The Vatican and the Third Reich: an Unholy Alliance

Letter showing Pope Pius XII had detailed information from German Jesuit about Nazi crimes revealed

Historians have long been divided about Pius’ record, with supporters insisting he used quiet diplomacy to save Jewish lives while critics say he remained silent as the Holocaust raged.

Undated file photo of Pope Pius XII.AP

AP
SEP 16, 2023 - 06:10 EDT


Newly discovered correspondence suggests that World War II-era Pope Pius XII had detailed information from a trusted German Jesuit that up to 6,000 Jews and Poles were being gassed each day in German-occupied Poland, undercutting the Holy See’s argument that it couldn’t verify diplomatic reports of Nazi atrocities to denounce them.

The documentation from the Vatican archives, published this weekend in Italian daily Corriere della Sera, is likely to further fuel the debate about Pius’ legacy and his now-stalled beatification campaign.

Historians have long been divided about Pius’ record, with supporters insisting he used quiet diplomacy to save Jewish lives while critics say he remained silent as the Holocaust raged.

Corriere is reproducing a letter dated Dec. 14, 1942 from the German Jesuit priest to Pius’ secretary which is contained in an upcoming book about the newly opened files of Pius’ pontificate by Giovanni Coco, a researcher and archivist in the Vatican’s Apostolic Archives.

Coco told Corriere that the letter was significant because it represented detailed correspondence about the Nazi extermination of Jews from an informed church source in Germany who was part of the Catholic anti-Hitler resistance that was able to get otherwise secret information to the Vatican.

The letter from the priest, the Rev. Lothar Koenig, to Pius’ secretary, a fellow German Jesuit named the Rev. Robert Leiber, is dated Dec. 14, 1942. Written in German, the letter addresses Leiber as “Dear friend,” and goes on to report that the Nazis were killing up to 6,000 Jews and Poles daily from Rava Ruska, a town in pre-war Poland that is today located in Ukraine, and transporting them to the Belzec death camp.

According to the Belzec memorial which opened in 2004, a total of 500,000 Jews perished at the camp. The memorial’s website reports that as many as 3,500 Jews from Rava Ruska had already been sent to Belzec earlier in 1942 and that from Dec. 7-11, the city’s Jewish ghetto was liquidated. “About 3,000-5,000 people were shot on the spot and 2,000- 5,000 people were taken to Bełżec,” the website says.

The date of Koenig’s letter is significant because it suggests the correspondence from a trusted fellow Jesuit arrived in Pius’ office in the same three weeks before Christmas 1942 that Pius was receiving multiple diplomatic notes from the British and Polish envoys to the Vatican with reports that up to 1 million Jews had been killed so far in Poland.

While it can’t be certain that Pius saw the letter, Leiber was Pius’ top aide and had served the pope when he was the Vatican’s ambassador to Germany during the 1920s, suggesting a close working relationship especially concerning matters related to Germany.

According to “The Pope at War,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist David Kertzer, a top secretariat of state official, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, told the British envoy to the Vatican in mid-December that the pope couldn’t speak out about Nazi atrocities because the Vatican hadn’t been able to verify the information.

“The novelty and importance of this document comes from this fact: that on the Holocaust, there is now the certainty that Pius XII was receiving from the German Catholic Church exact and detailed news about crimes being perpetrated against Jews,” Coco was quoted by Corriere as saying.

However, Coco noted that Koenig also urged the Holy See to not make public what he was revealing because he feared for his own life and those of the resistance sources who had provided the intelligence.

Pius’ legacy, and the revelations from the newly opened Vatican archives, are to be discussed at a major conference at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University next month that is notable because of its across-the-spectrum participant list and sponsorship. The Vatican, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust research institute, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial as well as the Israeli and U.S. embassies are all backing it, among others.

The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, is to open the Oct. 9-11 meeting that will feature scholars including Kertzer, Coco and Johan Ickx, the archivist at the Vatican secretariat of state whose own book on the archives, “Pius XII and the Jews” published in 2021, praised Pius and the Vatican’s efforts to care for Jews and people fleeing the war.

Coco said Koenig’s letter actually was found in the Vatican’s secretariat of state archives and was turned over to the Vatican’s main Apostolic Archives only in 2019, because the secretariat of state’s papers were disorganized and scattered, with some of Pius’ documents kept in plastic containers in an attic storage space where heat and humidity were damaging them.

