Posted on 12/22/2009 11:16:51 AM PST by markomalley
It's become almost impossible to have a sensible discussion about this topic. The clear implication here, is that Pius XII's silence was the result of moral cowardice. Was it? Or could there just possibly have been other reasons?
The ultimate objective was to save the lives of as many Jews as possible. Would more or less Jews have been saved by the Church had Pius XII spoken out against Hitler? It's a given that public condemnation of Hitler would have had zero effect on plans for the "Final Solution" but would it have helped or hindered the Church's efforts to take more Jews out of harms way? There's a school of thought which says that it allowed the Church to fly under the radar and carry out its rescue efforts with greater freedom.
As for the comments of Taylor and Tittman, the less said the better. Where was the US in the dark days of 1939, 1940 and 1941 when the "Final Solution" was really starting to hit top gear? If the Japanese had not bombed American soil, when, if ever, would the US have entered the war?
As for "holocausts", there's one happening right now in this country, sadly, in which many Jews and other Americans are complicit and which the Catholic Church is fighting. And what is our reward for that?
Abuse, just as it is for rescuing Jews from the first Holocaust.
One of many reasons to admire Pope Pius XII. He had two groups of enemies ... the national socialists and the international communists.
He acted effectively to counter national socialists ... then the international communists slandered him. Now communist sympathisers continue the slanders.
But the children and grandchildren of the people who were saved by his efforts walk the earth to this very day ... and NO mere human can take that away.
With a bit of vacation coming up, maybe I'll have time.
I watched it and drank a six-pack of 12 proof French beer.
At the end I was as tough as my Italian college roomate after he drank wine and watched Rockey 1-3 back to back.
F.D.R. ANTISEMITISM AND ANTICATHOLICISM
Why is it that some Jews, instead of slander Pope Pius XII, who did his up must to save the Jews (risking the destruction of the Catholic Church by the Nazis), do not condemn those who, like president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, could have spoken against the Holocaust but no only kept silent, he denied entrance into U.S. those Jews fleeing Nazi occupied Europe?
FDR’S ANTISEMITISM
©1998 by Robert Michael
The records of the Casablanca Conference contain the clearest and most significant evidence concerning the President attitudes toward the Jews and the basic reason why he did nothing to end the anti-refugee policy of the United States.
The conference took place in January 1943 in the middle of the period when the mass murder of Jews was taking place in Europe. By this time, Roosevelt knew nearly everything about these atrocities. Roosevelt had been informed over the years by American diplomats and American press reports about the Jewish condition in Europe.1 Moreover, in December 1942 the Polish government in exile had accurately informed the U.S. government of many of the facts of the Holocaust.
Yet at Casablanca, Roosevelt amazingly seemed to sympathize with Nazi discrimination against Jews. He proposed to Generals Noguès and Giraud that the French government in North Africa discriminate against the Jews of French North Africa just as Hitler had done in Germany before the war .2)
Roosevelt stated that the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions . . . should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole North African population.
He endorsed the same plan for Germany. Limiting the number of Jews in the professions, he stated, would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a single part of the population, over 50 per cent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany were Jews. 3)
Roosevelt’s misinformation and solutions were shared by American Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, who had written to Charles Crane that he, Dodd, had told the Germans unofficially that they had a serious [Jewish] problem but that they did not know how to solve it. The Jews had held a great many more of the key positions in Germany than their numbers or their talents entitled them to. 4)
The errors in Roosevelt statements were telling, because they mirrored modern antisemitic stereotypes. In the interwar period, the facts are that Jews comprised about 16 percent of German lawyers, 11 percent of physicians, 4 percent of the university teachers, and 1 percent of teachers in lower grades. 5 )
At Casablanca, F.D.R.¸s comments echoed Nazi and American anti-Jewish propaganda of the 1930s. Father Coughlin praised the National-Socialists¸ understandable effort to block the Jewish-Communist plan for subjugating Germany.6
Congressman Louis McFadden had encouraged Hitler¸s attempts to destroy the alleged Jewish control of the German economy, media, education, and professions.7)
For President Roosevelt, America was a “Protestant” nation,8) and Jews were here on suffrance. F.D.R.¸s feelings about Jews (and Catholics) are clear from a private conversation with Leo Crowley, the Catholic economist and wartime Alien Property Custodian.
