Word: nazis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only to cases like Pinochet's, when somebody who has committed truly terrible crimes on a massive scale would otherwise avoid the reach of justice. This principle has been accepted and applied by prestigious national courts in the past. The Israeli supreme court did so when it tried the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman. American courts also accepted the principle when they extradited John Demjanjuk to Israel for trial as a Nazi war criminal...
...left without recourse. If taken seriously, Pinochet's argument would mean that any criminal leader could avoid all consequences of their actions, simply by granting him or herself immunity. If Slobodon Milosevic decides to grant himself immunity, should the world really have to respect that? Had Hitler granted Nazi leaders immunity, should the world really have had to respect that...
...scene is the papal kitchen, 1942. Pope Pius XII is holding two closely written sheets. On them is his denunciation of the Nazi persecution of European Jews, to be published by evening. But word has just arrived that after Holland's bishops issued a similar statement from the pulpit, the Germans deported 40,000 Catholics of Jewish origin. If the Dutch protest cost 40,000 lives, Pius says, "my own could cost the lives of perhaps 200,000 Jews. I cannot take such a great responsibility. It is better to remain silent before the public and do in private...
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...
...dictator set only a few conditions: the disbanding of the Catholic-dominated German Center Party and the defining of any Catholic criticism of Nazi political acts as "foreign interference." The 1933 concordat, claims Cornwell, "imposed a moral duty on Catholics to obey the Nazi rulers" and so neutered Germany's "last democratic focus." (Catholics made up one-third of the German population.) Pacelli, meanwhile, commenced his long silence on Jewish persecution...