Jan 27: Poland: Red Army (322nd Infantry unit) rolls into and liberates Auschwitz (Death Camp) Oswiecim, (southern) Poland.
Between 1.1–1.6 million individuals (90 percent Jewish) were murdered here by the SS – between May 1940 through the above–noted liberation in January 1945. A total of approximately 6 million Jews are persecuted, then murdered by the Nazi state terror–machine overall.
Auschwitz, as the other camps, was a house–of–horrors…sadism, torture, and murder on a daily basis…
The human mind was simply not created to grasp the enormity of the horror–crimes, let alone to endure them…
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Pope Pius XII – charged by many with being (for the most part deafeningly) “silent” on the ongoing genocide for the 6 year duration of mass murders… contentious issue, particularly as the Vatican—for the past decade—apparently eager to press for this sainthood… On October 16, 1943, over 2,000 Rome Jews deported to Auschwitz from Rome’s Jewish center a mile away from Pope Pius XII’s Vatican by the Nazis…On October 29–30, 14 days later, the Vatican’s semi–official daily L’Osservatoro published a front–page article stating that “the German troops have respected the Roman Curia as well as Vatican City.” The pope who controlled the newspaper? Pius XII.
Author – One very clear definitive and very public admonition from Pius XII to the Nazis to cease their mass atrocities against the Jews, undoubtedly would have had profound resonance around the world with manifold positive ramifications for the embattled Jews trapped in Christian Europe…It is asserted – and not challenged – that Pius XII never once uttered the word “Jew” publicly, during his papacy.
The Pope is supposed to be primarily a moral force, not primarily, as asserted by his defenders, a subtle, nuanced diplomat—as millions are being torture–murdered all across Christians Europe. Respectfully, those proposing sainthood for the ‘silent pope,’ merely become complicitous themselves; notwithstanding their intellectual acrobatics.
One should be clear that the Nazis, while non–Christian, and, indeed opposed to the Vatican, nevertheless tapped directly into the wellspring of hatred and anti–Semitism implanted—pervasively and deeply—into Europe quite knowingly by the Catholic Church over the 17+ centuries leading right into the Holocaust.
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Contemporary debate may focus on what Pope Pius XII (formerly Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli) did or did not do. But the seeds of Auschwitz’s crematoria were not planted by Pius XII, nor even by the Vatican over–the–centuries; rather, the original seeds of hatred are sown in the Canon Gospels themselves, in the Gospel of Matthew in particular. The hate–mongering of Matthew is acute – and rabid. A “hate crime” of ignominious magnitude. It is intended to elicit hatred. And indeed, it does. Its hand of death, will span the centuries. In turn, the Passion Saga performances globally which fed the masses of Christianity hatred as entertainment for centuries, poisoned Europe against the Jews.
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Until the Church as a whole, confronts its unacceptable roots of hatred, as did the contemporary Lutheran Church, the boil of anti–Semitism will never truly be lanced. Perpetually, the Right Wing of the Church will find ways to disseminate or tolerate the flow of hatred, while the Left Wing of the Church espouses themes of ecumenicism and reconciliation.
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Until such time, however quixotic, that the Church elects to diligently teach of valorous Jewish icons in its schools, to teach, among other things that Jesus was Jewish and not anti–Jewish, to counter the diabolical Jewish stereotypes embedded in the Canon Gospels and in its already–embedded lore, then, what the left hand of the Church giveth, the right hand of the Church perpetually taketh away.
Ultimately, both individuals and entities define themselves by their actions, not by their transient power or by their public spin. And ultimately only the Church will define who it truly is. By action and deed.
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“In October 1941, Harold Titman, a US Delegate to the Vatican asked the pope to condemn the atrocities against the Jews, Pius XII replied that the Vatican wished to remain ‘neutral,’ reiterating the ‘neutrality policy’ that the Vatican had invoked since early as September, 1940.” [Perl, William, The Holocaust Conspiracy, see pp. 176, 206 in particular.]
“Neutrality” between the state–sponsored Gestapo terror–murder machine and the defenseless and ongoing hounded, tormented and mass–murdered civilian Jewish population of Europe?
Moral equivalence?
Perhaps Pius XII forgot the quote from fellow Italian, Dante…[see 1314 CE above]
“The hottest places…..”
In the annals of history, Pius XII’s stated as well as de facto policy of “neutrality” vis–à–vis the ongoing Nazi terror–murders of the Jews (against the backdrop of the Church’s historic instigation of the same “toxic brew” of Jew–hatred), must certainly rank as the epitome of callousness. But, then again, his behavior merely paralleled Church policy, and that of its bishops noted previously above, towards the Jews for many, many hundreds of years. There were exceptions, for sure, but the norm was callous posturing, but no substantive action.
Hence, the Vatican rush to canonize (the “silent pope”) Pius XII, and the absence of any significant move to canonize his proactive and bona fide valiant predecessor, Pope Pius XI.
For, “the silent pope,” Pius XII, symbolizes the Church’s own “neutrality” at best—over the millennia—with murder and terror ongoing against the Jews around it, (again, against the sordid backdrop of the Church’s historic instigation of the same European Jew–hatred) whereas valiant Pope Pius XI, of course, epitomizes what the Church might have been.
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The Vatican will be hell–bent to canonize the legitimizer of its own dubious modus operandi. That will be an easier move on the chessboard for the Church than actually confronting itself, than actually being true to the ideals of its central icon, Jesus of Nazareth.
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Primo Levi, 26 years old, formerly a young Italian Jewish chemist pre–War, barely survives a year in Auschwitz. He will write: Survival in Auschwitz (‘Se questo è un Uomo’ – original Italian title); The Reawakening (‘La Tregua’ – original Italian title); The Periodic Table; Moments of Reprieve; The Drowned and the Saved; The Monkey’s Wrench; If Not Now, When? (‘Se non Ora, Quando?’ – original Italian title); The Reawakening (The Truce)…his masterful works, likely to endure as immortal literature of any genre – author.
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Respectfully, as regards Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (who became Pius XII March 2, 1939), he can probably best be encapsulated as paradigmatic of the executive who rises to the presidency of his company by having two secretaries, and having them respectively notarize opposing positions to be attributed to him—on major issues facing the company, as contentious issues emerge.
Depending on the eventual outcome of each issue, the particular secretary produces the notarized position paper, and vouches publicly for him that her boss had clearly been “right all along” on this issue.
Pre–war and during the war, successively as Cardinal and then as Pope, Eugenio Pacelli never even finds the will to say the “Jew” publicly. Nor to even halt the deportation of Rome’s own Jewish targets, a mile away, to the death camp Auschwitz in Poland. Post–war, and six million Jewish corpses later, when anti–Semitism is declasse at least for the time being, advocates for his sainthood, magically find his “ghost–writing” (emphasis on “ghost”) of various papers challenging the persecution of the Jews. His hands are “always clean.” He can posture both ways. Sort of.
On net balance, Eugenio Pacelli was, indeed, “the silent pope’. And, nowhere in the 5,000 year annals of human history, has the self–serving deafening silence of one extremely powerful clergyman, so very directly allowed the suffering and deaths of so many.
The Vatican’s obsessive touching–up of Pacelli’s record, in turn, is part of a much broader, concerted and ongoing Vatican effort to re–touch history, both in its texts and on the web, to attempt to sanitize its 1,900 year historical role and moral culpability vis–à–vis the debasement and murder of the many millions of Jews of Europe a.k.a. “the Holocaust.”