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title: "The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany"
brand: "guenter lewy"
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# The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany

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			        		&quot;The tragic failure of the Catholic Church to live up to its moral canons in the confrontation with Nazism is traced in shattering detail in this disturbing book.&quot; -- The New York Review of Books
						    	
					    	
						
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        		About the Author
        	
        	
        		
        		
	        		
						
			        		Guenter Lewy left his native Germany in 1939 at the age of fifteen, emigrating to Palestine and then to the U.S. He has been on the faculties of Columbia University, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts and is the author of Religion and Revolution, America in Vietnam, The Cause That Failed, and The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies.
						    	
					    	
						
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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Catholic Church as an institution did nothing to oppose Hitler's annihilation of the Jews
*by L***N on May 4, 2016*

This is a very difficult book to read, both because of the material and also Lewy's complicated style of writing, which sometimes seems as circuitous as the Catholic pronouncements he is presenting and explaining. Nevertheless, it is a treasure of information.Lewy's bottom line conclusion is damning: although a few priests and even fewer bishops tried to oppose Hitler and his annihilation of Jews, most did not. The Church as an institution did nothing. The fundamental reason for this was the Church's centuries-long denunciation and persecution of Jews, which locked its own position and that of German Catholics into an attitude of indifference to the plight of Europe's Jews.In the final analysis, Pius XII did not disagree with Hitler that the Jews were a menace to be eliminated. There is no evidence that Pius XII condoned Hitler's mass murder of Jews, but neither did he say a single word to condemn it. Lewy's conclusion, and mine, is that this was a total and disgraceful abdication of the Church's pretension to moral authority.Cardinal Faulhaber, who is a character in my new historical novel, appears many times in Lewy's book, and thus I have gained many opportunities to raise questions in my novel as to what Faulhaber thought as he dealt with his Church's appropriate role and his own personal dilemma.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Spectacular book on the covered-up Catholic role in Nazi Holocaust.
*by B***T on April 10, 2015*

Great book on the Vatican and their role in Nazi Holocaust. Especially the archives and family lineage given by the Vatican to the Nazis so that they can find the Jews hiding in the population.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 90% even-handed; 10% polemical.
*by P***Y on July 18, 2014*

