CHAPTER II GENOCIDE

HITLER, the new Constantine, and his Swastika labarum. — Plans for the evangelization of Russia. — Pogroms and massacres in the concentration camps well before the signing of the concordat with Hitler. — The “final solution”: systematic extermination of the Jews. — The “Einsatz”, commandos of assassins, and the collaboration of the Wehrmacht. — The most terrifying nightmares. — The official figure: 25 million dead in the concentration camps. — An interview with the Holy Father: why was he silent in face of so many atrocities? “We were never informed . . .”. — Washing of hands after the manner of Pontius Pilate, or the deaf man who does not wish to hear.

WITH the help of numerous quotations we have established how first of all Fascism and Hitlerism, then Francoism—these three movements of a same origin—were able to spring into existence, to grow and finally to impose themselves by means of the complete and constant support of the Roman Church. We have equally established that this same Church, by a skillful preparation of consciences, co-operated most actively in the propagation of totalitarian doctrines in the European countries destined to fall under the dictatorial yoke. Whether ostensible or camouflaged, the basis of the manoeuvre was always the same, and its sole object was to pave the way for the conquerors.

For these victors there would be the temporal domination over an entirely subjugated Europe, and, for the Vatican, the domination over souls, through the institution of”Christian”regimes in the conquered countries. Such was the pact—it could hardly be termed secret—which bound the two dictators to the”Vicar of God”, and ever since the very beginning of Fascism and of Hitlerism, every act, every word and every manifestation coming from the Vatican—and even its silence, in certain cases—was influenced by it. Hitler was a second Constantine, bringing the Gospel to the world, in the folds of his Swastika labarum. Was it not for this purpose that he had been raised to power; that the bishops of Germany, and then of Austria and Slovakia, were praising him and having the Te Deum sung for every one of his victories? His was a holy war, the war of the Papacy.

It was especially on the eastern front that the evangelizing hero and his helmeted missionaries were fighting the good fight”ad majorem Dei gloriam”. It was there that gigantic holocausts were being offered up to Heaven. It was there, in accordance with the wish of the Jesuit Father Muckermann, already quoted, that men were living a heroic period”by shedding their blood for Christ”.

“Hitler never left the Catholic Church”recalled moreover Dr. Otto Dietrich who lived very close to the Fuhrer. “He had forbidden that Charlemagne be called ‘the butcher of the Saxons’, by the press or by anyone else; Charlemagne had forcibly Christianized the Germans by the sword and this name had been given him because of the bloody battles he had led against the Duke of Saxony.”

Another author, Walter Hagen, who belonged to the German Secret Service, reveals how, in the conquered territories, the converting priests of the”Russicum”were marching behind the Wehrmacht and the SS:

“Count Halke von Ledochowski, Jesuit General, was disposed to organize, on the common basis of anti-Communism, a certain degree of collaboration between the ‘German Secret Service’ and the Jesuit Order. . . . Von Ledochowski considered the forthcoming bellicose settling of accounts between Russia and Germany as inevitable. . . .”

And the Easier Nachrichten (27 March 1942) did not hesitate to write:

“One of the questions arising from German activity in Russia which is of supreme importance to the Vatican, is the question of the evangelization of Russia.”

This is confirmed by Father Duclos himself, in a book covered by the Imprimatur:

“During the summer of 1941, Hitler appealed to all Christian forces . . . (he) authorized Catholic missionaries to go to the new eastern territories. . . .”

Nor has it been forgotten that, in France, Cardinal Baudrillart and Mgr. Mayol de Luppe recruited the L.V.F. for the crusade against Russia.

And there was also Hans Kerll, the Third Reich’s Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs who, according to Andre Guerber, declared in a beautiful mystical flight:

“Just as Christ assembled his twelve disciples in a single cohort that was faithful even to the point of martyrdom, so are we witnesses of an identical spectacle — Adolf Hitler is, in reality, the Holy Spirit.” (What blasphemy!)

“In 1933”, writes Leopold Durand, “in forty-five camps of horror forty thousand Germans were already suffering brutal oppression. The sinister camp of Dachau was regularly devouring its quota of prisoners. Pogroms and assassinations had already been launched from one end of the country to the other.”

And the author recalls the type of extermination songs that were already echoing in the streets:

“When the knife sets Jewish blood flowing,
“We are once more refreshed. . . .”

And La Croix itself admits:

“Ever since 1933, prisoners of the concentration camps were being massacred.'”

All this did not trouble His Holiness Pius XII, to judge from his silence. Moreover, this was but a beginning. There was far better to come.