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Unsealed Archives Give Fresh Clues to Pope Pius XII’s Response to the Holocaust

Pope Pius XII in the Vatican.Credit...ANSA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Several documents that have emerged from the newly opened Vatican Archives on the papacy of Pius XII bolster accusations of indifference to Jewish suffering, but some scholars say the full picture has yet to emerge.


By Elisabetta Povoledo
Aug. 28, 2020


ROME — When the Vatican opened its sealed archives from the World War II-era pontificate of Pius XII in March, the Brown University historian David I. Kertzer was among the first in line.

Like many other scholars, Dr. Kertzer had been eager to mine the papers of a pope — long under consideration for sainthood — whose response to Nazism and the Holocaust has become the target of fierce debate.

Some have cast Pius XII as the pontiff who remained shamefully silent as the Nazis massacred Jews during the war. Others claim that Pius worked behind the scenes to encourage the Roman Catholic Church to save thousands of Jews and other victims of persecution.

Now documents from the archives are beginning to trickle out, offering an early taste of what could emerge from the tens of thousands of papers that scholars had been clamoring to study for decades. Pius XII’s pontificate stretched from 1939 to 1958.

In an article published in The Atlantic on Thursday, Dr. Kertzer revealed previously unpublished documents, including a memorandum advising Pius against making a formal protest when the Gestapo rounded up 1,000 of Rome’s Jews on Oct. 16, 1943, for deportation to the concentration camp in Auschwitz.

Dr. Kertzer also found a trail of documents revealing that Vatican officials directed clerics in France to resist turning over two Jewish boys who had been put in the care of local Catholics and baptized when their parents were killed in Auschwitz — despite rulings by French courts ordering that the boys be given to their aunt.

David I. Kertzer, an historian at Brown University, was one of the first to publish research found in the newly unsealed archives of Pope Pius XII.
Steven Senne/Associated Press

Hitler's Pope: Pius XII by John Cornwell

God and the Fascists: The Vatican Alliance with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic

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Excerpt from GOD AND THE FASCISTS; The Vatican Alliance with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic, by Karlheinz Deschner (Prometheus Books, 2014). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.


This is the prologue to the book:





Why, after almost fifty years, should there be a reprint of Karlheinz Deschner's work God and the Fascists ( Mit Gott und den Faschisten )? Because it is very topical. Because it is, fully unfairly, in danger of being forgotten. Because it disrupts a process of suppression, or better, indeed the deliberate policy of disinformation, pursued by the Vatican. It reminds us of the Vatican's collaboration not only with Hitler, the greatest criminal of all time, but also with Mussolini, Franco, and the little-known Pavelić, the Fascist leader in Croatia who, along with Cardinal Stepinac, was responsible for the concentration and death camp of Jasenovac, of whose existence only few people know today.

Because the web of lies spun by the Vatican is exposed. It has been trying to position itself as an anti-Hitler resistance organization for decades, although according to Cardinal Faulhaber, Pius XII was "the best friend, indeed, the only friend of the new Reich at the beginning," especially in the unstable initial phase of National Socialism, when history could have taken a completely different course! Because it is not a fashionable book that caters for a trendy opinion for reasons of accommodation but presents and summarizes historical facts precisely and in great detail and draws conclusions that are comprehensible to everyone. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen clearly considers it unnecessary to quote Deschner at all in his book A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust , despite Deschner being able to provide much more information using much less ink nearly forty years earlier. And because it is also exciting to read, like a novel but where every line is the truth and every reader is considerably more intelligent and enlightened after reading it than he or she was before and may also be shocked to see the extent of the collaboration between the Nazis, all the Fascists, and the Vatican! In short, because it exposes a historical lie. The lie of the Catholic resistance.

Let us not forget that it was the French Revolution that showed the Catholic Church where its boundaries were and thereby put an end to its feudal power--albeit, unfortunately, only half-heartedly. But still, the Spanish Inquisition did not sentence the last heretic--the schoolteacher Caetano Ripol--to death at the gallows, followed by a "symbolic burning," until July 26, 1826, almost half a century after the Bastille was stormed! After the revolution, Napoleon's troops occupied the Papal States at the end of the eighteenth century--which had arisen from bloody wars and been legitimized by a forged document, the so called Donation of Constantine--arrested Pius VI, and took him to Valence as a prisoner. The Congress of Vienna restored the Vatican rState again in 1815 with a reduced territory, but in 1870, after the occupation by Italian troops, it finally disappeared in the new Italian state. Those responsible were then excommunicated. . . and could not have cared less.

