Father András Kun, anti-jewish priest.

Discussion in 'The Holocaust' started by Owen, Apr 14, 2007.

  1. civvie

    civvie Member

    I had intended to start a new thread asking for critiques of 'Hitler's Pope' because I didn't want to divert or hijack this thread. Instead I'll be brief.

    I came to the book in the course of trying to understand how so many ordinary German citizens could have been mesmerized by Nazism - or rendered incapable of effective opposition. Cornwell's account of the neutralizing of the Catholic Centre Party, potentially a source of powerful opposition, in the course of negotiating the Concordat ensuring some freedom of worship, seems convincing to me.

    I have yet to find any clear-cut, explicit, unequivocal public condemnation by Pacelli of Nazism or the suffering of Jewry but doubtless I have much more reading to do. There could be many reasons for Pacelli's public reticence, amongst them the need to avoid provoking the Nazi authorities to worse repression of German Catholicism should their pretense of dialogue have collapsed.

    On-line I have found many general rebuttals and challenges to Cornwell's work but these seem to be mainly the product of Catholic institutions of which, as a lapsed Catholic, I am sceptical. Does anyone know of an impartial, disinterested critique?
     
  2. Tom Canning

    Tom Canning WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    Civvie -
    you can start your new reading by going back to Peter g's message # 20
    Cheers
     
  3. civvie

    civvie Member

    Civvie

    Cornwell rightly praises the Papal Nuncio to Hungary, Monsignor Angelo Rotta, but he fails to explain that a papal nuncio does not act without papal authority, nor does he say what Angelo Rotta did other than mentioning that he 'made frequent representations to cabinet ministers on behalf of the Jews'. You'll find a more balanced account here regarding Angelo Rotta

    As for the murderous András Kun, although known as 'Father' Kun (pater Kun), he wasn't a priest. He had been a monk but was thrown out of his order before he joined the Arrow Cross party in 1944; he was hanged in Budapest on 19 September 1945. There is an Arrow Cross propaganda clip here A HOLOKAUSZT MAGYARORSZÁGON Kun appears towards the end getting out of a car.

    I've also scanned and attached the relevant pages of what Cornwell says in his rather unbalanced account.

    Peter



    Thanks for this. I can imagine there were many Angelo Rottas often working at great risk to themselves. I'm not quite clear how much latitude for independent decisions a papal nuncio would have but I can't imagine the good work could have been carried out without making frequent instant judgments without reference to higher authority even if in that authority's name. Or do you feel Pius X11 deserves full credit?

    In the end the big question must be could great loss of Jewish and other lives have been more effectively averted had Pius X11 openly entered total confrontation with Nazism or would the risk to Germany's Catholics and Church have been insupportable?

    This is a 'what if' issue but I'm intrigued by Cornwell's suggestion that early political opposition to Nazism by Germany's substantial Catholic population might have deflected the course of Hitler's rampage. I'm currently reading Michael Burleigh's 'The Third Reich - A New History' whose detailed account of the pervasive impact of Nazi totalitarianism suggests to me that resistance wouldn't have worked.

    'Mit Brennender Sorge' (MBS) is mentioned above - I am familiar with it although you may know it in greater detail than I. I can imagine the impact of such a document and know that Hitler was outraged by it, but wasn't the potential of MBS compromised by Rome's own ambivalent attitude to authoritarian regimes? That really is why I was looking for later protests and an explicit condemnation of Nazism and of the peril facing the Jews...
     
  4. Tom Canning

    Tom Canning WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    Civvie -
    you ask does a Papal Nuncio have much latitude " in making independent decsions" - of course they do - within the broad framework of what the Pope lays down - see also the works of Angelo Roncalli in Bulgaria - the future John XXIII.

    you are taking a narrow view based on the lies of Cornwall and the other German Playright who was paid by Andropov and Kruschev in 1963 to write their scurrilious works on the basis that "dead men can't defend themselves" - they did it exceedingly well.

    So try to read Golda Meir's eulogy to Pius X11......or Einstein's comments.... and hundreds of Balkan Rabbi's including the Head Rabbi of Rome, Zolli - he converted to Catholicsim and took Pius X11's name of Eugenio - in respect do you think ?

    But why did the Soviets think they could be so successful ? That takes bit more reading I'm afraid as - in my mind - they were a bit more cocky than they were just two years before in 1961 - so what happened in the interim ? - Try googling for "The Pact of Metz" - that might answer some more of your questions...this was promoted by the same Angelo Roncalli - so - go figure ! "

    Some of us call it " Diabolical Disorientation "
    Cheers
     
  5. PeterG

    PeterG Senior Member

    Thanks for this. I can imagine there were many Angelo Rottas often working at great risk to themselves. I'm not quite clear how much latitude for independent decisions a papal nuncio would have but I can't imagine the good work could have been carried out without making frequent instant judgments without reference to higher authority even if in that authority's name. Or do you feel Pius X11 deserves full credit?