One day in January 1942, Roosevelt proclaimed to a shocked Crowley: Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance. It is up to both of you [Crowley and Henry Morganthau, a Jew and Secretary of the Treasury] to go along with anything that I want at this time. 9)
F.D.R.¸s comment confirms his belief that Jews as well as Catholics would always be aliens in a Protestant nation like the United States. This attitude, not uncommon among America’s Protestant elite, may help explain FDR’s aloofness from the agonized experience of the Holocaust’s Jews. He may have hated the Nazis and their collaborators for the crimes they committed against non-Jews, but he remained aloof, unable to make the human connection with Jewish victims. 10)
Like many liberals, FDR avoided the realities of the Jewish catastrophe based on a mild antisemitism. As Life magazine’s managing editor, John Billing, wrote in his diary, “We’re all antisemitic, only some of us have better self-control than others.”11)
FOOTNOTES 1) At the time of Kristallnacht in November 1938, President Roosevelt had already been warned by his ambassador to Poland, Anthony Biddle, that The plight of the Jewish populations as a whole in Europe is steadily becoming . . . untenable. Biddle to Roosevelt (10 November 1938). See Lipstadt, Beyond Belief.
2) Noguès was Vichy France¸s Resident General of Morocco.
3) The Roosevelt-Noguès and the Roosevelt-Giraud Conversations at the President¸s Villa (noon and 4:20 p.m., 17 January 1943), Roosevelt Papers, McCrea Notes, in Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Washington 1941-1942 and Casablanca 1943 (Washington D.C. 1968), 608-11.
4) Brecher, Charles R. Crane¸s Crusade for the Arabs, 47, 54n34.
5) See Jewish Historical Atlas.
6) Curran, Xenophobia and Immigration, 149.
7) Shapiro, The Approach of War, 48.
8) Robert Herzstein, “Jews, the Holocaust, and Henry Luce,” Dimensions, 15.
9) Entry of 27 January 1942, Henry Morganthau Diaries, in Morgan, FDR, 553.
10) NAnother example was Henry Luce, the owner and director of Time Magazine, AMerica’s most powerful journalistic enterprise. Herzstein, “Jews, the Holocaust, and Henry Luce,” Dimensions, 19.
11) Herzstein, “Jews, the Holocaust, and Henry Luce,” 21.
©1998 by Robert Michael
F.D.R. DENIED ASYLUM TO JEWS FLEEING NAZI OCCUPIED EUROPE
The St. Louis and U.S. Policy Failures
German Jews Denied Entrance to America in 1939
Aug 22, 2009 Michael Streich
Allowing 937 Jews to leave Germany in May 1939 served Nazi propaganda goals, particularly when the the United States rejected asylum after Cuba refused their entry visas.
In May 1939, the S.S. St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg, Germany bound for Havana with 937 Jewish men, women, and children. It was only seven months since Kristallnacht had wrecked a bloody havoc on the Jews in the German Reich and only five months from the outbreak of World War II. The plight of these Jews would become intimately entangled with insensitive American immigration quotas, President Franklin Roosevelt’s political expediency, and deeply rooted Anti-Semitism in the United States.
The passengers on the St. Louis were a varied group. They represented young and old, professional and worker. Some had been in concentration camps. Both Dachau and Buchenwald camps were in full operation, a fact known to most foreign governments including the United States.
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, used the sailing of the St. Louis to strengthen the ideological posture of Germany toward the Jews to appeal to world public opinion.
On the one hand, Germany was demonstrating compassion by allowing these Jews to leave, albeit at a steep price. Those with property forfeited everything to the Reich. This aspect of the Nazi procedures was not for public opinion. Although issued exit visa, the passenger’s entry documents into Cuba would not be honored. The passengers did not know this.
Dr. Goebbels, Reichsmarschal Goering, and Hitler knew that, inevitably, the St. Louis would be turned away, proving to the world that nobody wanted the Jews. Most European nations had already stopped the flow of refugees crossing their borders. Britain not only curtailed Jews from entering Britain, but severely limited the number of Jews migrating to Palestine, a viable and logical destination coming out of late 19th-Century Zionist efforts.
FRANCO OFFERED REFUGE IN CATHOLIC SPAIN TO PERSECUTED JEWS.
The reaction of the Western democracies was in stark contrast with that of “Fascist” Spain. General Franco’s regime, even though his country was devastated and impoverished after a bloody civil war, recognized all the Sephardic Jews living in the Nazi occupied territories as Spanish citizens. That measure allowed them to return to Spain- the beloved Sepharad, land of their ancestors where they lived a golden age more than five centuries ago. Franco’s government also collaborated with the Holy See and several South American countries in providing false passports for Jews trying to flee the Nazi scourge.
