Pius XII And The Third Reich

6 Pages 1613 Words

“From the very fist month of the occupation [in Poland], hundreds of priests were arrested and executed; Catholic intellectuals, both clerics and laics, were sent to the concentration camp at Oranienburg (Belt 71).” “Of five hundred priests in the diocese [Chelmno-Pelplin in Pomeranic, Poland], only twenty were still alive (Belt 72).” “A report sent to Rome concluded that out of two thousand priests a third were dead and that seven hundred were in prison (Belt 78).” “The Nazis in Poland alone murdered more than three million Catholics together with over three million Jews (Chao 7).”
The Jewish community was not the only people under persecution by the Third Reich during the Second World War. “"The heaviest blow to humanity" he [Hitler] once said, "was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of Jews (Chao 7)."” Hitler wanted to extirpate the Catholic Church because he thought that Catholics and Jews were the source of every evil. Hitler wanted to create a national German Church that would be loyal to the Führer; the leader, Hitler himself. If this church had been created, then Hitler would have not had as much resistance and the ‘Final Solution’ might have been a greater possibility.
In September 1943, just after a few days into the German occupation of Italy, Hitler wanted to have Friedrich Otto Wolff, supreme commander of the SS in Italy, to occupy the Vatican and take Pope Pius XII and the Curia to Liechtenstein (Cornwell 313-314). Hitler wanted to take Pius XII under his control. What was he thinking?
Yes, it is true that the Christian and Jewish religions had been in conflict with each other numerous times in the past. From the being of Christianity, the Jewish Community has been under attack and always being persecuted. In the first few centuries, the Jewish people were used as the scapegoat for the Roman Empire and some people e...