pius XII warned the Roman Jews already on September 17, 1943 in a note with the title “Feared Measures against the Italian Jews”!

  Fortunately the Pope did not follow your advice tp escape to London, since in this case he would cut himself off the network of help he built up and, at the same time, become “the Pope of the allies”, losing all influence on Hitler’s satellite states and the Catholics in Germany. He would tremedously weaken the German military resistance with whom he cooperated which planned to use the Church to get the loyalty of the  population after their planned (and unfortunately failed) coup d’etat against Hitler. No, officially the Pope had to remain neutral to become efficient as a peacemaker in the post Hitler era! The “Vatican treasures” only played a role if you refer to the funds he used to help the Jews and other victims of the War. He even planned to sell the paintings of the Vatican Museums when he got short of funds for this charity!

  You indeed claim that the major historians and holocaust scholars are not taking us serious? The opposite is true! Sir Martin Gilbert, world’s foremost holocaust scholar (and a Jew) support PTWF’s effort as well as Michael Tagliacozzo from Israel. Indeed, only a few, mainly left-wing or radical atheist historians share the position of Hochhuth and Cornwell - the majority already agrees that Pius XII did everything humanly possible to save hundred thousands of Jews.

  Rev. Dubuque,

  as a apostate Catholic Priest you certainly have an agenda on your own, nut please, at least get your facts straight. Of the Nazi leaders you name were several protestants and others who left the Church by their own, like Himmler, Heydrich and Hoess. They were not “divorced from the Church by its leaders”, since they excommunicated themselves by leaving the Church. Only Hitler and Goebbels, for sheer political reasons (to keep the German Catholics on their side and to have an excuse for a strike against the Catholic Church, would they get excommunicated) remained in the Church on the paper, although they not even once practised it (e.g. went to Church). For Adolf Hitler, the last visit to a Catholic Church was the funeral mass of his mother in 1907, when he was 18 years old.  

  You are also completely wrong when you claim that the Vatican was “used to protect thousands of Catholic war criminals”. It was NOT the Vatican who did it, but an Austrian bishop in Rome, Msgr. Alois Hudal, who acted against the orders of the Pope and therefore was disciplined by Pius XII in several steps: In 1949 he was declared a “persona non grata” and was physically stopped from entering the Apostolic Palace and “thrown out”, 1950 his Austrian pilgrim’s office was closed and in 1951 he was forced to resign from all positions and retire in the mountains near Rome.  There he wrote his memories, called ”Roman Diaries”, where he blames Pius XII for NOT using the Nazis as allies in the fight against communism. In this book, Hudal admits: “Because of my help (for the Nazi war criminals) the Roman curia called me a Nazi, faschist Bishop – troppo tedesco (too German) until I felt as being unbearable for the Vatican policy.” So by his own admission, Hudal (who in his book still defended his errors) faced the opposition of the Pope and the Vatican and acted by his own, being solely responsible for the shame he brought upon the Church for helping war criminals to escape to South America.

  The Six Million Victims of the Holocaust were not persecuted by “other Catholics”, but by members of an anti-Christian neo-pagan cult-like terror-regime, the Nazis, who not only sent thousands of Polish Priests and Religious to the Concentration Camps, too, but also planned to exterinate the Catholic Hierarchy in Germany after the War, a plan outlined in all details by Hitler in his “Table Talks”.

  And no, Rev. Dubuque, the Nazi Party was not “nnothing but a noisy Tea Party prior to 1933″, but were with  37,3 % of the votes the strongest political party during the elections of 31 July 1932! Of course “Mein Kampf” was ghost written by Hitler’s secretary Rudolf Hess, who was a protestant and practicing occultist but never a Jesuit at all. And yes, the Vatican did not only put the “Nazi Bible” “Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts” by Nazi chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg on the index but also planned to put Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” on the index, too. The plan was ceased when Rosenberg’s book became a major bestseller after the ban (which was used by the Nazi propaganda to promote the book) and since it would have been considered a hostile act against a Head of State and therefore a political act against an ally of Italy, when the Lateran Treaty condemned the Vatican to everlasting political neutrality.

  Sincerely, Michael Hesemann
  PTWF Germany   
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  June 1, 2010 at 8:30 am

  Herr Hesemann, if there’s one thing I can conclude after our exchanges is that the problem of “Nichtwahrhabenwollen”, or, as you said, to refuse to believe what you don’t want to believe, not only applied to the war and post-war Germans but to you too.
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 1, 2010 at 10:02 am

  Tovarish Wilensky,

  if you prefer to believe in what is proven to be KGB disinformation (the Hochhuth Play), that it fine to me. But if you reply to my rather long and detailed remarks, to the facts here and to all the hundreds of documents we present on our website, to all the well-documented evidence proving you wrong with nothing than a three line ad hominem-attack, it only demonstrates that you run out of anything better and just admit that you have nothing left  to defend yourself.

  It was my pleasure debating with you. I am sorry that you surrender so early, but time’s glory is to calm contending kings, to unmask falsehood and bring truth to light, to quote The Bard. At the end, you can’t deny the truth, so sooner or later any black legend has to come to an end.

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann
  PTWF Germany 
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 1, 2010 at 10:44 am

  Mr. Hessman,
  We can all see we are dealing with a logically -impaired person when they begin their argument with a sorry ad hominem like “as a apostate Catholic Priest you certainly have an agenda on your own”.
  What my “agenda” has been for as long as I can remember in my 73 years is to be the best human being that I can be. And when I discovered what an immoral institution the Roman Catholic priesthood and hierarchy are, I found that it was more honorable to be an “apostate priest” than a support of that immorality.
  Now as for “facts’, what is “several were protestants”  supposed to mean?  I spent a lot of time studying their history to find out that all of thet I people I put on my list WERE CATHOLICS, and I even indicated that some had a Catholic parent and a non-Catholic parent.  If you want to be in the same league as me you’ll have to at least spell out who was not a Catholic and some evidence that they were something else.
  And even when you say a few LEFT the Church, what is it about the church they were nurtured in that made so many of these people future Nazis and LEADERS of the Nazis at that???
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 1, 2010 at 10:56 am

  Mr. Hesemann addresses me as follows:  
  “Mrs. Vise–unfortunately your idea of the situation of Poland and the Polish Catholics during the German ocupation is, excuse me to be frank, rather naive. To put it into an adequate line, it was sheer terror. The Nazis treated the Polish as an “inferior race”, destined to be slaves and servants….[quoting a Pole] ‘There is no difference between Jews and Polish.’….The same can be said about the Ukraineans. Only in the beginning, they considered the Germans their liberators from the terror of Stalin who nearly starved them to death in the ‘Holodomor,’ the genocide by starvation, and were willing to become their ‘partners in crime,’ considering many Jews as collaborators of the Communists.”

  To answer your last item first, Mr. Hesemann, yes, it is true that the Ukrainians arbitrarily chose to view the peaceful Jewish villages (shtetlach) of the Ukraine as “collaborators of the Communists”–it is ironic that those who hate Jews are capable of imagining all Jews to be simultaneously guilty of capitalism and communism, and the poverty and hard work of simple Jewish villagers failed to dissuade them of their determination to hold onto this excuse for their hatred.  My father witnessed this first hand during the Ukrainian “resistance” to the Bolsheviks, which seemed to consist primarily of Ukrainian nationalists charging into a shtetl, breaking into Jewish homes, and murdering anyone who happened to be handy.  That was how he, at the age of eight, witnessed the shooting death of his own beautiful young mother, and that was how his grandmother was savagely cut up with a sword in another shtetl nearly.  I am thus not naive about the attitude of Ukrainians towards anyone who lived in a Jewish village.  But in case you require more evidence, there is the infamous Black Book, which details, in specific numbers by area, the degree to which the Ukrainians eagerly participated in the shooting murders at Babi Yar in Kiev and the other shooting murders near Uman and other Ukrainian centers penetrated by the Nazi regime.  You acknowledge Ukrainian participation and you justify it as supposedly OK because of the Ukrainians’ justifying their murderous perennial Jew-hatred via the canard of “Jews as Communists”.  So, to be blunt, Mr. Hesemann, I cannot even remotely excuse your remarks about the Ukrainians’ murderous mass-shootings of Jewish women and babies (including incidentally my aunts, uncles, and cousins, as reported to me by a surviving cousin) as “naive”.  And, yes, a phone call, a coded telegraph, a threat of excommunication or denial of the sacraments, smuggled to Ukrainian bishops and preached even once from each pulpit, would have been enormously helpful in halting the Ukrainians from venting their hatred of Jews in cooperation with the Nazi regime.  

  I also recall the tales of Nazis walking along the street, before the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto, shooting Jewish children.  They assumed the blond children were Poles and did not shoot them.  The Polish women who witnessed this nudged the Nazis and, quite unnecessarily, pointed to the blond ones, saying, “You missed some.”  So the Nazis went back and shot the blond children too.  

  As for the terror of the Poles, the record shows that the Nazi aim with respect to the Jews was total:  women, the elderly, the children, the babies.  Eli Wiesel’s Night tells of seeing, in 1944, a dump truck full of Jewish babies, emptying the babies into a raging fire to burn alive. 

  The Polish babies, as illustrated in the foregoing anecdote about the blond children, were left almost entirely untouched.  The Poles were regarded merely as inferior, and only the men of fighting age were sought out for death or imprisonment.  The children and the elderly were not sent to the camps.  Even the healthy young women were hardly at risk.  Almost all of the millions of Poles who were killed by the Nazis were young men of military age.  This is indeed terrible, but it also means that the risk faced by the Poles was partial, while the risk to the Jews was total. 

  Poles in general pointed Jews out with alacrity, and refused either to hide Jews or to permit Jews to join the Polish resistance or to sell guns or bullets to Jews.  Jerome Mintz, in Legends of the Hasidim, without any intent to indict Poles, records a typical interview of a Holocaust survivor, ending on page 36:  “I went home….we thought…people would greet us in our home town….I couldn’t even go up to my apartment….  I couldn’t and I ran away….the Polish people started killing Jews again, pogroms and everything the same as it used to be before.  They hate us again….  I ran away on the train”  (italics added). 

  Moreover, whatever the Polish excuses may have been for failing to hide Jews, the almost universal Polish refusal to sell arms or bullets to Jews is difficult to excuse, and the Polish penchant for helping to hunt down adult Jews and to point out Jewish children is certainly inexcusable–yet these might be excused by the fact that, on the scale of living beings, the Poles, like the Germans and Ukrainians, ranked Jews not only as subhuman but as subanimal, the official European Catholic church ranking the Jews at the very bottom of the scale of living things, below even the cockroach, as had been inculcated in European churches for hundreds of years.  Having been thus indoctrinated by the Catholic church, they were entitled to be disabused of this notion, also by the Catholic church, which ought to have informed the Polish faithful, even before the war, that Jews are human and that the faithful would be expected to treat Jews as human.  

  By the way, the valor of the Polish army in resisting the German army fails to measure up to the valor of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, where resistance was maintained almost to the last man and woman, whose resistance lasted LONGER, despite an almost total lack of weaponry, than that of the entire Polish army. 

  Finally, the title “Mrs.” means “wife of”.  Since, in deference to my Catholic and Protestant in-laws, I am avoiding the use of my married name, I would prefer that others not subject me to the misleading “Mrs.” title.  I have never been the wife of anyone with the last name I am using here, nor do I have any kin in this generation by that last name. 

  Yes, Virginia, there ARE many, many good people among the Catholics and among other Christians as well, especially in the United States, and many of them are my blood kin, my friends, and my neighbors, whose kindnesses to me are legion.  And many of them were humane enough, and courageous enough, to find ways to save the lives of hundreds or thousands of Jews during WWII.   

  Unfortunately for those who seek to convince me that Pope Pius XII was one of these righteous gentiles, the only way to do so would be to demonstrate that the pope was not silent after all, but that he did communicate to the faithful across Europe and across Poland and the Ukraine, during the Hitler years, whether before or after the invasion of Poland, that Jews are indeed human rather than children of the devil, or cockroaches, or vermin, and that good Catholics were expected to treat Jews humanely. 
   

   
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 1, 2010 at 11:11 am

  Mr. Hesemann,
  Nice try in attempting to distance Pacelli from Hudall, but they had a very long history together and even if you say they had a falling out LATE in their lives you haven’t proved that the Pope didn’t know that this important bishop friend of his was leading a cladestine effort to help some of the war’s worst criminals to use institutions IN ROME – if not within the walls of  ”Vatican City” –  to escape prosecution by the allies, i.e. people like :
  Adolf Eichmann, “the architect of the Holocaust”, ,Alois Brunner , referred to as his “best man” by Eichman,Dr. Josef Mengele, “the Angel of Death” ,Franz Stangl, commandant of the SobibÛr and of Treblinka extermination camp ,Gustav Wagner assistant to Franz Stangl,Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon” ,Edward Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga”,Aribert Heim, Mauthausen concentration camp’s “Dr. Death”,Walter Rauff, believed responsible for nearly 100,000 deathsAndrija Artuković, “the Himmler of the Balkans”.
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  June 1, 2010 at 11:16 am

  Ah, my dear Mr. Hesemann… What can I say? I didn’t ignore you long post. It’s just that you, like Mr. Krupp, are both reiterating your points over and over again, seemingly ignoring or not acknowledging my and other poster’s comments yourselves. Believe me, I didn’t run out of things to say on my defense. I think I have been defending myself quite well, thank you. I only felt it unnecessary to make the same points when I myself spent a considerable amount of time previously making long, considered responses. In other words, I had “defended” myself already previously.

  Ultimately, as I explained to Mr. Krupp earlier, you have a quasi-religious conviction of your views and suffer from what is, in my view, an error of interpretation. You are absolutely convinced that you have documented evidence that proves me wrong, and fail to understand how I, and many other Holocaust scholars (much better qualified than me, if I may say so) fail to be persuaded by your “evidence”. Well, my dear Mr. Hesemann, maybe you should ponder this. As I expressed in an earlier post, you need to ask yourselves if we are all malicious, dimwitted, or what. Of course, one possibility you should consider is that all of us who are not persuaded by your “well-documented evidence” simply think the evidence, at least that which may be credible, is simply evidence of something else. You need to ask yourselves if, instead of everyone else being wrong, it is indeed you the ones that are.

