{"id":78531,"date":"2020-05-27T17:00:42","date_gmt":"2020-05-27T15:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=78531"},"modified":"2020-05-26T16:42:28","modified_gmt":"2020-05-26T14:42:28","slug":"04-00-46","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=78531","title":{"rendered":"What the New Evidence on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust Means"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>What the New Evidence on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust Means<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Rafael Medoff<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Researchers combing through recently-opened wartime records of the Vatican have discovered that a senior papal adviser, Angelo Dell\u2019Acqua, told Pius XII in 1942 that reports of the slaughter of European Jews were unreliable because Jews \u201ceasily exaggerate.\u201d Despite numerous other reports that Pius XII had received, which amply documented the atrocities, he chose to embrace Dell\u2019Acqua\u2019s perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n

This new evidence dovetails with an episode that emerged from declassified U.S. government files many years ago. Those documents revealed that in January 1943, the American ambassador to the Vatican, Harold Tittman Jr., asked the Pope why his recent Christmas message, in which he mentioned the persecution of innocent people in Europe, did not mention either the Jews or the Nazis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tittman reported back to Washington that Pius XII replied \u201cthat he \u2018feared\u2019 that there was foundation for the atrocity reports of the Allies [about the Jews] but led me to believe that he felt that there had been some exaggeration for purpose of propaganda.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Some government officials in London and Washington likewise were inclined to doubt reports about Jewish suffering\u2014especially if the reports came from Jews. Regarding German atrocities against Jews in occupied Poland in 1940, Reginald Leeper, the chief of the British government\u2019s Political Intelligence Department, wrote to a colleague: \u201cAs a general rule Jews are inclined to magnify their persecutions.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSources of information [about anti-Jewish atrocities] are nearly always Jewish whose accounts are only sometimes reliable and not seldom highly colored,\u201d Foreign Office staff member I. L. Henderson insisted. \u201cOne notable tendency in Jewish reports on this problem is to exaggerate the numbers of deportations and deaths.\u201d He wrote those words in early 1945, nearly six months after the liberation of the Majdanek death camp.<\/span><\/p>\n

A State Department memorandum to the Office of Strategic Services in August 1942, summarizing the latest reports it had received on the Nazis\u2019 plans to annihilate European Jewry, asserted that the information seemed to be nothing more than a \u201cwild rumor inspired by Jewish fears.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no record that President Franklin D. Roosevelt disbelieved the reports concerning the Nazi mass murder. But his characterizations of Jewish suffering sometimes bordered on dismissive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider, for example, Roosevelt\u2019s response in October 1940, when refugee advocate James G. McDonald clashed with Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who was in charge of refugee affairs for the State Department and vehemently opposed more immigration. Each of them took their case to the president. Long wrote in his diary afterwards that Roosevelt was \u201c100% in accord with my ideas.\u201d FDR also told Long that when McDonald came to the White House, the president \u201ctold him not to \u2018pull any sob stuff\u2019 on him\u201d regarding the plight of refugees seeking a haven.<\/span><\/p>\n

Walter Kirschner, a longtime family friend of the Roosevelts, encountered a somewhat similar attitude when he approached the president regarding the plight of European Jewry, in 1944. According to Kirschner, FDR replied: \u201cI haven\u2019t time to listen to any Jewish wailing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Why did Pope Pius XII view reports of anti-Jewish atrocities as \u201cexaggerations\u201d? What prompted President Roosevelt to dismiss \u201cJewish wailing\u201d and \u201csob stuff\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no way to know if either man was personally influenced by the centuries-old stereotypes of Jews as incorrigible liars who fabricate claims in order to advance their interests.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, there can be no doubt there were practical considerations at stake. In the case of the Pope, the \u201cConcordat\u201d which the Vatican signed with Hitler in 1933 pledged that German Catholic clergy would refrain from political activities in exchange for the regime\u2019s non-interference in German Catholic religious life. Despite the Nazis\u2019 many violations of the agreement, Pius XII insisted on keeping his end, even to the point of not raising questions about the mass murder of the Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

President Roosevelt, for his part, had a practical consideration of his own. Fully acknowledging the extent of the Jews\u2019 plight and drawing attention to it could have policy implications. Senior State Department official R. Borden Reams candidly noted in a 1942 memo to a colleague that if the administration publicized the mass murder, \u201cthe way will then be opened for further pressure from interest groups\u201d for steps such as admitting more refugees to the United States\u2014something FDR and his administration strongly opposed.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, whatever their respective reasons, the Pope and the president both opted to look away from the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Dr. Medoff<\/strong> is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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What the New Evidence on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust Means Rafael Medoff Researchers combing through recently-opened wartime records of the Vatican have discovered that a senior papal adviser, Angelo Dell\u2019Acqua, told Pius XII in 1942 that reports of the slaughter of European Jews were unreliable because Jews \u201ceasily exaggerate.\u201d Despite numerous other reports […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78531"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78531"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78560,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78531\/revisions\/78560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}