Reply #117: First they came for the ....................................

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http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/hitlerspope.htm
HITLER'S POPE

Long-buried Vatican files reveal a new and shocking indictment of World War II's Pope Plus XII: that in pursuit of absolute power he helped Adolf Hitler destroy German Catholic political opposition, betrayed the Jews of Europe, and sealed a deeply cynical pact with a 20th-century devil.

BY JOHN CORNWELL

One evening several years ago when I was having dinner with a group of students, the topic of the papacy was broached, and the discussion quickly boiled over. A young woman asserted that Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, the Pope during World War II, had brought lasting shame on thc Catholic Church by failing to denounce the Final Solution. A young man, a practicing Catholic, insisted that the case had never been proved.

Raised as a Catholic during the papacy of Pius Xll - his picture gazed down from the wall of every classroom during my childhood - I was only too familiar with the allegation. It started in 1963 with a play by a young German author named Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter (Thc Deputy) which was staged on Broadway in 1964.

It depicted Pacelli as a ruthless cynic, interested more in the Vatican's stockholdings than in the fate of the Jews. Most Catholics dismissed Hochhuth's thesis as implausible, but the play sparked a controversy which has raged to this day.
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