Word: hochhuth
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...Deputy, German Playwright Rolf Hochhuth earned instant international notoriety by indicting Pope Pius XII for his failure to speak out against Nazi persecution of the Jews. Hochhuth's second play, Soldiers, which had its world premiere in Berlin last week, casts an accusing glance at Sir Winston Churchill. In essence, Soldiers contends that Churchill was responsible for the mysterious death, in July 1943, of General Wladyslavv Sikorski, leader of Poland's exile government...
...Hochhuth portrayed Pius XII as a Machiavellian "inverted mystic" who hoped to use Hitler to save Europe from Communism. The Churchill of Soldiers seems to be an equally callous caricature. According to the play, Britain's wartime Prime Minister (played by Otto Hasse) was a tragic figure who authorized immoral acts in hopes of saving his nation. Among them was the murder of Sikorski, a stiff-necked patriot who infuriated Stalin first by demanding the postwar return of Polish territories annexed by Russia, then by calling for an investigation of the Katyn massacre of 4,253 Polish military prisoners...
Although a number of World War II historians have been suspicious of Sikorski's death,* Hochhuth could only claim that the bulk of the "evidence" is on file in a Swiss bank vault and cannot be revealed for 50 years. But what disappointed the opening-night audience in Berlin was a lack not of historical evidence but of dramatic talent. Soldiers came across as a static bore, filled with ponderous moralisms and unwitty aphorisms ("Marriage," says Churchill, "is love without longing") and totally lacking in tension...
...possibility of compiling official German documents on the subject. From these and other sources-but not from Vatican documents, which were not available to him-Friedlander wrote Pius XII and the Third Reich (Knopf; $4.95). It seems likely to create the same kind of stir as Playwright Rolf Hochhuth's polemical The Deputy...
...Hochhuth, basing his play on a hit-or-miss reading of history, argued that Pius stayed silent because he wanted Germany preserved as a bulwark against the conquest of Europe by Russian Communism. Friedlander, an Israeli citizen whose parents died at Auschwitz and who is now associate professor at Geneva's Graduate Institute of International Studies, comes to much the same conclusion...