Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That gemlike story has long served as a key anecdotal exhibit in the defense of Pius for his public silence during the Nazi genocide. In his scathing new book, Hitler's Pope, British author John Cornwell repeats it--but not to Pius' benefit. The 40,000 figure, he reports, was impossible--twice the total of all Jews deported from Holland by that date. The likely number of deported Jewish-Catholic converts, Cornwell says, was "no more than 92." Though undeniably tragic, 92 deaths seem a thin reed on which to base a continent-wide policy of discretion in the face...
Such painstaking--and painful--revisionism suggests why, three weeks before its publication and a week before the appearance of a long excerpt in Vanity Fair, a Vatican theologian had already branded Hitler's Pope a "shameful libel." Cornwell, a practicing Catholic, says he originally enlisted "on the side of all these chaps in believing Pius had had a really bad deal" at his critics' hands. But research into the lightly trod territory of Pius' decades-long German involvement before his papacy left Cornwell in a state of "moral shock," he says. "The material I had gathered amounted...
...from a family of Vatican loyalists dedicated to tightening Rome's rein on its semi-independent European churches. As a diplomat in Germany, he pursued the long-term goal of a church-state pact granting Rome near total control over its Teutonic flock. No German leader would sign--until Hitler...
...evidence." Blet was one of four Jesuits who compiled the official 12-volume record of Pius' war years from Vatican archives. He too has a new book: a useful summary titled Pius XII and the Second World War. Blet maintains that the 1933 pact was "practically imposed by Hitler." And papal power was hardly its only carrot: "The Nazis offered such good conditions that it would have been crazy not to sign it." Cornwell's implication of Pacelli in the Center Party's demise, he notes, rests heavily on uncorroborated memoirs by a former party head...
...hard to imagine Adolf Hitler as a sex symbol. Yet during the '30s, he set many a Madchen's heart aflutter. Unfortunately for them, the Fuhrer was already smitten by a saucy teenager named Angelika Raubal, daughter of his half-sister. Hansen's fictional tour de force sticks to the historical record, but what may or may not have been said or done in private is of necessity impure fiction--dramatizations of Hitler as a sexually disabled masochist are graphic and over the top. Still, this is a painless way to learn a little history and enjoy such priceless dialogue...