The increasing power of the bourgeoisie, the development of the European national states, the emancipation movement, the natural sciences and progress through technological developments increasingly forced Catholicism onto the back foot in the second half of the nineteenth century--it tried desperately, and in vain, to take up the fight against "modern rationalism" with the first Vatican Council and restore the beleaguered papal authority by means of the dogma of infallibility. But time was against Catholicism. Under Bismarck, nearly two thousand Catholic clergy were imprisoned or given hefty fines in the Kulturkampf ("battle of the cultures") for interfering in state affairs; the United States broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican on February 28, 1867 (and did not restore them until 1984 under Ronald Reagan). The "Roman Question" had arisen: How could the Holy See be saved from ultimate, and at that time foreseeable, downfall? How, and with whose aid, could its former power be restored? This problem was exacerbated by the growth of the decidedly anticlerical workers' movement after the debacle of the First World War, which was committed to enlightenment and the principle of equality.

This is the starting point of Karlheinz Deschner's book God and the Fascists . The aim of this new edition, published by Prometheus Books, is to ensure it is not forgotten. With richness of detail, historically founded, and by mining a vast number of sources, it proves that after the First World War, the chance was seized to turn the wheel of history back together with the rising Fascist movements. For fear of a victory of the workers' movement across Europe--according to the Soviet model--the Vatican, together with the reactionary property-owning classes and their henchmen--the Fascists--entered an alliance that was intended to secure the existence of both. This unholy Catholic alliance with the supposedly lesser--Fascist--evil led to the greatest catastrophe in human history: the Second World War and the Holocaust.

After the Catholic party "Partito Popolare" was dissolved by Pius XI, the curia paved the way for Benito Mussolini and Italian Fascism. As a reward, they received--by means of the Lateran Pacts--the Vatican State back, a sovereign, stately construct, albeit reduced in size, and the monstrous sum of one billion lire in state bonds and 750 million lire in cash. These assets formed the basis of the Vatican Bank, which is under strict observation from the American supervisory authorities today because of its machinations, suspicion of money laundering, and proximity to the Mafia.

And the Vatican helped the Nazis to power according to exactly the same pattern and under the same premises. The Catholic Centre Party--the oldest party in Europe led by Prelate Kaas, a close friend of Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, the Pope's second-in-command--concurring with the Enabling Act of March 24, 1933, and then dissolving itself cleared the way for Hitler. The subsequent dictatorship set the catastrophe in motion. The historical lie that nobody at the time knew who they were dealing with is clearly disproved by Karlheinz Deschner. Because the first concentration camps had been built before the Enabling Act--not for the Jews at this point, but for political opposition--basic citizens' rights were suspended and the boycott of Jewish businesses, doctors, and lawyers was called for. Hitler's Mein Kampf could not have been unknown to Eugenio Pacelli: the same Eugenio Pacelli who had been the papal nuncio in Berlin until 1929 ("the best-informed diplomat in Germany") and then made a career in the Vatican, first as cardinal secretary of state, then as pope. Pope Pius XII. He, who had the reputation of being an outstanding connoisseur and friend of Germany, harvested the fruits of that collaboration on July 20, 1933, in the form of the concordat with Nazi Germany. This treaty under international law still has constitutional status in the Federal Republic of Germany to this day (Article 123.2 of the German Basic Law). It regulates the friendly relations between the Holy See and the German Reich; state religious education was introduced under it, with a status equal to that of the other subjects taught, the payment of salaries from religious-education teachers to bishops by the state from public tax revenue is guaranteed and church tax collected by the state--to this day, let it be noted--a new phenomenon that was to have far-reaching consequences. Workers must publicly declare their religious confession, losing their previously constitutional right to keep this silent, and employers are obliged to take part in the collection of the ecclesiastical obolus. A church state was born! The Hitler concordat meant that the clergy's robes were afforded the same protection as military uniforms, priests were exempted in advance from military service--they knew what was coming--the dissolution of the Centre Party was retrospectively justified and a great deal more.

Karlheinz Deschner describes how the collaboration of the German episcopate with the Nazis--which could only happen with the approval of the curia--lasted until the end of the Second World War, how vicars, priests, and bishops prayed for Hitler's Reich every Sunday all across the land, which was also regulated in the concordat (Article 30), and agitated in favor of the war, how churches and cathedrals were decorated with swastikas on Hitler's birthday, and the papal nuncio personally congratulated the Führer, full of pride, on his fiftieth birthday in 1939--half a year after the Kristallnacht! In the so-called church struggle, which is supposed to have been the expression of church resistance, the church stood up only for its own interests, never against Hitler, never against the war, and never for the Jewish population. And even after the military defeat of Nazi Germany, the Vatican helped high-ranking Nazi functionaries to flee to South

America with the help of the ratline, with which Mengele, Eichmann, and many other criminals escaped the Allies' justice.