  Lastly, what was that nonsense about me believing any KGB disinformation? Are you saying that everything I’ve said so far is part of that same Soviet disinformation campaign? It certainly seems so, given you are now addressing me as “tovarish”.
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 1, 2010 at 11:28 am

  I see that Henemann chooses to address anyone who disagrees with him by whatever negative title he chooses.  Having chosen to misaddress me as “Mrs.,” which could be mere thoughtlessness, Henemann stoops so low as to deliberately use the expression “Tovarish Wilensky”–”comrade Wilensky,” a communist mode of address.  Thus he violates the directive to “be nice” and effectively questions Mr. Wilensky’s loyalty to America;  moreover, Henemann also thereby expresses his solidarity with the Ukrainians whose committing of shooting murders of as many Jews as they could likewise was done under the pretext of regarding them as “pro-communist” and hence as “disloyal” to Ukraine.  I regret to acknowledge that Henemann has thereby totally trashed his own credibility in my eyes, along with any pretense he may have of honor or of even minimal decency, much less with any concern for his murdered Jewish brethren.  I say “brethren” because, regardless of Henemann’s ethnicity, Beethoven’s Ninth symphony ends with the song proclaiming that  Alle menschen werden Brudern, “all humans all brothers”.  But evidently, according to Henemann, it would seem that we have to expect, and to justify, exceptions for maybe Jews or communists or capitalists or children of the devil or cockroaches or other vermin.   

  I begin to see why Henemann is so eager to excuse the silent Pope.   After all, he acknowledges that the Ukrainians eagerly participated in the shooting murders of Jews, but excuses this on the grounds that “the Ukrainians….in the beginning…considered the Germans their liberators from the terror of Stalin who nearly starved them to death in…the genocide by starvation, and were willing to become their ‘partners in crime,’ considering many Jews as collaborators of the Communists.”  

  But in fact the Jews were not “collaborators of the Communists” just as Mr. Wilensky is not a “collaborator of the communists” and just as my father’s kindly loving mother and the others whom the Ukrainians shot that Purim day in 1918 were not “collaborators of the communists”. 
  The fact that Henemann has thus at least twice revived this “collaborator” canard against Jews, regardless of Henemann’s own Jewish credentials or lack of them, demonstrates to me a hostility towards Jews that obviates any consideration for truth.  In view of this blatantly hate-filled stance, I shall not attempt to influence his opinion, but shall try to avoid reading any further messages of his, and urge other readers to do the same. 
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 1, 2010 at 12:19 pm

  Reverend Dubuque,

  well, the objectivity of an Ex-Priest in a discussion about Church history is as high as that of a divorced wife talking about her ex-husband. And before you protest: Yes, your priesthood was a love affair with the Church and now this relationship has failed, for whatever reason. This is sad but we all have to admit that you might be overwhelmed by emotions which are not really connected with the subject of our discussion.

  I am myself Roman Catholic and I know my Church and its hierarchy well enough not only to question but to flatly deny your claim of the RC Church being an “immoral insitution”. Nothing can’t be more far away from the truth! 

  But you wanted a detailed reply and so you get it. Let’s investigate the religious background of the Nazi leaders:

  Adolf Hitler: Apostate Catholic. Father “Freethinker”, mother Catholic. Went to Church last time when he was 18 (funeral of his mother).

  Rudolf Hess: Protestant

  Hermann Goering: Protestant

  Heinrich Himmler: Apostate Catholic, Left the Church in 1935

  Joseph Goebbels: Apostate Catholic

  Martin Bormann: Protestant

  Joachim von Ribbentrop: Protestant

  Alfred Rosenberg: Protestant

  Reinhard Heydrich: Apostate Catholic, Left Church in 1935

  Rudolf Hoess, Catholic Apostate, joined the neo-pagan Artamanenbund in 1927, left the Church in 1935

  Julius Streicher, Catholic Apostate, left the Church in 1925

  Fritz Thyssen was Catholic but protested against Hitler’s Anti-Jewish excesses and the war and left Germany in 1939 out of protest; the Nazis arrested him in France and put him into several Concentration Camps.  

  As you can see, after 1935 only TWO leading Nazis, Hitler and Goebbels, were officially still members of the Catholic Church, although none of them practised this religion for decades. Indeed the Nazi party was anti-Catholic from the very beginning, blaming the Catholic faith to be “created by the Jew Shaul” (St.Paul) and considered Jesus Christ a revolutionary against the Jews of Aryan blood. Therefore, they considered their program as a new form of “positive Christianity” (as it was called in the program of the NSDAP) in contrast to the faith of the Church, which they fought against.

  Ms. Vyse,

  during a public audience in 1941, Pius XII loudly addressed a young Jew with the words:
  “You are a young jew. I know what that means and I hope you will always be proud to be a Jew … My Jewish friend, go with the protection of the Lord, and never forget, you must always be proud to be a Jew!”
  This statement was published in the Palestine Post of April 18, 1944, now the Jerusalem Post, at that time the leading newspaper of the Jewish settlers in what is today Israel. 
  His predecessor, Pius XI. stated on September 6, 1938, the very year of the Kristallnacht and the introduction of the “Nuremberg” Racial Laws in Italy: “Spiritually we are all Semites”.
  The Nazi Racism was officiall condemned in the Papal “Syllabus” of April 13, 1938, when Pius XI ordered all Catholic Universities and Semianries to fight against the “absurd dogmata” of Racism.   
  The Antisemitism was already OFFICIALLY CONDEMNED by the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XI in 1928!
  I must admit that I read your comment with great horror. I am shocked and saddened how Jews were treated by individuals both in Poland, Germany and the Ukraine. We all agree that this is the saddest chapter in human history. I can’t deny that the Christian Antijudaism (which is not a Catholic invention and indeed two of the most radical Antijewish polemics were written by St. John Chrysostomos and Martin Luther) prepared the grounds for the racist Antisemitism of the 19th and 20th century. But still, there is a major difference. The Christian Antijudaism had one goal, the conversion of the Jews. The Racist Antisemitism did not care for the Jewish religion, but the alleged Jewish race – and made no conversion, no escape possible. It considered Jews as a different, inferior race. This concept is completely against the Catholic doctrine of the humani generis unitas, the unity of the human race, which was stressed not only by Pius XI (e.g. in Mit brennender Sorge), but also by Pius XII in his very first encyclyca Summi Pontificatus as well as in Mystici corporis (1943).
  These encyclicae were spread whereever possible by the Catholic clergy. Their distribution was forbidden in Germany. Indeed, the French let 88.000 fliers with its text rain upon Germany from their planes. And still, the majority did not care.

  I have to apologize that I called you “Mrs.”, which was not intended in any way as an offence, but I am still sorry. But still, your plea is in vain. Whatever we demonstrate you, it is and was always a fact: Good Catholics treated Jews humanely, and if you study history you see that all great Popes were protectors of the Jews.  No Pope ever claimed that Jews were “Children of the devil, or cockroaches or vermin”, since this would be a complete perversion of the Catholic doctrine. Of course, Jews as much as Catholics, are children of the same God, created according to His image out of the same dust, sharing the same ancestor, Adam. Whoever claimed or acted differently, was guilty of a heresy. And Nazism was, as Eugenio Pacelli wrote already in May 1st, 1924 (and I had his handwritten notes in my hands in the Vatican Secret Archives): Nazism was “the most dangerous heresy of our times”. Three days later he explained why: “Nazism puts state and race above all, above true religion, above truth and above justice”.  A Catholic could never be a Nazi nor could a Catholic ever be Antisemite, unless he completely ignores or even perverts the doctrine of his Church!
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 1, 2010 at 1:11 pm

  Excuse me, Ms. Vyse,

  after I was called everything from “Herr Hesemann”, pointing towards my German roots (and questioning my objectivity) in Mr. Wilenskys ad hominem attack and “Mr. Hessman”, obviously to build up a ficticious connection to Rudolf Hess, I took the freedom to reply slightly ironically to Mr. Wilensky as “tovarish”, due to the fact that he still defends the lie of “Hitler’s Pope”, which was a black legend invented by the KGB disinformation department and brought on stage by a communist theater director who had just returned from Moscow to West Berlin (Erwin Piscator), using, as author, the former “Hitler Youth” boy Rolf Hochhuth, a dear friend of Holocaust-denier Irving.  Still, in spite of this rather dubious background, “The Deputy” became the mother of all Pius-bashers and turned the public image of this great and saintly Pope by 180 degrees, from applause and gratitude towards debunking and defamation. Still, it is up to Mr. Wilensky to believe in any myth he wants, but I politely ask him to discuss facts and claims instead of mailing arrogant 3-lines ad hominem attacks.
  I never claimed that any Jew was a “Collaborator of the communists”, I just explained the attitude of the Ukraineans after the German invasion. They just suffered under Stalin and believed the Germans were there liberators, until they found out that they were even worse. Still, in the beginning they were willing collaborators when the Nazi propaganda let them BELIEVE that the Jews were communist partisans, although, of course, THEY WERE NOT.
  I already apologized to Ms. Vise, it really was not my intention to hurt her in any way. But how should I know that she is not married and prefers to be called “Ms.”? But please, Ms. Vise, I would not consider “Mrs.” a negative title and I use it for many women I highly respect (as much as I respect you). It is just an error,  as I consider it an error when you call me “Henemann” instead of “Hesemann”.

  I really wonder, Ms. Vise, how you can blame me of a “hate-filled stance”, especially after I wrote Mr. Wilensky “It was my pleasure debating with you”. This is rather a remark of respect than of disrespect or hate. But I think he could have done better than just trashing my long comment with a threeliner, so I wanted to provoke him a little bit to get back to the facts and to a serious discussion. I am deeply sorry when this was misunderstood.

  SHALOM!
  Sincerely, Michael Hesemann
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 1, 2010 at 4:32 pm

  I apologize.  I truly did not intend to misspell the name Hesemann and I am sorry.  I scrolled up to see it and I should have written it down, because by the time I scrolled back again I had misremembered it.  I thoroughly and heartily regret my error and I offer no excuse for it, unless my own stupidity counts.   

  I did think that referring three times in two posts to communists (once by Mr. Wilensky’s title, and the other two times with the actual word) in refrences to Jews was a bit too close to one of the classic negative stereotypes–and, yes, a bit much, especially when it was used, in the prior post and again in this one, to acknowledge and exonerate the fact that the Ukrainians murdered Jews–up to about 900,000 Jews, the most in any one country except Poland. 

  This attempted exoneration of the shooting murders of 900,000 people is at outrage. 

  Can you imagine what it must have been like, participating in the shooting murders of so many people?  Can you imagine doing that yourself and being glad to do it, as the Ukrainians were?  Do you realize that their antipathy for Jews came not from their experiences with Jews but frm the preachings of their Catholic churches? 

  And yet you exonerated the murders as based on the Ukrainians’ unwarranted, church-inspired, belief in an imaginary ”collaboration” with communists, thus implying it was OK, or at least excusable, for the Ukrainians to murder 900,000 or so Ukrainian Jews. 

  If it was OK, or even merely excusable, for the Ukrainians, that implies that it was similarly OK or excusable for everyone, since it was motivated by the hatred that the church had instilled for centuries in its faithful flocks.  

  Six million “OK” murders is the ultimate implication of that little remark. 

  You may have failed to notice the implications of what you said, but those implications are nonetheless an outrage.  Let us assume that you must have failed to notice, and that you did not intend any such implications. 

  However, anyone who finds the murder of six million Jews an outrage would also find it unthinkable to offer excuses for the murderers.  

  I can assure you that it would never enter my mind to find excuses for any of the murderers of the Jews in any country in Europe.  It would simply be impossible for me to think such a thing, much less say it or write it.  I prefer to avoid thinking about the Ukrainians at all; I like to thik about Bulgaria, for example, which heroically protected its Jews from export, or about Denmark, which saved almost every one of its Jews.  

  Do you realize that the tiny Jewish villages, the shtetlach, were so close togther that a traveller could walk from one to another between sunrise and sunset?  That one could walk across Europe and always have a kosher meal and a bed in a little Jewish village every night?  All those hundreds of thousands of villages are gone, the people murdered, the buildings with their books and tapestries and Torahs and Talmuds burned to the ground, the graves uprooted, leaving no trace that anyone ever lived and sang and prayed there.  Have you any idea what it means when an entire culture is lost forever, as this one has been?  Only shreds remain, out of which Jewishness is being slowly recreated.  Have you any concept of the enormity of this loss? 

  And then there was the content of the ”excuse”–That the murderers had already been so well schoooled in their hatred of their mythic concept, “the Jews,” that they falsely regarded “the Jews” as communist collaborators, and were breaking into homes in Jewish villages even in 1918 when they shot my father’s beautiful young mother and many of the other inhabitants of her village.  I can assure you that she was totally uninvolved with any communists in any manner way shape or form, as was his grandmother.  The Ukrainian misconception that “the Jews” were supposedly so involved fails to excuse their murdering her. 

  Making excuses for the murdering of Jews is infnitely worse than misspelling a name or using a wrong title.  

  So go ahead.  Misspell my name all you want.  Call me Vyse.  You can even call me “Mrs.”  It doesn’t matter, and I don’t matter.  But making excuses for the murder of some 900,000 Ukrainian Jews, or of any other Jews, does matter.   

  That makes you a poor choice of debater as to whether Pope Pius XII was right or wrong to have been silent about their murders.   Whose side was Pope Pius XII on, the Jews or the Jew-haters?  His position is ill-served by an advocate who excuses the murders on the grounds that the murderers had been taught by the Catholic church to falsely regard “the Jews” as “communist collaborators”. 

  But go ahead, defend the pope, and close your mind to any evidence that he should have cared more and should have spoken out clearly even once.  Are you defending Pope Pius XII because the Pope prevented as many murders as he could?

  But what exactly did Pope Pius XII think about Jews?  Had he , like the Ukrainians, been schooled to associate “the Jews” with ”communist collaborators”?  Would that false association make it OK in his eyes to murder them?  Might that opinion make him reluctant to speak out on their behalf?  

  in 1936, Cardinal Augustyn Hlond, primate of Poland, said in a letter, “It is a fact that the
  Jews are…the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion….” (James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp 271-272).  This was read from the pulpit of all churches in Poland. 

