Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Appendix E: The Role of the Vatican
Scavizzi’s reports, particularly the report of May 12, 1942 concerning the persecution
of the Jews. It is not likely that Scavizzi independently invented the extermination
legend, although it is remotely possible. If he did not invent the extermination
claims appearing in his letter of May 12, 1942, he must have heard them
somewhere, a fact of some interest, as his report is dated over a month before Zionist
organizations in the West started talking this way (the first known such
statement for the World Jewish Congress was on June 29, 1942, as we noted on
page 98). This suggests that such propaganda was in circulation in Eastern Europe
earlier than June 1942. This, indeed, is in agreement with the account of Dawidowicz,
according to whom extermination claims for the Wartheland (the annexed
part of Poland south of the Corridor), claiming killings via gasmobiles at Chelmno,
first appeared in the four-page Jewish underground, the Veker, which
printed these first extermination claims on pages three and four in issues published
in February 1942. Claims of exterminations in the General Government of
Poland (via gassing at Belzec) appeared in the underground publication Mitteylungen
in early April 1942. 465 The evidence, thus, suggests that the extermination
legend owes its birth to obscure Polish Jewish propagandists, but the nurturing of
the legend to the status of an international and historical hoax was the achievement
of Zionist circles centered primarily in the West, particularly in and around
New York.
Since it appears that extermination propaganda was in existence in Poland in
the spring of 1942, and because much of the information that reached the Vatican
from Poland came through the office of the Papal Nuncio in Berlin, such stories
might have reached Orsenigo at the time. Indeed, a letter of Orsenigo’s to Msgr.
Giovanni Montini (the later Pope Paul VI, who often substituted for Maglione
during the war), dated July 28, 1942, was devoted mainly to deploring the difficulty
of ascertaining exactly what was happening in regard to the Jews. After
commenting on the occasional practice of the Nazis of suddenly and without
warning ordering selected Jews to pack up for deportation, he wrote: 466
“As is easy to understand, this lack of advance notice opens the door to the
most macabre suppositions on the fate of the non-aryans. There are also in
circulation rumors, difficult to verify, of disastrous journeys and even of massacres
of Jews. Also every intervention in favor only of the non-aryan Catholics
has thus far been rejected with the customary reply that baptismal water
does not change Jewish blood and that the German Reich is defending itself
from the non-aryan race, not from the religion of the baptized Jews.
Among such sinister rumors there is no lack of some less bleak: thus for
example there is talk that in Holland, where deportations of the non-aryans
have now commenced, an outspoken protest by the clergy, with which the
Catholic Bishops associated themselves, succeeded in getting the baptized
non-aryans excepted from the deportations. Likewise it was reported that in
the notorious ghetto of Litzmannstadt, in the Wartheland, a Polish priest, who
with a spirit of apostolical heroism had requested it, was granted permission
465
466
Dawidowicz, 295ff.
Actes et documents, vol. 8, 607f.
357