This is a difficult book to assess.  This is the "go-to" book for the recent crop of Catholic-bashing authors. J.S. Conway's The Nazi Persecution of the Churches (1968) calls it "one-sided.")  In addition, Lewy opens his book with a quotation from Rolf Hochhuth's "The Deputy."  Since The Deputy is supposedly a work of fiction and was written as part of a Communist propaganda action against the Catholic Church, Lewy's ratification of Hochhuth's smear job is not a promising start for the integrity of his work.On the other hand, for the first 90% of the book, I was impressed with the even-handedness of Lewy's presentation.  Lewy presents the evidence pertaining to the interaction of the Nazis and the Catholic Church by presenting facts pertaining to both the  Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church and the repeated calls of the Catholic hierarchy for solidarity and loyalty to the Nazi regime, even after and notwithstanding that persecution.It is probably a sad commentary that what was considered one-sided in 1968 can be viewed as even-handed in 2014.  Most people today start from the default position communicated by the Kultursmog that somehow the Catholic Church promoted the Nazis into the office of Chancellor.  Books rarely mention the facts that Lewy offers up about the Catholic Church banning Nazi members from attending Mass and advising Catholics to vote for the Catholic Center Party and the Bavarian People's Party. Likewise, Lewy describes the arrest and imprisonment of Catholics, the banning of Catholic Center Party members from employment and the murder of prominent Catholics in 1935.I've been debating these issues for years and I have had difficulty locating these supporting facts. Likewise, I've been reading the current crop of books on the issues and it seems that these facts are ignored by current books on the Nazis and Catholics in Germany or on Pius XII. So, given the extreme one-sidedness of modern books - which are largely polemical rather than scholarship (See Were the Popes Against the Jews.")An example of a detail that I hadn't seen before - until I read J.S. Conway's book last week - was the story of Bishop Sproll of Wurttemberg://One bishop, Dr. Johannes Baptista Sproll of Rottenburg, also refrained from voting on April 10, but not because of objections to Hitler's annexation of Austria. As he later explained to Cardinal Bertram, "I gladly welcomed the Anschluss of Austria and celebrated it with a general ringing of bells. Besides other general considerations, I was led to this attitude by my emotional sympa- thies."155 But since a "yes" vote meant electing men he considered hostile to Christianity and Church, and since he did not want to negate his approval of the Anschluss by voting "no," Sproll stayed away from the polls. This led to hostile demonstrations and the bishop had to leave town. A request of the government to the Vatican to have Sproll recalled from his diocese was turned down by Pacelli. Ambassador Bergen reported that Pacelli, nevertheless, "according to all indications did not approve of the Bishop's actions" and that in clerical circles Sproll's conduct was called "very inept."156 When Sproll, allegedly in accordance with express instructions from the Holy See, returned to Rottenburg on July 16, his palace was broken into and ransacked by a mob. The Bishop refused to leave again but he was eventually forcefully removed by the Gestapo and banished from his diocese.157 It appears that Sproll was the only higher Church dignitary who failed to vote "yes" on April 10.//Guenter Lewy. The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany (Kindle Locations 2918-2926). Kindle Edition.It is interesting how the Sproll anecdote has disappeared from the narrative over the last 50 years.  Also, we can see a bit of "one-sidedness" in Lewy's treatment of the Sproll anecdote.  Lewy treats it as anomalous and insignificant, but J.S. Conway reports that Heydrich referred to Sproll's conduct as "typical" of the Catholic obstinate hostility to the Nazis. (The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, p. 218.) (Conway also notes that Sproll was the only bishop to be "so maltreated but the example was not encouraging." (Id. at p. 224.) .)For the first 90% of the book, I thought that Lewy's points and conclusions were generally fair and thought-provoking.  It is a mystery of some kind why Catholic bishops were so enthusiastic for a regime that was oppressing them so severely.  Obviously, the level of enthusiasm differed from bishop to bishop, and from time to time, but I thought that Lewy's discussion of how the two bishops with jurisdiction over the Saar region - the bishops of Trier and Speyer - pushed so hard in 1934 for the Saar Catholic population to vote for re-affiliation with Germany was well-made. These bishops continued their push even after Catholic leaders were butchered by the Nazis on June 30, 1934.  It seems - in retrospect - that there were enough warnings that bishops who put being Catholic above being German would have wanted the Saar to remain independent.But were there?  The Nazis had created a situation of deniability by blaming lower echelon "bad," "neo-pagan" Nazis with the arrest of the Catholic Action leaders, and the Nazis were spinning the story that the leaders had committed suicide enough to give a plausible basis for people who didn't want to confront the possibility that Germany was being run by gangsters.  And was it not possible for Catholics to think that the initial salvos against Catholicism and the violations of the Concordat were just the overly-enthusiastic actions of the bad neopagan Nazis and not the decent heroic soldier who had lived through the trench warfare of the Great War?  Given the nebulous circumstances, is it inconceivable that patriotism and the long buried investment of planning for the return of the Saar would have outweighed the qualms raised by recent events? How would Americans feel at the prospect of regaining Michigan, Ohio and Illinois if they had been carved out of the United States after losing a war?I think a problem with Lewy's approach is that it virtually ignores the economic and historical context that would have made the conduct of Germans more understandable. Germany had lost a war and had had been occupied in the Saar and had its sovereignty compromised.  