{"id":2889,"date":"2023-04-21T20:13:38","date_gmt":"2023-04-21T18:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cok.hr\/en\/?p=2889"},"modified":"2023-04-24T16:36:09","modified_gmt":"2023-04-24T14:36:09","slug":"the-myth-of-hitlers-pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cok.hr\/en\/the-myth-of-hitlers-pope\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of “Hitler’s Pope”"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Robin Harris<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After years of noisy public pressure, the archives relating to the reign of Pope Pius XII (1939-1958)<\/strong> were officially opened to researchers in March 2020. Since then, remarkably little has been heard of them. This is not surprising, because documentation of the most controversial period \u2013 the Second World War \u2013 had already been published by the Vatican in eleven volumes between 1965 and 1981. Some documents are not published in full, others are just mentioned in footnotes, perhaps a few are omitted for some other reason. But the four Jesuit historians who did the work were men of professional skill and integrity.<\/p>\n

The Serbian side of the Vatican\u2019s Mixed Commission appointed by Pope Francis to investigate Blessed Cardinal Archbishop Stepinac\u2019s<\/strong> role in the Second World War period triumphantly produced excerpts of two letters from Stepinac to the Pope of May and June 1941 which, taken out of context, were superficially embarrassing. They were presented in 2017 but only used for publicity purposes in the spring of 2021. Doubtless, further such bits and pieces will appear as Serb researchers dig away in the archives in Rome, where the Croats are currently notably absent.<\/p>\n

In fact, however, the most interesting material is likely to relate to the struggle by Pius XII to protect the Church in Eastern Europe \u2013 including Yugoslavia \u2013 against Party infiltration and persecution. The critics of Pius will, of course, show no interest in that, for it is a tale of extraordinary heroism which reminds the world of the true nature and aims of Communism, and so does not fit their agenda. (The files of the Communist Party in Moscow remain tightly sealed under the instructions of its successors who rule the Russian state.)<\/p>\n

Croats<\/strong> need to take notice of Pius XII \u2013 and that includes the Catholic Church in Croatia, not just the historians and publicists.<\/p>\n

A surprising number of Croats still do not fully understand why the actions and historical reputation of Archbishop Stepinac are so important to modern Croatia. But far more do not understand the importance of the connection between Stepinac, Croatia and Pius XII. The campaign of slander against Stepinac \u2013 though since taken up by the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Serbian state, and others \u2013 was and is part of a wider campaign of Communist and post-Communist slander directed against Pius XII and the Catholic Church as a whole.<\/p>\n

The Communist Party from the start linked the accusations against Stepinac with accusations against the Vatican. Only after Pius\u2019s death in 1958, however, did this campaign develop its full ferocity. When Pius died, the praise for his actions in saving the Jews was loud and near universal. This, however, changed, principally because of the play, Der Stellvertreter<\/em> (\u201cThe Deputy\u201d or \u201cThe Vicar\u201d)<\/strong> which in 1963 portrayed Pius XII as a cold-hearted, cynical, pro-German antisemite, who ignored the Holocaust taking place under his own window. Allegedly written by the non-entity Rolf Hochhuth<\/strong>, it was in fact the work of the KGB and was used as the spearhead of a massive global Communist propaganda campaign \u2013 as described in 2013 by the late former Romanian spy chief, Ion Mihal Pacepa<\/strong>, and Professor Ronald Rychlak<\/strong>, in their book, Disinformation<\/em><\/strong>. The slander was just as effective as the campaign against Stepinac. It is principally why Pius has not been beatified, just as the mendacious campaign against Stepinac is principally why he has not been canonised. And as with the campaign against Stepinac, it continues – despite detailed factual refutation by many well-informed writers \u2013 including Jewish writers.<\/p>\n

The article which follows is the Croatian translation of a review by one of those Jewish authors \u2013 the late Sir Martin Gilbert<\/strong>, Churchill\u2019s official biographer and among Britain\u2019s most distinguished historians \u2013 of a book by an American Jewish historian (and Rabbi) David G. Dalin<\/strong>. The review originally appeared in the July\/August 2006 issue of the American Spectator<\/em>. It was later reproduced in a volume which is of fundamental importance to understanding the case of Pius XII and the Jews, Pope Pius XII and World War II: The Documented Truth<\/em>, ed. Gary L Krupp (Pave the Way Foundation, 2012). What follows contains an important note from that edition. The article is reproduced here by courtesy of Mr Krupp.<\/p>\n