    In the end the big question must be could great loss of Jewish and other lives have been more effectively averted had Pius X11 openly entered total confrontation with Nazism or would the risk to Germany's Catholics and Church have been insupportable?

    This is a 'what if' issue but I'm intrigued by Cornwell's suggestion that early political opposition to Nazism by Germany's substantial Catholic population might have deflected the course of Hitler's rampage. I'm currently reading Michael Burleigh's 'The Third Reich - A New History' whose detailed account of the pervasive impact of Nazi totalitarianism suggests to me that resistance wouldn't have worked.

    'Mit Brennender Sorge' (MBS) is mentioned above - I am familiar with it although you may know it in greater detail than I. I can imagine the impact of such a document and know that Hitler was outraged by it, but wasn't the potential of MBS compromised by Rome's own ambivalent attitude to authoritarian regimes? That really is why I was looking for later protests and an explicit condemnation of Nazism and of the peril facing the Jews...
    As to what the papacy could do locally, I think it might help if we first clear up what Vatican City is. It's an independent state in the middle of Rome; it's total area is 0.17 square miles, roughly twice the size of Buckingham palace, and consists of a few buildings and a park. With a population of just under 1,000 and no army, the idea that it could have put up any physical resistance to the Germans occupying Rome is simply ludicrous. http://www.nationsonline.org/maps/Vatican-City-map_855px.jpg

    As for the encyclical Mit Brennenden Sorge, it was drafted in German by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaberpartly then partly re-drafted by Eugenio Pacelli, who in 1939 was to become Pope Pius XII, in particular para. 8 is entirely his. What is most unusual about it is that it was drafted and published in German and not in Latin; papal encyclicals are always published in Latin in the Osservatore Romano and then translated into vernaculars. It was also decreed that it should be read out in every German Catholic Church in its entirety. Here are some key points:
    4. If, then, the tree of peace, which we planted on German soil with the purest intention, has not brought forth the fruit, which in the interest of your people, We had fondly hoped, no one in the world who has eyes to see and ears to hear will be able to lay the blame on the Church and on her Head. The experiences of these last years have fixed responsibilities and laid bare intrigues, which from the outset only aimed at a war of extermination. In the furrows, where We tried to sow the seed of a sincere peace, other men - the "enemy" of Holy Scripture - oversowed the cockle of distrust, unrest, hatred, defamation, of a determined hostility overt or veiled, fed from many sources and wielding many tools, against Christ and His Church. They, and they alone with their accomplices, silent or vociferous, are today responsible, should the storm of religious war, instead of the rainbow of peace, blacken the German skies.

    8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds. [this paragraph was added by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli]
    ...

    11. None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah xI, 15).
    ...
    17. The peak of the revelation as reached in the Gospel of Christ is final and permanent. It knows no retouches by human hand; it admits no substitutes or arbitrary alternatives such as certain leaders pretend to draw from the so-called myth of race and blood.
    The full text can be accessed here:
    Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge (14/03/1937)

    The Nazi response is set out in Mit brennender Sorge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
    The German newspapers did not mention the encyclical at all; the offices of every German diocese were visited the next day by the Gestapo and all extant copies were seized. Every publishing company that had printed it was closed and sealed, diocesan newspapers were all proscribed and limits imposed on the paper available for Church purposes. Catholic flags were prohibited at religious ceremonies and towns with religious names(Heiligenstadt, etc.) were renamed.

    Frank J. Coppa asserts that the encyclical was viewed by the Nazis as "a call to battle against the Reich" and that Hitler was furious and "vowed revenge against the Church". Hitler wrote that “I shall open such a campaign against them [the Catholic clergy] in press, radio and cinema so that they won’t know what hit them …. Let us have no martyrs among the Catholicpriests, it is more practical to show they are criminals.”

    Thomas Bokenkotter writes that "the Nazis were infuriated, and in retaliation closed and sealed all the presses that had printed it and took numerous vindictive measures against the Church, including staging a long series of immorality trials of the Catholic clergy."

