Hitler and the Holocaust (20 page)

Nor did Hitler forget to repeat his obsession with the “crypto-Marxist” instigator of revolt, Saint Paul. Following Dietrich Eckart, Hitler saw in Paul “the first man to take account of the possible advantages of using a religion as a means of propaganda.” Paul had found an ideal terrain in the decadent Roman Empire for his “egalitarian theories,” which contained “what was needed to win over a mass composed of innumerable uprooted people.”
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Paul’s proto-Bolshevism had marked the end of the reign of “the clear Greco-Latin genius.”
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The Jews, using the disguise of Pauline Christianity, had deliberately invented the fiction of a transcendent “Beyond,” in place of aesthetic harmony in the cosmos and the natural “hierarchy amongst nations.” Under the mask of monotheistic religion, the Jews “introduced intolerance in a sphere in which tolerance formerly prevailed.”
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Above all, Judeo-Christianity had deliberately subverted the natural order: “It constantly provokes the weak against the strong, bestiality against intelligence, quantity against quality. It took fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity. We would therefore be wrong to sin by excess of confidence and proclaim our definite victory over Bolshevism. The more we render the Jew incapable of harming us, the more we shall protect ourselves from this danger. The Jew plays in nature the role of a catalysing element. A people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order.”
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At first sight, these thoughts seem no more than the infinitely crude and malevolent rant of an unhinged mind. While the Einsatzgruppen were busy massacring countless Jews and “Bolsheviks” on the Russian steppes, why engage in hysterical diatribes against Saint Paul? Why insist that Christianity and
its offshoots in the Reformation (and more dubiously in modern revolutions) meant the death of all empires and of human civilization itself? And yet, we have arrived here at one of the deepest reasons why Hitler ordered the Holocaust. For at the root of Hitler’s antiSemitism was an apocalyptic vision of the future of civilization and of the “Aryan” destiny that necessitated the complete eradication of a rival Jewish messianism. It was the Judeo-Christian ethic that had alienated humanity from the wholeness of the natural order in pursuit of the “lie” of a transcendent God. Judeo-Christianity in its secularized form had, he believed, given birth to contemporary teachings of pacifism, equality before God and the law, human brotherhood, and compassion for the weak, which the Nazis were determined to uproot. They no longer made any secret of their contempt for Christian ideals of charity, meekness, and humility, inimical as they were to the Germanic warrior ethos.
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Since 1937, it had seemed to Hitler that the churches were allies of Judaism rather than of National Socialism. They persisted, for example, in treating the Old Testament as a major source of Christian revelation, and they had rejected the cult of the “Aryan” Jesus. In Protestant circles, the Confessing Church had openly challenged the Nazi-sponsored German Christians. Nor can there be any doubt that the Nazis were infuriated by Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical protesting the regime’s many violations of the concordat and sharply criticizing certain manifestations of National Socialist neo-paganism. True, German Catholic and Protestant leaders did not express any public sympathy for persecuted Jews, confining themselves strictly to a defense of the biblical Hebrew heritage of Christianity. But even church passivity on the “Jewish question” was interpreted by Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Robert Ley, and others as proof that Christianity was irredeemably tainted by “Jewish” influences. In SD reports after 1937, the churches figure prominently alongside Jews and Communists as “ideological enemies” of the regime.
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The real chasm between Nazism and Christianity was perhaps best summed up by Martin Bormann, the head of the Party Chancellery and private secretary of the Führer. On the night of 29 November 1944, he ominously remarked: “In the same way any doctrine which is anti-Communist, any doctrine which is anti-Christian must
ipso facto
, be anti-Jewish as well. The National Socialist doctrine is therefore anti-Jewish
in excelsis
, for it is both anti-Communist and anti-Christian.”
