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They Don’t Know Much About History
A headline from the Washington Post:
WWII-era letter suggests Vatican knew of Holocaust atrocities
A newly revealed letter from the Vatican archives suggests that World War II-era Pope Pius XII was aware thousands of Jews were being killed in gas chambers in occupied Poland, undercutting earlier Vatican arguments justifying the pope’s wartime silence on the Holocaust.
Following decades of pressure from Jewish organizations and historians, the Vatican in 2020 opened its secret archives on the wartime pope, who headed the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958. Pius XII has since become one of the most controversial pontiffs for not publicly condemning the Nazis during the war, with critics dubbing him “Hitler’s Pope.” Others, including the Vatican, have argued his diplomacy saved lives in part by preventing a Nazi backlash.
A newly unveiled document has added fuel to the debate. It’s a German letter sent by a German Jesuit member of the anti-Nazi resistance, Father Lother Koenig, and addressed to the pope’s trusted private secretary Rev. Robert Leiber. In the letter dated Dec. 14, 1942, Koenig wrote that up to 6,000 people, “above all Poles and Jews,” were dying every day in “SS-furnaces” at the Nazi-run Bełzec concentration camp in what was then occupied Poland. Reported this week by Italian daily Corriere Della Sera, the letter was discovered by Vatican archivist Giovanni Coco, who described it as further evidence of a flow of explicit and detailed news on Nazi crimes to the Holy See.
I have some news for the Washington Post. Not only was the Vatican aware of Holocaust atrocities, so were the British and US governments before 1942.
Jan Karski was a Polish soldier, resistance fighter, and a diplomat. He acted as courier for the Polish government in exile.
Starting in 1940, Karski reported to the Polish, British, and US governments on the situation in Poland, especially on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi extermination of Polish Jews.
He smuggled out of Poland microfilm with further information from the underground movement on the extermination of European Jews in German-occupied Poland. His reports were transcribed and translated by Walentyna Stocker, the personal secretary and interpreter for Sikorski. Based on Karski’s microfilm, Polish Foreign Minister Count Edward Raczyński provided the Allies with one of the earliest and most accurate accounts of the Nazi Holocaust.
Raczyński’s Note, addressed to the governments of the United Nations on 10 December 1942, was later published along with other documents in a widely distributed leaflet entitled The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland. – from Wikipedia
From 1940 the reports were available to the Allies and as well as the Vatican. How many Military Divisions did the Vatican have? The same number of journalists that know anything about history, none.
Pope Pius XII encouraged and oversaw efforts to try and save as many Jews as possible from the Nazi Holocaust. “The Israeli diplomat and historian Pinchas Lapide estimated the figure at between 700,000 and 860,000, although the figure is contested.”
The exact number may never be known, but the Vatican and Catholics throughout Nazi-occupied Europe saved more Jewish lives than all the Allies combined.
Published in History
only if one ignores the Jews that weren’t killed because the Allies won the war.
More headlines to libel the Catholic Church. Did the article answer why the Pope was unwilling to have the Swiss Guard fight the Stormtroopers?
(Man, we could use a Pope like Pius XII again. )
Is there any evidence that the Holocaust had any influence or was even a small reason for the USA having entered the war against Germany?
Hmmm. I wonder what the Washington Post was writing about in 1942.
What does that have to do with the truth of my statement? Motivation for why the Allies were in the war doesn’t change the fact that winning the war ended the murder of the Jews.
That’s not the point. The point is that Hitler would have exterminated ALL the jews if Germany had won the war.
And the implication is they kept it under wraps because publicizing it would make ___ support the Nazis (or support them more).
What goes into the blank space?
That wasn’t a challenge to the truth of your statement. It was a response to the point that the Allies knew about the Holocaust for several years and did nothing. Maybe there was nothing they could do? I don’t know. But one thing for sure, the horror of what the Nazis were doing could have been reported with much greater frequency at the time. The NY Times buried it and they knew about the camps and the death. BTW, if it was by pure chance that the Allies, having won the war, saved the Jews, it’s not a lot to brag about…now that you mention it.
Specifically, there were requests/proposals for the 8th Air Force to bomb Auschwitz and/or the tracks leading to it, but they were rejected based on the principle that doing so would divert aircraft from higher priority targets that would help end the war sooner.
Now we’re getting into “was the US Civil War about slavery or Secession” territory. Maybe it was “pure chance” that defeating the Confederacy ended slavery. I mean, there was no particular requirement that reincorporating the CSA states into the Union required abolition.
Gotta keep beating the Holocaust drum, to keep the Neocons revved up, to make sure that American foreign policy continues to serve Tel Aviv.
The true story of the timing of the discovery of the killings is complex. The main conference to organize it did not occur until January 1942.
The killing of the Jews is not the fault of the Vatican, nor of the British, nor of the US. Personally, I’m sick and tired of the Jews who, for my entire life plus 20 years, have been heaping guilt on the guiltless, in service of their own interests.
Like the supporters of Critical Race Theory, there are plenty of non-Jews who join in this activity, for purposes of virtue signaling. The Jews actually seem to be the prototype for most of the identity politics movements.
The Wannsee Conference occurred in January 1942. Raczyński’s report was delivered to the United Nations on December 10, 1942. The article from the the OP says that the Vatican was informed on December 14, 1942.
The US entered World War II in December 1941.
“Nothing”?
My usual response to this type of comment is “I did NAZI this response coming”.
Except in this case I did.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been exterminated by the time the Wannsee Conference took place, starting with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and accelerating hugely after the Soviet Union was attacked in June 1941. The meeting lasted 90 minutes and did little to nothing to “organize” the Holocaust. It was far more a bureaucratic initiative than an operational one. It resulted in no new decisions or changes of course; the annihilation of the European Jews was already underway in multiple countries.