    According to John Vidmar, Nazi reprisals against the Church in Germany followed thereafter, including "staged prosecutions of monks for homosexuality, with the maximum of publicity". 170 Franciscans were arrested in Koblenz and tried for “corrupting youth” in a secret trial, with numerous allegations of priestly debauchery appearing in the Nazi controlled press, while a film produced for the Hitler Youth showed priests dancing in a brothel.
    You ask ... but wasn't the potential of MBS [the encyclical] compromised by Rome's own ambivalent attitude to authoritarian regimes?
    There was no ambivalence that I am aware of, you have to remember that the Catholic Church, as a state religion, dates back to the reign of the Emperor Constantine in 324 AD and that until the French Revolution ALL governments were authoritarian; absolute monarchism was seen as part of the divine plan. However, the Pope had refused to recognise the Italian democratic state following the fall of the Papal States and the capture of Rome in 1870. This became known as 'the Roman Question' and was not resolved until 1928 with the concordat between Mussolini and the Papacy. The agreements included a political treaty which created the state of the Vatican City and guaranteed full and independent sovereignty to the Holy See. However, the Pope was pledged to perpetual neutrality in international relations and to abstention from mediation in any controversy unless specifically requested by all parties.

    Authoritarian regimes in the modern sense only arose during and after WW1. For historical reasons the Vatican, as it was now known, tacitly approved of Fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Pildulski's authoritarian Poland, and Salazaar's Portugal but was opposed to Stalin's Communist USSR and, publicly from 1937, Hitler's Germany.

    It was the exception to the commitment made in 1928 not to interfere internationally which made Mit brennergen Sorge encyclical so important in 1937. But the warning that "The experiences of these last years have fixed responsibilities and laid bare intrigues, which from the outset only aimed at a war of extermination" was dismissed by Mussolini and ignored by the western powers which a year later, despite the Vatican's warning that Nazi Germany was not to be trusted, entered into the Munich agreement.

    One has also to remember that in July 1938 we had the shameful episode of the Evian Conference with the world's democratic countries squabbling over who could take the least number of Jews, and not only from Germany and Austria but also Jews seeking to leave the right-wing antisemitic regimes of Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Canada was not interested unless they brought riches with them; the Argentineans said they had done enough, and Australia which, despite its then vast unpopulated lands, would not allow even one Jew to land. As one Australian delegate put it bluntly at Evian 'we have no real racial problem [and] we are not desirous of importing one.' Not a single country had a word of public condemnation of the Third Reich, that is the background to Mit Brennenden Sorge.

    Less well known is the encyclical Summi Pontificatus of 12 October 1939, the full text is here
    Summi Pontificatus

    Para. 108 clearly spells out which side Pope Pius XII was on:
    ... The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, ... the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace. ...
    This is not to say that there was no anti-Semitic senior clergy during WW2 in the Catholic Church. Three French cardinals clearly were: Cardinal Baudrillart who is on record as saying "as a priest and a Frenchman ... should I refuse to approve this noble common enterprise, in which Germany is taking the lead?" The other two were Cardinal Liénart of Lille and Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon. Gerlier twinned Pétain with Franco as 'un chef magnifique' and 'speaking on behalf of the Church in France', he said: "France needed a leader to guide her towards her eternal destiny. God permitted that you should be there". But there is no evidence that Pius XII was antiSemitic, he was Italian; even among Italian fascists before the German occupation, few were anti-Semitic.

    The Germans began shelling Rome on 10 September 1943, occupying the city in the evening. It was liberated on 5 June 1944 following a harsh occupation of 8 months and 26 days. When the Germans entered the city there were about 8,000 Jews resident in Rome. Their ordeal began on 26 September when Herbert Kappler, the head of the Gestapo in Rome, had a meeting in the German embassy, Villa Wolkonsky, with the head of the Jewish communities in Italy, Dante Almansi, and the president of the Jewish community in Rome, Ugo Foà. Kappler ordered them to deliver 50 Kg of gold within 36 hours telling them that if they failed to do so 200 Jews would be 'deported' to Germany. But let Renzo de Felice tell the story, [see attached scanned pages], he omits however to say that the man who liaised with the Vatican over the gold was the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, who later converted to Catholicism.

    As for Rabbi Zolli, current Jewish assessment of him is summed up here:
    Although Pope Pius XII took great pride in baptizing the former chief rabbi of Rome, the Catholic Church could hardly consider “Zolli” a pious convert. This is because Rabbi Israel Zoller’s apostasy to Catholicism had little to do with any spiritual conviction or theological satisfaction he found in the Roman church. Rather, it was the result of his ostracism and banishment after the Holocaust by the survivors of the Italian Jewish community, whom he callously abandoned during the war when he hid in the Vatican while fleeing the Nazis.
    Unfortunately there is a great deal of, what Italians call, 'il saggio di poi' in this and a distortion of the record.