What did Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII dream of ? They dreamt of a Catholic continental Europe in a united military battle against the godless Soviet Union, as degenerated as it may already have been by Stalin's influence (read Arno Lustigers Stalin and the Jews: The Red Book ). They dreamt of the end of Orthodoxy, the end of communism, and the Catholicization of Russia. And of a neutral, Anglican Great Britain and a neutral United States. Because a military conflict within the western camp made the outcome of the war unpredictable. After the military defeat of France, this dream seemed to be well within reach, and in 1940 the whole world was convinced that Hitler would win the war. The realization of the curia's dream had, with Hitler's help, come within their grasp.

We learn from Karlheinz Deschner how the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, was openly welcomed, not only by the German episcopate, and how unlimited their enthusiasm for Hitler and agitations against Russia were. And Pius XII--who allegedly did too little against Hitler and said too little--spoke in a radio address one week later of "rays of light that raise the heart to great, holy expectations: great bravery and courage in defending the foundations of Christian culture and optimistic hope for their triumph," by which he intended to express, according to embassy counselor Menshausen, the hope that the great sacrifices demanded by this war would not be in vain and would, should Providence so wish, lead to victory over Bolshevism. In this "war between worldviews," which had been so longed for by the Catholics and which Hitler also called it, the Holocaust was viewed as a kind of collateral damage.There may even have been a secret feeling of satisfaction in light of the two thousand years of Christian anti-Judaism. Had Hitler not, in April 1933, already coquetted before high Catholic functionaries--as Deschner reports--and much to their delight, that his "treatment of the Jewish Question" was merely a continuation of medieval Catholic tradition?! In any case, the pope never condemned the Nazi pogroms against the Jews, not even when the Jews were rounded up before his eyes, so to speak, and taken away. Today's propagated idea of a Judeo-Christian West is based on a syncretism swindle.

The Vatican was even more deeply involved in Fascist crimes in Croatia, where the Franciscans played a leading role in the atrocities perpetrated there, which were so brutal that even the Germans complained. Ante Pavelic, the leader of the Croatian Fascists, called the Ustashi, coined the slogan that a third of the Orthodox population of Yugoslavia should be forcibly converted, a third expelled, and the other third murdered. Seven hundred fifty thousand Serbs fell victim to this regime with clerical help, and often after brutal torture, as did 80 percent of the Jews in Yugoslavia. The Primate of the Croatian Catholics, Archbishop Dr. Stepinac, collaborated with Pavelić from the first minute to the last. After his conviction as a war criminal, the Ustaša leader managed to escape, initially to South America, with the help of the ratline. He was accompanied by the former contact man between the Croatian archbishop Stepinac and the Vatican, the priest Krunoslav Draganović, who was, among other things, responsible for the deportation of Jews and Serbs during the war as a "resettlement officer" and was later one of the key figures in the organization of the ratline. He later fled to Franco's Spain, where he found refuge in a Franciscan monastery in Madrid. This war criminal died on December 26, 1959, and received the blessing of the Holy Father on his deathbed. Stepinac was the only high cleric who was at least partly brought to justice for his deeds. The sentence: sixteen years' imprisonment with forced labor. After six years of imprisonment, he was released early. Today's theologians may claim that this verdict was based on a "misunderstanding." But it is no misunderstanding that Yad Vashem rejected the obscenity of an application to grant him the title and honor of a "Righteous among the Nations" twice, in 1970 and 1994. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1998.

In his resume at the end of the book, Karlheinz Deschner says, in 1965, "If one considers the attitude of Eugenio Pacelli to the politics of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic, it hardly seems an exaggeration to say: Pius XII is probably more incriminated than any other pope has been for centuries. He is so obviously involved in the most hideous atrocities of the Fascist era, and therefore of history itself, both directly and indirectly, that it would not be surprising, given the tactics of the Roman Church, if he were to be canonized."

And now the beatification is already under way, less than fifty years later! If Hitler had won the war, one may wish to add, then he would presumably have long since attained the same Catholic honors.

And Franco's support from the Vatican in the Spanish Civil War--and before--is also a theme of this rewarding book, this irreplaceable source of information.

