9.** ? 1940’s It was not immediately obvious to world just how bad the Jews were being treated. About 6 million were put to death. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered 1.3 million people to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz, around 90 percent of them Jewish.**
10. 1940 Seven years after the Concordat – Jewish physicist Albert Einstein praises the Church as being the only one who stood in the way of Hitler and the oppression of freedom.
11.** 1943 – 1944 Pope Pius XII works directly to help save the Jews in Rome. See physical documentation from 1943 below.**
Hitler was under no illusions about the Catholic Church’s opposition to his regime:
Should we decide to recall our present representative from the Vatican, I can see no adequate reason for sending any fresh incumbents to this Embassy. The relations between Germany and the Vatican are based on the Concordat. But this same Concordat is no more than the survival of agreements reached between the Vatican and the different German States, and with the disappearance of the latter and their incorporation in the German Reich, it has become obsolete. It is true that it has as its basis these various agreements, but it is a confirmation of past agreements rather than a current agreement in force. (#248 4 July 1942, at dinner)
…I have shown myself unresponsive to the attempts of the Vatican towards extension of the provisions of the Concordat to embrace the newly acquired territories of the Reich. The Saar, Sudetenland, Bohemia and Moravia, the Reichsgau Danzig-East Prussia, the Warthegau, a large part of Silesia and Alsace-Lorraine have, in fact, no relations with the Roman Catholic Church which are supported by international agreement. In those territories, therefore, Church affairs must be settled locally. If the Papal Nuncio seeks audience of the Foreign Office and tries through this channel to gain some say in religious developments in the new territories, his advances must be rejected. (#248, 4 July 1942, at dinner)
Once the war is over we will put a swift end to the Concordat. It will give me the greatest personal pleasure to point out to the Church all those occasions on which it has broken the terms of it. One need only recall the close cooperation between the Church and the murderers of Heydrich. Catholic priests not only allowed them to hide in a church on the outskirts of Prague, but even allowed them to hide in a church on the outskirts of Prague, but even allowed them to entrench themselves in the sanctuary of the altar. (#248, 4 July 1942, at dinner)
Not only the history of the past, but also present times afford numberless examples of the very hard-boiled diplomats to be found in the service of the Catholic Church, and how extremely cautious one must be in dealing with them. (#248, 4 July 1942, at dinner)
The fact that I remain silent in public over Church affairs is not in the least misunderstood by the sly foxes of the Catholic Church, and I am quite sure that a man like the Bishop von Galen knows full well that after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing. And, if he does not succeed in getting himself transferred in the meanwhile to the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, he may rest assured that in the balancing of our accounts, no “T” will remain uncrossed, no “I” undotted! The attitude of the Bishop von Galen affords just one more argument in favor of terminating the Concordat after the war, substituting for it regional regulation and the immediately withholding from the Church the financial support at present guaranteed to it by that treaty. (#248, 4 July 1942, at dinner)
I have numerous accounts to settle, about which I cannot think today. But that doesn’t mean I forget them. I write them down. The time will come to bring out the big book! …One acts more shrewdly when one bides one’s time…When I read of the speeches of a man like Galen, I tell myself that there’s no point in administering p(name removed by moderator)ricks, and that for the moment it’s preferable to be silent. (#52, 25 October 1941, evening)
The great ambition of the parson clique is, and always has been, to undermine the power of the State. And for as long as we suffer these parsons in our midst, it serves us right! Every country gets the type of parson it deserves, at the moment I can do nothing about it, and so I shall continue to keep them happy. But one of these days, I shall bring this conflict, as old as Germany itself, to an abrupt and decisive conclusion. I’ll make these damned parsons feel the power of the State in a way they would never have dreamed possible! For the moment I am just keeping my eye on them; if I ever have the slightest suspicion that they are getting dangerous, I will shoot the lot of them. This filthy reptile raises its head wherever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on wherever it does so. (#287 - 11 August 1942 - Evening)
Methods of persuasion of a moral order are not an effective weapon against those who despise the truth - when we have to do with priests, for example, of a Church who know that everything about it is based on lies, and who live by it. They think me a spoilsport when I rise up in their midst, indeed, I am going to spoil their little games. (#52, 25 October 1941, evening)
Those who hate the Church will always have plenty of reasons to hate It.