Religion

Eugene

(62,648 posts) Mon Mar 4, 2019, 01:15 PM Mar 2019

Vatican to unseal archives on controversial WWII pope

Source: The Guardian

Vatican to unseal archives on controversial WWII pope

Pope Francis wants Pius XII, accused of not condemning Holocaust, ‘correctly’ judged

Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent
Mon 4 Mar 2019 16.22 GMT

Vatican archives on Pope Pius XII, the controversial wartime pontiff accused of failing to condemn the Holocaust, are to be opened next year after pressure from campaigners and historians.

Pope Francis announced the archives would be unsealed in March 2020, eight years ahead of schedule, saying the Roman Catholic church was “not afraid of history”.

His predecessor had been “criticised, one can say, with some prejudice and exaggeration”, he added.

The role of Pius XII, a staunch anti-communist who became pope in March 1939, six months before war engulfed Europe, has long been questioned by historians.

According to a display in Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, Pius “did not intervene” when Jews were rounded up and deported from Rome to Auschwitz.

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5 replies

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Vatican to unseal archives on controversial WWII pope (Original Post) Eugene Mar 2019 OP

Be careful what you wish for Cartoonist Mar 2019 #1

Indeed. Raster Mar 2019 #2

Alois Hudal was an Austrian titular bishop... Raster Mar 2019 #3

"the archives would be unsealed in March 2020, eight years ahead of schedule," trotsky Mar 2019 #4

Pope wink wink nudge nudge. Voltaire2 Mar 2019 #5

Cartoonist

(7,530 posts)

1. Be careful what you wish for

Reply to Eugene (Original post)

Mon Mar 4, 2019, 01:28 PM

Mar 2019

the Roman Catholic church was “not afraid of history”.

Raster

(20,999 posts)

2. Indeed.

Reply to Cartoonist (Reply #1)

Mon Mar 4, 2019, 01:43 PM

Mar 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/nazis-escaped-on-red-cross-documents

Red Cross and the Vatican helped thousands of Nazis to escape

Research shows how travel documents ended up in hands of the likes of Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie in the postwar chaos

The Red Cross and the Vatican both helped thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to escape after the second world war, according to a book that pulls together evidence from unpublished documents.

The Red Cross has previously acknowledged that its efforts to help refugees were used by Nazis because administrators were overwhelmed, but the research suggests the numbers were much higher than thought.

Gerald Steinacher, a research fellow at Harvard University, was given access to thousands of internal documents in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The documents include Red Cross travel documents issued mistakenly to Nazis in the postwar chaos.

They throw light on how and why mass murderers such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie and thousands of others evaded capture by the allies.

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