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For the National Socialists, with the outbreak of war it was already clear that there would eventually have to be a “Final Solution” of the “religious question,” though for tactical reasons they preferred to postpone any major confrontation with the churches in wartime. But from an ideological standpoint—especially from the summer of 1941—Judeo-Christianity was seen as the embodiment of universalist, rationalist, and humanitarian values antithetical to the Nazi creed. Hence the annihilation of the Jews had a profoundly symbolic as well as an ideological and political meaning: it simultaneously brought the Christian anti-Semitic tradition to a twisted and horrific climax while negating every positive value that Christianity had ever contained.

The danger that National Socialism represented to Christianity in general was not unfamiliar to the new pope, Pius XII, who had been elected on 2 March 1939. Having spent twelve years as papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin before 1929, his personal knowledge of German Catholicism as well as his love of the German language and culture was unrivaled in the Roman hierarchy. Well informed about domestic conditions in the Third Reich, Pacelli had been the architect of the concordat in 1933 but had also played a role in formulating the 1937 papal encyclical.
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As pope, however, he sought to achieve a détente with Hitler in order to preserve the vital interests of the church in Germany.

At a meeting in the Vatican in early March 1939 with the German cardinals—Faulhaber from Munich, Bertram from
Breslau, Schulte from Cologne, and Innitzer from Vienna—he emphasized that he considered the “German question” to be the most important one and that “he reserved its treatment” to himself alone.
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He further told the cardinals (also on 9 March 1939) that he had no intention of breaking with the Nazi regime, having earlier successfully persuaded Pius XI against precisely such a drastic step. Moreover, he forbade the Vatican newspaper,
L’Osservatore Romano
, from engaging in any further criticism of events in Germany. Such polemics had rarely mentioned the Jews, focusing rather on Nazi harassment of the church or disapproval of the “neo-pagan” aberrations of biological racism. Objections to German antiSemitism before the war generally related solely to its violence and brutality, not to the intrinsic right of the state to discriminate against Jews.
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The “Jewish question” did not have any more priority for Pius XII and his closest collaborators than it did for the German cardinals. Hence it is no surprise that Pius XII’s letters to them contain so few comments about the outrages committed against Jews. Yet there was no lack of information on the subject nor of appeals to the pope for his intervention. Konrad von Preysing, the bishop of Berlin (the most perceptive and anti-Nazi of the front-rank German Catholics), wrote to Pius XII on 17 January 1941: “Your Holiness is certainly informed about the situation of the Jews in Germany and the neighbouring countries. I wish to mention that I have been asked both from the Catholic and Protestant side if the Holy See could not do something on this subject, publish an appeal in favour of these unfortunates.”
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As with other appeals of this kind, the Pope felt unable or unwilling to respond. But a year later, a great deal more information was becoming available. In the Vatican as in other European capitals, knowledge was fast growing about the “horrible deportations” of Jews to the east. On 30 January 1942, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Maglione had commented to the British ambassador at the Vatican, Sir Francis
d’Arcy Osborne, about a Hitler speech in which the Nazi leader had promised: “The Jews will be liquidated for at least a thousand years!”
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Much more concrete information soon began to pour in to Rome from many sources. In March 1942, the Vatican received news from Giuseppe Burzio, its representative in Bratislava, that the deportation of eighty thousand Slovak Jews to Poland meant “certain death” for a large number of them.
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On 18 March 1942, Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress and Richard Lichtheim of the Jewish Agency sent a remarkably detailed report on the fate of the Jews in Poland and the rest of Europe which reached the Vatican through the Swiss nuncio in Bern, Filippo Bernardini. It spoke of more than a million Jews “exterminated by the Germans,” pointing out that the old, the sick, women, and children were being systematically deported, a measure that clearly could not have been implemented for the purposes of forced labor.