More than 50,000 Jews were saved thanks to the Spanish government actions. When the Nazis discovered the covert operation, some of the Latin American countries retracted from accepting the validity of the faked passports.
The Vatican, on January 24, 1944, interceded with the Latin American governments asking them to recognize the passports “no matter how illegally obtained”, and the humanitarian operation proceeded. Brazil gave 3,000 enter visas. Paraguay, Chile and others South American countries were also very receptive to the Pope’s pleas in favor of the Jews.
During WWII, the Church organized an extensive underground network for sheltering Jews from NAZI persecution. In the postwar chaos, the same network was used to shelter families targeted for revenge killing by Communist partisans. Mussolini and his mistress were famously lynched by Communists along with many others who did not escape. Even if revenge seems justified, the Church cannot condone lawless killing.
The Holocaust Museum-proposed fishing expedition through Vatican archives could fuel monetary lawsuits against the Church if her records contain evidence of sheltering officials who cooperated with NAZI occupation. The United States brought over NAZIs in Operation Paperclip and Israel never turned away Warsaw Ghetto Jewish police or similar NAZI collaborators. The Holocaust Museum should request US and Israeli postwar secret archives to establish proper context before demanding the Vatican provide the same.
What an amazing statement made by the US Holcaust Memorial Museum. However, if you think deeper, it’s not so amazing.
Most of the Board Members of the Museum are Obama supporters. So it makes sense that they ignore the actions that are endorsed by many Jewish and Israeli statesman and citizens about the over 800,000 Jewish men,women and children saved by the Catholic Church and the Pope. It makes ironic sense that they ignore the reality of actions and focus on the Pope’s “silence” on the issue at the time.
A great speech would have made all the diffence in the world. Just look at all that Obama has accomplished. In the past few days he has spoken like a school lecturer about cutting government spending. The policy of being on pace for a $1.8 Trillion annual budget deficit matters not. But oh that speech.
I’m afraid the Museum Board Members appear to be “selling controversey”, with the “Nazi Pope” myth. In my opinion their actions are profane.
If they would be more neutral on the subject by admitting that the process to open the archives is underway, while at least mentioning addmissions from Israeli statesmen regarding the known good the Pope did, then their “statement” which amounts to dreadful aspersions, wouldn’t look so preposterous.
They need to be reminded they are selling the reality of history and not carnival tickets.
ANTISEMITISM WAS PREVALENT DURING THE HOLOCAUST AT THE PARTY OF THE KKK.
Truman and the Jews
By William Safire
New York Times | July 15, 2003
A 5,500-word diary in President Harry Truman’s handwriting, unnoticed for decades, recently turned up at the Truman Library in Independence, Mo. Three pages were mysteriously loose and interleaved in the journal.
On these detached and reinserted pages was this entry: “6:00 P.M. Monday July 21, 1947. Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine [sic]. Told him I would talk to General George] Marshall about it.”
On that day, news reached the world that 4,500 Jewish refugees seeking entry to Palestine aboard the ship Exodus 1947 had been seized by British soldiers. These “displaced persons” had been placed on three vessels ostensibly headed to nearby Cyprus for detention until permitted entry to the Holy Land, where other Jews waited to welcome them. Instead, the homeless families, including a thousand children, were encaged on decks being taken back to a hostile Europe.
“He’d no business, whatever to call me,” Truman wrote. Morgenthau, who had served as F.D.R.’s treasury secretary, was telephoning Truman as chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, and had an obligation to get through to the president to stop this further atrocity.
“The Jews have no sense of proportion,” wrote the incensed Truman after he hung up, “nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.” These refugees were welcomed in Oswego, N.Y., just after the war, and Truman saw political implications in Gov. Thomas E. Dewey’s support for Jewish immigration: “When the country went backward — and Republican in the election of 1946, this incident loomed large on the D[isplaced] P[ersons] program.”
Then the president vented his spleen on the ethnic group trying desperately to escape from Europe’s hatred: “The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DP as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog.”
After equating the cruelty of Jews with that of Hitler and Stalin, Truman waxed philosophic about ingratitude: “Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.”
Truman wrongly assumed that the plight of all of Europe’s displaced was the same — ignoring the “special treatment” Hitler had inflicted on the Jews of the Holocaust, resulting in six million murdered, genocide beyond all other groups’ suffering. The homeless survivors now faced sullen populations of former neighbors who wanted no part of the Jews’ return.
This diary outburst reflected a longstanding judgment about the ungrateful nature of the oppressed; in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, he repeated that “Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.”
