Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Appendix E: The Role of the Vatican
to have considered it so much holy hot air. The Allies, we recall from our Chapter
3 (p. 100), had officially embraced the extermination claims on December 17 in a
statement, in which “the number of victims” was “reckoned in many hundreds of
thousands” of Jews, and they were not satisfied with the Pope’s statement and
thought it was not explicit enough. 457 From our point of view, however, the
Christmas remark seems at first puzzlingly strong in view of the picture of the
situation that the Vatican had received from the Berlin Nunciature and also in
consideration of the oddity that the Pope’s strongest remark of such a category
should have been made so early in the war and then not repeated.
An explanation for the appearance of the “death or progressive extinction” remark
in the Pope’s Christmas address is found in the Vatican’s wartime documents.
In late 1942 and early 1943, one of the Vatican’s principal diplomatic objectives
was to secure a pledge from the Allies not to bomb Rome. The British
were particularly insistent on their right to bomb Rome, as compared to the
Americans, who had a large Catholic minority that constituted a very important
component of the political base of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The British took the
position that Rome could not be given special consideration and would be
bombed if and when military factors indicated such action. In pursuit of its objective,
the Vatican dealt not only with the Allies, attempting to divert them from
their apparent course, but also with the Germans and Italians, attempting to persuade
them to remove any operations of a military nature from Rome (there was
little or no war industry in the city, but there were military command headquarters
and military barracks). In December 1942, the Italian Government agreed to relocate
its military headquarters away from Rome. Feeling that some progress toward
their objective had been made, Cardinal Maglione met on December 14 with
the British Minister to the Vatican, Sir F. D’Arcy Osborne, in order to communicate
this development to the British and to further discuss the bombing issue. Osborne,
however, was unimpressed and pointed out that there remained Italian
troops quartered in the city. Maglione’s notes on the meeting summarized the exchange
thus: 458
“The Minister pointed out that one has the impression that the Holy See is
particularly preoccupied with the Italian cities, when it speaks of bombings,
because they are Italian.
I made him observe: (1) that for Rome there are special considerations. I
recounted them to him (and I did not fail to repeat to him that if Rome is
bombed, the Holy See will protest); (2) that the Holy See now intervenes
against the bombing of the civilian population of the Italian cities because
such bombings are in progress. The Minister must not forget that the Holy Father
spoke against bombing of defenseless populations on other occasions:
when the English cities were being bombed everybody knew that the bombings
of the English cities did not escape really harsh words from the Holy Father.
The Minister recognized the justice of my observation and, then, ex-
457
458
Rhodes, 272ff; Waagenaar, 409, 435f.
Actes et documents, vol. 7, 136ff. Waagenaar, 413, quotes from the Osborne-Maglione exchange,
but he does not quote it in its proper context of the bombing threat to Rome.
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