Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Appendix E: The Role of the Vatican
priests, in every village, situated in such a way (hearing gossip, confessionals,
etc.) that no such thing as the exterminations could possibly have happened without
the entire Polish Catholic clergy knowing about then. It is true that the Germans
imposed a censorship on communications to or from Poland, so that the Polish
clergy and the Vatican could not communicate with customary freedom, as
explained in the Introduction to volume three of Actes et documents, but as also
there explained, there were many ways of circumventing the censorship, notably
through Italians, who had business of various sorts in Poland and points east, and
through messages carried by private persons from Poland to the office of the Papal
Nuncio in Berlin, who communicated with the Vatican through privileged diplomatic
channels.
Rhodes realizes that the claim of ignorance of the exterminations is not tenable
and concedes (because he assumes the exterminations happened) that Pius XII
must have known about them. The explanation for the failure to speak up unambiguously
seems to Rhodes to be a fear that any public and explicit condemnation
would have made the situation of Catholics in Germany and the occupied territories
worse. Rhodes then asserts that “in his private messages to Heads of States in
connection with the persecution of the Jews, Pius XII certainly ‘spoke up’” (Rhodes’
italics), and then gives two examples of such private messages, bearing on
Slovakia and on Hungary, which however contain nothing about exterminations,
but speak only of deportations and persecutions of Jews in general terms. 450
Rhodes‘ picture of a timid Pius, afraid to speak up against the Nazis and their
programs, does not hold up for many reasons. As shown by the documents Rhodes
quotes, he must claim that the Pope was also too timid to speak up in confidential
diplomatic communications. Moreover, the historical record does not support
Rhodes’ picture of a Catholic Church terrorized into silence by the Nazis.
While, in parallel with their counterparts in Allied countries, they never opposed
the German war effort, they were quite vocal during the war in their opposition to
the religion-related policies and values of the National Socialist regime and expressed
their opposition in the Catholic press in Germany and in pulpits throughout
Germany. In December 1942, the German Bishops, meeting in their annual
conference in Fulda, sent a declaration to the German Government denouncing
the persecution of Catholic Churches in occupied countries. In January 1943,
Konrad Count von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, made a public condemnation of
Nazi racial theories and policies. In August 1943, the German Bishops publicly
denounced the Nazi policies hostile to Catholic education, and this denunciation
was read in public all over Germany. 451 The inescapable fact is that the Catholic
Church was not terrorized into silence.
Timidity does not explain why Pope Pius failed to condemn the alleged exterminations
after the Nazis had been defeated. The Pope’s speech to the College of
Cardinals on June 2, 1945, was a long and blistering attack on the defeated Nazis,
and yet the only thing in the speech that could possibly be interpreted as a reference
to exterminations was a reference to “applications of national socialist teach-
450
451
Rhodes, 347.
New York Times (Jan. 22, 1943), 6; (May 13, 1943), 8; (Sep. 5, 1943), 7; (Sep. 6, 1943), 7.
349