ISSUES: CHRISTIANS AND THE WORLD

In my brief summary on August 14 of the stories highlighted online by L'Osservatore Romano from its daily edition, I noted this: "A major story in the inside pages is a revelation of how both the US and UK governments ignored repeated warnings from the Jewish representative in Switzerland starting in August 1942 of Germany's extermination plan for the Jews - even as between 1943 and the liberation of Italy in 1944, Pius XII was the only leader on the world scene who actually did anything to help the Jews."

Unfortunately, I did not have the time to translate that story. (Because of less available time for Forum 'work', I have prioritzied - and thus limited - my translations to papal texts first, and items directly having to do with Benedict XVI.] Several days later, the Anglophone news services came around to it, and the line was what the UK's Daily Telegraph took.

I have not altered the headline given by the Telegraph, but once again, it commits the usual journalistic offense of labelling a bylined news report on objective fact - in this case, quotations from the contemporaneous diaries of a ranking US official - to be 'claims' or 'accusations' made by 'the Vatican' or by 'the Vatican paper'. That is crassly assuming that anything reported in a newspaper is necessarily the view of that newspaper and its editors and publishers.

At the same time, it would be naive to think that the OR would fail to publish such an article (or even solicit it, for that matter) since there is objective evidence to back up the writer's story.

Until I can do a full translation, here is the Telegraph article, and later, the CNS item on the same:



Britain knew about extermination
of Jews, Vatican claims
By Simon Caldwell and Nick Squires in Rome

17 Aug 2009


The Vatican's official newspaper has accused Britain and the United States of having detailed knowledge of Hitler's plans to exterminate the Jews but of failing to do anything to halt the Final Solution.

L'Osservatore Romano said the British and American governments ignored, downplayed or even suppressed intelligence reports about the Nazis' extermination plans.

They could have bombed Nazi concentration camps and the railways that supplied them but instead chose not to, the newspaper claimed.

It quoted from the diary of Henry Morgenthau Jr., the wartime US secretary of the treasury, who described London's alleged indifference to the plight of the Jews as "a Satanic combination of British chill and diplomatic double talk, cold and correct and adding up to a sentence of death".

British and American inaction was in contrast to the efforts made by the wartime Pope, Pius XII, who tried to save as many Jews as he could through clandestine means, L'Osservatore claimed in a lengthy article titled "Silence and omissions at the time of the Shoah (Holocaust)".

[The statements about Pius XII's activities are likewise objective fact, amply documented, not a 'claim' taken out of thin air. And it is perfectly legitimate to cite such activities in contrast to the lack of activity on the part of the US and UK governments - and I don't think any historian is going to dispute that there was a lack of official activity by the Allied governments in 1942-1945 to rein in the Nazi genocide.

Indeed, the standard and accepted line to explain such inactivity has been that "the main strategic objective of the Allies was to defeat Hitler militarily" and that therefore, in view of limited resources, any 'side issues' had to take the back seat.]

The editorial* is the Vatican's latest effort to rehabilitate the reputation of Pope Pius, whose reluctance to denounce the Nazis publicly prompted accusations of anti-Semitism and earned him the title "Hitler's Pope".

L'Osservatore (i.e., the article] dismissed such claims as a "radically false" characterisation of the pontiff's wartime record.

It quoted Morgenthau as saying that as early as Aug 1942, the US government "knew that the Nazis were planning to exterminate all the Jews of Europe".

In his diary, Morgenthau cited a telegram dated Aug 24, 1942, and passed on to the US State Department, that relayed a report of Hitler's plan to kill between 3.5 million and four million Jews, possibly using cyanide poison.

L'Osservatore, which is regarded as the semi-official mouthpiece of the Holy See, reproduced a copy of the telegram.

American officials had "dodged their grim responsibility, procrastinated when concrete rescue schemes were placed before them, and even suppressed information about atrocities," Morgenthau wrote.

When the US government was finally convinced to try to rescue European Jews who had not already been sent to concentration camps, the British baulked, the editorial said.

It cited a British Foreign Office cable that warned of "the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy occupied territory" and advised against allocating money for the project.

While the British and Americans prevaricated, Pius was engaged in "the only plausible and practical form of defence of the Jews and other persecuted people" by arranging for them to be hidden in monasteries, convents and other Catholic Church institutions, the newspaper claimed.

L'Osservatore said that although the Nazis rounded up and deported from Rome more than 2,000 Jews, another 10,000 were saved.

