Eichmann's diary reveals Catholic Church's assistance to Jews

[Sapphire Blue]

With all the attention given to & controversy regarding Ratzinger's involvement in the Hitler Youth, and condemnation of the Catholic Church's aiding Nazis, I'd like to present another side of the Catholic Church with this excerpt from 'AD2000 - a journal of religious opinion'...


Eichmann's diary reveals Catholic Church's assistance to Jews

After guarding Adolf Eichmann's diaries for almost 40 years, the Israeli Government made them public early in March. Eichmann, a Nazi SS lieutenant colonel, was executed in 1962 in Israel for "crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity."

Eichmann wrote these diaries during the months following the passing of his death sentence. They are especially chilling in their description of the way the Nazi regime came to the "Final Solution" against the Jews, and the way the extermination was implemented.

The pages are also very interesting in studying the Vatican's position on the persecution of Jews. Some people accuse the Church of having done nothing in October 1943, when the Nazis began to deport Jews from their "ghetto" in Rome. However, Eichmann wrote that the Vatican "vigorously protested the arrest of Jews, requesting the interruption of such action; to the contrary, the Pope would denounce it publicly."

<snip>

"The objections given and the excessive delay in the steps necessary to complete the implementation of the operation, resulted in a great part of Italian Jews being able to hide and escape capture," Eichmann wrote. A good number of them hid in convents or were helped by men and women of the Church.

http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/2000/apr2000p8_256.html

[MrChupon]

1. Are the diaries online?

If so, have a link? I'd like to read for myself.

[Sapphire Blue]

6. Sorry, no link... They were supposedly released & made available

... to the public in either 1999 or 2000, but I haven't come up with where they are supposed to be available.

If you can read German (I can't), this might be helpful...

In August 1999 Die Welt serialised extracts from a 1962 Eichmann manuscript. ACTION REPORT reproduces those excerpts here as a service to historians:

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Eichmann/DieWelt0899/serial.html

[atreides1]

2. At least they helped Italian Jews

Well it's good to know that the Vatican finally took a serious interest in the problem, when it involved Italian Jews. But what exactly did they do from 1939 until 1943, when the deportation of
Italian Jews started?

[demosincebirth]

5. Be damned if you do and damned if you don't.

[Sapphire Blue]

8. Pope Pius XII (aka chief architect and negotiator of the Reich Concordat

before he came out from behind the curtain, as it were)...


Pope Pius XII
March 2, 1876 - October 9, 1958

Pope Pius XII was pope from 1939 until 1958. He was born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli. He was ordained in 1899. He worked in the Vatican Secretariat of State and became a cardinal in 1929. He was the papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin during the 1920s, and was appointed as Pope Pius XI's secretary of state in 1930. He was the chief architect and negotiator of the Reich Concordat, the treaty between the Vatican and Hitler, signed in 1933 which helped the Nazis secure their hold on German government unopposed by the powerful Catholic community. This agreement was the primary reason that the Catholic Center Party was disbanded and the community lost all political leverage in the Reich. On March 2, 1939, he was elected to succeed Pius XI as pope.

Controversy surrounds Pius XII's silence during World War II concerning the extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany. In a recent book, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, author John Cornwell portrays Pius XII as an authoritarian who was primarily concerned with increasing papal power. His reticence during the Holocaust was typical of his antipathy towards Jews in general. Cornwell provides convincing evidence of the Pope’s reluctance to encourage opposition among the German Catholics against the National Socialists even when the Nazis repeatedly broke with the terms of the Reich Concordat. The lack of opposition through the 1930s and the Second World War has been credited to the fear of persecution of the Catholic minority by the Nazis. However, even as late as 1942, the Catholic community was successful in protesting the euthanasia programs of the Nazis and these had to be stopped, for the most part, or taken underground. Pius XII also failed to publish the encyclical of Pius XI, Humani generis unitas (The Unity of the Human Race), after the death of Pius XI. The encyclical was the result of Pius XI’s growing concern about the National Socialists and anti-Semitism.

http://hist.academic.claremontmckenna.edu/jpetropoulos/holocaust/piusxii.htm


Reich Concordat - July 20, 1933

The Reich Concordat was an agreement signed between the Vatican and the National Socialist government of Germany. The person primarily responsible for the negotiation and signing of this document was the Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII with the agreement of Pius XI.