  Within a few months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Archbishop of Paderborn spoke of a struggle “for the protection of Christianity…from the threat of anti-Christian Bolshevism”  (Gunter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p 231).  

  Perhaps others know of other proclamations of the higher eschelons of the Catholic Church expressing deep concern about Bolshevism or Communism and drawing a connection between these evils and Jews?  

  If so, Mr. Hesemann, you may have provided us with a clue as to one of the motives for the silence of the Vatican as the Jews of Europe were being exterminated.  
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  June 1, 2010 at 4:38 pm

  Mr. Hesemann, I think you got it all wrong. I did not address you as “Herr” in any derogatory way, unless the word can be conceived that way in German. If so, I offer my apologies as I was not aware of it. My only intention was to treat you with respect, and I thought that I was doing just that by substituting “Mr.” for “Herr”, given you were German. From my perspective, that in and of itself is nothing to be ashamed of, irrespective of what Germans of previous generations may have done.
   
  Also, I did not “attack” you, ad hominem or otherwise. I only remarked on what I think is at the heart of this conversation, namely, that your convictions are so strong that you refuse to see facts in any other light. If you reread everything I said from the very beginning of this conversation you will see that I have always addressed you and your points with the utmost respect, even when I strongly disagreed with them. You asked me to discuss facts. Well, again, if you read my posts carefully you’ll see that I have consistently been discussing facts, backed by quotations from the pertinent players whenever appropriate to back my assertions.
   
  I am personally not interested in picking up a fight with anyone, or with wasting time in semantic squabbles. I have enjoyed this debate with you and Mr. Krupp as well, and I hope we can now continue discussing the issues.
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 1, 2010 at 4:47 pm

  By the way I know how terrible Stalin was.  He, too, killed millions of people. 

  Two wrongs don’t make a right. 
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 2, 2010 at 12:36 am

  Mr. Hesemann, do you realize that you are embarrassing yourself (and the church you are trying to represent)?  e.g.
  You wrote to me “please, at least get your facts straight. Of the Nazi leaders you name were several protestants”,  When I challenged you to at least tell us WHICH were protestants you named
  “Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering, Martin Bormann, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg” .
  The FACT is that – far from identifying these Nazi leaders as Roman Catholic AS YOU CLAIM – I said NOTHING about them in this thread and  the thousands of people who have been reading my http://JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/NaziLeadership.html page over the years have always been informed that they were Protestants.
  So while telling ME to get your facts straight YOU show that you don’t know FACTS from FIGS!
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 2, 2010 at 12:36 am

  Mr. Hesemann, do you realize that you are embarrassing yourself (and the church you are trying to represent)?  e.g.
  You wrote to me “please, at least get your facts straight. Of the Nazi leaders you name were several protestants”,  When I challenged you to at least tell us WHICH were protestants you named
  “Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering, Martin Bormann, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg” .
  The FACT is that – far from identifying these Nazi leaders as Roman Catholic AS YOU CLAIM – I said NOTHING about them in this thread and  the thousands of people who have been reading my http://JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/NaziLeadership.html page over the years have always been informed that they were Protestants.
  So while telling ME to get your facts straight YOU show that you don’t know FACTS from FIGS!
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 2, 2010 at 12:53 am

  Mr. Hesemann, do you realize that you are embarrassing yourself (and the church you are trying to represent)?  e.g.
  You argue against MY ability to be objective : “well, the objectivity of an Ex-Priest in a discussion about Church history is as high as that of a divorced wife talking about her ex-husband. And before you protest: Yes, your priesthood was a love affair with the Church and now this relationship has failed, for whatever reason. This is sad but we all have to admit that you might be overwhelmed by emotions which are not really connected with the subject of our discussion.
  I am myself Roman Catholic and I know my Church and its hierarchy well enough not only to question but to flatly deny your claim of the RC Church being an “immoral insitution”.”
  If you can’t see how utterly SILLY it is to claim that YOU  as a devoted son of “Holy Mother the Church” and of your “Most Holy Father”   has any credibility, while you are making the above argument, then you are indeed HOPELESS !
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 2, 2010 at 1:12 am

  Dear Ms. Vise,

  apologies accepted, and I hope on both sides. The subject is too serious and too important to become distracted by anything personal.

  So back to the facts: And please let us make one thing clear: Not the Ukrainians nor the polish are responsible for the Holocaust but first of all the Nazis, a neo-pagan racist cult turned into apolitical party, and second the Germans which voted for and hailed this maniac and allowed him to come in power – Hitler’s helpers!

  I can’t believe that the Ukrainians by themselves murdered 900.000 Jews. Instead they were forced to do so by the Nazis/Germans. They certainly never did it because it was preached in their Churches. Maybe they collaborated because they FALSELY BELIEVED (in no way I want to exonerate them and in no way anyone can excuse the killing even of a single Jew!) that the Jews were responsible for Communism (as the Nazis claimed – for them, Bolshevism was a Jewish invention, as Catholicism was). You can’t blame the Ukrainian Catholic Church for it. It NEVER taught to kill Jews!

  Again, Ms. Vise. I NEVER claimed it was okay or excusable or anything to participate in a genocide. There is and there will never be ANY excuse. But this includes the (false)  excuse that they were taught to do so in their Churches. Indeed, for centuries Jews and Ukrainians lives together in peace. Galicia, Western Ukraine, was home of the richest Jewish culture in Europe – and the place many Jews went to when they escaped from persecution in other parts of Europe. During all these centuries of coexistence the Ukrainian Catholic Church taught the same – the gospel of Christ: Love your neighbor (what includes your Jewish neighbor!)!

  Czarist Russia started the first pogroms because of greed – the Czar was bancrupt and greedy for alleged Jewish wealth. The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were invented (faked, hoaxed) by the Czarist Secret Service to justify these progroms. Many Russian Jews therefore migrated into the peaceful Western Ukraine, Galicia. Again, no violent Antisemitism there!

  The Ukrainians suffered under Stalin. They hated the Communists. And only when the Nazis INVENTED the false formula “Jews=Communists” they could bring the Ukrainians at least for a while on their side and made some of them there willing helpers in the holocaust, when the majority was just FORCED TO KILL. There is no way to excuse these horrible crimes. But as the trigger, you have to blame the Nazi ideology and NOT the Ukrainian Catholic Church!

  How can you even claim that I try to find excuses for the murder of Jews? I try to define what caused the Nazi helpers to do the unthinkable, at least those who did not do so with a machine gun pointed at their back, knowing that they would be the next wouldn’t they follow their orders. And indeed the support the Nazis primarily received in the Western Ukraine was cause by the believe of the Ukrainians that they were liberators from Communism. NO EXCUSE, just an explanation for the lack of resistance!

  Yes, you are right. It is immensely sad and tragic that this rich Jewish culture was destriyed by unscrupulous murderers, a culture which peacefully coexisted with the Ukrainian Catholic culture, because Catholicism NEVER intended any pogrom or the unthinkable, a genocide. 

  And, once again, the murderers were NOT taught by the Catholic church to falsely regard “The Jews” as “Communist collaborators-  BUT BY THE NAZI PROPAGANDA! That’s why the horrible killing of 900.000 Ukrainian Jews took place during the dark times of the Nazi occupation and not during all the centuries when the Ukrainians were free and listened to their Church!

  What did Pius XII think about Jews? He had a Jewish friend at school and went to Shabbat-dinner at his family’s home (this friend, Guido Mendes, became a famous physician in Israel after Pius XII helped him to escape to Palestine). He read Jewish authors and wanted to learn Hebrew. He supported Zionism, was a supporter of Nahum Sokolow who praised the “unusual abundance of friendship” he received from him. He tried everything to let the Jewish community of Germany have palmleaves for Sukhot during WW1 (and unfortunately failed, since the Italian authorities did not cooperate) and started a diplomatic intervention to stop the killing of Jews by Cemal Pasha in Palestine at the end of WW1. Indeed he was the first who considered “interventions against the danger of antisemitic excesses in Germany” already on April 4, 1933 – when the Nazis just came inpower. And he told a young Jew in 1942, the year of the Wannsee-Conference: “You must always be proud to be a Jew!” He was a friend of the Jews, the most philosemite Pope in history until JPII was elected!

  When the Nazis tried to convince the Vatican to bless their war as an Anti-Bolshevist crusade, Msgr. Tardini replied in the name of the Pope: “”The Svastica is not really the cross of a crusade.” ”It is impossible to condemn the errors and terror of communism and … at the same time forget the derailments and persecutions of Nazism”. Therefore he would recommend to use, “Instaed of the term crusade”, the proverb: “one devil hunts the other”.

  When the Austrian bishop Hudal wanted to celebrate a Holy Mass for the Germans who died during the Russian campaign, it was forbidden by the secretary of the Pope, Fr. Leiber, in person: The Russian people had any right to fight the invaders “so that rather their defense of their home country can be called a Holy War”.
  “The communist danger is real, but at the moment the danger of the Nazis is more serious”, Pius XII. told Cardinal Paolo Dezza in 1942.
  That’s why he gave his nihil obstat to the alliance with Stalin AGAINST Hitler, when millions of young Catholic soldiers in the US hesitated to fight side to side with “godless communists” (since Communism was condemned by Pius XI). To win the war against Hitler had absolute priority!

  Therefore, Ms. Vise, your conclusion is wrong. The Vatican did NOT draw any connection between Communism and the Jews. Instead, the Vatican was even willing to accept an alliance with godless communism and Stalin himself if it serves the purpose to fight the bigger evil, Nazism, and STOP THE KILLING OF THE JEWS!
   
  Excuse my bad English, it’s not my mother tongue and sometimes it is difficult to find the right words, to get into the subtilities of your language. But please don’t even try to put things into my mouth which I never said nor ever intended to say, even if this would serve and support your prejudices against the Catholic church!

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann

   
• Gary Krupp says:

  June 2, 2010 at 1:18 am

  Dear Mr., Wilensky,
  As this debate is winding down, we must accept that we will agree to disagree. I wish to personally invite you, as I have done for some of the other Pius critics, to join me in Rome. I will get you accredited as soon a possible at the Vatican Archives and perhaps Michael Hesemann can join us. Michael has written many books on this subject he is a respected historian. He visits the open Secret Archives almost every month or so. He travels from Germany to Rome at his own expense to specifically go into the archives and every time he studies its contents he comes up with another revealing document. Currently, we are waiting for a copy of a handwritten letter from Nachum Sokolow (head of the World Zionist Organization) where he is warmly thanking Archbishop Pacelli for his intercession. In 1917 Sokolow met with young Pacelli to ask him to intercede to save the Jews of Palestine from the Ottoman Turks.  Pacelli succeed and accomplished this by getting German guarantees of protection (documents on our website). Then in 1925 he asked Pacelli’s advice on the notion of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Pacelli helped him to meet with Pope Benedict XV(documents on our website). These are the types of documents that anyone can see but no one from the critical side has come to study. This is why the argument that “we will wait for the war years Archives to open is bogus” They have simply ignored the open section now, which contains 65% of Pacelli’s ministry. So when the war years are open the critics will simply say that the Vatican sanitized the contents and this Shonda will never end.
  Between the Actes of the Holy See, published in 1981 (covering 5125 documents from the closed war years section), the open archives up to 1939, supporting eye witness testimonies and documents (from other archives from many other countries including Israel), there is no doubt about the conditions of the day and what had to be done to survive,  and to rescue as many Jews as possible. You will see the documents where the Vatican checked off the names of over 20 countries that they contacted to accept Jews and in many cases were turned down with “No Jews allowed”. In some cases the pre-conditions to allowing Jews to immigrate were that the Jews could only come if the stated they would work in agricultural work rather than professional or business activities. Jewish immigration to South America and the US, Pius XII encouraged the issuance of false baptismal papers so that the Jews can leave as “non-Aryan Catholic Jews”. Many claim that these refugees are converted Jews but we have proof they were not. If they had been actually baptized they would have simply been simply called  Catholics. Never before in Vatican correspondence has this terminology been used. It was simply a way of telling a white lie to save Jewish lives. In the case of Brazil one week after the Jews arrived their visas were revoked for practicing irregular religious ceremonies (Shabbat).
  Pope Benedict XVI has ordered the archive’s personnel to be increased from 3 to 20 people. The Vatican is desperately trying to complete the cataloging so that the year 1939-1958 can be opened as soon as possible. When this day comes we will be monitoring who actually shows up, how long they stay and will loudly report this information.
  As my challenge to come to Rome to debate the experts is always completely ignored, I will be happy to bring you personally on a one to one basis to see documents and hear the remarks of those who know the truth. You can go to the codification section to see how all messages had to be encrypted and to the archives see actual documents. I am serious about this invitation.
  On a previous subject we also will be sending an accurate translation of the actual speech of Pacelli in Budapest in 1938. This speech is in the L’Osservatore Romano of May 26, 1938 on our website. It s in the original French and it does not appear say “Crucify him” Crucify him.” In fact it says “The cynicism of Herod, the denial of justice by Pilate the opportunist. It clearly blames Herod and Pilate. When this is completely translated it will be clear that Pacelli is condemning the G-dless regimes of National Socialism and Communism.
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 2, 2010 at 1:21 am