Let us now return to the present, to the constitutional knock-on effects of the church's collaboration with Fascism in Germany. One has to only compare this close interrelationship between church and state, this still-surviving German church state--which, under the Weimar Constitution and the federal constitution of Germany, should never have been permitted--with the constitutions of France and the United States, in which the separation of church and state is clearly stipulated. It then becomes clear how far Germany is today from being a modern democracy. It is a country in which the churches, on the basis of regional concordats, have places in all radio and television broadcasting councils, in nearly all newspaper editorial offices, in countless other influential institutions, and--some quite openly, others well hidden--at the levers of power. It then becomes clear what massive favors Hitler and Mussolini did the Vatican with this special answer to the Roman Question, with the restoration of its statehood, its assets, and its public influence, which were in a state of dissolution in the second half of the nineteenth century. And at what cost to the rest of the world!

General News 9/26/2013 at 13:31:44

Headlined to H2 9/26/13

Karlheinz Deschner's book is an important contribution to enlightenment, a jewel for anyone who seeks historical truth; it is an antidote to the historical lie of Catholic resistance to Adolf Hitler and provides a fundamental contribution to the current debate on the rehabilitation of the Pius Brotherhood (fronted by Richard Williamson, who denied the Holocaust), the planned beatification of Pius XII, the scandal surrounding the Vatican Bank, the reintroduction of the Good Friday Intercession, and the role of the Vatican in the world in general.

Anyone who is looking for the historical Ariadne's thread in the labyrinth of church heteronomy will go nowhere without Karlheinz Deschner's book God and the Fascists . I would, at this juncture, recommend to anyone who wishes to find out more, many historical layers deeper, for example, about the historical origins of Christianity, Hyam Maccoby's superb, central work The Mythmaker:

Paul and the Invention of Christianity (1986), in which he proves that Christianity is not founded on the Jewish Jesus but the Greek Paul, who composed a highly virulent mythical mix of gnosis, mystery cults, and the story of Jesus and, therefore, started off two thousand years of Christian anti-Judaism, which culminated in the Holocaust.

The other Ariadne's thread from the religious labyrinth--the subjective, "psychological" one--can be found by anyone looking for it in Sigmund Freud (e.g., Totem and Taboo , The Future of an Illusion , Moses and Monotheism ), and more especially in the pioneering study of religion by Fritz Erik Hoevels, ""Bhagwan' Rajneesh and the Dilemma of any Humane Religion" in Mass Neurosis Religion , published by Ahriman International, which is now also to be credited with the republishing of Deschner's masterpiece God and the Fascists . Both authors make it clear how small the eye of the needle is through which human society must pass if the aims of enlightenment, reason, freedom, the principle of equality, and maximum happiness for the maximum number of people are to become reality, how many archaic and yet real power structures must be broken in order to achieve this.

May the interested reader convince himself or herself of the topicality of this book nearly fifty years after God and the Fascists was first published. It is thrillingly written and a literary achievement of the first rank.


Peter Gorenflos

Berlin, Germany

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New Nations From Old Ones

Chapter 1

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NEW NATIONS FROM OLD ONES

When in 1917, during the First World War, the Papal Nuncio in Munich, E. Pacelli, secretly negotiated with the Central Powers to accomplish the Pope's Peace without Victory, in order to save both Germany and Austria-Hungary from defeat, he had already made his first attempt to strangle a nation as yet unborn; Yugoslavia. If the Vatican's attempt was directed at preserving its most useful Hapsburg lay partner, it simultaneously had another no less important goal: to prevent a motley of nationalities from springing out of the Empire's ruins as sovereign States in their own right. In such States, Poland excepted, Catholicism would have sunk to the level of a minority. Worse, it would have been dominated by heretical churches and their political Allies: i.e. by the Protestant and Liberal in Czechoslovakia, by the Orthodox in Yugoslavia. With its last attempt to save the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Vatican therefore struck a final blow against the yet unborn "Hussite" Czechs and the Catholic Slovaks on one side, and the Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats and Slovenes on the other, the fulfillment of their dreams lying as it did in the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian colossus.

The Emperor Charles was advised to transform the Empire into a Federation. The idea, which originated at the Vatican, was repellent to both, as it meant, besides the loosening of Imperial control, the loosening of Catholic control over the various races of the tottering Empire. But in the circumstances the alternative was total collapse. In October Charles announced the transformation of the Hapsburg Monarchy into a Federal State. The offer—which, significantly, was made only at the last moment—although accompanied by secret papal moves, left the Allies determined to end for good the rule of the double-headed Austrian eagle. President Wilson's reply to Charles, and thus to the Pope, was firmly hostile. The USA, said Wilson, admitted "the justice of the national aspirations of the Southern Slavs." It was for these people, he added, to decide what they would accept.