Pacelli was a firm believer in the unchallenged authority of the Pope as the head of the Catholic Church. For this reason, he had long aimed to establish a formal agreement between the Vatican and Germany, and impose upon the country’s Catholic population the pope’s authority. The German Catholics were one of the most powerful, influential and wealthy Catholic communities around the world. Pacelli wished to establish a power relationship with the local clergy that would heavily favor the Vatican. He aimed to do so through the imposition of the Canon Code of Law, a definition of Church laws that was published and brought into force in 1917; this interpretation of Church law encouraged the supremacy and absolutism of the pontiff over the local clergy.

The Concordat allowed the papacy to impose the new laws on the German clergy, and gained special privileges for Catholic schools and organizations. Pacelli also hoped that the agreement would safeguard against Nazi encroachments on and persecution of the German Catholic minority. In exchange, the Vatican would ‘encourage’ the local Catholic clergy and faithful to ‘voluntarily’ withdraw from politics, going as far as disbanding its powerful Catholic Center Party. This effectually destroyed any political opposition against the Nazis. This guarantee of nonintervention left Hitler and the Nazis free to pursue their anti-Semitic policies.

<snip>

Eventually, the reluctance of the Vatican to encourage Catholic opposition against the Nazis and their policies served as a silent endorsement of their policies. The moral base for protest for the Catholics was further compromised with the silence of Pius XII even when the terms of the Concordat were repeatedly violated by the Nazis. The reticence of the Pope in publicly denouncing Nazi anti-Semitism and his failure to publish "The Lost Encyclical" of Pius XI are seen by at least one historian as a violation of the moral obligations of his role.

http://hist.academic.claremontmckenna.edu/jpetropoulos/holocaust/reichconcordat.htm

[jedr]

3. What the Church did overall was wrong to do, but;

Roosevelt also turned away a boat load of Jewish refuges because he didn't want to get involved. Not many countries, churches, or individuals helped the Jews. They were given a desert wasteland as a country to keep them from repopulating Europe. The thought that we, or anybody, were there for the Jews is very romanticized.

[moondust]

7. The Red Cross also failed.

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

[bloom]

4. Mostly about "German Christians" (Lutherans) - also mention Hitler Youth

It was especially these "German Christians" who pushed for a national church under one bishop and one Fuehrer. Once Hitler consolidated his power in the course of 1933, their influence grew tremendously. They had members in every provincial church-governing body and were openly supported by members of the Nazi party, many of whom now joined the church. It was the patriotic thing to do. The church was not only a religious body, but also a bulwark of morals and of German traditions. Storm-troopers and Hitler Youth came to church in full uniform. What an impressive sight to see more than a hundred young men march to church on Sunday in uniform and sit in the front pews. Mass marriages were rigged; army bands in SS uniform played. The spectacles drew many to the churches....

Mueller retained his official function, and he soon made it clear that by severing his ties with the "German Christians" he had not relinquished his pro-Nazi stance. Toward the end of December he shocked the churches by signing, on his own authority, an agreement with Von Shirach, the Hitler Youth leader, whereby the 6 or 700,000 members of the Evangelical Youth Organization were transferred to the Hitler Youth. Official protests were of no avail, and those among the young people who refused to go along with the transfer were ostracized by classmates and ill-treated by the authorities. Mueller must have had Hitler's approval. Hitler once said, in connection with his attempts to subdue the church:

"In my youth, I took the view: dynamite. Later I realized that one can't break the Church over one's knee. It has to be left to rot like a gangrenous limb . . . . But the healthy youth belongs to us."



...Leading churchmen, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, languished in concentration camps. Karl Barth was forced to return to Switzerland. Confessing church presses were closed. So was Bonhoeffer's seminary. He himself would be imprisoned in 1943 and executed in 1945. Niemoeller also was imprisoned. Outspoken pastors and church members suffered a similar fate or were drafted into the army as quickly as possible. During the war the pastorate of the confessing churches was spread dangerously thin. The letters and stories of imprisoned Christians provide a moving tribute to the few but dedicated church members who withstood not only false doctrine, but also a diabolical regime.

http://spindleworks.com/library/peet/german.htm

[sweetheart]

9. Were not catholics also taken to this final solution

Though the jews were by far the largest single "minority" in the
holocaust, catholics were persecuted as well. Except for the word
of german catholics to this effect, i've no source, and perhaps am
wrong... but methinks that the jews were just "part" of a greater set
of millions murdered... They say up to 5 million catholics exterminated.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

11. The upper eschelons of the SS were comprised of Austrians

Austria is a Catholic country. Bavaria is also Catholic. So while Catholics that resisted Hitler were imprisoned, they were not targeted like Jews, Gypsies and Gays.