  Dear Ms. Vise,
  apologies accepted, and I hope on both sides. The subject is too serious and too important to become distracted by anything personal.
  So back to the facts – and please let us make one thing clear: Not the Ukrainians nor the Polish are responsible for the Holocaust but first of all the Nazis, a neo-pagan racist cult turned into a political party, and second the Germans which voted for and hailed this maniac and allowed him to come in power – Hitler’s helpers!
  I can’t believe that the Ukrainians by themselves murdered 900.000 Jews. Instead they were forced to do so by the Nazis/Germans. They certainly never did it because it was preached in their Churches. Maybe they collaborated because they FALSELY BELIEVED (in no way I want to exonerate them and in no way anyone can excuse the killing even of a single Jew!) that the Jews were responsible for Communism as the Nazis claimed (for them, Bolshevism was a Jewish invention, as Catholicism was) and told them. You can’t blame the Ukrainian Catholic Church for it. It NEVER taught to kill Jews!
  Again, Ms. Vise. I NEVER claimed it was okay or excusable or anything to participate in a genocide. There is and there will never be ANY excuse. But this includes the (false)  excuse that they were taught to do so in their Churches. Indeed, for centuries Jews and Ukrainians lived together in peace. Galicia, Western Ukraine, was the home of the richest Jewish culture in Europe – and the place where many Jews found refuge  from persecutions in other parts of Europe. During all these centuries of coexistence, the Ukrainian Catholic Church taught the same – the gospel of Christ: Love your neighbor (what includes your Jewish neighbor!)!
  Czarist Russia started the first pogroms because of greed – the Czar was bancrupt and greedy for alleged Jewish wealth. The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were invented (faked, hoaxed) by the Czarist Secret Service to justify these progroms. Many Russian Jews therefore migrated into the peaceful Western Ukraine, Galicia. Again, no violent Antisemitism there!
  The Ukrainians suffered under Stalin. They hated the Communists. And only when the Nazis INVENTED the false formula “Jews=Communists” they could bring some Ukrainians at least for a while on their side and made some of them even willing helpers in the holocaust, when still the majority was just FORCED TO KILL. There is no way to excuse these horrible crimes. But as the trigger, you have to blame the Nazi ideology and NOT the Ukrainian Catholic Church!
  How can you even claim that I try to find excuses for the murder of Jews? I try to define what caused the Nazi helpers to do the unthinkable, at least those who did not do so with a machine gun pointed at their back, knowing that they would be the next wouldn’t they follow their orders. And indeed the support the Nazis primarily received in the Western Ukraine was caused by the believe of the Ukrainians that they were liberators from Communism. NO EXCUSE, just an explanation for the lack of resistance!
  Yes, you are right. It is immensely sad and tragic that this rich Jewish culture was destroyed by unscrupulous murderers, a culture which peacefully coexisted with the Ukrainian Catholic culture, because Catholicism NEVER intended any pogrom or the unthinkable, a genocide. 
  And, once again, the murderers were NOT taught by the Catholic church to falsely regard “The Jews” as “Communist collaborators-  BUT BY THE NAZI PROPAGANDA! That’s why the horrible killing of 900.000 Ukrainian Jews took place during the dark times of the Nazi occupation and not during all the centuries when the Ukrainians were free and listened to their Church!
  What did Pius XII think about Jews? He had a Jewish friend at school and went to Shabbat-dinner at his family’s home (this friend, Guido Mendes, became a famous physician in Israel after Pius XII helped him to escape to Palestine). He read Jewish authors and wanted to learn Hebrew. He supported Zionism, was a supporter of Nahum Sokolow who praised the “unusual abundance of friendship” he received from him. He tried everything to let the Jewish community of Germany have palmleaves for Sukhot during WW1 (and unfortunately failed, since the Italian authorities did not cooperate) and started a diplomatic intervention to stop the killing of Jews by Cemal Pasha in Palestine at the end of WW1. He supported a Zionist support group in Germany and invited his friends to join it. Indeed he was the first who considered “interventions against the danger of antisemitic excesses in Germany” already on April 4, 1933 – when the Nazis just came inpower. And he told a young Jew in 1942, the year of the Wannsee-Conference: “You must always be proud to be a Jew!” He was a friend of the Jews, the most philosemite Pope in history until JPII was elected!
  When the Nazis tried to convince the Vatican to bless their war as an Anti-Bolshevist crusade, Msgr. Tardini replied in the name of the Pope: “”The Svastica is not really the cross of a crusade… It is impossible to condemn the errors and terror of communism and … at the same time forget the derailments and persecutions of Nazism”. Therefore he would recommend to use, “Instead of the term crusade”, the proverb: “one devil hunts the other”.
  When the Austrian bishop Hudal wanted to celebrate a Holy Mass for the German soldiers who died during the Russian campaign, it was forbidden by the secretary of the Pope, Fr. Leiber, in person: The Russian people had any right to fight their invaders “so that rather their defense of their home country can be called a Holy War”.
  “The communist danger is real, but at the moment the danger of the Nazis is more serious”, Pius XII. told Cardinal Paolo Dezza in 1942.
  That’s why he gave his nihil obstat to the alliance with Stalin AGAINST Hitler, when millions of young Catholic soldiers in the US hesitated to fight side to side with “godless communists” (since Communism was condemned by Pius XI). To win the war against Hitler had absolute priority!
  Therefore, Ms. Vise, your conclusion is wrong. The Vatican did NOT draw any connection between Communism and the Jews. Instead, the Vatican was even willing to accept an alliance with godless communism and Stalin himself if it serves the purpose to fight the bigger evil, Nazism, and STOP THE KILLING OF THE JEWS!
   
  Excuse my bad English, it’s not my mother tongue and sometimes it is difficult to find the right words, to get into the subtilities of your language. But please don’t even try to put things into my mouth which I never said nor ever intended to say, even if this would serve and support your prejudices against the Catholic church!
  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 2, 2010 at 1:27 am

  Rev. Dubuque,

  if you believe that HATE against the Church is the only qualification for this debate and/or an “objective” view of it, then indeed I am disqualified.

  Still, I am used to believe that HATE causes blindness and I see many examples supporting this view.

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann 
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 2, 2010 at 4:20 am

  Mr, Hesemann,
  Spare us the “poor is me Catholic Church victimization” crap!  Here in the U.S.A. where the R.C. church now boasts 6 of the 9 U.S. Supreme Court justices,  there are still Catholics who whine whenever their church is criticized.  YOU may think that criticism = hate, but MY idea of hate is the kind of teaching and preaching of contempt which leads to the persecution and murder of its victims.  MY idea of idea of HATE is what your “Holy Mother the Church” is doing now to foment contempt for gays, what it did for about 17 centuries to the Jews until some of its members were moved to find a “final solution” to its “Jewish problem”.
  I have literally over a hundred living close family members who are still Roman Catholics, and I live in one of the most Catholic areas of the U.S.A. New Haven, Connecticut, so most of my friends are Roman Catholics.  I love all of these friends and family enough not to want them deceived and abused by leaders who are so corrupt that they are either capable of sexually molesting innocent young children themselves, or to look the other way when their peers do it. If you want to call that  ” hatred for your church”, then be my guest.
  A Jewish friend of mine also “hates your church”.  He says, “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!”
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 2, 2010 at 5:11 am

  Rev. Dubuque,

  you are obviously not interested in any serious discussion on Pope Pius XII but move to a completely different subject, the sad and tragic child molestation cases committed by individuals, sinners and apostates of the Catholic moral, but certainly not by the Church itself and certainly never sanctioned by it.  

  The RC Church does not hate anybody, not even the greatest sinners, and if you read the Catechism you find that it also teaches respect towards homosexuals as towards any human being. Still it loves the sinner but hates the sin – it can not accept homosexuality as anything than what it is, a sin against nature and against God’s laws, as they were revealed to Moses, the fundament of both, Judaism and Christianity and confirmed by St. Paul, who severely condemned the homosexual act (once again, NOT the homosexual PERSON) in several of his letters.   

  As a former priest, you should know the Catholic doctrine and morals a little better, I’m afraid…

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  June 2, 2010 at 6:31 am

  Mr. Hesemann, it’s true the Germans are responsible for the Holocaust. It’s also true the Nazis wanted to make Nazism into a neo-pagan cult. But it’s also true that despite all efforts they failed as the vast majority of the population remained Christian. In any case, it’s misleading to even bring this up given the widespread active and passive participation of ordinary Christian civilians in the occupied countries, most of whom were Catholic. It’s disingenious to say that the Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians and others are not resposible for the Holocaust too. Sure, Germany was the force behind it, but the Germans would not have been able to do what they did without the willingness—actually, eagerness—of others that willingly denounced, hunted down, and killed Jews. I don’t think the Ukrainians killed 900,000 Jews either, although the Ukrainians auxiliaries were certainly guilty of many tens of thousands of murders, and other less overt crimes. But it’s a canard that they were forced. You know, or should know that. No one was forced to kill Jews. You persevere in your attempt to perpetuate already discredited post-war myths. The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and Ordungspolizei gave their platoon members the option not to participate in killing operations. Only a handful (literally!) did so, and they suffered no consequence for it. The willing auxiliaries in the East were very happy to sign up for the task. They were very happy to join the Waffen SS. They were very happy to finally solve the “Jewish Question”. No one put a gun to their heads to do anything. No one forced the French police to round up the French Jews. Mr. Hesemann, how do you expect to persuade people, and particularly history scholars, when you so blatantly mislead, particularly after we had already discussed this earlier in this conversation?

  You say the Catholic Church never taught to kill Jews, and I think that is true if we are talking about the Church as an official institution (as opposed to clergy and other Catholic lay people), and we are talking about “killing”. But it did teach that “The Jews held Him [Jesus], the Jews insulted Him, the Jews bound Him, they crowned Him with thorns, they dishonored Him by spitting upon Him, they scourged Him, they heaped abuses upon Him, they hung Him upon a tree, they pierced Him with a lance…”, as Augustine said. He also wrote that Jews may survive, but never thrive. Before you tell me the masses did not read or could understand Augustine’s heavy theology, you should know that the anti-Jewish teachings in Christianity were pervasive at all levels, including the sermons parish priests delivered to the faithful. Echoing the teachings of St. Augustine, German priest Joseph Deharbe explained to his flock in a sermon in 1869 why the Jews were permitted to live: “God did not wish this people—which deserved to be annihilated more than any other people—to be totally destroyed, in order that we should have living testimony of the truth of our holy religion.” The peoples of France, Slovakia, Croatia, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Hungary, Lavia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and other places outside Germany and Austria were not steeped and brainwashed by Nazi ideology. They were steeped in Christian theology and Christian antisemitism. The Ukrainian Catholic church did not teach their parishoners to love their Jewish neighbors as you claim. That is simply a gross misrepresentation of history. In other words, to use your terms, I actually do blame church teachings and not just Nazi ideology for pulling the trigger, because absent the former the locals would have found Nazi idelogy preposterous!

  Once again you paint Pope Pius as a Jew lover, and maybe before the war he was. Maybe even during the war he was, although nothing he publicly said or did seem to support this claim. But in any case, he did not do what someone in his position should have done to help Jews.

  It’s interesting you mention Msgr. Tardini, a man who as I quoted earlier had no qualms in leaking the memo sent to Father Tiso of Slovakia reprimanding him for the deportatin of Slovakia’s Jews so the world would know of the Church’s concerns about the Jews, or who opposed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine because “Palestine is by now holier for Catholics than for Jews.”

  In any case, the Church hierarchy knew very well who the real enemy was, Tardini’s comments in regards to the anti-Bolshevik crusade notwithstanding. Long before the Nazis came to power, Achille Ratti (the future Pius XI) wrote “the Jews form the principal force [of Bolshevism] in Poland” and, relating his experience in Warsaw, Ratti reported, “I saw that the [Bolshevik] Commissioners . . . were all Jews.” Cardinal Pacelli had given Hitler money while he was nuncio in Munich so Hitler could fight the Communists. In 1937, Father Muckermann wrote in amazement in the Dutch weekly Der Deutsche Weg about the warm attitude the German bishops showed toward Nazism. He said that “despite the inhuman brutalities perpetrated in the concentration camps, despite the currency and defamation trials, despite the personal insults against individual princes of the Church, against the Holy Father and the entire Church, and in spite of all hostile measures amounting to another Kulturkampf, . . . the bishops find words of appreciation for what (next to Bolshevism) is their worst enemy.” As Hitler told Cardinal Faulhaber before the war, “The Catholic Church should not deceive herself: if National Socialism does not succeed in defeating Bolshevism, then Church and Christianity in Europe too are finished. Bolshevism is the mortal enemy of the Church as much as of Fascism.” Don’t deceive yourself, Mr. Hesemann, and don’t deceive those readers without the knowledge of the historical context. The Church knew very well that if the Communists won, that woud have been the guaranteed end to the Catholic Church.

  Gabriel Wilensky
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 2, 2010 at 10:22 am

  Mr. Wilensky,

  unfortunately you confuse Christian antijudaism, which was indeed a sad theological error, as we know today, with antisemitism, which had nothing to do with Christianity, but the concept of “races”, alien to the Christian belief that ALL humans were descendants of Adam. It was a brainchild of 18/19th century thinking, was used to justify colonialism and found its own religion in theosophy, a cult invented by a Russian-born charlatan in colonial India with a huge supportership both in the US and the UK. Theosophy claimed a different origin of the races, invented the model of “master races” and “root races” and claimed the Jews to be descendants of a different age and race as the “Aryan masterrace”, descendants of Atlantis. To you and me this might sound like amusing science fiction, but indeed this neo-pagan, neo-gnostic cult caused the foundation of another cult, “Ariosophy” in Austria, which heavily influenced Adolf Hitler in Vienna. It had its offspring in Germany, the “Germanenorden” and the “Thule Society” (named after the homeland of the Aryan race, according to Theosophy), which founded the “Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” (DAP) and hired a young Austrian volunteer in the German Army, famous for his big mouth, as a promotional speaker – Adolf Hitler.  
  For theosophy, as for Hitler, history was the history of the fight of the races for superiority and the two major opponents in this case were Aryans and Jews. Christianity, he believed, was created by the Jews to weaken the Aryan race. Jesus himself, he claimed, was an Aryan, the illegitimate son of a German serving in the Roman Army and a Galileen woman, offspring of Celtic settlers in the Near East, fighting against the Jewish faith. You get an idea why he was never even close to the Church, who he claimed to be a Jewish creation, masterminded by St. Paul who “falsified the true teachings of Jesus”. His own neo-gnostic antisemite beliefs he called ”Positive Christianity”.
  THIS is the ideological background of the  Holocaust, NOT the sad Christian Antijudaism (although I admit that Antijudaism made Antisemitism acceptable for a lot of people, especially Lutherans/Protestants after the violent Anti-jewish writings of Martin Luther).
  Still, also in the Catholic Church were Antijewish prejudices alive and the Jesuit publications you quoted are just tragic examples for this theological and doctrinal absurdity. But our subject of discussion is Pius XII. Did he share antijewish prejudices? Certainly NOT. He was a friend of the Jewish faith from since his childhood!