So far as France was concerned, we have no difficulty in believing that the Status of the Jews which was drawn up by the Vichy Government obtained the Vatican’s nihil obstat. In this connection, Leon Poliakov supplies us with an extract of a note from L6on Bdrard, Ambassador to the Holy See, to Marshal Petain:

“‘. . . I stated that nothing had ever been said to me at the Vatican that could have been interpreted as a criticism or disapproval on the part of the Holy See of the legislative and regulative acts concerned.. . .'”

And he adds:”. . . The proposal for joint action, formulated by the Protestant Church of France at the time of the raids (Jewbaiting) in the summer of 1942, was rejected by the dignitaries of the Catholic Church.. . .”

Adults were not the only victims of these raids, as Olga Wormser and Henri Michel bear witness in a document from which we have extracted the following passage:

“During the second half of August 1942, four thousand children were brought without their parents to Drancy. They and their parents had been arrested on 16 July. . . .

“The children were aged from two to twelve years.

“They were expulsed from the buses into the middle of the courtyard like small animals. The buses arrived with policemen on their platforms, the barbed-wire fences were guarded by a police detachment. Most of these men made no attempt to conceal their sincere emotion at this sight and their disgust for the job they were being forced to do. … Every night, the endless weeping of frantic children could be heard coming from the other side of the camp. . . . They did not stay long at Drancy. Two days after their arrival, half of the children were deported from the camp. . . . The second half’s turn came two days later.

“The day before their deportation, the children were searched, like everyone else. Boys and girls of two and three years old came with their small parcels into the search-hut, where the inspectors of the Police for Jewish Questions carefully went through the luggage and sent them out with their belongings unwrapped. . . . The tiny broaches, ear-rings and small bracelets worn by the little girls were all confiscated by the inspectors of the Police for Jewish Questions. One day, a small girl of ten came out of the hut, her ear bleeding—the searcher had torn off the ear-ring which she, in her terror, had not been able to unfasten quickly enough. And in the second half of August 1942 the crematoria of Auschwitz incinerated, at the same time as their nurses, the four thousand children who had been wrenched from their mothers.”

There were mothers who knew exactly where these convoys were heading and who had the supreme courage to hurl their children out of the window rather than to surrender them to the Germans. This infamy provoked a keen reaction on the part of the population of Paris and some of them did all they could to rescue a few of the victims from the murderers. But neither the heart of Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, nor that of the Holy Father was touched by the ghastly holocaust. Pius XII, the Pope who was reigning so gloriously, took great care not to condemn this new “Massacre of the Innocents”. And with very good reason. . . .

Indeed, let us for a moment study the Dannecker document. This clearly shows that these arrests were subject to the decision of the Vichy Government. Now, we have already seen that this government took no decision in the matter without the consent of the Roman Curia. Must we stress the obvious conclusion?

But it was in eastern Europe that the anti-Jewish crusade was especially rife; it was of unprecedented extent and its atrocity verged on insanity. The relevant documents, in particular those placed before the international tribunal of Nuremberg and mentioned by R. W. Cooper,13 would fill many a library. We shall now quote a few extracts from these papers.

The final solution

“Very soon after war broke out, the systematic extermination of the Jewish race began. Hoss told us about it (at Nuremberg): ‘The final solution of the Jewish problem was the complete extermination of all European Jews. I was ordered to facilitate their extermination at Auschwitz. . ..’

“While the German armies were advancing across Russia and the Baltic states, the ‘Einsatzkommandos’ were following in their wake. Their atrocious task had been studied and prepared in advance. In the dossier describing the operations of group ‘A ‘, was a map of the Baltic countries showing for each state the number of Jews to be hunted down and killed. Another map gave the results of three months’ work. . . .

“This task was not accomplished by Himmler and the SS alone. It was accomplished in collaboration with the commanding officers of the armies and with the full support of Marshal Keitel and General Jodl; furthermore, every member of the government, every commanding officer of the armed forces and every soldier fighting on the eastern front knew about it.

“How could operations of this nature possibly have remained unknown when they were being carried out over vast territories, not for months but for years, with the help of the advancing armies and in the regions administered by them?”

In Serbia

As early as September 1942, the Berlin press was able to announce to its readers:

“Serbia is the first region in Europe to be cleared of these Jews.” (‘Boersenzeitung’ of Berlin, 9 September 1942).

“Indeed”, says Leon Poliakov,!4″there was no deportation in Serbia: the Jews were exterminated on the spot. . . .

Nightmares of the most terrifying kind

“A Wehrmacht officer, giving an account of what he had seen in the ‘eastern zone of operations’, writes: ‘The Jews are”transferred”according to orders. This is what happens: they are instructed to be at a given meeting place the following night, with their best clothes, jewels and finery.