As far as the USA was concerned, he concluded, it had already recognized Czechoslovakia as a belligerent independent State. The American reply had sealed the fate of Austria-Hungary. On October 28, 1918, the Czechoslovaks declared their independence. On the 29th the Yugoslavs proclaimed theirs. On December 1 the Yugoslav Council invited the Regent, Alexander, in Belgrade, to proclaim the Union. The new independent kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—Yugoslavia—had come into being.

The birth was welcomed in certain quarters—e.g. by the Allies—and was unwelcome in others—e.g. the Vatican—to which the new nation, besides being the unnatural creature of the Allies' political blindness, was a religious aberration not to be tolerated. Orthodoxy, swept away in Russia, where it had seemed unassailable, with the birth of Yugoslavia had now become paramount in a country the population of which was more than one-third Catholic. Worse still, in addition to permitting Orthodoxy to rule Catholics, Yugoslavia was preventing the latter from setting up a wholly independent Catholic community. When to the above was added the fact that Yugoslavia, by her mere existence, represented the greatest obstacle to the long-range Catholic strategy, the Vatican's feeling, more than one of hostility, become one of implacable hatred, a wind which boded no good to the young nation. This hatred became the main inspirer of the Vatican's anti-Yugoslav strategy, the objective of which was the destruction of Yugoslavia. Having embarked on such a course, the Vatican began a vigorous campaign, the fulfillment of which to some extent depended on another factor: the collapse of Bolshevik Russia, the early disappearance of which was, at that period, taken almost for granted by everyone, particularly by the Allies, who had dispatched sundry armies to hasten her collapse. The Vatican counted, then, on a Russian collapse in order to execute its policy of a forced Catholic domination of the Balkan peninsula through the sword of Pilsudski. The creation of the Catholic Danzig-Odessa Polish Empire would have meant one thing: the death of Yugoslavia and other Balkan Orthodox and Protestant countries. When, however, Pilsudski's bloody adventure terminated and the Allies' efforts to destroy Bolshevik Russia relaxed, the Vatican changed its tactics and embarked on a new policy: destruction of Orthodoxy by penetration, instead of by force. Consequently, when in 1920 Pilsudski's Catholic Empire vanished, and the Pope set out to convert Russia, a parallel policy was pursued in connection with Yugoslavia. Although the keynote of this new anti-Orthodox strategy was penetration, its tactics were different in each country. Thus, whereas in Russia they were meant to penetrate in order, in the long run, to dominate her religious life, in Yugoslavia they consisted of penetrating Yugoslav political life in order, once Catholics had come to control it, to enhance the power of Catholicism, and thus ultimately stultify, and indeed paralyze, the Orthodox Church throughout Yugoslavia.

Such a policy, vigorously promoted, mostly by ambitious, clerically-dominated Catholic politicians in Croatia, yielded no little success. In no time Catholic clericalism became a power behind the scenes, with the result that, within a few years, the Hierarchy began to exert undue weight in the administration, not only of Croat affairs, but also of those of Yugoslavia as a whole. This alarmed several honest Catholic Croats, notably Radich, leader of the powerful Croat Peasant Party, aware of the danger that such tactics were creating both for Yugoslavia and for Croats. Defying the Hierarchy—and thus indirectly the Vatican—he began to combat the Catholic Trojan-horse tactics, warning Croatia that, by permitting their politicians to be led by the Hierarchy in political matters, they were bound, sooner or later, to lead all Croats to disaster. Radich's counsel was followed; and for almost a decade Catholic strategy, weakened where it should have been at its strongest, was far less successful than if Radich had acted otherwise.

But in 1928 Radich was assassinated. The assassination coincided with the general overhaul of Vatican European strategy towards Communism. In that same year the Curia finally broke off its negotiations with Soviet Russia. The Papal Nuncio in Germany, E. Pacelli, led the powerful Catholic Centre Party sharply to the extreme Right, thus allying it with the forces which were to sky-rocket Hitler to power. In Italy the Vatican strengthened Fascism by signing a pact with Mussolini (1929). Fascist Catholic movements rose everywhere. An era of Catholic policy had ended, and a new one had begun. The policy of penetration had been replaced by one of active agitation and the swift mobilization of all the religious and political forces of Europe against



Strip of photographs from the Album of Terrorists, maintained by the Yugoslav Secret Police, as early as 1933. Bottom row, first left, Ante Pavelic, the future Leader of the Independent Catholic State of Croatia. Prior to the latter's establishment, all the men above, as sworn Ustashi were engaged upon the promotion of a policy of terrorism, within and outside Yugoslavia. This they did by murdering singly or collectively, political enemies or innocent people alike. They placed explosives in public places, ships or trains. For instance, a train compartment was blown up by an Ustashi bomb at Zemum, killing the family of Professor Bruneti.

