I have been posting a lot of information defending Pope Pius XII against charges that he did little or nothing if not abating the Holocaust of the Jewish people in Europe from the Nazis rise to power in 1933 to their defeat at tremendous cost in 1945. At least six million Jews and approximately another six million Gentiles were deliberately murdered at the orders of the Nazi regime from Hitler down to the privates of the regular army and particularly the SS. People want to blame someone for the fact that this was allowed to happen. The most blame must fall onto the shoulders of Adolf Hitler and his immediate associates like Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, Joseph Mengele to name a few. They set the stage and used the political and financial crisis of the early depression coupled with the German belief that they were not to blame for the first world war and had been betrayed by the politicians. The German people themselves are next to blame, millions of citizens of one of the most advanced culture in the world turned their back on their neighbors and friends and even war heroes because it was just easier to obey the Nazis. Millions of those Germans who survived the war claimed they didnt know. That is a load of horse hockey. Maybe if you lived in a remote agricultural area in southern Germany I could consider that as an acceptable excuse. Not so in the industrial and major population centers. The average citizen of Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, etc may not have personally known and befriended Jewish citizens, but they certainly knew of them. So how could they explain why first Jewish people were harassed in the streets, then their homes and shops vandalized, then their synagogues were burned, and then their Jewish neighbors disappeared totally? They cannot. The German people KNEW what their leaders were ordering and in what they were complicit. But the assignment of blame continues. Let us look at France and Great Britain. By the Treaty of Versailles and due to the carnage of the First World War and the aggression of Prussia against France in 1870; an important piece of land called the Rhineland was to be devoid of German military force. On March 7, 1936 German troops marched into the Rhineland. At night they sneaked back over the river and re-marched into the Rhineland. This was an act of war. The Allies Britain and France who outnumbered the Germans 10 to 1 could have quashed that in an instant. Still unwilling to see the dangers of Nazism, British PM Stanley Baldwin and French PM Albert Sarraut worried about public opinion at home and opted to see it as Hitler marching into his back yard. Mussolini the Italian dictator, already mad about sanctions against Italy due to the invasion of Ethiopia, decided to join Hitler. Jump to 1938. Hitler is threatening war if he isnt ceded land in Czechoslovakia where there are some German speaking people (who had never been part of any German state excepting Austria) in a region called the Sudetenland. In order to avoid war and trusting Josef Stalin of the USSR, British PM Neville Chamberlain pressured the French PM Edouard Daladier to sell out the Czechs and the world and let Hitler have what he wanted. Between the French and Czech armies, Germany would have been vastly outnumbered and bogged down in a two front war. But the French were afraid to go it alone without Britain. To make it more sad, at the time of the Czech crisis (September 1938), there was a plot by the German regular army officers to arrest Hitler if he started a war over the Sudetenland. Within 11 years and FIFTY million dead, the Nazis were finally defeated.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 23:24:04 +0000
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