Did this deep-seated belief affect Truman’s policy about taking immigrants into the U.S., or in failing to urge the British to allow the Exodus refugees haven in Palestine? Maybe; when the National Archives release was front-paged last week in The Washington Post, historians and other liberals hastened to remind us that the long-buried embarrassing entry was written when such talk was “acceptable.” The director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum dismissed it as “typical of a sort of cultural anti-Semitism that was common at that time.”
For decades, I have refused to make such excuses to defend President Nixon for his slurs about Jews on his tapes. This is more dismaying.
Lest we forget, Harry Truman overruled Secretary of State George Marshall and beat the Russians to be first to recognize the state of Israel. The private words of Truman and Nixon are far outweighed by their pro-Israel public actions.
But underdogs of every generation must disprove Truman’s cynical theory and have a duty to speak up. I asked Robert Morgenthau, the great Manhattan D.A., about Truman’s angry diary entry, and he said, “I’m glad my father made that call.”
WAS PIUS XII OR THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ANTI-SEMITE?
Pius XII had a deep knowledge of Germany where he served for 13 years as Papal Nuncio during Pope Benedictus XV and Pius XI. No other world leader at that time was more aware than him of the evil nature of Nazism and Communism, the two ideologies that were to bring rivers of blood to mankind. A consummated and experienced diplomat, Pacelli was well groomed by Pius XI to be his successor. There was an extraordinary spiritual and ideological communion between these two great Popes; they both were of one mind. Pacelli dedicated his life to the service of God, The Church, and mankind, through five decades of indefatigable struggle for world peace.
In 1928 the Holy Office had already condemned anti-Semitism. On September 6, 1938, Pius XI told a group of Belgian pilgrims: “Through Christ and in Christ, we are spiritual descendants of Abraham.” Incontrovertible facts prove the extraordinary efforts that Pius XI, Pius XII, and the Catholic Church made in saving the Jews during the Holocaust.
As early as 1935, Cardinal Pacelli describes Nazism as diabolical
Before becoming Pope, and as early as 1935, Pius XII had described as “diabolical” the new German
Regime in conversations with the French Ambassador to the Holy See, Charles-Roux, while the rest of the world were willingly accepting Hitler’s power grasp upon the German government. The Duke of Windsor visited Hitler and Lloyd George even went so far as to call him the “greatest living German”! In the U.S. there were also people in high positions who were openly sympathizers of Hitler, such as Henry Ford I, who was also a strong anti-Semitic.
In 1937, Pius XI published the Encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge,” stating that Catholics must never be anti-Semite.
On March 14, 1937, before it was fashionable to denounce the German Führer as a villain and long before the creation of the concentration camps and the gas chambers, Pius XI, ably seconded by his Secretary of State, wrote the Encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge” meaning “with burning anxiety”. It dealt with the nazi threat to racial minorities and specifically the Jews addressing the Encyclical directly to the German people. The Encyclical exhorted that Catholics must never be anti-Semitic because “we are all Semites spiritually” and ought to hold the Jewish people in high regard accordingly. The Encyclical exposed to the world the III Reich’s persecution of the Catholic Church as well as the incompatibility between the principles of the National Socialism and those of the Catholic faith. The German government prohibited the entrance of the Encyclical to the country and it became necessary to smuggle it into Germany under the nose of the ruthless Gestapo. On Sunday March 21, The Encyclical was read from 12,000 Catholic pulpits across Germany. As a result, the Nazi’s campaign of innuendoes against The Church as well as the persecution of Catholics worsened.
The German Catholic hierarchy thanked Pope Pius XI for the letter, which strongly condemned both, racism and anti-Semitism. The Pope pointed to Cardinal Pacelli saying that it was he who had been responsible for the Encyclical. It was the Secretary of State, who asked the German Cardinal Faulhaber to submit a draft text, which he amended carefully. Pacelli also bore the burden of its defense when the Encyclical was the subject of strong German diplomatic protests; he did so personally, not by delegation.
The Vatican condemns Communism with the Encyclical “Divini Redemptori” in 1937
Pius XI and his Secretary of State were following the Magisterium of the Church when they published on March 19, 1937, the Encyclical “Divini Redemptori.” It was a most comprehensive and devastating condemnation of Communism as “intrinsically perverse.” Already Pius IX, as early as 1846, pronounced in the Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” a solemn condemnation of Communism “that infamous doctrine which is absolutely contrary to natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the rights, the property and possessions of all men, and even society itself.” Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclical “Quod apostolici muneri,” defined communism as “the fatal plague that insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin.” Pius XI and Pius XII were highly active, energetic and zealous opponents of totalitarianism and oppression in every form-for them, National Socialism and Communism were both intrinsically evil.