It also was paying reparations at a time when it was undergoing an economic collapse. The Nazis represented hope that seemed to be absent from any other political direction. In terms of understanding how people could have succumbed to the evil of Nazism, I think that the approach mapped out by Dan McMillan in How Could This Happen: Explaining the Holocaust, which looks at the "perfect storm" of circumstances to explain the how the holocaust happened is absolutely essential. This approach also explains the odd fact of so many German Catholics and German Protestants in Austria, the Sudetenland and Poland who were so eager to become part of the Reich even after years of persecution of the Christian churches.I think Lewy is definitely on solid grounds in mapping out the way that compromises build on themselves by corrupting  the people who make those compromises.  The German bishops certainly did compromise - for all kinds of reasons - and by the time that Jews were being required to wear stars (September, 1941) or the deportation of German Jews (October of 1941), the German hierarchy was compromised by its previous compromises.All this was good, particularly for a reader with a good knowledge of the facts.  Unfortunately, in the last 10% of the book, Lewy largely goes off the tracks.  At this point in the book, Lewy moved from particular facts and circumstances and tried reaching for the big indictments of Catholicism and Pope Pius XII, and it is at this point that he starts making factual mistakes and logical jumps.  Some of the mistakes are obvious, and clearly part of the big lie that afflicts modern believers of pseudo-history.  For example, Lewy notes://It has been argued first, most recently by Hochhuth, that the Pope could have saved numerous lives, if not halted the machinery of destruction, had he chosen to take a public stand and had he confronted the Germans with the threats of an interdict or the excommunication of Hitler, Goebbels and other leading Nazis belonging to the Catholic faith.//Guenter Lewy. The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany (Kindle Locations 4005-4007). Kindle Edition.But Goebbels was already excommunicated - for marrying the divorced Magda Goebbels, and that excommunication did not seem to have much effect on Goebbels. Himmler and Streicher had formally abjured their Catholicism in 1935. As for Hitler, no one really thinks that Hitler would have been affected by an excommunication; he had already been excommunicated, along with the entire Nazi party, prior to 1933, and he was clearly indifferent to going to Hell for mass murder.  As for the rest of the "Catholic Nazi leaders," they were all apostate because we certainly remember that the Catholic Church had put members of the Nazi party under a religious interdict before the Nazis reached power. Logically, one would think that if excommunication didn't affect them when they had no power, it was hardly likely to affect them when they had power.Likewise, Lewy offers the following as evidence on Pius XII's motivation for his alleged silence://Finally, one is inclined to conclude that the Pope and his advisors-influenced by the long tradition of moderate anti-Semitism so widely accepted in Vatican circles-did not view the plight of the Jews with a real sense of urgency and moral outrage. For this assertion no documentation is possible, but it is a conclusion difficult to avoid.//Guenter Lewy. The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany (Kindle Locations 4041-4042). Kindle Edition.Really?  But earlier Lewy had previously acknowledged the following://The Pope's policy of neutrality encountered its most crucial test when the Nazis began rounding up the 8,000 Jews of Rome in the fall of 1943. Prior to the start of the arrests, the Jewish community was told by the Nazis that unless it raised 50 kilograms of gold (the equivalent of $56,000) within thirty-six hours, 300 hostages would be taken. When it turned out that the Jews themselves could only raise 35 kilograms, the Chief Rabbi, Israel Zolli, asked for and received a loan from the Vatican treasury to cover the balance. The Pope approved of this transaction.140Guenter Lewy. The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany (Kindle Locations 3976-3979). Kindle Edition.//Contrary to Hudal's and Weizsacker's apprehensions, however, the man in the Vatican palace remained silent. On October 18, over 1,000 Roman Jews-more than two-thirds of them women and children-were shipped off to the killing center of Auschwitz. Fourteen men and one woman returned alive. About 7,000 Roman Jews -that is, seven out of eight-were able to elude their hunters by going into hiding. More than 4,000, with the knowledge and approval of the Pope, found refuge in the numerous monasteries and houses of religious orders in Rome,143 and a few dozen were sheltered in the Vatican itself. The rest were hidden by their Italian neighbors, among whom the anti-Jewish policy of the fascists had never been popular. But for the Germans, overwhelmingly relieved at having averted a public protest by the Pope, the fact that a few thousand Jews had escaped the net was of minor significance.//Guenter Lewy. The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany (Kindle Locations 3988-3994). Kindle Edition.Pius would seem to be a strange kind of anti-semite in engaging in acts of personal charity (which put him at personal risk for hiding Jews on Vatican property.)  Further, there is the one-sidedness of the description of Pius's intervention to stop the round-up of Roman Jews.  Lewy sets the scenario up as if Pius did nothing but protest and that only a few Jews were saved, when the facts that he describes is actually that those protests - and the threat of going public - saved the majority - 7/8  - of the Roman Jewish population!Also, Lewy apparently did not read the memoirs of Rabbi Israel Zolli - who converted to Catholicism and took the baptismal name of "Eugenio" in honor of Pius XII - because if he had, he would have learned that Zolli had been warning Roman Jews to go underground with the German occupation. Those Jews refused, notwithstanding that they were also getting information about the Holocaust, because it was considered a form of cowardice, apparently. (See Before the Dawn: Autobiographical Reflections by Eugenio Zolli, Former Chief Rabbi of Rome.)  