WikiLeaks cables: Vatican vetoed Holocaust memorial over Pius XII row

[TheTrueCentrist]

guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/21/wikileaks-cables-vatican-holocaust-pius

"The Vatican has withdrawn from a written agreement to join an international Holocaust memorial organisation because of tensions over the activity of Pope Pius XII, the pope during the second world war, American diplomatic cables show.

Relations have become so frosty that the Vatican “rowed back on a prior written agreement” to take up observer status on an international organisation dedicated to remembering the Holocaust and transmitting its lessons to the future, according to Julieta Valls Noyes, the number two at the American embassy to the Holy See."

 

[Not_Sure_1]

maybe the Vatican should be allowed to keep its own business, and people shouldn’t care whether they donate money to a holocaust memorial or not. Plus, these same people are pressuring the Vatican about the canonization of Pius XII, and spreading lies that demean his character, by saying he helped Hitler. Pope Pius XII hid many jews in the Vatican and even gave them baptismal certificates, so he could say they were Catholic.

 

[Joseph_L_Varga]

Here’s a good outline of how and why the false accusations against Pope Pius XII were invented. It’s a pity that the Holocaust Memorial Organization believed the lies. All they had to do was do some research to find out the truth, and ask the many Italian Jews who were saved from Nazis because they were hidden in Catholic monasteries and convents.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_12

Seat 12

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seat 12 also known as Operation Seat 12 was a disinformation campaign of communist propaganda during the Cold War to discredit the moral authority of the Vatican because of its outspoken anti-communism.[1][2][3] In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev authorized a covert plan to discredit the Vatican’s moral authority in Western Europe with a campaign of disinformation due to its fervent anticommunism, Venerable Pope Pius XII being the prime target.[4][5][6] The motto of Seat 12 was “Dead men cannot defend themselves” since Pius died in 1958.[7]

The plot was revealed by Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Romanian general who headed the secret service before defecting in 1978 (the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Warsaw Pact).[8] He reports that General Ivan Agayants, chief of the KGB’s disinformation department, created the outline for what was to become a play mischaracterizing the Pope as a Nazi sympathizer, The Deputy, that the purported research for the play consisted of forgeries[9] and the research was done not by its claimed author Rolf Hochhuth but by KGB agents and that the play’s producer, Erwin Piscator, founder of the Proletarian Theater in Berlin who had sought asylum in the USSR during the war, was a devout Communist who had long established ties with the USSR.[10][11][12] The play had its debut at east Berlin’s Freie Volksbühne (“Free People’s Theater”)[13] The play toured the Eastern Bloc and then proceeded to tour the free world.[14]

The KGB employed Romanian spies to feign that Romania was preparing the reestablish dipolmatic relations with the Holy See.[15] Under this ruse, Pacepa obtained entree to Vatican archives from the Church’s head of secret discussions with the Warsaw Pact, Monsignor Agostino Casaroli.[16] Three communist spies in the guise of priests over two years secreted materials out of the archives for copying and transfer to the KGB.[17] “In fact,” Pacepa reported, “no incriminating material against the pontiff ever turned up.”[18] General Ivan Agayants, head of Soviet disinformation, while in Bucharest in 1963, informed Pacepa the disinformation campaign had “materialised into a powerful play attacking Pope Pius XII”, Agrayants having authored the outline of The Deputy and overseen KGB’s compilation of the “research” which incorporated documents Pacepa’s agents had purloined from the Vatican.[19]

The American producer of Seat 12’s play was also a communist, many of the press who lauded the play had deep connections to leftist or Communist causes, a highly Communist influenced periodical helped to guarantee the Deputy played on Broadway, and even early reviews had communist links.[20] Pacepa also relates that in 1974 Yuri Andropov admitted that had Soviets known in 1963 what they knew in 1974 (newly released information that Hitler was hostile to and plotted against Pius XII) they would never have gone after him.[21][22]