Pope Pius XII’s first Encyclical, “Summi Pontificatus”, in 1939, attacks Nazism and Communism
Pius XII’s first encyclical on October 27, 1939, “Summi Pontificatus” reiterated the attack on the German regime and the Gestapo was ordered to prevent its distribution. In it, the Pope declared his position “against exacerbated nationalism, the idolatry of the state, totalitarianism, racism, the cult of brutal force, contempt of international agreements”, against all the characteristics of Hitler’s political system; he laid the responsibility for the scourge of the war on these aberrations. The Allies airdropped 88,000 copies of the Encyclical over Germany.
WERE PIUS XII AND THE CHURCH REALLY SILENT DURING THE HOLOCAUST?
The Pope was well aware that any public denunciation against Hitler would make things even worse for the Jews. His polices were aimed at saving the Jews. In fact, that was the same policy followed by the International Red Cross and the World Council of Churches both based in Geneva as well as the one recommended by most of the International Jewish organizations involved in the rescue operations of Jews. Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, accepted the validity of this policy –preferring action rather than words, as the common goal.
Historian Fr. W. Saunders has stated that we must remember that any defiance of the Nazi regime meant immediate and severe retaliation. Jean Bernard, Catholic Bishop of Luxembourg, who was detained at Dachau, later wrote: “The detained priests trembled every time news reached us of some protest by a religious authority, but particularly by the Vatican. We all had the impression that our warders made us atone heavily for the fury these protest evoke (on them.)” (6)
Fr. Robert A.Graham, S.J., has said that: “it may surprise the contemporary generation to learn that the local Jewish communities and the world Jewish bodies did not, for the most part, urge the Pope to speak out. Their objective was far more concrete and down-to-earth… Appeals to world opinion, high-sounding though it may appear, would have seemed cheap and trivial gestures to those engaged in rescue work…The need to refrain from provocative public statements at such a delicate moments was fully recognized in Jewish circles.” (7)
When an Italian priest, Fr. Scavizzi, a chaplain on a military train travelling through Poland, told the Pope of the conditions in the camps, especially of the Jews, the Holy Father broke down and wept. Bitterly, Pius XII confided to him: “After many tears and many prayers I have judged that a protest of mine not only would fail to help anyone, but would create even more fury against the Jews, multiplying acts of cruelty. Perhaps my solemn protest would have earned me praise from the civilized world, but it would also have brought more implacable persecution of the Jews… I love the Jews.” (8)
Massive onslaught of Jews and Catholics after Dutch Bishops publicly protested Jewish deportations
The Pope knew first hand of the results of open confrontation with the Nazis. The Catholic clergy of Holland protested more loudly, and frequently against Jewish persecutions than the Catholic hierarchy of any other Nazi-occupied country. The end result was that over 110,000, or 80 percent of all the Jews, were deported to death camps, even more, in comparison, than anywhere else in the West. The reprisal included also thousands of Catholics, including the distinguished Catholic Carmelite philosopher Edith Stein, a converted Jew. In fact, Pius XII had his own even stronger protest ready to be published that very evening in the L’Osservatore Romano. But he had the draft burnt saying: “If the protest of the Catholic Bishops has cost the lives of 40,000 people, my intervention would take at least 200,000 to their deaths.” (9) Without an army to support him, the struggle was fought through diplomatic and humanitarian channels, and through covert actions, that risked the neutral status of the Vatican State.
The Protestant Dutch Reformed Church refrained from protesting openly the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews, as a result, the lives of the Jews converted to the Reformed Church were spared, and none was deported to the concentration camps. In Germany, most of the Protestants not only supported Hitler, but many of them became part of the political German Protestant church, the so-called “German Christians”, under a “Bishop of the Reich” imposed by the Nazis. The German authorities had repeatedly complained to the Papal Nuncio that “the Catholic clergy were unwilling or slow to celebrate their military victories, whereas the Protestant ministers did so.” Nevertheless a small minority of anti-Nazis Protestants existed under the leadership of the great evangelical theologians, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as the hero of the German resistance, the pastor of Dahlem, Rev. Martin Niemoller.
With the existing proven facts, can in all consciousness, truly be said that Pope Pius XII remained silent throughout WWII while millions of Jews and gentiles were exterminated? I do not think so. The Pope was not silent during WWII, he was not even neutral-he was on the Allies’ side.
File this under “No good deed goes unpunished.”
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