This review contains a wealth of information \u2013 and answers to disinformation \u2013 not otherwise available in Croatian. COK believes that the pyramid of Communist lies about the Catholic Church in the Second World War must be crushed by the hammer blows of truth<\/strong>, and we intend to continue to explore this theme on future occasions.<\/p>\n

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Hitler\u2019s Pope?<\/h1>\n
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by<\/span>\u00a0MARTIN GILBERT<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
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August 18, 2006, 4:07 AM<\/div>\n
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T<\/span>his review appeared in the July\/August 2006 issue of<\/em>\u00a0The American Spectator.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Myth of Hitler\u2019s Pope:
\nHow Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From the Nazis<\/em><\/strong>
\nby David G. Dalin<\/strong>
\n(Regnery, 209 pages, $27.95)<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

AS A HISTORIAN OF THE HOLOCAUST, I frequently receive requests from Jewish educators, seeking support for grant applications for their Holocaust programs. Almost all these applications include a sentence about how the new program will inform students that the Pope, and the Vatican, \u201cdid nothing\u201d during the Holocaust to help Jews.<\/p>\n

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The most recent such portrayal reached me while I was writing this review. It is part of a proposal to a major Jewish philanthropic organization, and contains the sentence: \u201cAlso discusses the role of the Vatican and the rabidly anti-Semitic Pope Pius XII, who were privy to information regarding the heinous crimes being committed against the Jews, and their indifferent response.\u201d<\/p>\n

That the Pope and the Vatican were either silent bystanders, or even active collaborators in Hitler\u2019s diabolical plan \u2014 and \u201crabidly anti-Semitic,\u201d as stated above \u2014 has become something of a truism in Jewish educational circles, and a powerful, emotional assertion made by American-Jewish writers, lecturers, and educators.<\/p>\n

David G. Dalin, professor of history and political science at Ave Maria University, Naples, Florida \u2014 and an ordained rabbi \u2014 demonstrates in his recent book,\u00a0The Myth of Hitler\u2019s Pope<\/em><\/a>, that this is a false and distorted portrayal. He also shows its long pedigree, starting more than 40 years ago, in 1963, with Rolf Hochhuth\u2019s play\u00a0The Deputy<\/em>. Although that play was fiction, it was widely regarded as based on fact in its strident assertion of the moral cowardice and silence of Eugenio Pacelli<\/strong>, who in 1939 became Pope as Pius XII.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Photo 1 : Pope Pius XII appears on the central loggia after his election on 2 March 1939 (source: Wikipedia)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since Hochhuth\u2019s play, this theme has become commonplace. John Cornwell, a Roman Catholic, in his book\u00a0Hitler\u2019s Pope<\/em>\u00a0(1999) blamed Pius XII not only for silence, but for active collaboration with the Nazi regime. Jewish writers have understandably been shocked by the reiterated assertion of papal refusal to help Jews at their time of greatest need. Daniel Goldhagen\u2019s book\u00a0A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair<\/em>\u00a0(2002) portrays Pius XII as part of a wider Roman Catholic anti-Semitic tradition that permeated the Church\u2019s teachings and was integral \u2014 in Goldhagen\u2019s words \u2014 to the very \u201cgenesis of the Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dalin takes issue with these critics of Pius XII. Building on earlier documented defenses of Pius XII, including Ronald J. Rychlak\u2019s detailed study\u00a0Hitler, the War, and the Pope<\/em>\u00a0(2000), he builds a powerful case for Pius XII, suggesting that the desire of Pope John Paul II to canonize Pius need not have been offensive \u2014 or insensitive \u2014 to Jews, as it was widely portrayed.<\/p>\n

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THE HISTORICAL RECORD is clear. There can be no minimizing the horrors of those manifestations of Christian anti-Semitism that were a curse in the story of Nazi-dominated Europe. The Polish villagers who murdered their neighbors in Jedwabne had been churchgoers all their lives. The Roman Catholic priests who, on many documented occasions, turned their flocks against the Jews throughout Eastern Europe were ordained in the rites of Rome. The Slovak leader, Father Jozef Tiso, who asked the Germans to deport his Jews to German-occupied Poland and to slave labor \u2014 and death \u2014 was an ordained priest.<\/p>\n