  It is still true that the Vatican was sceptic about the state of Israel in the beginning. Why? Because Pius XII would have preferred a state of religious Jews. Israel turned out to be a secular state. Many of its founding fathers embraced socialist ideas, the Kibbutz was just one of them. The secular Worker’s Party played a major role in the Israeli policy. Religious Jews became a minority, concentrated on the city of Jerusalem. And this was NOT the fulfillment of Pacelli’s dream who invisioned a religious Israel, who was sceptic towards any form of socialism. Does this indicate Antisemitism or Antijudaism? No, only Antisecularism and Antisocialism!

  When the Nazis came in power, Pacelli stated: “This is more tragic than a victory of the Socialist left would have been.” That’s a FACT. It’s also a fact that already in 1924 he called Nazism the “greatest heresy of our times”, NOT communism. For him, Hitler was the more acute danger. Only after Hitler was defeated, after the War, he faced the 2nd biggest enemy of the Church, Communism. 

  You make an outrageous claim, when you write: “Cardinal Pacelli had given Hitler money while he was nuncio in Munich so Hitler could fight the Communists.” THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE. I don’t know who told you this, but it is a lie. Pacelli (who was not a Cardinal at that time anyway) never met Hitler in person. He just witnessed one of his speeches and was disgusted. I went through all his reports he sent to the Vatican, all kept and preserved in the Vatican Secret Archives. My colleague Andrea Tornielli went through all his personal correspondence with his brother which is in the possession of the Pacelli family. Not in a single letter or report does he show ANY “sympathy with the devil”, I mean with Hitler. 

  The very first document in which he ever mentioned Hitler was his report on the “Bierhallenputsch” of November 9, 1923. This report was titled “The anticatholic character of the Nazi revolt”. A quote: “This (anticatholic) character especially manifested in the regular tirades against the Catholic clerics, used by the supporters of Hitler and Ludendorff, the leading figures among the street talkers, who stir up the population and deliver the clergy to insults and mockery … especially the highly educated and conscientious Cardinal Archbishop who, in a sermon gfiven in the Cathedral, denounced the persecution of the Jews.”

  Half a year later, he called the Nazis “fanatic anti-catholic” and mentioned their “vulgar and violent campaign … also against the Holy See”. On May 1st, as I already stated, he called Nazism “the most dangerous heresy of our time”. Do you really think he would have given the leader of this campaign, Adolf Hitler, money?

  No, Mr. Wilensky, this never happened. It is a slanderous lie, spread by the enemies of the truth, by those who still want to prevent a reconciliation of Christians and Jews for their own reasons. Please argue with FACTS, not with made-up “evidence”! Thank you!

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann
     
   
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  June 2, 2010 at 12:14 pm

  Mr. Krupp, yes, it’s possible we’ll need to agree to disagree. Once again, I thank you for your offer to visit the Vatican and I reiterate that I might take you up on it sometime. In the meantime, I strongly disagree with your position that waiting until the archive covering war years are open is a bogus claim. Mr. Krupp, how can that be if the Holocaust happened during the war years? Don’t you think that that is the relevant period we should be studying? What is the really important information, what the pope did before or after the war had begun? Look, Cardinal Pacelli may have been a magnificent individual. Even saintly, perhaps. He may have been the biggest lover of Jews since god called them his “Chosen People”. But is this relevant if his actions vis-à-vis the Jews after he became pope and the Holocaust began were different? Hitler loved children, and he loved his dog. He also hated Jews. Does the former diminish or change in any way the latter? Does any love Eugenio Pacelli may have felt toward Jews prior to the war matter if, in their moment of greatest need, he remained indifferent to their fate? In other words, who cares what Pacelli did in 1917? The very fact that you bring this sort of thing up is part of a disinformation campaign intended to mislead. Mr. Krupp, what matters is what the Pope did after 1941.

  I applaud Pope Benedict for increasing the staff in the Archives so that the relevant years can be opened to independent scholars. Still, I wonder why they do not open the archives and let scholars examine whatever period is already indexed, even if it only goes to 1940 or 1941, or whatever it may be. Why wait until everything up to 1958 is indexed? One also needs to ask why this was not done under Paul VI, or even John Paul II.

  I see that you believe my quotation from the Budapest speech is mistranslated, and that it thus conveys a meaning different from that of the original. Maybe so, but I seriously doubt it. I consulted the issue of L’Osservatore Romano where the speech was published in French, but it’s really hard to read the scan. I found the part about Herod you mention, which I think is totally irrelevant, but unfortunately I did not find the paragraph I quoted. If it’s any easier to read on your end, it would be great if you can post the same paragraph I quoted in its original French.
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 2, 2010 at 12:47 pm

  Mr. Hesemann,
  You can pontificate all you like about what is ih my heart ( accusing me of “hate” and not being “serious”), and what is in the hearts of others  (such as churchmen “loving” or “not hating” Jews, etc., etc., but there are things you can only speculate about not things you can  know or prove.
  What those of us who are indicting your church are doing is not speculating about what was in their hearts, but pointing out what THEY DID, or DIDN’T DO, things that ARE KNOWABLE.
  As for my bringing up the CURRENT  pedophilia scandals – far from being a diversion therse are simply examples of the corruption of Catholic priests and bishops that CANNOT BE DENIED which show how foolish it is to DENY the corruption of the Catholic hierarchy during the Holocaust.  The coverup by Catholic bishops of the pedophilia scandal is NOTHING compared to the coverup of the participation of millions of Roman Catholics in the mass-murder not only of millions of Jews, but of fellow Roman Catholic Poles as well.
   
   
• Gary Krupp says:

  June 2, 2010 at 1:26 pm

  Mr. Wilensky,
  Your question relative to the archives is reasonable. The problem is a logistical one where the archives are separated into sections from different areas including the Secretary of State and every nunciature and so on. I personally made the same request to partially open the archives. The Vatican very honestly and politely explained why this couldn’t be done. They said it would take many more people to first put documents in a date order; they are basically not in date order . Since there are ranges of years from each section, if they were opened prematurely you would not have 1939-1941 you would have 1939 mixed with 1956 with 1943 and so on. Obviously the document trail that archival scholars need would end. They aren’t being cataloged in years but in sections.  The Vatican’s process is that first documents are sewn together in book form to prevent theft. Then each page is numbered, then read and described in the catalog. This process must be accurately carried out for every document. The basic documents of the papacy of Pius XII are currently in up to 50,000 cases numbering over 16,000,000. If you were to include all of the documents from all of the nunciatures and so on the number rises to 35,000,000. Remember they just finished the papacy of Pius XI in 2007 so they are pushing hard to complete the war years. Privately, I can show you my letter to recommend partial opening and their response.
  You will also be interested in knowing when they do find an extraordinary document the Pope is made aware of this. This is why I think he finally decided to sign the decree on the beatification. He waited over 2 years to do so but was finally personally convinced based on new discoveries. Perhaps if you join me in Rome you might see a couple of these unpublished documents.
  Now as for the importance of studying the papacy of Pius XI and earlier I think it is impossible to render a decision about a man without studying how he dealt with Adolf Hitler and National Socialism before the war started. How do you judge the actions of someone without knowing who he is, where he comes from and how he reacts to a crisis? As an example we have the documents from when the nunciature in Germany was attacked by a communist mob and he stood his ground and said “leave this house of God.” One of the invaders even threw a pistol at him, which bounced off his pectoral cross. Surprisingly the invaders came back the next day to apologize. But this shows that Pacelli is no coward as many claim. There are numerous examples of how he interacted with personal requests especially from Jews to determine his attitude towards Jews. I think it is literally impossible to render a decision about Eugenio Pacelli without studying everything. There are many that simply say that he was classically anti-Semitic. We have found so many instances of his direct action to benefit Jews that no anti-Semite would ever do. But you will never know this if you do not come to the open archives. This is why I was so shocked and so disappointed when I learned that literally no one came to the early archives and still have not come to study this period.
  I am 63 years old and I was in the US Army from 1969-1974 during the Viet Nam war. My perception of survival during a war time environment is quite different from one who isn’t old enough to of experienced this or never to of served in the armed forces. This is why one must be able to step into someone’s shoes to try to determine what would I do under the same circumstances?  How do you analyze his decision process?
  When one reads all of the critical remarks and accusations against Pacelli it is obvious to me that many of these people can’t imagine what is like to function with a gun pointed to your head literally looking into the eyes of death. If you were caught with an unencrypted phone number or name in your pocket you could have been shot on site. In one of our interviews with Msgr Centioni this is exactly what happened to him but he hid from the Nazis. This is why it is so easy to say he could have done this or should have done that. Many of these critics also will make judgments like “one would assume the Vatican should have known this or that.” How do you make a judgment like this if you do not understand specifically how the Vatican operates? This is why studying the open archives is a critical minimum precursor to preparing to study the war years.
  I do so look forward to meeting you in Rome I do promise it will be an exceptional scholarly experience for you and the food is not half bad either. When you are ready email me.
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 2, 2010 at 1:54 pm

  I know this is irrelevant but I see this all the time, and, as an English teacher, I am bothered by it.  Please forgive me.   

  To cite means to quote an authoritative source
  A site is a location.
  A sight is something you see. 
  Interestingly, both of the following could be true: 
  A person could be shot on sight (i.e., whenever he is seen) or he could be shot on site (on location). 
  I suppose a person could also plan to shoot another person if he cited a certain source. 
  If he did, then would the person be shot on cite?  Or on citation?  Or on citing?
  Isn’t this exciting?
• Gary Krupp says:

  June 2, 2010 at 2:11 pm

  Beats the heck out of me the bottom line is when your dead your dead.
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 2, 2010 at 2:43 pm

  It has become customary to cite websites, so I will cite one.  First, however, the quote: 

  “Symon Petlyura began his political activity in the ranks of the revolutionary socialist movement in the Ukrainian Social Democratic party. In order to combat Bolshevism, he threw over his democratic principles in favor of a personal dictatorship and colluded in a series of deals with enemies of his own people: with Germany, with Russian monarchists, with the Entente, with the reactionary Polish regime of Pilsudsky. In the West, Petlyura is best known for presiding over the bloody Jewish pogroms of 1919—1920.” 

  Now the citation of the site cited above: 
  http://web.mit.edu/people/fjk/essays/Ukraine%20rehabilitates%20Petlyura.htm

  However I can also cite the following: 

  “With the retreat of his forces before the Red Army in January and February of 1919, [Petlyura's] units turned into murderous bands and perpetrated mass killings of Jews in the Ukrainian towns and townlets [and shtetlach, including Zhitomir, Proskurov, among many others].  Petlyura did little to stop the wave of mob violence which became endemic within the Ukrainian army and the gangs of rebellious peasants, connected with his government….  On May 26, 1926, [Petlyura] was assassinated in the street by a Jew, Shalom Schwartzbard.  In 1927, after a dramatic trial, in which the Jewish tragedy in the Ukraine was amply documented, Schwartzbard was acquitted by a court in Paris.” 

  For documentation of this statement, see the following: 
  Committee of Jewish Delegations, The Pogroms in the Ukraine (1927); E. Tcherikower, Di Ukrainer Pogromen in Yor 1919 (1965), index; J. B. Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman (1956), 399-415; A. Revutsky, In di Shvere Teg Oyf Ukraine (1924); A. Shul’gin, L’Ukraine et le cauchemar rouge (1927); J. Reshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution (1952), index; Hunczak and Szajkowski, in JSOS, 31 (1969), 163-213. 

  I hope this will put an end to the at best nonsensical and at worst specious and in any case certainly false claim that the Catholics regarded the Jews as “fellow-Ukrainians”.  The Ukrainians were murdering Jews all along, without any Nazi tutelage.  Their only tutors were the priests, whose sermons on Good Friday and other appropriate occasions had for years consisted of polemics against the “Christ killers” and how they “ought” to be punished, and those peasants who lacked guns had knives as well as sharpened hoes, spades, shovels, and other farm implements and would traditionally leave church on such occasions to go on mob killing sprees in the local shtetl. 

  The difference between the pogroms and the murders under the Nazis is that the Nazis provided the murderers with more efficient weapons. 

  I request that posters kindly refrain from the offensive gesture of again offering the false claim that the Ukrainians were “forced” to kill Jews.  The “Black Book” documents, at length and in detail, the extent of eager participation of the Ukrainians in the murder of Ukrainian Jews during the Hitler years. 
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 2, 2010 at 2:52 pm

  I will cite more about Nazis next time.  Meanwhile it’s almost midnight so I’ll stop for now. 
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 2, 2010 at 3:32 pm

  Sorry, but citing from websites is so much easier…not having to type in every letter and worry about misspellings….this is from Wikipedia….

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Petlyura
  Petliura’s role in pogroms
  During the rule of Petliura, a series of mass  were perpetrated against the Jews of Ukraine. Estimates of the number of civilian Jews murdered range from 35,000 to 100,000; up to 40% of these victims may have been killed by forces loyal to Petliura (others being killed by independent warlords, Denikin’s White forces, and Bolsheviks). At the time, Ukraine was a major Jewish population centre, and during the Russian Civil War, an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000.