In "Before the Dawn," Rabbi Zolli describes the interview where he requested the gold to ransom the Roman Jewish population as follows://Zolli also provides details of the Vatican's offer of the gold demanded by the Germans in lieu of hostages from the Jewish community. According to Zolli's eyewitness recounting:"The Vatican had already spent millions in aiding fugitive Jews to reach safety. I said, "the New Testament does not abandon the Old. Please help me. As for repayment, I myself shall stand as surety, and since I am poor, the Hebrews of the whole world will contribute to pay the debt."Both the Treasurer and the Monsignori were moved. The Treasurer disappeared, and after a few minutes returned. He had gone to the Holy Father. "Come back shortly before one `clock. The offices will be deserted, but two or three employees will be here waiting for you and will give you the package. You may leave a receipt in the form of a simply note. There will be no difficulty."//Again, Lewy would have been better off giving up the axe he seems to be grinding and reading other texts because there are in fact "documents" that call into question this diagnosis of "anti-semitism."Other puzzling omissions in the book include, (a) that Lewy doesn't mention the stress that Pius XI and Pius XII put on the fact that Catholics were "spiritual semites," which is a strange thing for supposed anti-semites to be saying, and (b) although Lewy's theory seems to be that Pius XII in some way favored the Nazis because of his fear of Communism, Lewy doesn't mention the things that Pius did to assist the allied war efforts such as permitting Catholics to work on projects that materially aided Communist Russia and not condemning the Soviet Union for its atrocities, such as invading Poland and the Katyn Forest Massacre.  We don't have to speculate about this motivation, because we know it existed from an inside source. Thus, Lewy cites the American Deputy Ambassador to the Vatican, Harold Tittman, Jr., - which is interesting because none of the modern authors seem to be aware of this source of inside information - but he omits the following information//Pius also pointed out that he would have to condemn Soviet atrocities in order to maintain his neutrality://"Second, if I denounce the Nazis by name I must in all justice do the same as regards the Bolsheviks whose principles are strikingly similar; you would not wish me to say such things about an ally of yours at whose side you are engaged today in a death struggle.' It was difficult for us to argue these points effectively with the Pope and in the end we were obliged to resign ourselves to the failure of our attempts."//(See Inside the Vatican of Pius XII: The Memoir of an American Diplomat During World War II.)Lewy spends no time on the Pope's "silence" concerning World War II Communist atrocities.There is also an awful lot of speculation passing for considered judgment in the last ten percent of the book.  Thus, Lewy condemns Pius XII and the German Bishops for not speaking out - more? - forcefully, but what would have happened if they had?  Lewy is enough of a scholar to acknowledge the following://Since the condition of the Jews could hardly have become worse, and might have changed for the better, as a result of a Papal denunciation, one could ask why the Church did not risk the well-being and safety of the Catholics and of the Vatican. Why did she not at least attempt to help the Jews?The Catholic bishops of Holland tried this gamble. In July 1942, together with the Protestant Church, they sent a telegram of protest against the deportation of the Dutch Jews to the German Reiichskommissar and threatened to make their protest public unless the deportations were halted. The Germans responded by offering to exempt from deportation non-Aryans converted to Christianity before 1941 if the churches would remain silent. The Dutch Reformed Church agreed to the bargain, but the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht refused, and issued a pastoral letter in which he denounced the wrong done to the Jews. The Germans retaliated by seizing and deporting all the Catholic non-Aryans they could find, among them the noted philosopher Edith Stein.149 Once the inability of the Pope to move the masses of the faithful into a decisive struggle against the Nazis is accepted as a fact, there is thus some basis for the contention that a public protest, along with any good that would have come of it, might have made some things worse, if not for the Jews, at least for the Mischlinge and the Catholics themselves.//Guenter Lewy. The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany (Kindle Locations 4027-4035). Kindle Edition.Totalitarians are masters of extortion. They don't threaten the potential martyr so much as they threaten other people.Finally, Lewy's book is oddly dated.  Lewy spends some unappetizing time on the argument that Catholicism is somehow uniquely supportive of dictatorships.  This was still a "live" argument in America in 1963, when this book was written.  The second edition of Paul Blanshard's American Freedom and Catholic Power came out in 1958, which made many of the same arguments forwarded by Lewy in this book. Yet, in 1963, the second Vatican Council was putting the finishing touches on a number of magisterial documents, including Dignitatis Humanae, which extended the Catholic concept of liberty past religious liberty and into the field of human rights. Over the next 30 years, those Catholic concepts would shake and ultimately destroy the foundations of the totalitarian survivor of this war of totalitarian giants.Lewy's book has many virtues and is worth reading, so long as the reader understands that ultimately Lewy is providing - in the last ten percent, at least - polemics with some scholarship mixed in.  It is unfortunate that his modern intellectual heirs don't read the first 90% and try to incorporate at least some of the scholarship; instead they seem to have pushed the envelope on the polemics.

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