But, as I myself pointed out in my book\u00a0The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(2003)<\/strong>, there was another side to this coin. In France, leaders of the Roman Catholic clergy were outspoken in their condemnation of the deportations. In Italy, churchmen across the whole spectrum of Roman Catholicism, including leading Jesuits, saved Jews from deportation.<\/p>\n

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Many hundreds of Polish priests and nuns are among more than 5,000 Catholic Poles who have been recognized by the state of Israel for their courage in saving Jews.<\/p>\n

Where does this leave Pope Pius XII, the object of so much published hostility, and the main figure in Dalin\u2019s short but powerful book? Can Pius really merit the words of Israel\u2019s then Foreign Minister, Golda Meir (later Prime Minister of Israel), when she telegraphed to the Vatican on Pius\u2019s death in 1958: \u201cWhen fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who were in charge of that Nazi terror during the war years held this same view during the war itself. After Pius XII delivered his Christmas message in December 1942, the Reich Security Main Office, the German government department in Berlin responsible for the deportation of the Jews, informed its representatives, who were in charge of encouraging local leaders to permit their Jews to be deported: \u201cIn a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order\u2026. Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice to the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was stern condemnation<\/strong> by the Nazis of a man who is now condemned for the opposite failing. Yet nine months later, Pius XII was to upset the Nazis even more. After the German occupation of Rome and the northern part of Italy, when the SS determined to introduce the Final Solution in all areas of Italy under German military control, Pius and the Vatican took the lead in seeking to frustrate the deportation plan.<\/p>\n

A MAIN OBJECT OF SS POLICY in Italy after the German occupation in 1943 was the deportation to Auschwitz of all Jews living in Rome. Margherita Marchione has told this story in\u00a0Consensus and Controversy: Defending Pope Pius XII<\/em>\u00a0(2002)<\/strong>. The roundup began without warning at eleven in the evening on October 15, 1943. Between then and one in the afternoon on October 16, one thousand of Rome\u2019s 6,000 Jews were arrested and taken to a deportation holding center, the Collegio Militare: their destination (although unknown at the time) was Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

News of the start of the round-ups was brought personally to the Pope early on the morning of October 16 by an Italian Catholic princess, Enza Pignatelli Aragona Cortes, who had been alerted by a Jewish friend. Having received the princess early that morning, the Pope immediately instructed the Cardinal Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, to protest to the German ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsacker (a former German Deputy Foreign Minister).<\/p>\n

Maglione did so that morning, making it clear to the ambassador that the deportation of Jews was offensive to the Pope. In urging Weizsacker \u201cto try to save these innocent people,\u201d Maglione added: \u201cIt is sad for the Holy Father, sad beyond imagination, that here in Rome, under the very eyes of the Common Father, that so many people should suffer only because they belong to a specific race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following Maglione\u2019s appeal, Weizsacker gave orders for a halt to the arrests. To protect those who were thus still in their homes from a possible German reversal of the halt to the deportations, the Pope gave instructions for the Vatican to be opened to Rome\u2019s Jews, and for the convents and monasteries of Rome to provide hiding places, or provide false identification papers.<\/p>\n

As a result of this papal initiative, in Rome a larger percentage of the Jews<\/strong> were saved than in any other city then under German occupation. Of the 5,715 Roman Jews listed by the Germans for deportation, 4,715 were given shelter in more than 150 Catholic institutions in the city; of these, 477 were given sanctuary within the confines of the Vatican itself.<\/p>\n

In reporting on the Maglione-Weizsacker meeting to London two weeks later, the British ambassador noted: \u201cVatican intervention thus seems to have been effective in saving numbers of these unfortunate people.\u201d Of the thousand deportees of October 16, only ten survived. The remaining four-fifths of Rome\u2019s Jews were alive at liberation.<\/p>\n

A footnote to these events: fifty-one years after Weizsacker\u2019s decisive intervention, his son Richard was the first President of the Federal Republic of Germany to visit Israel, and there to express his shame at what Germany had done to the Jews in the Nazi era.<\/p>\n