[Sapphire Blue]

12. Catholic resistance fighters at Dachau...

Memorial Site at Dachau

"Dachau can and shall be a lesson! Therefore we dare not be silent about it, although the memory of it is sad and grievous." Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, Auxiliary Bishop of Munich and former Dachau inmate, June 17, 1960


"Never Again" in five languages on wall at International Monument

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/MemorialSite/index.html


Church of the Mortal Agony of Christ

Many first-time visitors to the former Dachau concentration camp are shocked, as I was, to find that the most prominent spot in the present-day Memorial Site is occupied by a Catholic Church. Since the first news reports about Dachau at the end of April 1945, the concentration camp has always been associated, in the minds of most people, with the death of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. On all three of my visits to the Dachau Memorial Site, I overheard several people commenting that they didn't think it was appropriate to have Christian memorials at the site where so many Jews had suffered and died. Actually, the majority of the prisoners at Dachau were Catholic, including many Polish, Italian and French inmates. They were not sent to Dachau because of their religious beliefs, but because they were anti-Nazi resistance fighters. When the American liberators arrived at Dachau on April 29, 1945, the majority of the prisoners in the camp were Polish Catholics. According to the US Army census, there were 2,539 Jews in the camp, most of them having arrived in the last days and weeks of the war, after being evacuated from other camps.

In addition, numerous Russian Prisoners of War, who were Russian Orthodox Catholics, perished at Dachau. After 1940, all the Catholic priests, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis for resistance activities, were consolidated at the Dachau camp. A total of 2,579 Catholic clergymen were among the inmates at Dachau, including many anti-Nazi priests brought from Poland. Although the Catholic Church itself was not officially opposed to Hitler, himself a non-practicing Catholic, the majority of the prisoners who died in the camp were Roman Catholic.

The name of the Catholic chapel is Todeangst Christi. It is usually translated as Mortal Agony of Christ in English, although the literal translation of the German title would be Christ's Mortal Fear. The church was built in 1960 at the instigation of Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a former inmate of the camp who became a Bishop in Munich after the war. Neuhäusler was arrested in 1941 for breaking one of the laws of the Nazi government by publicly reading the critical writings of Cardinal Faulhaber, who opposed the Nazi regime. He was first taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin and then transferred to Dachau a few months later.

Continued @ http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/MemorialSite/Catholic.html

[rockymountaindem]

16. That's not correct.

Hitler did not target people specifically for being Christian/Catholic in the way he targeted Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and the disabled just for being members of those groups. If one was a Christian/Catholic, the only reason you were going to be attacked by the Nazis was for being a vociferous opponent of their regime.

When people say "Holocaust", it's a reference to a) Hitler's incoherent ravings in Mein Kampf and b) the chillingly sophisticated "final solution" drawn up at the Wansee conference in January 1942. The Nazis eventually killed about 12 million people (not including those who were not exactly murdered directly by them, but who died as a result of the war they started, i.e. civilians behind the lines who starved to death). 6 million of them were Jews, over 1 million were Gypsies. The other five million included homosexuals, the mentally ill or those with genetic deformities (though many of them were sterilized, not killed), suspected communists, active trade unionists, and anybody who stood against the Nazi regime. Although many of these people were undoubtedly Christian, there was never a time when the Nazis said "let's dispose of the Christians". The only Christian group that was targeted were Jehovah's Witnesses, because they are pacifists and refused to serve in the army or war industries. If it weren't for that, the Witnesses would have been in the clear too. Nobody was targeted just because they believed in Jesus.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm tired of this misconception that Hitler persecuted Christians being spouted from Conservatives who have no idea what they're talking about.