Before the Second World War these men were active all over Europe. Their most spectacular success was the simultaneous assassination of the King of Yugoslavia and of Mr. Barthou, the French Foreign Minister, during a State visit to France, 9 October 1934. The double murder was the forerunner of a series of many others which were to contribute to the birth of the Independent Catholic State of Croatia.

The Ustashi and Ante Pavelic were "protected" by Mussolini, and tacitly but effectively by the Vatican. Both supported them financially.


Bolshevik Russia. Thus, while in the West the Vatican had launched upon a global hate campaign against Communism, in the Balkans, after Radich's death, it embarked upon a policy directed at the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Radich's successor, Dr. Macek, reorientated the Croatian Peasant Party into a rabid nationalist movement which, by becoming increasingly bold, became an active factor for the growing political tension inside Yugoslavia. From this period onward, Separatism became the keyword of Croat Nationalism, with the result that the latter began increasingly to play into the hands of the Catholic Hierarchy and thus into those of the Vatican. The Vatican's policy in the first decade implied Yugoslavia's existence as a united nation; in the second—i.e. since the emergence of a naked Separatism—it overtly aimed at Yugoslavia disintegration. In the promotion of the Vatican's new grand strategy, Yugoslavia was reckoned a major obstacle even more than in the past, in that now it was impeding the swift Fascistization of Europe and the eventual Fascist attack on Soviet Russia, with all the ensuing Balkan commotion which, it was hoped, would cause the tumbling of Yugoslavia itself. In connection with the latter, the Vatican laid down a three-fold policy:

(a) The detachment of Catholic Croatia from the rule of Orthodox Serbia,
(b) the setting up of Croatia as an independent Catholic State, and, last but not least,
(c) the possible creation of a Catholic Kingdom in the Balkans.
For such goals to be attained, one thing was necessary: the partial or total disintegration of Yugoslavia.

To assert that Yugoslavia succumbed thanks only to Vatican machinations would be to falsify history. On the other hand, to minimize its role would be a crude historical distortion. Factors alien to religion played into its hands. These could be summarized as: the animosities of the Croats and the Serbs in the domestic field, the political ambitions of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the international. Croat Separatism became an increasingly important factor as the internal and external tension grew. Its identification with Catholicism made it almost a blind tool of the Catholic Hierarchy, and thus of the Vatican, which unhesitatingly used it to further not only its local interests, but also its vaster Balkan schemes of religio-political domination.



Typical portraits of Ustashi leaders. Men like the above were the brains behind the numberless acts of terrorism carried out by the Ustashi in Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary, Germany, France and in other countries, chiefly from their headquarters in Fascist Italy.

(Left) Mijo Bzik, known as "Miko," was chief of the Ustashi camps in Italy, and the recruiter of the assassins who came from Yanka-Pusta. One of his main tasks was the placing of internal machines in public buildings, or crowded places.

(Centre) Eugen Kvaternik, one of Ante Pavelic's principal accomplices. He personally accompanied from Italy to France, the assassins, who went to murder the King of Yugoslavia. Pavelic created him Minister of Police when Catholic Croatia became independent.

(Right) Zvonimir Pospishil, one of the most brutal of terrorists. He belonged to a special group of Catholic Ustashi charged with the assassination of eminent personalities. He was given the task of killing King Alexander, by blowing him up in Paris had the Marseille plot failed in 1934.


The Croat leader, Radich, never tired of warning the Croats against following the Vatican in political matters; in this he echoed the voice of another great Catholic patriot, the leader of the Polish Nationalists, Roman Dmowski, whose slogan became a by-word of certain Catholic Polish Nationalists: "Never rely upon the Vatican in political affairs."