AS THE GERMANS began deporting Jews from other parts of northern Italy, the Pope opened his summer estate at Castel Gandolfo to take in several thousand (women had their babies in the Pope\u2019s apartment) and authorized monasteries throughout the German-occupied areas of Italy to do likewise. As a result, while the Germans managed to seize and deport a further 7,000 Italian Jews to their deaths, 35,000 survived the war \u2014 one of the highest ratios of those rescued of any country.<\/p>\n

There was to be a further decisive papal rescue action after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. Under the leadership of the Pope\u2019s senior representative in Budapest, the Papal Nuncio Angelo Rotta, the diplomats of eight neutral countries represented in the Hungarian capital \u2014 including the Swedish ambassador and his staff, prominent among them Per Anger and Raoul Wallenberg \u2014 organized a city-wide rescue scheme.<\/p>\n

Under Rotta\u2019s energetic lead, an \u201cInternational Ghetto\u201d was established in the northern section of the city, in which more than 40 safe houses were established, marked by the Vatican emblem, and other national emblems. Into these safe houses \u2014 a series of tall, modern apartment buildings \u2014 25,000 Jews found refuge, and survived. Elsewhere in Budapest, Roman Catholic institutions hid several thousand more Jews in their cellars and attics.<\/p>\n

The influence and authority of Pius XII was wide-ranging. In the port of Fiume, the Italian police chief, Giovanni Palatucci \u2014 the nephew of an Italian bishop, Giuseppe Palatucci \u2014 together with his uncle, saved 5,000 Jews from deportation during the German occupation of the port. They did so by providing the Jews with false identity papers, enabling them to gain safety in the bishop\u2019s diocese in southern Italy. For helping the Jews of Fiume, Giovanni Palatucci was arrested by the SS and sent to Dachau, where he was executed.<\/p>\n

Pius XII took a direct part in sending money to support the Jewish refugees from Fiume (Rijeka)<\/strong>. He also sent considerable sums of money to other rescuers of Jews in Italy, and to the French Capuchin monk, Father Pierre-Marie Benoit, from whose monastery in Marseille several thousand French Jews were smuggled across the borders of neutral Spain and Switzerland.<\/p>\n

AMONG THE LEADING Roman Catholic clergymen who helped save Jews was Archbishop Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. When the government of Israel asked him, in 1955, to accept an award for his rescue work during the Holocaust, Montini replied: \u201cAll I did was my duty. And besides I only acted upon orders from the Holy Father.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the deportation of 80,000 Jews from Slovakia to Auschwitz began in March 1942, Pius authorized formal written protests by both the Vatican secretary of state and the papal representative in the Slovak capital, Bratislava.<\/p>\n

When a second round of deportations began in Slovakia the following spring, Pius wrote a letter of protest to the Slovak government. Dated April 7, 1943, it was outspoken and unambiguous. \u201cThe Holy See has always entertained the firm hope,\u201d Pius wrote, that the Slovak government \u201cwould never proceed with the forcible removal of persons belonging to the Jewish race. It is, therefore, with great pain that the Holy See has learned of the continued transfers of such a nature from the territory of the republic.\u201d<\/p>\n

That pain was \u201caggravated further,\u201d the Pope wrote in this same letter, since it appeared \u201cthat the Slovak Government intends to proceed with the total removal of the Jewish residents of Slovakia, not even sparing women and children. The Holy See would fail in its Divine Mandate if it did not deplore these measures, which gravely damage man in his natural right, mainly for the reason that these people belong to a certain race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Six times the Pope appealed to the Slovak leader \u2014 the Catholic priest Father Tiso<\/strong> \u2014 to halt the deportations. After the sixth appeal, on April 7, 1943, the remaining planned deportations were halted.<\/p>\n

On April 8, 1943, the day after his final protest to Father Tiso, Pius XII instructed the Vatican\u2019s representative in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, to take \u201call necessary steps\u201d to support those Bulgarian Jews facing immediate deportation. From Istanbul, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), a former Papal Nuncio in Bulgaria, and godfather to the king\u2019s sons, added his voice to that of Pius XII, urging the King of Bulgaria not to deport the Jews of his kingdom. Roncalli also signed transit visas for Palestine for several thousand Slovak Jewish refugees.<\/p>\n

