Pius XII Quotes
We leave it to the [local] bishops to weigh the circumstances in deciding whether or not to exercise restraint, ad maiora mala vitanda [to avoid greater evil]. This would be advisable if the danger of retaliatory and coercive measures would be imminent in cases of public statements of the bishop. Here lies one of the reasons we ourselves restrict our public statements. The experience we had in 1942 with documents which we released for distribution to the faithful gives justification, as far as we can see, for our attitude.
This letter was written in response to the murder of Dutch Jews by the Nazis in retaliation for the public condemnation of Nazi persecution of the Jews by Dutch Catholic bishops.
Pius XII, 1876-1958, [Eugenio Pacelli], Roman Catholic Pope, Letter to Konrad von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, 1943
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The historical record that is available shows that while the Pope did not, actively or aggressively oppose Hitler, and he did not discipline Catholic prelates who were Nazi supporters, there is no specific evidence that shows the Pope conspired with Hitler, about the extermination of Jews or anything else. However, most of the relevant documents of the era are in the Vatican and the records have been sealed and have not been visible to historians. Apologists for the Pope’s passivity point out that a large percentage of Germans were Catholic and he had a duty to not antagonize Hitler who would retaliate against German Catholics and the German Catholic clergy and church property. Further, Fascist Italy was under Hitler’s control, and the Vatican itself could have closed and its property seized. The historical record is still very vague.
At this point, the horrors of the German concentration death camps were generally known by the world press. This quotation shows the denial that the Irish Free State was in about the German Nazi atrocities. The 6-county Nationalsits were the Irish counties in Northern Ireland that did not join the Irish Free State and so far as the Catholic Irish were concerned, the Catholics of Northern Ireland were a persecuted minority undergoing oppression and that was not they believed morally different from the murders of millions of Jews, Gypsies and handicapped people in Europe. If the Free State Irish publicly admitted the difference, they would morally have had to join the allies and De Valera was totally opposed to that. Over 70,000 Irishmen and women rejected the moral stand of their government, and volunteered for the British Army to the great distress of the Free State leaders like De Valera. See {639722} for his personal denial of reality.
This was the first day of WWII and Hitler’s armies seemed invincible. Kaplan was one of the few who at that time predicted allied victory. He was not even wrong about his own fate. He and the vast majority of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto never survived.
Lindbergh, a great aviator, was a major Nazi supporter and Hitler admirer. He not only campaigned against America joining the allies in trying to stop Hitler’s aggression, but also was a major propagandist for the Nazi party-line canards about the Jews controlling the media and the government.
The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, preceded him with the announcement of declaration of war against Germany, but it was left up to the Foreign Minister to explain the implications. This was the first time in history that a nation had used radio to communicate such momentous events to its population.
Chvalkovsky had just returned from Berlin where he had met with Hitler and German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. He related the meeting to the French Ambassador who reported it to the French Foreign Minister by letter.
Eisenhower was then Supreme Allied Commander.
This is the classic war crime of collective punishment.
He signaled his subordinates that it was OK to commit war crimes against the Italian Partisans.
He was shot in 1944 for his involvement in an attempt to kill Hitler
She had saved over 2000 Jewish Children in the Warsaw Ghetto from Death by the Nazis. As a member of the Polish Resistance, she was caught be the Germans, badly tortured, and sentenced to death which she narrowly escaped.
The assassination was attempted in 1944 and after its failure, he was shot be a firing squad.
His response was typical of the German intelligencia and the upper middle class at the time. They neither took the old militarists nor Hitler’s Fascist Brownshirts very seriously, even when they were seizing power. The Nazis and the militarists had attributed the harsh terms that the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI was attributed to a cabal of Jews who had embedded themselves in key positions advising the American, English, and French leadership so they could dominate the world. But first, they had to weaken Germany because the Jews knew that the German leadership was aware of their plans and would be their strongest obstacle. This fantastic conspiracy theory came from the notorious forgery, The Protocol of the Enders of Zion which had been published and distributed heavily among the German right wing. Hitler and his henchmen used this existing libel, to dupe most Germans, among whom there was extensive anti-Semitism, into thinking that the Jews were responsible for most of the serious ills of Germany at the time—the terrible economy and inflation, the weakened military, the loss of the Sudetenland and their overseas colonies, the sexual immorality in Germany, the Communist agitators, the perception of most of the civilized world that the Germans were dangerous militarists who had to be contained.
Saint Benedicta was born and brought up as a Jew and converted to Catholicism. She and a few other leading German Catholics spoke out forcefully against Nazi crimes and immoralities. She was one of the few German Catholics who wanted the Pope to act more forcefully in Germany.
During WWII, he ignored and defied the orders of his own government to issue no visas for the safety of war refugees fleeing from invading German military forces in the early years of World War II. Between June 16 and June 23, 1940, he frantically issued Portuguese visas free of charge, to over 30,000 refugees seeking to escape the Nazi terror, 12,000 of whom were Jews who were thus saved from murder. He was fired by the Portuguese dictator and spent the remainder of his life in disgrace and poverty. In 1966 Sousa Mendes was honored at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust as one of the "Righteous Among The Nations," Also in 1987, the Portuguese Republic began to rehabilitate Sousa Mendes' memory and granted a posthumous Order of Liberty medal,
Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli was born on 2 March 1876 in Rome into a family of intense Catholic piety with a history of ties to the papacy (the "Black Nobility"). His parents were Filippo Pacelli (1837–1916) and Virginia (née Graziosi) Pacelli (1844–1920). His grandfather, Marcantonio Pacelli, had been Under-Secretary in the Papal Ministry of Finances and then Secretary of the Interior under Pope Pius IX from 1851 to 1870 and helped found the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano in 1861. His cousin, Ernesto Pacelli, was a key financial advisor to Pope Leo XIII; his father, Filippo Pacelli, a Franciscan tertiary, was the dean of the Roman Rota; and his brother, Francesco Pacelli, became a lay canon lawyer and the legal advisor to Pope Pius XI, in which role he negotiated the Lateran Treaty in 1929 with Benito Mussolini, bringing an end to the Roman Question.