Hostility to Vatican political directives by Catholic political leaders was born out of bitter experience: e.g. during the First World War, when Roman Dmowski, having gone to Rome to ask for help to establish Polish independence, was greeted with open disfavour, such Vatican hostility being inspired by political interests identified with those of Austria and other great European Powers who had worked against Polish aspirations for centuries. The extraordinary result of this was that the Poles never got any support from the Vatican, even when they rose against the Czars—an attitude which incensed them to such a degree that one of their great national poets, Julius Slowacki, coined the famous warning: "Poland, thy doom comes from Rome." Which subsequent events proved was more than prophetic.

Radich adopted the same slogan, although with more tact. When, however, his Party was taken over by Macek, the original ideal of Ante Starcevic was swiftly injected with a new overdose of undiluted extremism, which made it turn sharply to the extreme Right. The main exponent of this new trend was one Ante Pavelic, an individual obsessed by the idea of an independent Croatia, inspired by racialism, erected upon Fascism, wholly impregnated with Catholicism, a formidably compact miniature totalitarianism. A movement sprang out of this weird conception; its backbone a ruthless core of terrorist bands, led by Pavelic himself, whose policy consisted of blackmail, murder, plots, and assassinations. The shadow of powerful protectors from across the sea descended swiftly upon them, thus enabling them to carry on their activities in defiance of national or international procedure—e.g. from Italy and Germany, both of whom saw in Pavelic's Croatia a useful instrument for Fascist and Nazi expansion in the Balkans.

The expansionist policies of these nations often ran parallel with that of the Vatican, which, by skillfully manipulating them, could frequently promote its own interests. It did that, not by remaining only an aloof spectator of various Fascist and Nazi activities, but by promoting a most vigorous anti-Yugoslav policy of its own.



The Vatican and Fascism helped each other from the beginning. Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) ordered the Leader of the Catholic Party to disband it (1926), the better to consolidate the regime of Mussolini. The latter negotiated the Lateran Treaty and Concordat with the Church (1926-1929).

By virtue of the first, the Vatican became a sovereign state within Rome. While with the second, the Church was granted immense privileges and Catholicism was declared the only religion of Fascist Italy, which it wholeheartedly supported.

Bishops took an oath of allegiance to the Fascist Dictatorship, and the clergy were ordered never to oppose it or incite their flock to harm it. Prayers were said in Churches for Mussolini and for Fascism. Priests became members of the Fascist Party and were even its officers.

One of the main supporters of the Fascist-Vatican pact was Mgr. E. Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII), then in Germany. His brother, a lawyer, became one of the chief secret negotiators. He is seen in this photograph standing behind Cardinal ...... Later, the Papal Nuncio to Germany, Mgr. E. Pacelli saw to it that his brother was made a Prince.


This yielded a rich harvest sooner than was expected. While the Vatican's Fascist associates were busy engineering political or terrorist activities, Catholic diplomacy—as previously in Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and France—came to the fore with the promotion of a powerful Catholic fifth column. This, which had already gnawed at the internal structure of Yugoslav unity, consisted of all those Croats infected with national-religious fanaticism, of the Catholic Hierarchy of Croatia, and of an illegal Nationalist Army composed of bands of Catholic terrorists, called the Ustashi, the last led by Ante Pavelic, supported by Vladimir Macek, leader of the Croat Peasant Party, who in 1939 arranged for Mussolini to finance him with 20 million diners for the Croat Separatist Movement, and by [1] Archbishop A. Stepinac, leader of the Catholic Hierarchy in Croatia.

The specific role played by the Vatican followed the familiar pattern: use of the Hierarchy to help political and military plotters engaged in undermining or overthrowing the legal Government. Unlike its practice in other countries, however—e.g. Petain's France or Franco's Spain—here the Catholic Church attempted to erect, and indeed did erect, a State in complete accord with all her tenets. The result was a monster standing upon the armed might of twin totalitarianism: the totalitarianism of a ruthless Fascist State and the totalitarianism of Catholicism—the most bloodthirsty hybrid yet produced by contemporary society. What gives to such a creature of Vatican diplomacy its peculiar importance is that here we have an example of the Catholic Church's implementing all her principles, unhampered by opposition, or by fear of world opinion. The uniqueness of the Independent Catholic State of Croatia lies precisely in this: that it provided a model, in miniature, of what the Catholic Church, had she the power, would like to see in the West and, indeed, everywhere. As such it should be carefully scrutinized. For its significance, by transcending its local background, is of the greatest import to all the freedom-loving peoples of the world.


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Footnotes

1 See The Ciano Diaries, 1946, pp. 46,48,50-60. [Back]

The Vatican's Holocaust
The sensational account of the most horrifying religious massacre of the 20th century

By Avro Manhattan

Source: http://www.reformation.org/holoc1.html