As for the rest of your, er, contribution, I find it disgraceful.
Current-era campaign ads suggest Democrats know of Planned Parenthood atrocities.
For example: (September 1941)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar
That’s putting it mildly.
We are very lucky indeed as Americans. We did suffer losses in WWII, but we did not suffer through the occupation that Poland, France, or any number of countries in Europe suffered under Nazi Germany, or the lingering occupation of the Soviet Union, that was gifted through the Yalta Conference.
There were two uprisings in Poland. One takes place on April 19th, 1943, the Jewish Ghetto Uprising in Warsaw. Then the second Warsaw Uprising of August 1, 1944, to try and liberate the city before the Soviet Union could occupy Warsaw and Poland.
My flag is displayed on both those days.
I am a Jew who lost countless family members in the Holocaust. But I don’t think, any more, that the rest of the world should have a guilty conscience about it.
In principle, we should always oppose innocent blood being shed.
In reality, there is always realpolitik, as much as I hate it. The world is largely silent when murderous campaigns against weaker people are being conducted. The Holocaust is merely one of many examples. Nobody in the West attacked Stalin for the Holodomor. Pol Pot and Mao murdered tens of millions of people. Communism murdered 100+ million people in the 20th century, yet those who opposed communism were forced on the defensive.
Everyone should obtain the means to defend themselves. We all have to take responsibility for our lives, the lives of our loved ones and our communities. Ultimately, people must never give up their rights to defend themselves to the state. Because the state always – eventually – turns.
This issue has had much written about it; some of it trash but much of it worth examining.
Your second sentence is totally correct; Pope Pius XII was walking an extremely tight rope during the German occupation of Rome. Although he had declared a policy of neutrality, there was much more going on. How could he remain silent when, for example, over 2,500 Polish priests and monks were liquidated? (In addition, some accounts state that Hitler was planning on kidnapping Pius shortly before the end of the war.)
At the end of the war, when the facts of the Holocaust came out, there were many who wished to believe that others, in addition to the Germans, were complicit. For example, in the early 60s a German playwright (Rolf Hochhuth) wrote a play entitled The Deputy which sought to show that Pius had failed to speak out against the atrocities being carried out. This was, by no means, an isolated instance in which Pius was portrayed as “Hitler’s Pope”. (And, it didn’t help much that a priest inside the Vatican was discovered to be instrumental in the creation of a Nazi “Rat Line” that ran war criminals to the safety of South America.)
However, more scholarship has come out showing that Pius did (and said) all that he could to show what the Germans were doing. (One work that I would recommend is Church of Spies by Mark Riebling.)
The true story of the timing of the discovery of the killings is complex. The main conference to organize it did not occur until January 1942.
The killing of the Jews is not the fault of the Vatican, nor of the British, nor of the US. Personally, I’m sick and tired of the Jews who, for my entire life plus 20 years, have been heaping guilt on the guiltless, in service of their own interests.
Like the supporters of Critical Race Theory, there are plenty of non-Jews who join in this activity, for purposes of virtue signaling. The Jews actually seem to be the prototype for most of the identity politics movements.Jerry, I seem to recall you placed a high regard on understanding accurate history. In fact, you claim to have converted to your current political leanings (US should be an isolationist theocracy with your worldview enforced on the populace) with all of the zeal of a fanatic by what you state is an accurate reading of history. Can you not consider that there is value in knowing history accurately? It’s important to remember the Holocaust, alongside other acts of mass murder.
[Redacted]
I wish just once people would recognize Stalin’s role in all of this. Yes….Hitler was a brutal dictator and a devout anti-Semite….but so was Stalin….and Stalin was worse. Read Sean Mkmeekens Stalin’s War….Stalin drove WW2… he put a clown suit on Hitler at almost every step…..Stalin makes Hitler look like a flower child going to San Francisco in 1968….then of course there is Mao….but hey…it’s okay to wear Stalin and Lenin shirts because of you know….Hitler…..I’m not defending Hitler….but this obsession with him that he defines totalitarian governments gets old when history shows he was really a distant 3rd….maybe even behind Pol Pot if we are really being honest….
I seem to recall a historian showing that Rolf Hochhuth ignored all evidence that failed to support his predetermined thesis.
Hochhuth also wrote a play depicting Winston Churchill as a war criminal as bad as Goering because he supported and planned the strategic bombing of Nazi Germany. It seems that Hochhuth was a German desperate to find “reasons” to see everyone else as being no better than Nazi Germany.
If the Pope had openly condemned the Nazis he may well have alienated the German government and thereby lost the Church’s ability to save victims of the Holocaust.
Fie on the Washington Post and their addiction to fake controversy.
FWIW, in a war you have to have to consider plans that are comparable to those of your enemy. I fact you have to consider plans that are morally worse. Well, unless you are winning handily in which case you can afford to ‘be the better man’.
Ion Pacepa was the highest ranking defector from the eastern block during the Soviet era. As the Romanian counter intelligence boss, he interacted with Soviet leadership and knew many of their plans.
After defecting he wrote a number of books including Disinformation where he described Soviet efforts to discredit Pope Pius with false information accusing him of being complicit with the Nazis.
From the blurb:
Unfortunately, even though the Soviet Union is gone, our media still carries on the campaigns of defamation.
Here is a presentation by Rychlak (Pacepa’s co author) where he specifically addresses the Soviet operation to smear the pope, and hence, the catholic church.
The video above specifically addresses The Deputy.
Even in world history classes in the 60’s we weren’t taught this. Reading Mila 18 as a 16 year old was eye-opening.
Thank you very much for posting that. Everything I read about the issue was quite a few years ago.
♪And you know where you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men,
(Man, we could use a Pope like Pius XII again.)♫