“‘They are then led to a specially prepared place outside the locality in question. On the pretext of certain formalities to be completed, they have to deposit there their clothes, jewels and finery. They are then taken off the beaten track and liquidated. Their anguish is beyond description, and the German kommandos have no alternative — usually they have to be well plied with alcohol before the executions can take p1ace’.”

The horrible score

“The indictment of Nuremberg”, writes the Attorney General Boissarie””supplies the figures and documentation. . . . Fifteen milUon annihilated in gas chambers and crematoria, to which must be added another 10 million who were progressively annihilated by slavery until they died. . . .”

This is confirmed by La Croix of 7 September 1951:

“From the statistics supplied by the United Nations, it will be seen that 32 million men were killed on the battle-field, 25 million died in concentration camps, 29 million were injured or mutilated, and 21,245,000 lost all they had. . . . Thus, in five years of fighting, humanity lost the equivalent of the entire population of France and Italy. . . .”

But what was the Pope, the Most Holy Father of Christianity, doing during so many years of unimpeded Nazi savagery?

On 15 November 1945, Dr. Nerin F. Gun, contributor to the Gazette de Lansanne — who had experienced the horrors of the German camps—was received by Pius XII. Here are a few passages from the interview:

“I frankly told the Pope how those of us who had been deported were unable to understand why the Vatican failed in its duty to organize some assistance during our imprisonment and why it did not unequivocally condemn the Nazi criminals responsible for the Nazi atrocities, as well as the German people who were their passive accomplices.

The Pope replied: ‘We knew that, for political reasons, violent persecutions had taken place in Germany, but We were never informed of the inhuman character of the Nazi repression. Never were We allowed to make the slightest intervention or to send the smallest parcel of comforts’

—How was it, we asked, that your representatives in Germany failed to inform you?

“—The information they had must have been incomplete and it was difficult for them to communicate it to Us.. . .”

And yet, this is what Avro Manhattan writes on the subject in his latest book, recently published in Germany:

“Since all priests are de facto its agents and since its nuncios possess means of information and of pressure not available to other diplomats, the Vatican is certainly one of the world’s most efficient centres of information. Indeed, it is able to receive circumstantial reports, whether of a religious, economic, social or political nature, on the smallest parish or diocese anywhere in the world.”

Thus, this vast army of confessors, penetrating everywhere under orders from three thousand bishops who are obliged to send in a weekly report to Rome on the slightest happening in their diocese— this”Intelligence Service”, unparalleled in any state, did not suffice to keep the Pope informed!

If this was so, what was to prevent him from switching on his wireless, like any ordinary Mr. Brown? The BBC would have provided him with all he needed to know of events in Germany, France, Poland and Croatia.

Let it be said, rather, that the question put by Dr. Nerin F. Gun was very naive … or even indiscreet. It brought forth, in reply, that puerile safety valve. Did this survivor of the Nazi camps expect his holy interlocutor simply to confess:

“—I could not disown my own offspring, him whom I had raised to power for very precise ends. … As for the details of execution (meaning: details of the tortures), I was not going to expose the whiteness of my holy robe to that mire of blood.”

This, in all decency, he could not say, or that—like Pontius Pilate—he was washing his hands of so many horrors.

To be sure, the miserable excuse invoked by Pius XII cannot withstand the most elementary common sense. Moreover, there are many testimonies which formally deny it, the most outspoken of which emanate from his entourage.

Let us first of all hear Francois Charles-Roux,!8 Ambassador of France at the Vatican:

“Pius XII was perfectly aware what cruelties the Germans were committing in Poland. He also knew of the hardships they were imposing on the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia. . . . The evidence of German cruelties is so abundant that Plus XII no longer feels entitled to doubt it.”(22 January 1940).

Camille Cianfarra, the New York Times correspondent accredited to the Vatican, is no less explicit:

“The Vatican was unceasingly and remarkably well informed of the internal situation prevailing in the various parts of Europe. . . . The periodic reports which the priests . . . sent to the bishop of their diocese, always got to Rome somehow or other.”

Here, finally, is the most conclusive of these testimonies, that of Radio Vatican’s announcer. Father Mistiaen, as reported by Father Duclos:

“One of my German colleagues. Father L…., who was in possession of first-hand information, used to bring me overwhelming documents on the inhuman cruelties perpetrated by the Nazis in Poland.’ One wonders what else the Sovereign Pontiff needed in order to feel that he was “informed”.

“There is none so deaf”, says the proverb, “as he who does not wish to hear”.

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