  The following comes from http://israeli.filmography.co.il/Articles/Entry_24/Documentary_films_recording_the_Pogroms_in_the_Ukraine.html

  Documentary films recording the Pogroms in the Ukraine

  
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  Following the fall of the Russian Czarist regime in 1917 a civil war stormed over the Ukraine and the country turned into a battleground. Several armed forces tried to maintain their rule on the land; at first the Imperial German occupation, then the free Ukrainian government and army, Anarchist armed groups, bandits disguised as Revolutionists, the Russian Czarist White Army, Polish troops and the Soviet Red Army. Throughout the war all the citizens suffered immensely but the fate of the Jewish population was the worst. Tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children were murdered with savage cruelty in more than 2000 pogroms. Most of the massacres were committed by military units of the Ukrainian Government in 1919-1920 and their followers. Only the victory of the Soviet Red Army (1921) put an end to this Genocide. Jewish institutions in the Ukraine and abroad assembled testimonies on the bloody actions against their people. In Berlin “The Archive of the East-European Jews” became the main world center for the preservation of documents, still photographs and motion pictures from the 1919-1920 pogroms.
  The film archive of the “Yad Vashem” institute in Jerusalem, Israel, keeps copies of two documentary films, edited from filmed material assembled by the archive. One film is available with French titles: “Les pogroms Juifis en Ucraine 1919-1920. Vues editées par les Archives Historiques des Juifis Ucrainiens, Berlin“, duration is 07:26. The other one comes with English titles: “The Jewish Pogroms in Ukraine 1919-1920” and its duration is 15:27. Both films were measured by beta video copy. The “Red Rooster” at the beginning of these films probably identifies them as the work of “Pathé” cameramen, or at least some material of “Pathé” has been used. The different technical qualities of the pictures show that they were shot by different cameras, probably by different cinematographers. Inter-titles supply data on locations of pogroms, army units and commanding officers responsible for the killing, number of dead and names of victims and the date of the events. The earliest one is 26th January 1919 and the latest is 7-11th October 1920, hinting that the filming continued for a period of nearly two years.
  Both films were edited from moving images as well as from still photos. Some still pictures in both films are identical and clearly come from the same sources. The images show that the original stills were photographed close to the pogroms but filmed later, possibly in Berlin from the archive’s pictures library. Most of the stills show dead or wounded individual victims, others show funerals, cemeteries and destroyed places.
  The motion pictures footage exhibits horrible sights of mutilated bodies, families looking for their beloved amongst piles of corpses, streets and shops ruined and looted after the pogroms, severely wounded Jews being treated in hospital:
  1)Destroyed streets and looted shops:
  The sights were taken close to the events.
  2)Assembling dֹeֹaֹdֹ ֹbֹoֹdֹiֹeֹs dumped in the fields:
  The condition of the corpses shows that the filming was done some weeks after the murder.
  3) ֹFamilies looking for their murdered relatives:
  Shots were taken in a graveyard’s court. The condition of the bodies shows that the scenes were taken within few days of the actual killing.
  4)Wounded Jews in a Hospital:
  Doctors, nurses and orderlies treating severely wounded Jews, operations of a wounded child and a wounded man. Obviously these pictures were taken a short time after the incidents.
  As mentioned above, one reason for the production of these films is the will of Jewish institutions in the Ukraine and abroad to keep records of the horrors. The scenes of the Kiev’s Jewish hospital clearly point to a pre-planned documentation. It is possible then that in Kiev, the capital town of the Ukraine, some Jewish groups had gathered material on the pogroms and had initiated the filming of the atrocities. Kiev was one of the “Pathé” establishments in the Russian Tsarist Empire, and in 1919-1920 it was still capable of giving filming and laboratory services. Even in the chaos of the civil war they could send their products from Kiev abroad.
  Another important reason for the filming was the need to contest the total denial of the Ukrainian government of any responsibility or participation in the killings. Thus Jewish investigators tried to collect evidence of the identity and guilt of the murderers. In Paris, May 26, 1926, Shalom Schwarzbard shot Simon Petlyura, prime minister of the free Ukrainian government at the time of the pogroms, to revenge his butchered people. In his trial his defense lawyer presented such evidence in court. The verdict was: “Not Guilty”.
  An amazing discovery in the pogrom scenes was the fact that units of Soviet Red Army were among the “Pogromshchiks” too. It was true that the communist victory saved the Ukrainian Jewry from total destruction, but many Red Cossacks still exhibited their hatred of Jews, just like their White and Ukrainian opponents. One may learn more about it from the stories of the famous writer Isaac Babel who served as a Red horseman in Marshal Budiyoni’s cavalry corps.
  And of course it could be that some cinematographers took pogrom scenes while shooting newsreels in the battle fields of the civil war, and such footage was acquired by Jewish archives for the purpose of keeping the memory of the horrors and as library stock for the edited films.
  These authentic pictures are hard to look at, a shocking example of one of the first filmings of human atrocities in the 20th century, a true image of the cruel character of ethnic war and a predecessor of to-day’s “actualities” on television. Watching these films now-a-days one may see in them the first signs of a future catastrophe for the Jewish people only 20 years later (and also on the soil of the Ukraine): the Holocaust. The resemblance between the scenes of men with wooden shovels loading rigid corpses of murdered Jews on horse wagons in the fields of the Ukraine of 1919 to the famous shot in a British newsreel showing a bulldozer piling dead bodies in Bergen-Belzen death camp (1945) is blood-chilling. It is true then that some films can be really thought of as prophetic visions, if we can only have the sense to look into their hidden message.
  This paper was presented by historian Joseph Halachmi, at the DOMITOR conference, in tribute to the 100th year anniversary of the French “Pathé” film company, in the French Cinematheque in Paris, December 16, 1996. The presentation included a 12 minute Beta video screening of chosen scenes from the two pogrom films.
  Pogrom (Ukrainian) is an organized killing of a large class or group of people (especially with reference to killing of Jews in Russia).
  Gratitude: Prof. Perry Kraicer; Prof. Benjamin Lukin; Mr. Alexander Lutzki; “Yad-Vashem” film library; The French Cinematheque in Paris

  The following article comes from http://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/Russsian_Civil_War_pogroms.htm

  The Bolshevik (“October”) revolution of 1917 was followed by a civil war and a war with Poland. A large number of Jews, between 50,000 and 100,000 or even 200,000, died in riots and massacres. In the long history of European anti-Semitism, these were probably the largest-scale massacre of Jews to date. Because of the chaos prevailing in that period, and because of the interests of various sides in covering up the violence, the post-revolutionary pogroms are the least discussed and researched, and data about them are scarce.
  Neglected Pogroms

  The neglect of this period cannot entirely accidental. The Proskurov pogrom, in which about 2,000 Jews were murdered on February 15, 1919, was a horrendous event.Eventually, about 10,000 Jews were murdered in that district. The events are barely remembered by Jews, and certainly not by anyone else whose ancestors were not from that unfortunate town.  Yet at the time, the New York Times wrote:

  The first of a new series of events which leave the scope of ordinary pogroms and assume the character of slaughter occurred in a city which will forever be written in letters of blood on the pages of Jewish history.

   

  Jews Slain in Ukraine, New York Times, September 19, 1919, based on an article that had appeared in the Yiddish paper, Der Tog – the Day
  These pogroms were indeed a new and “improved” twentieth century version, which foreshadowed the mass murders of the Holocaust, Armies, rather than disorganized bands, often conducted the massacres, sometimes using machine guns.  One might think that these events were simply overshadowed by the Holocaust, but, for example, the pogroms of Kishinev are quite well documented, though they killed far fewer people.
  History of the Civil War Pogroms
  Most of this violence was not the “natural consequence” of war, but rather the result of pogroms, aimed specifically at Jews.  It is difficult to get more accurate numbers, or to know how many were murdered because they were Jews, how many died of starvation and disease and how many died fighting in the various armies.
  The area of the greatest concentration of pogroms corresponded roughly to the Tsarist Jewish pale of settlement. It included Ukraine, Galicia, Belarus (“White Russia” in the map), Moldavia, Eastern Poland, Easter Romania, and Western Russia. The borders shifted around with the confused fighting.

  [From this broader report we can see that the same hatred spoken of earlier with respect to the Ukrainians was operating in Galicia, White Russian, and Poland.  One reason the pogroms of the 1919 period are "not remembered" is that most of those who remembered them were themselves murdered during the Nazi years, starting about 20 years later.  The only reason I remember those pogroms, tersely told by my father, was because he left the Ukraine at the age of 12--that would be in 1922 or 1923--and so he lived to tell the tale.]
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  June 2, 2010 at 3:49 pm

  Mr. Hesemann, please, you should assume by now I know the difference between racial antisemitism and the so-called theological anti-Judaism. Please spare me the lecture. It should have been quite obvious that when I use the term “antisemitism” I am using it in the commonly understood meaning of this nonsensical term, namely, hatred of Jews. The anti-Jewish quotations I provided are not, as you say, “tragic examples of this theological and doctrinal absurdity”. Instead, they were the norm. In regards to whether Pacelli shared this anti-Jewish conception in Catholicism, how else could he not be? He was steeped in the same teachings as all other Catholics who hated Jews, except that because of his family history and career he was even more so. I quoted a little part of his Budapest speech already to give a hint of how he really felt toward Jews; you are surely familiar with the way he expressed himself after the episode with the Bavarian communists in the nunciature when he was in Munich, although I know that just like in the case of the Budapest speech, you think the world has it all wrong due to a mistranslation.

  The Holocaust certainly did not take place due to any one reason. It’s a very complex event, that stems from a number of reasons. But my point, which I think is indisputable, is that absent Christianity and its millenarian hatred of Jews (call it what you want) the Holocaust would not have happened. In other words, Christian hatred of Jews was a necessary, albeit not sufficient, reason for the Holocaust. Christian antisemitism was not more prevalent among Protestants, Mr. Hesemann, even with Luther’s vitriolic anti-Jewish rants. Catholics were as antisemitic as Protestant and Orthodox Christians. As a matter of fact, Catholic Austria had a higher percentage of Nazi party members than Germany and a disproportionately large role in the execution of the “Final Solution,” even when compared to the overwhelmingly more populous Germany, which was predominately Protestant.

  I am sorry but I find your assertion that Pope Pius refused to recognize the State of Israel because he woud have a preferred a state of religious Jews laughable. Come on, Mr. Hesemann! You can’t be serious! Please re-read my comments on this subject above. In any case, even if this was true, who did Pope Pius think he was to pretend to dictate to Jews the nature of their own state? If true, this is more proof of Christian contempt for Jews and if anything, betrays the pope’s true feelings for Jews and Judaism. Maybe Pacelli believed that a Socialist win in Germany would have been tragic, but ironically, it was his own role in the dissolution of the Catholic Center Party that brought about the Nazi victory, as a coalition between the Center Party and the leading Social Democrats would have defeated the Nazis and thus we would not be having this conversation today.

  Mr. Hesemann, Pacelli may have thought Nazism was a greater heresy than Communism, and he would have been right. Communism was an atheist regime, so the notion of “heresy” when applied to it is nonsensical. So, that Pacelli thought Nazism was a great heresy is immaterial to any discussion. In any case, neither his boss Pius XI nor himself once he became pope felt this heretical regime to be bad enough to dissociate the Church and the Catholic faithful from it beyond 1933, as we discussed at the beginning of this conversation.

  Regarding the anecdote of Pacelli meeting Hitler and handing him Church money to fight the Reds, no one told me. This was an eywitness account of Pacelli’s personal assistant Sister Pascalina, and it comes from Paul I. Murphy’s “La Popessa”, 1883,  p.52. It was also cited by Aarons and Loftus in “Unholy Trinity”, 1998, p. 294.
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 2, 2010 at 3:58 pm

  Sorry, but citing from websites is so much easier…not having to type in every letter and worry about misspellings….this is from Wikipedia….

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Petlyura
  Petliura’s role in pogroms
  During the rule of Petliura, a series of mass were perpetrated against the Jews of Ukraine. Estimates of the number of civilian Jews murdered range from 35,000 to 100,000; up to 40% of these victims may have been killed by forces loyal to Petliura (others being killed by independent warlords, Denikin’s White forces, and Bolsheviks). At the time, Ukraine was a major Jewish population centre, and during the Russian Civil War, an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000.
  [Notice the variant English spellings….Petlyura or Petliura or Petlura]

  The following comes from http://israeli.filmography.co.il/Articles/Entry_24/Documentary_films_recording_the_Pogroms_in_the_Ukraine.html