Marking the 50th anniversary of Pius's death last year, Pope Benedict XVI described him as a great pontiff who worked "secretly and silently" during the war to "save the greatest number of Jews possible".

Sir Martin Gilbert, the British historian and biographer of Winston Churchill, described in his 2001 book Auschwitz and the Allies how an underground network of European Jews had begged the RAF to bomb Auschwitz.

Churchill, who had told Anthony Eden in 1944 that the Holocaust was probably the greatest crime ever committed in human history, had given his permission for raids to go ahead.

"Yet even then a few individuals scotched the Prime Minister's directive because, as one of them put it at the time, to send British pilots to carry it out would have then risked 'valuable lives'," wrote Sir Martin.

"At that very moment, however, Allied lives were being risked to drop supplies on Warsaw during the Polish uprising and during these missions these very same pilots had actually flown over the Auschwitz region on their way to Warsaw."


*It was not an editorial - it was a bylined news report with commentary, therefore completely attributable to the person who wrote it.

In fact, in its running archive of OR articles, the OR itself classifies the article under the heading "Culture', where one can find the newspaper's daily bylined reports/commentary on art, religion, history, literature and pop culture. The other categories in the archive are The Magisterium of Benedict XVI, which includes all his textst as Pope; speeches by Cardinal Bertone; 'Editorials' by either Giovanni Maria Vian or his deputy, Carlo Di Cicco; Interviews; and 'Commentaries' which include the major Page 1 topical commentaries that the OR has published.



The archive may be consulted by clicking on the 'EDIZIONE QUOTIDIANA' line under Osservatore Romano. The links are found right below the facsimile of the day's front page.


Here is the CNS report. I find the headline faulty in that it is historical fact that the Allied governments did little to stop the Holocaust - this is not a claim made out of the blue by the Vatican more than 60 years after the fact.

It's so distrtessing that all-around journalistic sloppiness evidently afflcist even the editorial desks who it seems have been reduced to merely thinking up headlines and deciding which items to play up and how, forsaking their primary duty of enforcing objectivity, honesty, and correct information:


Vatican newspaper says Allied governments
did little to stop Holocaust
By John Thavis



VATICAN CITY, August 14 (CNS) -- In a lengthy article, the Vatican newspaper said [the correct statement is "An article by so-and-so in the Vatican newspaper said...". If you can't be punctilious abut the little things, you will also tend to be sloppy with bigger ones!], the U.S. and British governments had detailed information about the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews during World War II, but failed to act for many months and even suppressed reports about the extent of the Holocaust.

The [article in the] newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, contrasted Allied inaction with the quiet efforts undertaken by Pope Pius XII to save as many Jews as possible through clandestine assistance.

The article, published Aug. 13 [No, August 14], reviewed historical information in support of an argument frequently made by Vatican experts: While critics have focused on Pope Pius' supposed "silence" on the Holocaust, little attention has been given to documented evidence that the U.S. and British governments ignored or minimized reports of extermination plans.

The article quotes heavily from the diary of Henry Morgenthau Jr., U.S. secretary of the treasury during the war, who said that as early as August 1942 administration officials "knew that the Nazis were planning to exterminate all the Jews of Europe."

Morgenthau cited a telegram dated Aug. 24, 1942, and passed on to the State Department, that relayed a report of Hitler's plan to kill between 3.5 million and 4 million Jews, possibly using cyanide poison. The Vatican newspaper reproduced a copy of the telegram.

Eventually, in early 1944, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up the War Refugee Board that was credited with saving tens of thousands of Jewish lives.

But for 18 months before then, despite increasingly alarming reports, U.S. officials "dodged their grim responsibility, procrastinated when concrete rescue schemes were placed before them, and even suppressed information about atrocities," Morgenthau wrote.

The Vatican newspaper article also cited a series of State Department orders apparently aimed at preventing reports on Nazi atrocities from reaching the public, which would have increased pressure on the administration for action.

When the U.S. government was finally convinced to begin some efforts to rescue and relocate European Jews, the British government stalled, the article said.

It cited a British Foreign Office cable that warned of "the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy occupied territory" and advised against allocating any funds for the project.

Morgenthau described this message as "a satanic combination of British chill and diplomatic double talk, cold and correct and adding up to a sentence of death."

The [article in the] Vatican newspaper said that, while all this was going on, in Nazi-occupied Rome Pope Pius was carrying out "the only plausible and practical form of defense of the Jews and other persecuted people" -- hiding them in various church-run institutions. In the end, although more than 2,000 Jews were deported from Rome and killed, about 10,000 Jews of Rome were saved, it said.