    When we go back to the sources and the Roman papers of the day, quite a different story emerges. First Zolli was not ostracised by the Jewish Roman community until after 15 February 1945 when his conversion was publicly announced and he was formally excommunicated. Until then he had been treated as a hero. Nor was his conversion due to ostracism, for he had told Jesuit Father Paolo Razza, the rector of the Gregorian university, of his decision to convert on 15 August 1944 but he decided to keep his decision secret until all Roman Jews were free as he did not want to be accused of cowardice nor did he wish to escape the fate of his fellow Jews by his conversion. When Rome was liberated he was asked to resume leadership by the Jewish council. There is a telling point in this story, in September 1944 Zolli tendered his resignation as Chief Rabbi, but at that stage the Jewish council did not know the reason for his resignation and offered him the directorship of the Rabbinical College, but he declined the post. When the real reason emerged on 13 February 1945, there was uproar. The Roman Jewish paper published an edition breaking the news framed in black as if for a death. Even Protestants attacked him for not properly understanding the Gospels.

    After the war Zolli was criticised for not destroying the register of Roman Jews before it fell into the hands of the Germans. Zolli, according to his own account, had tried to have the register destroyed and the Roman Jews warned of impending disaster, but Ugo Foà, president of the Jewish community, did not share the rabbi's fears and considered Zolli's warnings about the Nazis to be alarmist. Indeed an American army colonel, Chaplain Rabbi John Pollock, held a formal inquiry into the dispute and found Ugo Foà guilty of close association with OVRA and Zolli innocent. Foà denied this, but Zolli was believed until he was excommunicated, when overnight he became a villain.

    Whatever the truth is, it is clear that both men and other leaders of the Jewish community were trying to do their best in extremely difficult circumstances. As for 'hiding in the Vatican', all Jews were in hiding after the dreadful events of 16/17 October 1943; the community was dispersed and neither Zolli, Foà, Amalsi, nor anyone else could be said to be 'leading' it. For part of the time Zolli was inside Vatican City, but he also found refuge outside the Vatican with two Italian families, and in particular in the house of Pietrantoni, a partisan with Giustizia e Libertà and was with that family when the Americans entered Rome. But until then he was split from his wife and his 20 year old daughter Mirriam, they were hidden separately by two other Roman families.

    Unfortunately, after nearly 70 years views are deeply entrenched, particularly on the Internet with Catholic sites praising him and Jewish sites damning him. As for the Jews of Rome, Liliana Picciotto, the eminent Italian Jewish historian, gives these figures (differing slightly from De Felice). On 16/17 October 1943, 1,259 Jews (infants and adults) were arrested. These were sifted and 236 released for various reasons (non Jews, foreigners citizens of neutral countries not subject to 'the final solution', or children of mixed marriages). The final number was 1,023. The train carrying them left on 18 October and arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the night of 22 October, where it remained sealed until the following morning. Several older people had died during the journey. Only one, Lazzaro Sonnino, managed to escape during a brief stop at Padova. He was quickly hidden by Italians. As for the rest, the total number gassed was higher than usual, 89% (839 people) due it is thought to an outbreak of typhus. By 23 October all 839 were dead, as for the rest only 15 survived.

    Other Jews were arrested over the following terrible months, bringing the total for Rome and its province to 1,694 arrested and gassed or murdered in other ways. But of the total of about 8,000 Roman Jews, 6,306 were hidden by the Roman population and survived.

    Pope Pius XII
     

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  6. Tom Canning

    Tom Canning WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    PeterG

    I thank you for your most erudite and cogent explanation of many things which have been swept under the carpet by many opponents of Pius XII which have grown immensely owing to books such as Cornwall's, and the play by the other paid lackey of his enemies and as has been noted " The truth shall make you free" - and eventually when this does occur - then Pius XII will be canonised as a Saint.

    Tom Canning
     
  7. James S

    James S Very Senior Member

    If God only knew of a fraction of what we have collectively "done in his name" over the years not one of us would blame him for walking away.
     
  8. Tom Canning

    Tom Canning WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    James S -
    .....and who is to say that He already has not given up on mankind......
    Cheers
     
  9. PeterG

    PeterG Senior Member

    This is the best detailed account in English. View at 125%
     

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  10. Tom Canning

    Tom Canning WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    PeterG
    The last sentence sums up all the lies which has even affected this woman in her BBc interview of 1995 - they probably had to dig deep to find her to justify their lies !
    Cheers
     

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