  Documentary films recording the Pogroms in the Ukraine
  Following the fall of the Russian Czarist regime in 1917 a civil war stormed over the Ukraine and the country turned into a battleground. Several armed forces tried to maintain their rule on the land; at first the Imperial German occupation, then the free Ukrainian government and army, Anarchist armed groups, bandits disguised as Revolutionists, the Russian Czarist White Army, Polish troops and the Soviet Red Army. Throughout the war all the citizens suffered immensely but the fate of the Jewish population was the worst. Tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children were murdered with savage cruelty in more than 2000 pogroms. Most of the massacres were committed by military units of the Ukrainian Government in 1919-1920 and their followers. Only the victory of the Soviet Red Army (1921) put an end to this Genocide. Jewish institutions in the Ukraine and abroad assembled testimonies on the bloody actions against their people. In Berlin “The Archive of the East-European Jews” became the main world center for the preservation of documents, still photographs and motion pictures from the 1919-1920 pogroms.
  The film archive of the “Yad Vashem” institute in Jerusalem, Israel, keeps copies of two documentary films, edited from filmed material assembled by the archive. One film is available with French titles: “Les pogroms Juifis en Ucraine 1919-1920. Vues editées par les Archives Historiques des Juifis Ucrainiens, Berlin“, duration is 07:26. The other one comes with English titles: “The Jewish Pogroms in Ukraine 1919-1920” and its duration is 15:27. Both films were measured by beta video copy. The “Red Rooster” at the beginning of these films probably identifies them as the work of “Pathé” cameramen, or at least some material of “Pathé” has been used. The different technical qualities of the pictures show that they were shot by different cameras, probably by different cinematographers. Inter-titles supply data on locations of pogroms, army units and commanding officers responsible for the killing, number of dead and names of victims and the date of the events. The earliest one is 26th January 1919 and the latest is 7-11th October 1920, hinting that the filming continued for a period of nearly two years.
  Both films were edited from moving images as well as from still photos. Some still pictures in both films are identical and clearly come from the same sources. The images show that the original stills were photographed close to the pogroms but filmed later, possibly in Berlin from the archive’s pictures library. Most of the stills show dead or wounded individual victims, others show funerals, cemeteries and destroyed places.
  The motion pictures footage exhibits horrible sights of mutilated bodies, families looking for their beloved amongst piles of corpses, streets and shops ruined and looted after the pogroms, severely wounded Jews being treated in hospital:
  1)Destroyed streets and looted shops:
  The sights were taken close to the events.
  2)Assembling dֹeֹaֹdֹ ֹbֹoֹdֹiֹeֹs dumped in the fields:
  The condition of the corpses shows that the filming was done some weeks after the murder.
  3) ֹFamilies looking for their murdered relatives:
  Shots were taken in a graveyard’s court. The condition of the bodies shows that the scenes were taken within few days of the actual killing.
  4)Wounded Jews in a Hospital:
  Doctors, nurses and orderlies treating severely wounded Jews, operations of a wounded child and a wounded man. Obviously these pictures were taken a short time after the incidents.
  As mentioned above, one reason for the production of these films is the will of Jewish institutions in the Ukraine and abroad to keep records of the horrors. The scenes of the Kiev’s Jewish hospital clearly point to a pre-planned documentation. It is possible then that in Kiev, the capital town of the Ukraine, some Jewish groups had gathered material on the pogroms and had initiated the filming of the atrocities. Kiev was one of the “Pathé” establishments in the Russian Tsarist Empire, and in 1919-1920 it was still capable of giving filming and laboratory services. Even in the chaos of the civil war they could send their products from Kiev abroad.
  Another important reason for the filming was the need to contest the total denial of the Ukrainian government of any responsibility or participation in the killings. Thus Jewish investigators tried to collect evidence of the identity and guilt of the murderers. In Paris, May 26, 1926, Shalom Schwarzbard shot Simon Petlyura, prime minister of the free Ukrainian government at the time of the pogroms, to revenge his butchered people. In his trial his defense lawyer presented such evidence in court. The verdict was: “Not Guilty”.
  An amazing discovery in the pogrom scenes was the fact that units of Soviet Red Army were among the “Pogromshchiks” too. It was true that the communist victory saved the Ukrainian Jewry from total destruction, but many Red Cossacks still exhibited their hatred of Jews, just like their White and Ukrainian opponents. One may learn more about it from the stories of the famous writer Isaac Babel who served as a Red horseman in Marshal Budiyoni’s cavalry corps.
  And of course it could be that some cinematographers took pogrom scenes while shooting newsreels in the battle fields of the civil war, and such footage was acquired by Jewish archives for the purpose of keeping the memory of the horrors and as library stock for the edited films.
  These authentic pictures are hard to look at, a shocking example of one of the first filmings of human atrocities in the 20th century, a true image of the cruel character of ethnic war and a predecessor of to-day’s “actualities” on television. Watching these films now-a-days one may see in them the first signs of a future catastrophe for the Jewish people only 20 years later (and also on the soil of the Ukraine): the Holocaust. The resemblance between the scenes of men with wooden shovels loading rigid corpses of murdered Jews on horse wagons in the fields of the Ukraine of 1919 to the famous shot in a British newsreel showing a bulldozer piling dead bodies in Bergen-Belzen death camp (1945) is blood-chilling. It is true then that some films can be really thought of as prophetic visions, if we can only have the sense to look into their hidden message.
  This paper was presented by historian Joseph Halachmi, at the DOMITOR conference, in tribute to the 100th year anniversary of the French “Pathé” film company, in the French Cinematheque in Paris, December 16, 1996. The presentation included a 12 minute Beta video screening of chosen scenes from the two pogrom films.
  Pogrom (Ukrainian) is an organized killing of a large class or group of people (especially with reference to killing of Jews in Russia).
  Gratitude: Prof. Perry Kraicer; Prof. Benjamin Lukin; Mr. Alexander Lutzki; “Yad-Vashem” film library; The French Cinematheque in Paris
  The Bolshevik (“October”) revolution of 1917 was followed by a civil war and a war with Poland. A large number of Jews, between 50,000 and 100,000 or even 200,000, died in riots and massacres. In the long history of European anti-Semitism, these were probably the largest-scale massacre of Jews to date. Because of the chaos prevailing in that period, and because of the interests of various sides in covering up the violence, the post-revolutionary pogroms are the least discussed and researched, and data about them are scarce.
  Neglected Pogroms
  The neglect of this period cannot entirely accidental. The Proskurov pogrom, in which about 2,000 Jews were murdered on February 15, 1919, was a horrendous event.Eventually, about 10,000 Jews were murdered in that district. The events are barely remembered by Jews, and certainly not by anyone else whose ancestors were not from that unfortunate town.  Yet at the time, the New York Times wrote:
  The first of a new series of events which leave the scope of ordinary pogroms and assume the character of slaughter occurred in a city which will forever be written in letters of blood on the pages of Jewish history.
  Jews Slain in Ukraine, New York Times, September 19, 1919, based on an article that had appeared in the Yiddish paper, Der Tog – the Day
  These pogroms were indeed a new and “improved” twentieth century version, which foreshadowed the mass murders of the Holocaust, Armies, rather than disorganized bands, often conducted the massacres, sometimes using machine guns.  One might think that these events were simply overshadowed by the Holocaust, but, for example, the pogroms of Kishinev are quite well documented, though they killed far fewer people.
  History of the Civil War Pogroms
  Most of this violence was not the “natural consequence” of war, but rather the result of pogroms, aimed specifically at Jews.  It is difficult to get more accurate numbers, or to know how many were murdered because they were Jews, how many died of starvation and disease and how many died fighting in the various armies.
  The area of the greatest concentration of pogroms corresponded roughly to the Tsarist Jewish pale of settlement. It included Ukraine, Galicia, Belarus (“White Russia” in the map), Moldavia, Eastern Poland, Easter Romania, and Western Russia. The borders shifted around with the confused fighting.

  [This was a long series of articles.  At the end I found the following:]
  This work and individual entries are copyright © 2005 by Ami Isseroff and Zionism and Israel Information Center and may not reproduced in any form without permission unless explicitly noted otherwise. Individual entries may be cited with credit to The Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Zionism and Israel

  [From this broader report we can see that the same hatred spoken of earlier with respect to the Ukrainians was operating in Galicia, White Russian, and Poland.  One reason the pogroms of the 1919 period are "not remembered" is that most of those who remembered them were themselves murdered during the Nazi years, starting about 20 years later.  The only reason I remember those pogroms, tersely told by my father, was because he left the Ukraine at the age of 12--that would be in 1922 or 1923--and so he lived to tell the tale.]
   
   
   
   
   
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 3, 2010 at 1:20 am

  Krupp & Hesseman,
  When are you “papal knights” going to tell Cathryn that all this mahem supposedly inflicted on the Jews of the Ukraine is just a “black legend” based on the fictious musical play “Fiddler on the Roof”, the way that you argue that the entire case against Pope Pius XII is based entirely on  ”the fictitious play by Rolf Hochhuth called The Deputy. Following that, a flurry of books were written supporting negative theories of this papacy and era. We later discovered absolute proof that this play and its impact was a well-crafted plan called “Seat Twelve” hatched and implemented by the KGB against the Catholic Church. ”
  And of course we all know that there was no discimination against African Americans in the U.S.A. during the 1940′s because the notorious enemy propagandist “Tokio Rose”  spoke of such things and therefore they couldn’t possibly be TRUE!
  As a former Catholic priest and seminary professor myself, I know the childish, ingrown kind of thinking that passes for “scholarship” in Roman Catholic circles.   Maybe our Jewish friends here, could tell me how  Gary Krupp,  a family members of the victims of the Roman Catholic Nazi leaders came to succumb to such thinking.  Don’t people like Krupp have family members who were tortured and KILLED under th direction of Roman Catholic Nazi leaders like  leaders Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Rudolf Hoess, Julius Streicher, Fritz Thyssen (who bankrolled the Nazi rise to power), Klaus Barbie, and Franz Von Papen, all of whom were raised as Roman Catholics and none of whom were ever DIVORCED from the church by its leaders if – as most of them chose to do – they wanted to remain Catholics?  The same is true of the heads of all of these NAZI countries : Leon Degrelle of Belgium, Emil Hacha of Bohemia-Moravia, Ante Pavelic of Croatia, Konrad Henlein of Sudetenland, Pierre Laval and then Henry Petain of Vichy-France. and the R.C. priest, Msgr. Josef Tiso, of Slovakia (who wasn’t even defrocked after the defeat of the Nazis).
• Rev. Ray Dubuque says:

  June 3, 2010 at 1:27 am

  Gabriel,
  In response to the question you raised above about Borman’s faith, here is what I my research uncovered and posted on my http://JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/NaziLeadership.html page:
  Martin Bormann became very anti-Christian latter in life, but “Bormann first became acquainted with Hitler at his 1929 wedding to Gerda Buch.  Her father was a chairman of the Nazi Party Court, and a powerful figure in Nazi circles, so Hitler served as a witness to the marriage.  And a year later Martin and Gerdaís first son was christened Adolf, after his Godfather, Adolf Hitler.” (McGovern 20-21).  This would indicate that Bormann was married and had his first son christened either in Hitler’s Catholic Church, or in Bormann’s Protestant church.

  Martin Adolf Bormann, Jr. (born 1930) was the first of Martin Borman’s ten children.  “As a child during World War II, he saw furniture in the house of Heinrich Himmler made from human skin and bones. His mother, realising that a lampshade given to her by Himmler must also be made from human skin, went home and burned it.  He says that the memory of this has haunted him throughout his life.
  After the war, he became a Roman Catholic and was ordained as a priest.  He was severely injured in 1969 and was nursed back to health by a nun.  In 1971, they renounced their vows of celibacy and married.  Mr Bormann has been a tireless campaigner to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and oppose the activities of Holocaust deniers.”
  [ from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Adolf_Bormann ]
  Likewise, Herman Goering (who was of Catholic & Protestant background) had a younger brother who was very different from his notorious sibling. Albert played the part of a small scale Oskar Schindler, by saving a number of Jews, http://www.auschwitz.dk/Albert.htm.
• Gary Krupp says:

  June 3, 2010 at 1:29 am

  Dear Rev.
  You seem to be taking sentences from one comment and mixing them with others.   I suggest you re read the comments.
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 3, 2010 at 1:40 am

  Ms. Vise,

  the tragic examples you quote of the pre-Nazi pogroms in Ukraine happened in the context of a civil war which followed the Soviet Communist revolution. When I talk about centuries of peaceful coexistence of Jews and Christians in Galicia, I refer to the pre WW1-era. Although we both know that this was not the case, the Jews were BLAMED to have sympathy or collaborate with the Communists. Of course this does not justify a pogrom, but this false suspicion CAUSED the progroms. The rise of antisemitism during the early 20th century was a direct consequence of this false claim and indeed went hand in hand with antibolshevism. Without the fear of a bolshevist revolution as the political alternative, Hitler would have never come in power.

  Mr. Wilensky,

  you can generalize and speculate (“since there was awidespread Catholic antijudaism, why should Pacelli think different”), but this has nothing to do with the facts. The facts are talking in a different language. The facts are that Pacelli – call him an exemption – had a childhood relationship with Jews, admired Judaism, loved the Jewish culture. Can you imagine a young Roman priesthood candidate of the Black Nobility participating in a Shabbat dinner? No, you can’t? Then that’s your problem. It’s a fact that this happened, the whole Mendes family witnessed it, Pacelli’s family confirmed it, and you find Dr. Guido Mendes’ testimony the first time published in “The Jerusalem Post” of 10 October 1958: “Ramat Gan Physician Recalls Schooldays with Pius XII”

  We have all the letters and reports Pacelli wrote to the Vatican when he was Nuntius in Munich, testifying for what he has done to help Jews. We have the testimony of Nahum Sokolov and the German Zionist Blumenthal, wo accompanied Sokolov to visit Pacelli in the Berlin hospital, where the doctors told him he has just 5 minutes to meet the nuntius, but Pacelli kept him for one and a half hours! And we have Pacelli telling a young Jew “Be proud to be a Jew!” in the year of the Wannsee Conference, in front of hundreds of German soldiers during an audience in the Vatican. THESE ARE THE FACTS, Mr. Wilensky, not assumptions how he should have thought, being a Roman Catholic. And indeed you are wrong. During the 1920ies, there even was a movement, “Amici Israel”, of Catholic Clerics who wanted a reconciliation with the Jews and the removal of the Good Friday prayer “pro perfidis Judaeis”. A minority? Indeed, in 1928, 19 Cardinals, 287 Bishops and Archbishops and about 3000 priests belonged to this movement, including the German Cardinal Archbishop Michael von Faulhaber. Although the movement did not succeed with the removal of the Good Friday Paryer formula, it ended with a public condemnation of Antisemitism by Pius XI and the Vatican in 1928.  As you see, a great part of the Catholic hierarchy was pro-Jewish already in the Pre-Pacelli era.

  Your claim that Hitlerwould have been prevented, had only Pacelli allowed a coalition between the Zentrum-Party and the Social democrats, is rather strange, since  the Great Coalition from 1928 until 1930 included Zentrum and the SPD (Social Democrats). Therefore Pacelli not only “allowed” a coalition of the Catholic Zentrum with the SPD, it actually happened during his time as Nuntius in Berlin! The coalition ended a few month after he had left Berlin and the cause was that the parties did not agree about the rise of the jobloss-insurance, a question in which the Catholic Church remained neutral.  

  You claim that Sister Pascalina “witnessed” that Pacelli financed Hitler? Excuse me, that’s not true . I read her memories in the original German (she was a Bavarian nun) and that’s all she wrote about Hitler:
  “I once asked the Nuntius whether this man (Hitler) could not also have a good side. His Excellence shook his head and replied: “I would be very, very wrong if this would come to a good end. This man is possessed by himself, everything which does not serve him, he negates and everything he does and says ist just a mirror of his insane egoism. This man walks over corpses and throws down everything which is in his way.”
  This statement, by the way,si confirmed by an American diplomate, the US Consul in Cologne, who wrote a confidential report to the State Department on March 3, 1939, mntioning a meeting with Pacelli a few years before:
  “His (Pacelli’s) views (on Hitler) surprised me by their extremeness. He said that he opposed unalterably every compromise with National Socialism. 
  He regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel but as a fundamentally wicked person … not capable of moderation.”
  You claim he financed Hitler? No way!!

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann 
• Gabriel Wilensky says:

  June 3, 2010 at 2:52 am

  Mr. Hesemann, as I said earlier, you can cite cases of Pacelli’s friendship with Jews on the early years of his career until the day of Final Judgement, but that won’t change his record once the war began.