On learning of the plight of Jews in concentration camps in Romanian-occupied Transnistria, Angelo Roncalli contacted Pius XII, who interceded at once with the Romanian authorities, and authorized the dispatch of money to those in the camps. When, in 1957, the Israeli government sought to thank Cardinal Roncalli for his help, the Cardinal replied: \u201cIn all those painful matters I referred to the Holy See and afterwards I simply carried out the Pope\u2019s orders: first and foremost to save human lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such is the historical record. It explains why Rabbi Dalin is so disturbed by the continuing assertions that Pius XII did nothing to help Jews, was an anti-Semite, and effectively acted as \u201cHitler\u2019s Pope.\u201d<\/p>\n

AN IMPORTANT ASPECT OF THIS BOOK is the carefully constructed background to Pius XII\u2019s attitude to the Jews, going back to his early days as a young Vatican official. Indeed, from his schooldays, Eugenio Pacelli \u2014 as he then was \u2014 was friends with a Jewish student, Guido Mendes, later a distinguished Roman physician. As a result of this friendship, Pacelli was the first Pope to have shared a Sabbath dinner in his youth at a Jewish home. In 1915, then aged 39, he helped draft Pope Benedict XV\u2019s powerful papal denunciation of anti-Semitism in Poland, which insisted that the Christian law to love one another \u201cmust be observed and respected in the case of the children of Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1919, as Papal Nuncio in Munich, Pacelli defended the Church against the ferocious onslaught of Communism, then \u2014 as in Russia two years earlier \u2014 spearheaded by individual Jews who had long since abandoned their religious faith. But anti-Communism did not make him pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic, as his critics claim. In May 1922, Pacelli warned the Jewish politician Walter Rathenau of an assassination plot by German anti-Semites. A month later, Rathenau was murdered. In November 1923, five days after Hitler\u2019s failed attempt to seize power in Munich, Pacelli wrote critically to the Vatican about the Nazi movement, and noted with approval the public defense of Munich\u2019s Jews by the city\u2019s Catholic archbishop.<\/p>\n

In 1933, while serving as Cardinal Secretary of State \u2014 the Vatican\u2019s Foreign Minister \u2014 Pacelli negotiated the \u201cReich Concordat\u201d<\/strong> with Hitler\u2019s Germany, determined to protect German Catholics from the anti-religious policies of the new regime. Dalin makes a convincing argument in favor of the Concordat as a protective measure, stressing that it was not a moral endorsement of Nazism. Indeed, from the outset of the anti-Jewish persecutions in Germany, Pacelli opposed them.<\/p>\n

On April 4, 1933, three days after the one-day boycott of Jewish shops, Pacelli instructed the Papal Nuncio in Berlin to warn the regime against the persecution of German Jews, asking the nuncio to become actively involved on behalf of the Jews. Four months later he twice expressed to the British ambassador to the Vatican his \u201cdisgust and abhorrence\u201d at the Nazi regime. The ambassador reported to the Foreign Office in London \u2014 on August 19, 1933 \u2014 that Pacelli \u201cdeplored the action of the German Government at home\u201d including \u201ctheir persecution of Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1936 Pacelli visited the United States. One result of his mission, Dalin notes, was that, at President Roosevelt\u2019s personal request, he prevailed upon Father Charles Coughlin<\/strong>, the \u201cradio priest,\u201d to end his anti-New Deal \u2014 and also anti-Semitic \u2014 broadcasts. While willing to meet Roosevelt, Pacelli never met Hitler. When, in a much-heralded gesture of friendship, Hitler visited Mussolini in Rome in 1938, Pacelli deliberately absented himself from the city, together with Pope Pius XI.<\/p>\n

While Secretary of State, Pacelli made an astonishing 55 protests against Nazi policies, including, repeatedly, the \u201cideology of race.\u201d In 1938 Pacelli publicly endorsed and repeated the words of Pius XI, that \u201cit is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is inadmissible; spiritually we are all Semites.\u201d<\/p>\n

So outspoken were Pacelli\u2019s criticisms that Hitler\u2019s regime lobbied against him, trying to prevent his becoming the successor to Pius XI. When he did become Pope, as Pius XII, in March 1939, Nazi Germany was the only government not to send a representative to his coronation.<\/p>\n

