Posted on 02/12/2015 6:19:47 PM PST by NKP_Vet
Take a hike??
How is appeasing Hitler conservative??
Not speaking out to appease Hitler is appeasement.
It shows how ordinary men, who were not Nazis, and not SS, became killers. A group of 500 or so men formed Reserve Battalion 101. They ended up killing about 75,000 people, about half directly, and the other half indirectly by shipping them off to death camps. The book makes clear that these men were not bad men at all before they started killing.
Why did they do this? Well they were following orders. The human instinct to follow authority is immensely ingrained on our brains. Their commander was smart and clever and devious at getting them to obey.
Why was there no authority message from Pius XII saying the opposite thing?
- Jewish leaders like the Pope.
- Pope had to appease Hitler by being silent.
- Jews told the Pope to be silent.
Then when the Allies mentioned the Holocaust, were they being antisemitic? This argument is absurd.
No one disputes that the Pope was silent. People just make excuses for his silence.
Since no one responds to my posts, I will not waste any more time on this thread.
There was never any ambiguity on the Vatican Secretary of State’s feelings about Hitler’s regime, and the Nazis knew it. When Cardinal Pacelli was elected Pope on March 2, 1939, the next day the Berlin Morgenpost (the Nazi party’s newspaper) wrote: “The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor.”
During Pacelli’s twelve years as Apostolic Nuncio in Germany (1917-29), he made 44 public speeches and in 40 of these attacked the fundamental tenets of the Communism and National Socialism. Already in April 1933, as Secretary of State of Pope Pius XI, he sent an urgent request to the new Nazi government “not to let it be influenced by anti-Semitic aims.”
On April 28, 1935, at Lourdes, where he went as the Pope Legate, Pacelli said to 250,000 pilgrims: “They (the Nazis) are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.” (4) Certainly, these were very strong words coming from such a consummated diplomat.
Hitler’s discussions with his closest collaborators, as well as the diaries and decrees by Goebbles, Bormann, Rosenberg and Himmler, denote that from the beginning Hitler and his followers were motivated by a pathological hatred toward the Catholic Church. All those who did not adhere unconditionally to their way of thinking and acting were considered and treated as enemies, who had to be annihilated, said Fr.Gumpel.
As Jewish historian Dr. Joseph L. Litchen wrote in the Anti-Defamation Bulletin for October, in 1958, commenting on Pius XII, “the new Vicar of Christ” said Litchen, “showed no softening after his election toward Hitler’s brutal policies; Pius the Pope was the same as Pacelli the priest.” (5)
What it mattered is that Pius XII ordered all Catholic institutions top give refugee to the Jews risking their lives and even the obliteration of the Catholic Church.
PIUS XII AND THE RESISTANCE
Pius XII, a man of great personal courage dared to be involved in a high risk venture that could even endanger the very existence of The Church-the support of the internal resistance to the Nazis inside the German Armed Forces. The French and the British governments were deaf to the pleas of the Vatican to assist the German internal resistance to the Nazi government. From the very beginning Pius XII tried to persuade the Allies to support the inside German opposition, but they did not heed the Pope.
A number of anti-Nazi plotters inside the Abwehr, the intelligence branch of the armed forces, made repeated, and ultimately futile attempts through the Holy See to reach and persuade the British to back, or even to talk with the German resistance. They were all killed in the July 20, 1944; plot to assassinate Hitler, the last in a long line of foiled attempts to get rid of the dictator. The leader, a Roman Catholic officer, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg was shot on he spot. Other conspirators, mostly Protestants, were not so lucky; they were hung by using piano strings from butchers’ hooks and filmed on Hitler’s orders so that he could watch it himself later.
According to historian O’Carroll, in 1983 the Italian magazine Gente, published the testimony of General Wolff, the commander of the German forces in Italy during WWII. He revealed that in 1943 Pius XII had invited him to the Vatican and tried to persuade him to end the war in Italy on his own initiative. General Wolff was impressed and gave the matter thought; he finally decided against the Pope’s plea. But he recorded the immense personal impression that Pius XII made on him. We already mentioned how the whole leadership of the Italian resistance found refugee in the Church’s facilities in Rome.
Pius XII also served as a conduit for an offer made by a group of anti-Nazi German generals to topple Hitler from power. They wanted to know if the British would make peace with Germany if they succeeded in arresting Hitler and removing him from power. The proposal was made by Colonel-General Ludwig Beck (four star general), who latter was made chief of the German General Staff, but who resigned in 1938 convinced that Hitler was a criminal. Pius XII had known Beck when he was Nuncio in Berlin and “highly esteemed his honesty and integrity.”
The Pope also allowed the Vatican diplomatic corps, which was protected by diplomatic immunity, to carry messages between the Allied powers. There was a close collaboration between the Vatican and the Allies’ intelligence services. In fact, the Vatican forewarned Holland and Belgium of the upcoming German invasion.
There’s the human side. Tens of thousands of lives depended on the Pope parsing his public pronouncements correctly. Many European Jewish leaders faced the same dilemma early on. Attacks on Pius XII are misplaced at best. I believe he’s unfairly denigrated because of the historical conduct of the Church, not because of his personal conduct.
To accuse Pius XII of appeasing Hitler denotes ignorance or plain anti-Catholic bigotry.
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 and FDR ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the powerful corrupt clan that influenced to this days American policies.
Those Jews that keep slandering Pius XII most probable are part of the 80% of Jews that put Obama in power twice and vote every year for democratic candidates, regardless that is the party of slavery and the KKK and spite that FDR denied refuge in U.S. the Jews trying to flee from Nazi occupied Europe.
JFK PRAISESM HITLER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3ei9ycAOdQ
Pope Pius was a great pope who did everything he could possibly do to save not only the Catholic Church during WW2 but to also save as many Jews as possible. You’re not going to find to many on FR that will agree with your liberal rewriting of history on Pius XII.
Anti-Catholic haters are gonna hate. Anti-Catholic liars are gonna lie.
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