  I find it interesting that you chose to mention the case of “Friends of Israel” (Amici Israel), as an example of Catholic friendship toward Jews. This was an organization of some dutch Catholics, and not representative of “a great part of the Catholic hierarchy”. I don’t know to what extent they were actually friends of the Jews, but it’s true their intent was to expose the blood libel as a myth and remove the accusation of deicide. What you conveniently failed to mention when you correctly stated that they failed to remove the Good Friday prayer formula, though, is that the Vatican suppressed the organization that same year (1928) since according to them “words and deeds have begun to intrude into the Society of the Friends of Israel which deviate from the concepts of the church, the spirit of the holy fathers and the sacred liturgy” and their program did not recognize “the continual blindness of this people.” As Pius XI said in a 1937 encyclical, “Jesus received his human nature from a people who crucified him.” Hardly a manifestation of pro-Jewish sentiment in the pre-Pacelli era, Mr. Hesemann.

  Regarding Sister Pascalina’s recollection of Pacelli giving Hitler money to fight the Communists, I do not know where Murphy got it from. I do not have his book in front of me now. The one thing I know for sure is that people do all sorts of things when they need to, when it’s convenient, and when it benefits them. In the years following WWI Pacelli had very negative experiences with the communists of Bavaria where he was apostolic nuncio. I think his hatred of Communists was greater than his disdain for a thug like Hitler. I actually agree with you. I don’t think Pacelli liked Hitler. But neither Hitler nor Roosevelt nor Churchill liked Stalin either, yet they all did business with him. Pacelli’s disdain for Hitler did not prevent him many years later from making the Vatican the first state to recognize Nazi Germany by being the first state to sign an agreement with him.
• Michael Hesemann says:

  June 3, 2010 at 9:44 am

  Mr. Wilensky,

  in the meantime, I checked your alleged sister Pascalina-quote with the leading biographer of Sr. Pascalina, Martha Schad, who also strongly votes against the veracity of this claim. And she studied literally everything Sr. Pascalina wrote or stated in public. You can’t even document your quote. Sorry, Sir, but this is not really how a historian should work. Serious historical work is based on documents, not on rumors!

  That’s why I prefer to work in Archives and see first hand documents. As I mentioned before, we have both, the reports Pacelli as Nuntius sent to the Vatican and his private letters to his family, especially his brother, which were evaluated by my colleague Andrea Tornielli. In none did we find any positive remark on Hitler. As I stated before (and I can back up my statement producing the document), the very first mention of Hitler and his movement describes the Nazis as “anticatholic”, not even antisemite and certainly not antibolshevist. Do you really believe Pacelli financed a movement he considered “anticatholic”?

  The “Amici Israel” were founded by a Dutch convert in 1926, but was far more than just some “Dutch Catholics”. Its president was the General Abbot of the Benedictine Congregation of Monte Cassino, among its members, as already stated, were 19 Cardinals, 287 Bishops and Archbishops and about 3000 priests – more than you ever find in the Netherlands. It had several high-ranking members in the Roman Curia. And even if it did not reach its major goal, to remove the Good Friday Prayer from the Liturgy, it reached a clear condemnation of Antisemitism by Pope Pius XI.
  And excuse me, I consider about 10 % of the world-wide Episcopate and about A FOURTH of the College of Cardinals “a great part of the Catholic hierarchy” and not “some Dutch Catholics”.

  Pacelli’s friendship with the Jews just got stronger during the War, as it was acknowledged by so many Jewish leaders of that era including Chaim Weizmann, Isaak Herzog, Dr. Leon Kubowitzky, Mosche Scharett, Dr. Raffael Cantoni, Albert Einstein and Golda Meir. And it was in the middle of the war period, 1941, when he made his famous “Be proud to be a Jew” statement, and after the war, in 1945, when he received Jewish survivors of the Concentration Camps in the Vatican and told them: “Soon you will have a Jewish state”. 

  Yes, Pacelli negotiated the Concordat in 1933 to protect the endangered Catholic Church in Germany from the Nazi terror and have a legal base for protests. It was stated clearly in the Osservatore Romano, 21 July 1933: “The Holy See negotiates with the states as such, to secure the rights and the freedom of the Church” and dsitances himself from “any recognition of any kind”. Indeed, in 1925/26 he had negotiated a Concordat with the Soviet Union, and I have a nice photo of him sitting on one table with the Soviet Foreign Minister during this talk. As Pius XI said: “I would even make a Concordat with the devil himself if this would help to save souls”. And Hitler certainly was “the devil himself” and nothing better, not only in our eyes, but certainly in the eyes of Pacelli.

  Sincerely,
  Michael Hesemann
    
• Cathryn Vise says:

  June 3, 2010 at 10:15 am

  I hope the following will clarify the record. 

  Let me begin by mentioning again the horrendous pogroms in the Ukraine, Poland, and elsewhere in the “pale of settlement” which occurred in 1919 but whose horrors have since been overshadowed by those of the Holocaust. 
   
  I found the following information specifying the viewing of some of the horrors of these pogroms at http://israeli.filmography.co.il/Articles/Entry_24/Documentary_films_recording_the_Pogroms_in_the_Ukraine.html.  [You may be able to reach it directly using “CTRL/click.] 
   
  “The motion pictures footage exhibits horrible sights of mutilated bodies, families looking for their beloved amongst piles of corpses,… severely wounded Jews being treated in hospital…”
   
  The following eye-witness account can be found [with the usual “CTRL/click] at http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924078399890/cu31924078399890_djvu.txt.  It may also be physically consulted in the Cornell University Library under call number 3 1924 078 399 890.  It was typed up and published in 1921 by THE FEDERATION OF UKRAINIAN JEWS IN AID OF THE POGROM SUFFERERS IN THE UKRAINE.
  (Registered under the War Charities Act.) Their address at the time was
  26a, Soho Square, London, W. I.
   
  “Hundreds and thousands of Jews have been wounded, ill treated,
  savagely beaten. Up to the present more than a million Jews have been
  robbed and many of them have had literally their last shirt taken from
  them. The most refined tortures have been devised. Old men and children
  have been cut to pieces. Thousands of women and young girls have been
  outraged, and among these even little girls and old women. The victims
  have been terribly mutilated; the right arm and left leg have been cut off,
  or vice versa, the left arm and right leg; one eye has been torn out and
  the nose cut off. The houses in which the Jews took refuge were burnt, and
  all perished in the flames. The number of cases in which these unhappy
  victims were doomed to die a slow death of mdeaonbable [sic] torture
  cannot be counted. Burning was the usual practice.”
   
  I hope that these facts, recorded by camera and written up by eye witnesses, may
  succeed in disabusing readers of the fantasy of the supposed amity of the Eastern
  European Catholics for the Jews.  The peasants and soldiers had been systematically
  exposed throughout their lives, as had their parents and grantparents before them,
  of the myth of “the Jew”—the myth of an entity powerful enough to kill their deity—a
  phantasmagorical demonic personage whom they much feared and hated.  The
  Jews in their turn lived in constant dread of those times when these peasants and
  soldiers acted out on living Jewish flesh the horror thus induced in the minds of those
  peasants and soldiers.  Such tentative friendships as managed to exist in easy times
  were demolished at times like these.  These  pogroms centering about the year 1919
  appear to be, until the Holocaust, the worst which had ever occurred in history,
  exceeding even the savagery the Chimielniki horror (1648-1657). The behavior of
  the peasants and soldiers who committed these atrocities does count, since their
  target was consistently “the Jew”. Yes, there was a war, and there were casualties,
  and there was hunger, and everyone suffered. But suffering from war is one thing,
  and suffering because your neighbors attack and mutilate you and/or members of your
  family for representing, in their minds, the mythic “Jew” of their folklore and church
  teachings, is something else again. It is unconscionable to pretend that the Catholics
  lived in amity with the people of the tiny Jewish villages, when in fact to these
  Catholics the Tevyes and Yentls of these villages represented “the Jew” of their own
  distorted folklore, rather than neighbors or even fellow-humans. The very word “Jew”
  in their language was a curse word, the epithet of a demon, and at any stressful occasion,
  such as Good Friday, they treated any Jews they could get their hands on accordingly.
  And of course the war and its aftermath were stressful, and the perennial hatred of the
  Eastern European Catholics was unleashed as thoroughly as possible.

  This was a foretaste of the Holocaust, which differed only in that the Nazis presented
  these same Catholics with better and more efficient means of destroying the
  demonized Jews whom they hated so much. I will say quite truthfully that anyone
  who pretends otherwise is quite simply trying to fool himself or trying to fool others.

   
  The following information concerning the geographical extent of these pogroms may be accessed at http://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/Russsian_Civil_War_pogroms.htm
  [You may be able to reach it directly using “CTRL/click.] 
   
  “Neglected Pogroms
  “The neglect of this period cannot be entirely accidental. The Proskurov pogrom, in which about 2,000 Jews were murdered on February 15, 1919, was a horrendous event. Eventually, about 10,000 Jews were murdered in that district. The events are barely remembered by Jews, and certainly not by anyone else whose ancestors were not from that unfortunate town.  Yet at the time, the New York Times wrote:
  ‘The first of a new series of events which leave the scope of ordinary pogroms and assume the character of slaughter occurred in a city which will forever be written in letters of blood on the pages of Jewish history.’

  “Jews Slain in Ukraine, New York Times, September 19, 1919, based on an article that had appeared in the Yiddish paper, Der Tog – the Day.  [You should be able to see the newspaper article using CTRL/click.]
  “These pogroms were indeed a new and “improved” twentieth century version, which foreshadowed the mass murders of the Holocaust, Armies, rather than disorganized bands, often conducted the massacres, sometimes using machine guns.  One might think that these events were simply overshadowed by the Holocaust, but, for example, the pogroms of Kishinev are quite well documented….
  “History of the Civil War Pogroms
  “Most of this violence was not the “natural consequence” of war, but rather the result of pogroms, aimed specifically at Jews.  It is difficult…to know how many were murdered because they were Jews, how many died of starvation and disease and how many died fighting in the various armies.
  “The area of the greatest concentration of pogroms corresponded roughly to the Tsarist Jewish pale of settlement. It included Ukraine, Galicia, Belarus (“White Russia” in the map), Moldavia, Eastern Poland, Easter Romania, and Western Russia. The borders shifted around with the confused fighting.”
  The above indicates that the Catholic Ukrainian massacres of Jews, which I have been mentioning all along (contrary to the false claims of amity between Catholics and Jews in Eastern Europe) were also occurring in Poland, Galicia, White Russia, Moldavia, and Russia—mostly in tiny villages with families like that of Tevye, made famous in the play, Fiddler on the Roof, and throughout almost all the areas where such rural Jews were living in Eastern Europe.  My own father lived in such a village in the Ukraine; its name was Teplik.  Since we are focusing at the moment on Catholics, we can ignore the behavior of the Russian Orthodox. 
  Because of these horrendous pogroms, and because of Pope Benedict XV’s concern for the murdered Jews, Pope Benedict sent Achille Ratti to Poland to do whatever he could to help the Jews in their struggle to survive this persecution by the Catholic Poles.  Hundreds of thousands of Jews were at that time being tortured, mutilated, and machine-gunned down by the Catholics of these nations, including Poland.  Achille Ratti returned from this trip, but all that he “saw” (or, perhaps, heard from the Polish Catholics?) was that “the Jews form the principal force [of Bolshevism] in Poland….I saw that the [Bolshevik] Commissioners…were all Jews” (Original is at ASV, ANV, b. 193, “Relazione finale della Missione di Mons. Ratti in Polonia redatta da Mons. Pellegrinetti, Luglio 1921,” f. 431; the published version is in Cavalleri 1990, pp. 148-0149.  Quoted in David Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews, p. 260.  See also Daniel J. Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning, p. 81). 
   
  Achille Ratti soon afterwards became Pope Pius XI.  He did not survive to lead the church during the Holocaust, but his attitude remained that of the Vatican. 
   
  Cardinal Pacelli was papal nuncio (ambassador) in Munich (the Weimar Republic) after WWI, a chaotic time when revolutionary groups sought to fill the power vacuum left by the abdicating Kaiser Wilhelm.  At a meeting of the diplomatic corps it was decided to talk to a certain Levine, head of the Munich Soviet, to ensure recognition of the immunity of diplomatic representatives.  Pacelli thought it would be more dignified to send Monsignor Schioppa.  On the basis of Schioppa’s report, which he accepted without question, Pacelli managed to write to the Vatican Secretary of State of a chaotic scene featuring “a gang of young women…Jews like the rest of them…with lecherous demeanor and suggestive smiles.  The boss of this female rabble was Levine’s mistress…a Jew….  This Levine is…also…a Jew.  Pale, dirty …and sly….surrounded by an armed escort, one of whom was an armed hunchback….he …whin[ed] repeatedly….”  Notice that the repeated references to “Jews” are tinged with disgust, through intimations of immorality and depictions of visual and aural ugliness.  A week later, some of the Red Brigade of the South came and demanded the nuncio’s official limousine and one of them “pressed his rifle against my breast….”  Pacelli afterwards reported that “the capital of Bavaria…is suffering under a harsh Jewish-Russian revolutionary tyranny” (Vatican SRS, Baviera, letter from Pacelli to Gaspari, April 18, 1919, folio). 
   
  Pacelli, of course, is the man who afterwards became Pope Pius XII, who reigned during rhe Holocaust.
   
  In the 1930s, Archbishop Konrad Gröber defined Bolshevism in the German Handbook of Contemporary Religious Questions as “an Asiatic state despotism, in point of fact in the service of a group of terrorists led by Jews,” and defined Marxism as “the materialistic socialism founded primarily by the Jew Karl Marx.”  The same article explained the Führer’s warning that “No people can avoid this clash between its national tradition and Marxism, which is opposed to national ties and led mostly by Jewish agitators and revolutionaries” (Gröber, Handbuch der religiösen Gegenwarsfragen, articles “Bolschewismus,” p. 86, “Marxismus,” p. 404, 86.  Quoted in Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p. 277).    While Gröber did not, of course, become Pope, his publication, with full impri