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Then, toward the end of June 1942, the London
Daily Telegraph
began to publish a series of reports on the exterminations in Poland. These reports were summarized for the pope by Osborne, who continued to supply His Holiness with similar material from BBC broadcasts on a regular basis. On 30 June 1942, for example, Osborne passed on to the pope the following item: “The Germans have killed over a million Jews in all, of whom 700,000 in Poland. Several million more have been deported or confined in concentration camps.” On 9 July, he reported the condemnation by Cardinal Hinsley, the highest ranking Catholic in Great Britain, of the “utter bestiality of German methods.”
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From the autumn of 1942, Osborne and the Vatican ambassadors representing Brazil, Poland, Belgium, and the United States began to pressure Pius XII to speak out on behalf of the mercilessly oppressed Poles and Jews. The Roman curia was upset at these moves, claiming that a public protest would only make the victims’ suffering even worse and oblige the Vatican to condemn other atrocities besides those of the Germans. Moreover, so Maglione argued, the massacres were
still not verifiable as hard fact, and the pope had already deplored such actions in general terms. Furthermore, he made it clear that it was out of the question for the pope to condemn by name either Hitler or Nazi Germany.
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These arguments did not overly impress President Roosevelt’s personal representative to the pope, Myron Taylor. On 22 September 1942, in an interview with a top Vatican official, Domenico Tardini, Taylor spoke “of the opportunity and the necessity, of a word from the Pope against such huge atrocities by the Germans.” Tardini privately agreed, even as he wearily repeated the standard refrain that Pius XII “has already spoken several times to condemn crimes by whomsoever they are committed.”
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Such answers did not reassure the American or British representatives. Osborne, writing to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on 3 October 1942, noted with some irony and regret that the “occasional declarations in general terms do not have the lasting force and validity that, in the timeless atmosphere of the Vatican, they might perhaps be expected to retain.… A policy of silence in regard to such offences against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership.”
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On 13 December 1942, Osborne angrily confided to his diary, “The more I think of it, the more I am revolted by Hitler’s massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand, and, on the other, the Vatican’s apparently exclusive preoccupation with the effects of the war on Italy and the possibilities of the bombardment of Rome. The whole outfit seems to have become Italian.”
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The next day, he urged the Vatican to reconsider its duties “in respect of the unprecedented crime against humanity of Hitler’s campaign of extermination of the Jews, in which I said that Italy was an accomplice as the partner and ally of Germany.”
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On 18 December, he pressed Tardini hard to get the pope to say something clear in his upcoming Christmas Eve broadcast. The evasive reply suggested to Osborne “that His Holiness is clinging at all costs to what he
considers to be a policy of neutrality, even in the face of the worst outrages against God and man, because he hopes to be able to play a part in restoring peace.”
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On 17 December 1942, the Allies themselves had issued a public declaration condemning the German massacres of the Jews, which Osborne promptly brought to the pope, hoping for an endorsement. The reply from Maglione was again negative, though he deplored the cruelties inflicted on innocent people. The Holy See, he explained, could only condemn atrocities in general, not particular crimes. Moreover, it was not in a position to verify Allied reports on the number of Jews who had been murdered and to know how reliable such estimates really were.
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This was a remarkably unsatisfactory statement, given the volume of increasingly detailed information that had reached Rome from a wide variety of sources during the past six months.

In the case of Slovakia, important knowledge had been made available fairly early by the Vatican’s energetic representative, Giuseppe Burzio, and the Vatican had then indeed acted. Anti-Jewish laws had been introduced almost immediately after Slovak “independence” had been declared on 14 March 1939. The fascist Slovak state was ruled by a cleric, Father Jozef Tiso, leader of the Hlinková Garda (Hlinka Guard), but there was a pro-Nazi group in the cabinet led by Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka and Alexander Mach, the interior minister. After September 1941, the Slovak government proceeded on its own initiative with the expropriation of Jewish property and then with deportations in March 1942. Initially, at least, the government enjoyed the tacit support of the Catholic bishops in Slovakia, who seemed to be concerned only with making sure that Jewish converts be granted appropriate facilities for observing their new faith.
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