Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Appendix E: The Role of the Vatican
cognate to the English “to suppress” and the French supprimer (which is relevant
because Roncalli and von Papen probably spoke to each other in French). The
Italian and French words are equivalent in meaning, but they are not equivalent to
the English word because, when applied to people, sopprimere and supprimer
carry some implication of killing in large numbers. However, when applied to
people, they are not entirely equivalent to “extermination” or “annihilation”; both
French and Italian have words cognate to and equivalent to these two English
words. To apply sopprimere to a large group of people carries an implication only
of large numbers of killings, and may or may not mean “extermination,” depending
on the context. Thus, one must allow the possibility that Roncalli was thinking
of something other then the sorts of extermination claims that the Allies had made
and which Roncalli had certainly heard by then. For example, he may have been
thinking in terms of such things as the then recent and highly publicized German
suppression of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion, in the course of which the Germans
killed many Jews. However, I am inclined to reject such an interpretation; it
seems more likely to me that Roncalli was indeed thinking in terms of extermination
such as the Allies had claimed.
If, however, one reads the Roncalli account carefully against its proper diplomatic
background, it becomes clear that it is not really very important what, very
specifically, Roncalli was thinking about when he made this remark. He describes
a chance meeting between two diplomats, one of whom, he, did not wish a meeting.
In accord with his “rule of circumspection” his words would therefore have
been chosen to “avoid meetings.” What Roncalli in effect said to von Papen was
that, if the latter wished to prolong the meeting, Roncalli was going to be difficult.
Roncalli communicated to von Papen, in diplomatic language, the attitude he sets
forth in plain and direct language in the first sentence of his report. Roncalli’s remark
was a diplomatic parry of a certain well known type, wherein it is not really
important to determine, in better than vague terms, what the speaker was referring
to, or to determine whether or not the speaker himself accepted the truth of the allegation
in question. All that is relevant in the exchange is that Roncalli did not
want to talk to von Papen, and that was all he communicated to von Papen. If, on
the other hand, Roncalli wished to speak to von Papen, he certainly would not had
opened his side of the exchange with such necessarily antagonistic remarks, either
in reference to exterminations or in reference to bloody suppression of ghetto revolts,
and quite independently of any of his own opinions on the subject of alleged
German atrocities and brutalities.
Because the Vatican was an observer of and participant in the events of World
War II, it was inevitable that the extermination stories, which the whole world
heard, were heard also by the Vatican. The stories are thus naturally reflected in
passages found in the Vatican documents, and when we encounter such passages
there, they should be viewed in the context of the possible specific motivations of
the person making the remark and also of the evolution of the propaganda as analyzed
in this book, especially in Chapter 3. Roncalli, as his report clearly implies
in its first sentence, was merely trying to get rid of von Papen at their July 8,
1943, encounter in Ankara, when he repeated the extermination claim which, as
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