Preface to Pope Pius XII’s Revisionism
Favourable to the Allies and obligingly helpful to the Jews, Pius XII was also a revisionist. It is precisely his revisionist’s scepticism, and not any ignorance of the facts, that explains his silence on the alleged physical extermination of the Jews, on the alleged Nazi gas chambers and on the alleged six million Jewish victims of what today is called “the Holocaust” or “the Shoah”.
Favourable to the Allies, in 1940 he went so far as to act as intermediary between, on the one hand, German opponents of Hitler’s regime and, on the other hand, France and Britain. Better still: in 1941, having to choose between Hitler and Stalin, he decided, at the behest of Roosevelt, to choose Stalin. Yet “Uncle Joe” embodied the Communism which, four years previously, an encyclical had denounced as being “intrinsically wrong”. Thus the German army was to see its soldiers, many of whom were Roman Catholics, and their chaplains get themselves killed in the East by American weapons supplied to the communist regime with the Pope’s secret blessing. The Germans reopened the churches closed by the Soviets but, later on, at the Nuremberg trial, they would find themselves accused – notably by a Soviet prosecutor – of religious persecution. And no one in the Vatican would protest against that criminal legal masquerade.
Obligingly helpful to the Jews, Pius XII always spoke out against racism and anti-semitism. During the war, whether in person or through his representatives, he went to the aid of European Jews. He did so via religious, diplomatic, material and financial avenues, and through the media outlets at his direct disposal (L’Osservatore Romano and Radio Vatican). In his public talks he attacked the internment of large numbers of Jews in camps or ghettos, their “slow decline” (progressivo deperimento) as well as the “exterminating harassments” (costrizioni sterminatrici) to which they were being subjected. During and after the war, tribute was paid to him for his action in favour of the Jews as a whole by numerous Jewish or Zionist personalities and authorities.
Revisionist in attitude and recalling the lesson of the lies of the First World War about Teutonic barbarity (children having their hands cut off, factories making products from human corpses etc.), it was with a worthy scepticism that he received the plethora of cacophonous stories of the Nazi death-works. Before imputing the alleged crimes to an Adolf Hitler whom he abhorred, he wanted to have confirmations and precise information. He was not supplied with these and was, at times, told that the obvious needed no proving. Then, rightly, he decided to keep quiet about things that were merely the stuff of unfounded rumours.
His scepticism in this regard was like that of the wartime Allied leaders, albeit more clear-cut. The latter, in their anti-Nazi diatribes, were assuredly scathing about “the extermination” of the Jews but with the rhetorical bluster of war speeches, and solely in a general and conventional sense; so it was that by “extermination” they meant excesses, maltreatment, mass executions, famine. In August 1943 they had almost gone further and spoken of “gas chambers” but the Foreign Office in London and the State Department in Washington, inundated with Jewish propaganda, decided by mutual agreement that there was “insufficient evidence” for them to talk about German execution gas chambers (August 29, 1943). In the same spirit, during and after the war, Churchill, Eisenhower and de Gaulle avoided mentioning the alleged gas chambers or gas vans in either their speeches or their memoirs.
Today, a certain Jewish or Zionist propaganda lays a blanket of blame on Pius XII, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the various resistance movements, the countries that stayed neutral and just about the whole universe. All find themselves rebuked for their indifference or silence with respect to the “little nation that has suffered so much”. Their descendants or successors must publicly express penitence (techouva), and pay up.
If truth be told, Pius XII has some defenders and, amongst them, some Jews. For these people, if the Pope kept quiet about the awful fate of the Jews, it was “because he didn’t know”. Besides, the Allied officials, they add, knew no more of it either, hence their own silence, their inaction, their refusal to bomb Auschwitz. The explanation is pitiful. It rests on speculation alone. It aggravates the case of those whom it seeks to defend: it makes deaf, blind or ignorant men of them.
If, for three or four years running, a physical extermination of such dimensions had been perpetrated with such horrible means as those gigantic chemical slaughterhouses, in the very heart of Europe (a Europe that was largely transparent, whatever else we may be told), and if the result of it had been the demise of six million persons (the equivalent of the population of Switzerland), people would have been aware of it and traces of the crime would abound. In fact, not a trace has yet been found, not one document pertaining to it has been discovered, and for good reason. The “Wannsee” minutes attest to the contrary of an extermination policy for they provide for the “freeing” (Freilassung) of the Jews at the end of the war and the creation of a Jewish entity somewhere outside Europe. On the other hand, from 1945, this alleged planned massacre produced millions of European Jews dubbing themselves “living witnesses to the genocide”, “survivors” or “miraculous escapees”. For anyone willing to reflect on it, those people constitute, quite unwillingly, rather an impressive body of “living proof” of the fact that there was, in reality, neither “Holocaust” nor “Shoah”.
For the devotees of the “Shoah” religion, the magical gas chamber is everything, permitting everything (Céline’s words in 1950). This myth is the sword and shield of Israel. It authorises exorbitant power, privileges, pressures, extortion and blackmail. “Auschwitz” is wielded as a “moral cudgel” (Martin Walser in 1998). The first victim is defeated Germany; the second is an insulted Christendom and the third an Arabo-Moslem world slated for constant humiliation.
Over a span of three decades Pius XII’s successors tried to offer some resistance to the rising flood of Jewish demands and recriminations grounded in this Great Lie. But both John XXIII and Paul VI had to yield step by step. As for John Paul II, who acceded to the papacy in 1978, his attempts at resistance lasted eleven years. In 1989, during the affair of the Carmelite nuns and their cross at Auschwitz, in the course of which he was to lay down his arms, he evoked, in a message to the Polish Episcopal conference, the “extermination of the Jews” in “the gas chambers”. In 1990 he repeated the gesture with a like remark before a group of Poles at an audience in the Vatican. In 1992 he condemned historical revisionism. In 1993 he recognised the State of Israel. In 1998, he spoke out, in so many words, against “the Shoah, that cruel plan to exterminate a people – a plan to which millions of our Jewish brothers and sisters fell victim”. In so behaving, he condemned Pius XII, for whom a process of beatification was thus rendered impossible. And all to the great satisfaction of the Jews who, as is well known, were demanding that a halt be put to that process.
For those who wish to do so, the only way to rehabilitate the memory of the “maligned Pope” is to speak the language of verifiable truth, historical exactitude or, quite simply, the facts.
At the same time they will happen to be defending the victims, who today number in the billions, of the “hoax of the twentieth century” (Arthur Robert Butz).
May 8, 2002