Don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware of RC’s institutional Jew-hate, including hiding Nazis. It’s just that the treatment of Pius XII is unfair. It’s much, much harder to defend FDR’s actions than it is to defend the Pope’s.
Thanks to Pius XII order to try to help the Jews, more than 800,00 were saved by the Catholic Church. A fact recognized by all the founders of Israel.
Jewish historian Richard Breitman has written five books, one on the Holocaust and another on Nazism. He is, up to this day, the only person authorized to study the OSS secret documents of U.S. espionage during WWII. The Italian newspaper “Corriere della Sera.” interviewed him on June 29, 2000. In the article, Breitman not only confirms the role played by Pius XII in defending and safeguarding the persecuted during the Nazi regime but he also found “the Allied silence on the Holocaust surprising. Their first testimonies are from the end of 1942…” He also remarked that the documents denoted how the Nazis considered that the Vatican was in the side of the Allies. (10)
The reaction of the US, French and British governments at that time, and even later, when knowledge of the concentration camps existed, were certainly not in solidarity for the persecuted Jews. In the middle of the genocide, Britain closed the doors of Palestine to the Jews. The U.S. government accepted a total of 10,000-15,000 Jewish refugees throughout the war – a truly scandalous statistic.