Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
ings, which even went so far as to use the most exquisite scientific methods to torture
or eliminate people who were often innocent.” However, reading further in
the speech it becomes clear that the Pope, like so many other people at the time,
was thinking of the catastrophic scenes found in the German camps at the end of
the war. The only specific victims mentioned are the Catholic priests interned at
Dachau, a high percentage of whom perished there for reasons abundantly covered
in this book. Although Pope Pius did mention that one Polish auxiliary
bishop died of typhus, his remarks leave the impression that he believed that the
deaths in the camps were intentional on the part of the Nazis, and the priests interned
at Dachau are described by Pius as having “endured indescribable sufferings
for their faith and for their vocation.” There is nothing in the address about
exterminations of any racial, religious, or national group. 452
While it is the case that the record does not indicate that the Roman Church
was terrorized into silence during the war, the Vatican was nevertheless vulnerable
to pressure to some degree, as is made evident by an examination of the circumstances
behind the declaration of Pope Pius’ which came closest to sounding
like a condemnation of exterminations, his Christmas Eve message of 1942.
In Chapter 3 (pp. 82f.) and above we saw that, in the autumn of 1942, the Allies
inquired of the Vatican whether it had any information supporting the extermination
claims that Rabbi Wise and some others had been making for several
months and that the Vatican had no such information. While Pope Pius and the
Secretary of State, Luigi Cardinal Maglione, no doubt smelled Greuelpropaganda
immediately upon hearing such stories, the Vatican material reproduced above
shows that they at least made some effort to inquire into the matter. Also, the Papal
Nuncio in Italy, Msgr. Francesco Borgongini-Duca, met on November 10,
1942, with Guido Buffarini, Undersecretary in the Italian Ministry of the Interior,
for the purpose of discussing the general military and political situation. The
situation of the Jews was discussed and Borgongini-Duca reported to Maglione: 453
“He then spoke to me concerning the speech of Hitler [in Munich on 8 November]
and, I having asked him if in allusions to retaliations, they might
mean asphyxiating gas, he twice replied to me decidedly no.”
Thus, the Vatican had essentially no information, in the autumn of 1942, tending
to confirm the extermination claims, and it took this position in its exchanges
with Allied representatives when the matter came up. In Chapter 3 (p. 84) we
noted that there was one anonymous note supposedly from a Vatican source, produced
in late November, which supported the extermination claims. However,
since that was not the Vatican position, the note was no doubt a forgery in some
sense. If it did come from a source inside the Vatican, it may have been authored
by Virgilio Scattolini, an employee of the Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore
Romano, who posed as a Vatican insider during the war in order to sell his fabricated
“information”, suitably tailored for the buyer, to all comers, and who for a
while was considered “our man in the Vatican” by the OSS. 454 A lesser possibility
452
453
454
350
New York Times (Jun. 3, 1945), 22.
Actes et documents, vol. 7, 82.
Catholic Historical Review, vol. 59 (Jan. 1974), 719f.