Was Pope Pius XII A Nazi Collaborator?

Is the Catholic Church the Wickedest Institution on the Face of the Earth?

“I warn against the moral stance, imported from abroad [Nazi Germany], that is basically and ruthlessly anti-Jewish. It is contrary to Catholic ethics. One may love one’s own nation more, but one may not hate anyone. Not even Jews…Beware of those who are inciting anti-Jewish violence. They are serving a bad cause…No good comes from these rash actions.” Augustin Cardinal Hlond, February 29, 1936[1]

    … by Jonas E. Alexis

In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen of Harvard released his first book entitled Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust and it quickly became a sensational and bestselling book.

• Goldhagen argues that anti-Semitism was so ingrained in the entire German people that not even the ordinary Germans were spared that irrational hatred.[2] Other Jewish writers such as Lucy Dawidowicz and Steven T. Katz ascribe to that thesis.[3]
• Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer agrees with some of Goldhagen’s arguments and desperately tries to rescue him from historical oblivion, but on a few occasions he criticizes Goldhagen.[4]
• Bauer wrote, “Goldhagen puts all anti-Semitism in the same basket, including the liberal type that wanted to see the Jews disappear by assimilation and conversion. He quotes Uriel Tal, but Tal never said that liberal efforts to assimilate the Jews were the same as extermination programs.”[5]
• Similarly, Albert S. Lindemann of the University of California pulls no punches when he declares, “Racism and anti-Semitism were, in the eyes of many German-speaking Jews, more accurately seen as products of reactionaries and of the mob. Hatred of Jews, they believed, was most typically to be found in Eastern Europe, or in the less developed parts of the German-speaking world.”[6]

Lindemann argues that Goldhagen’s book “is far more questionable and simplistic; he typically ignores, or is ignorant of, evidence that contradicts his by no means original reading of German history.”[7] Jewish historian Raul Hilberg called the book “worthless.”[8] Other historians such as Hans Mommsen declared that Goldhagen simply does not know “the internal structure of the Third Reich.”[9]

It was discovered by two scholars, Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, that Goldhagen invented many of his sources and concocted a sophisticated hoax.

 Instead of responding to his critics in a scholarly manner (the Cambridge Historical Journal invited him to do so), Goldhagen

“enlisted a high-powered London law firm to sue Birn and Cambridge University Press for ‘many serious libels.’ Demanding an apology, a retraction, and a promise from Birn that she not repeat her criticisms, Goldhagen’s lawyers then threatened that ‘the generation of any publicity on your part as a result of this letter would amount to a further aggravation of damages.”[10]

As a serious scholar, Birn went through the archives and checked the sources that Goldhagen had cited, and the majority of them were Goldhagen’s own inventions or distortions of the actual account. Knowing that the historical data and reason were not on his side, Goldhagen had to move on to a new territory: he wanted to sue Birn.[11]

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