A declassified British intelligence memorandum, dated January 10, 1969, surmises that Hochhuth may have played a knowing role in spreading communist propaganda, rather than having been a dupe, saying he “might perhaps be an ‘intellectual agent, writing either on behalf of the East Germans or the Soviets” and the British agents declined to “discount the possibility of long-term efforts by the communists to foster Hochhuth’s allegations until they become legend." [23] The memorandum continued: “whether Hochhuth is motivated only by the urge to write historical plays, to rehabilitate the Germans or is up to some more sinister game is difficult to determine at this stage. But the Russians are certainly reaping some of the benefit.”[24]

Writer and law professor, Ronald Rychlak, concluded that Hochhuth might not have been a knowing actor in the propaganda but was a “perfect candidate to be an unknowing dupe.”[25] As Rychlak noted: “his ideology was not far removed from Marxism. He also admitted that he was, at least at times, anticlerical. He was particularly opposed to priestly celibacy.”[26]

Referring to Pacepa’ account, German historian Michael Feldkamp indicates that “Pacepa’s report is wholly credible. It fits like a missing piece in the puzzle of communist propaganda and disinformation aimed at discrediting the Catholic Church and its Pontiff."[27]

 

[Joseph_L_Varga]

Here’s a quote from General Ion Mihai Pacepa’s article - see full article at the website given below:

nationalreview.com/articles/219739/moscows-assault-vatican/ion-mihai-pacepa

The Deputy saw the light in 1963 as the work of an unknown West German named Rolf Hochhuth, under the title Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy). Its central thesis was that Pius XII had supported Hitler and encouraged him to go ahead with the Jewish Holocaust. It immediately ignited a huge controversy around Pius XII, who was depicted as a cold, heartless man more concerned about Vatican properties than about the fate of Hitler’s victims. The original text presents an eight-hour play, backed by some 40 to 80 pages (depending on the edition) of what Hochhuth called “historical documentation.” In a newspaper article published in Germany in 1963, Hochhuth defends his portrayal of Pius XII, saying: “The facts are there — forty crowded pages of documentation in the appendix to my play.” In a radio interview given in New York in 1964, when The Deputy opened there, Hochhuth said, “I considered it necessary to add to the play a historical appendix, fifty to eighty pages (depending on the size of the print).” In the original edition, the appendix is entitled “Historische Streiflichter” (historical sidelights). The Deputy has been translated into some 20 languages, drastically cut and with the appendix usually omitted.

Before writing The Deputy, Hochhuth, who did not have a high school diploma (Abitur), was working in various inconspicuous capacities for the Bertelsmann publishing house. In interviews he claimed that in 1959 he took a leave of absence from his job and went to Rome, where he spent three months talking to people and then writing the first draft of the play, and where he posed “a series of questions” to one bishop whose name he refused to reveal. Hardly likely! At about that same time I used to visit the Vatican fairly regularly as an accredited messenger from a head of state, and I was never able to get any talkative bishop off into a corner with me — and it was not for lack of trying. The DIE illegal officers we infiltrated into the Vatican also encountered almost insurmountable difficulties in penetrating the Vatican secret archives, even though they had airtight cover as priests.

During my old days in the DIE, when I would ask my personnel chief, General Nicolae Ceausescu (the dictator’s brother), to give me a rundown of the file on some subordinate, he would always ask me, “For promotion or demotion?” During its first ten years of life, the Deputy leaned toward the Pope’s demotion. It generated a flurry of books and articles, some accusing and some defending the pontiff. Some went so far as to lay the blame for the Auschwitz atrocities on the pope’s shoulders, some meticulously tore Hochhuth’s arguments to shreds, but all contributed to the huge attention this rather stilted play received in its day. Today, many people who have never heard of The Deputy are sincerely convinced that Pius XII was a cold and evil man who hated the Jews and helped Hitler do away with them. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov, the unparalleled master of Soviet deception, used to tell me, people are more ready to believe smut than holiness.

continued

 

[Joseph_L_Varga]

…continued - quote from Pacepa’s article

FALSEHOODS UNDERMINED
Toward the mid 1970s, The Deputy started running out of steam. In 1974 Andropov conceded to us that, had we known then what we know today, we would never have gone after Pope Pius XII. What now made the difference was newly released information showing that Hitler, far from being friendly with Pius XII, had in fact been plotting against him.