IMMEDIATELY UPON BECOMING POPE, Pius XII responded to Mussolini\u2019s anti-Jewish legislation by appointing several Jewish scholars who had been dismissed from the university to positions inside the Vatican. Among them was the distinguished Jewish cartographer, Roberto Almagia, a professor at the University of Rome since 1915. On the day after his dismissal, Almagia was appointed director of the geography section of the Vatican library. While working there he completed an exceptional four-volume study of the Vatican\u2019s cartographic holdings.<\/p>\n

Another dismissed Jewish scholar, Professor Giorgio Levi della Vida, a world authority on Islam, was also given a job in the Vatican library, cataloguing the Arabic manuscripts.<\/p>\n

In his first encyclical as Pope, Pius XII specifically rejected Nazism and expressly mentioned the Jews, noting that in the Catholic Church there is \u201cneither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision.\u201d The head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Mueller, commented that the encyclical was \u201cdirected exclusively against Germany.\u201d So outspoken was it that the Royal Air Force and the French air force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany.<\/p>\n

One strong piece of evidence that Dalin produces against the concept of \u201cHitler\u2019s Pope\u201d<\/strong> is the audience granted by Pius XII in March 1940 to the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the only senior Nazi official to visit the Vatican during his papacy. After Ribbentrop rebuked the Pope for \u201csiding\u201d with the Allies, the Pope responded by reading from a long list of German atrocities and religious persecution against Christians and Jews, in Germany, and in Poland, which Germany had occupied six months earlier.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, under the headline \u201cJEWS\u2019 RIGHTS DEFENDED\u201d,<\/strong> wrote on March 14, 1940: \u201cThe Pontiff, in the burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop about religious persecution, also came to the defense of the Jews in Germany and Poland.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Photo 2: Members of the Canadian Royal 22e<\/sup>\u00a0Regiment<\/a>, in audience with Pope Pius XII, following the 1944 Liberation of Rome (source: Wikipedia)<\/strong><\/p>\n

DALIN DRAWS ATTENTION in this book to the man whom he regards as the missing personality in the story: Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, a position of influence in the Muslim world to which Hajj Amin had been appointed by the British in 1922. This senior Muslim prelate met Hitler several times during the war, called openly for the destruction of European Jewry, and intervened with Hitler to prevent rescue efforts.<\/p>\n

Having been given an office in wartime Berlin, Hajj Amin mobilized political and military support for the Nazi regime. Traveling to German-occupied Yugoslavia, he helped raise a Muslim Waffen SS company, which turned its savage attentions against both Jews and Serbian Christians. In one of his many broadcasts from Germany to the Middle East, Hajj Amin said of the Jews: \u201cThey cannot mix with other nations but live, as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals\u2026.\u201d Hitler found the Mufti a useful tool.<\/p>\n

In answer to Daniel Goldhagen\u2019s charge that the Roman Catholic Church remains a danger to the Jews today, Dalin writes: \u201cIt is radical Islam \u2014 Hitler\u2019s overt ally in World War II \u2014 not the Catholic Church, that threatens Jews today.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his book\u00a0Hitler\u2019s Pope<\/em>, John Cornwell calls Pius XII the \u201cmost dangerous\u201d cleric in modern history. Dalin feels that the Mufti is the one who deserves this title. As Dalin writes: \u201cHitler\u2019s mufti is truth. Hitler\u2019s pope is myth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Professor Dalin\u2019s book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the reality of Pope Pius XII\u2019s support for Jews at their time of greatest danger. Hopefully, his account will replace the divisively harmful version of papal neglect, and even collaboration, that has held the field for far too long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Robin Harris   After years of noisy public pressure, the archives relating to the reign of Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) were officially opened to researchers in March 2020. Since then, remarkably little has been heard of them. This is not surprising, because documentation of the most controversial period \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2910,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[244,245],"tags":[263,261,260,264,262],"class_list":["post-2889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-robin-harris-en","tag-anticommunism","tag-martin-gilbert","tag-pope-pius-xii","tag-robin-harris-en","tag-the-american-spectator"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Myth of "Hitler's Pope" - Center for the Renewal of Culture<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cok.hr\/en\/en\/the-myth-of-hitlers-pope\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Myth of "Hitler's Pope" - Center for the Renewal of Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"by Robin Harris   After years of noisy public pressure, the archives relating to the reign of Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) were officially opened to researchers in March 2020. Since then, remarkably little has been heard of them. 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