Oh, one more thing; when the Nazis prepared the "final solution to the Jewish problem" in 1942, they drew up the total figure of Jews they anticipated killing. Their expected number was 11 million Jews, including the Jewish populations of Britain, Turkey and the entire USSR (other than the ones in the parts they already occupied, such as Ukraine and Lithuania with their large Jewish populations.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

10. And the other side of the story

There were individual acts by heroic priests and nuns, that is true. But from an institutional perspective, the Vatican did a lot to aid the Nazis. Whether it was laundering money and gold for Nazi war criminals (mostly Bavarian and Austrian CATHOLICS), supporting the Croatian Ustache (pro-Nazi Nationalist Croatians, also Catholic), or supporting anti-semitic edicts, the Vatican has a lot to answer for.

Pope Pius also helped launder gold and money for escaped Nazi war criminals who settled in Argenina and Brazil. Pius twice received Ante Pavelic, the Croatian Ustashe dictator, in 1941 and 1943, despite the fact that he had learned of the Ustashe regime's massacre of Jews, Gipsies and Orthodox Serbs.

The Vatican quarreled with both Hitler and Mussolini on race, but hardly out of concern for the welfare of Jews. Throughout this period the Church seldom opposed anti-Jewish persecutions and rarely denounced governments for discriminatory practices; when it did so, it usually admonished governments to act with "justice and charity", disapproving only of violent excesses or the most extravagant forms of oppression.

When mass killings began, the Vatican was extremely well informed through its own diplomatic channels and through a variety of other contacts. Church officials may have been the first to pass onto the Holy See sinister reports about the significance of deportation convoys in 1942, and they continued to receive the most detailed information about mass murder in the east. Despite numerous appeals, however, the Pope refused to issue explicit denunciations of the murder of Jews or call upon the Nazis directly to stop the killing. Pius determinedly maintained his posture of neutrality anddeclined to associate himself with Allied declarations against Nazi war crimes.

http://www1.yadvashem.org/download/about_holocaust/christian_world/understanding.pdf

When Carlos Menem, who was elected President of Argentina in 1992, opened his country’s secret archives, HARD EVIDENCE showed that the Catholic Church in Europe and in North and South America was complicit in planning and helping Nazis escape to South America. This backed up many other state and church documents, as well as survivor accounts of the Church's complicity.

The Church also supported the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. The church heirarchy (bishops and archbishops) were some of Franco's greatest allies in the Spanish Civil War. Interestingly enough, many of the lower-level clergy (the rank-and-file priests and nuns) sided with the Republicans, even though the Republican coalition contained Communists, Socialists and Anarchists.

[rockymountaindem]

17. And in 1938 the Archbishop of Krakow

released a statement calling Polish Jews pimps, white slavers, Bolsheviks, tempters and the source of most of society's problems. Seven years later 85% of Polish Jews were dead, and most of the others had fled. Poland was devastated by the Nazis, but some of them were all too eager to use the war as an excuse to attack Jews, such as in the Jedwabne massacre, which the Poles then denied responsibility for during the next six decades.

[bklyncowgirl]

13. Many individual Catholics did great and heroic things.

The future Pope John XXIII who was a bishop at the time, issued thousands of fake baptismal certificates. Others as noted in the Eichmann diaries hid Jews from the Nazis.

There are some who think that Pope Pius knew of this activity and chose not to put a stop to it. I don't know. I still think he goes down in history as someone who actively aided and abetted genocide as as such is in a very special place in hell.

[Sapphire Blue]

18. There seem to be similarities between Pacelli (Pius XII) & Ratzinger

... in the power behind the throne each held & wielded as Cardinals, their actions as Cardinals... and their subsequent elevations to the Papacy.

Having experienced Ratzinger's persecution of Seattle's Archbishop Hunthausen during the 80's (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3514470), I am dismayed at his elevation to the Papacy. In desperation, I'm trying to find something redeeming in this person, wondering if he might have been involved in the resistance as a seminarian during the late 40's. I have not yet deluded myself... sigh. I continue to believe that the Catholic Church hierarchy... the Vatican, is, was, and (under Ratzinger's leadership) forever will be complicit in activities unbecoming a church.

[orpupilofnature57]

14. Not to mistake, the pope and cardinal shit, from true Christian catholics

Like the difference between kkkarl and shrub and democratic free America.The people not the dogma.

[K-W]

15. Wow, they objected, that was very courageous of them.

Im sure they came up with lots of ways to "rigourously" talk instead of acting.

And the fact that men and women of the church helped jews doesnt have much to do with the vatican at all. Men and women of the church tried helped Latin Americans try to escape from servitude, only to have the vatican tell them that wasnt a catholic thing to do.