Just a few days before Andropov’s admission, the former supreme commander of the German SS (Schutzstaffel) squadron in Italy during World War II, General Friedrich Otto Wolff, had been released from jail and confessed that in 1943 Hitler had ordered him to abduct Pope Pius XII from the Vatican. That order had been so hush-hush that it never turned up after the war in any Nazi archive. Nor had it come out at any of the many debriefings of Gestapo and SS officers conducted by the victorious Allies. In his confession Wolff claimed that he had replied to Hitler that his order would take six weeks to carry out. Hitler, who blamed the pope for the overthrow of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, wanted it done immediately. Eventually Wolff persuaded Hitler that there would be a great negative response if the plan were implemented, and the Führer dropped it.

It was also during 1974 that Cardinal Mindszenty published his book Memoirs, which describes in agonizing detail how he was framed in Communist Hungary. On the evidence of fabricated documents, he was charged with “treason, misuse of foreign currency, and conspiracy,” offenses “all punishable by death or life imprisonment.” He also describes how his falsified “confession” then took on a life of its own. “It seemed to me that anyone should at once have recognized this document as a crude forgery, since it is the product of a bungling, uncultivated mind,” the cardinal writes. “But when I subsequently went through foreign books, newspapers, and magazines that dealt with my case and commented on my ‘confession,’ I realized that the public must have concluded that the ‘confession’ had actually been composed by me, although in a semiconscious state and under the influence of brainwashing… [T]hat the police would have published a document they had themselves manufactured seemed altogether too brazen to be believed.” Furthermore, Hanna Sulner, the Hungarian handwriting expert used to frame the cardinal, who had escaped to Vienna, confirmed that she had forged Mindszenty’s “confession.”

A few years later, Pope John Paul II started the process of sanctifying Pius XII, and witnesses from all over the world have compellingly proved that Pius XII was an enemy, not a friend, of Hitler. Israel Zoller, the chief rabbi of Rome between 1943-44, when Hitler took over that city, devoted an entire chapter of his memoirs to praising the leadership of Pius XII. “The Holy Father sent by hand a letter to the bishops instructing them to lift the enclosure from convents and monasteries, so that they could become refuges for the Jews. I know of one convent where the Sisters slept in the basement, giving up their beds to Jewish refugees.” On July 25, 1944, Zoller was received by Pope Pius XII. Notes taken by Vatican secretary of state Giovanni Battista Montini (who would become Pope Paul VI) show that Rabbi Zoller thanked the Holy Father for all he had done to save the Jewish community of Rome — and his thanks were transmitted over the radio. On February 13, 1945, Rabbi Zoller was baptized by Rome’s auxiliary bishop Luigi Traglia in the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. In gratitude to Pius XII, Zoller took the Christian name of Eugenio (the pope’s name). A year later Zoller’s wife and daughter were also baptized.

David G. Dalin, in The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From the Nazis, published a few months ago, has compiled further overwhelming proof of Eugenio Pacelli’s friendship for the Jews beginning long before he became pope. At the start of World War II, Pope Pius XII’s first encyclical was so anti-Hitler that the Royal Air Force and the French air force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany.

Over the past 16 years, the freedom of religion has been restored in Russia, and a new generation has been struggling to develop a new national identity. We can only hope that President Vladimir Putin will see fit to open the KGB archives and set forth on the table, for all to see, how the Communists maligned one of the most important popes of the last century.

—Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.