One benefit of an open society is the chance to engage in debate, and on that score, my Easter column on atheism set off a small flurry of responses.While it's impossible to properly address all matters here, one in particular is worth revisiting -- the notion Adolf Hitler was Catholic, along with the idea that the Second World War-era pope, Pius XII, was "Hitler's Pope."
That accusation, the title of a book a few years back, was repeated by Richard Dawkins in his latest polemic against religion, The God Delusion.
On Hitler's alleged Catholicism, William Shirer, author of the 1960 classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, notes Hitler's nominal Catholic upbringing. Other historians have also reprinted Nazi party statements that seem to indicate Hitler was sympathetic to Christianity.
Except, as Shirer points out, the young Austrian also made clear in Mein Kampf that he thought the mistake of earlier German nationalist movements was their opposition to the churches. He thought it a tactical mistake. Tellingly, as Shirer notes, Hitler disliked the Catholicism of a certain Austrian politician, Dr. Karl Lueger, but admired how Lueger dealt with the Catholic church politically.
"His policy was fashioned with infinite shrewdness," wrote Hitler.
Hitler also said nice things about Protestants and union members, and killed them anyway. Anyone who thinks Hitler was sincere in his professions toward religion or anything else errs, as did British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who took Hitler's promises of peace at face value. If Hitler believed anything mystical, it was in ancient German pagan myths.
On the allegation that Pope Pius XII was sympathetic to or craven toward Hitler, the popular belief is wrong.
Yes, there were plenty of Nazi sympathizers in German Catholic and Protestant circles and historically, Martin Luther's anti-Semitism didn't help. But there were plenty of the same who actively opposed Hitler, including the Vatican in Rome.
Despite the Vatican's concordat with the Nazi government in 1933 (actually an action to protect Catholics, although unwise in retrospect as the diplomatic agreement gave Hitler an initial measure of respectability), it didn't mean the papal secretary of state, Monsignor Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, was soft on Hitler.
In his 2005 book, The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Rabbi David G. Dalum demolishes this
assertion that first popped up in a 1963 play from a left-wing writer in Germany, and which later became conventional wisdom.
In 1964, Livia Rothkirchen, then of Israel's Holocaust museum, wrote a scathing review of a book which alleged Pope Pius XII was sympathetic to the Nazis.
In 1967, Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide argued that Pius XII "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000 but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands."
Michael Tagliacozzo, a survivor of the Nazi roundup of Jews in Rome, staunchly defended Pius's role during the Nazi occupation.
Tagliacozzo notes that at the Pope's instruction, 5,000 Roman Jews were sheltered in monasteries and convents in Rome; 3,000 other Italian Jews were hid at the papal summer retreat, Castel Gandolfo.
On the German side, in 1939, Josef Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazi leadership believed that as pope, Pacelli would continue the "pro-Jewish" policy he had followed as Vatican secretary of state.
"We should not forget that in the long run the pope in Rome is a greater enemy of National Socialism than Churchill or Roosevelt," said high-ranking Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in a recorded exchange between himself and associates in the middle of the war.
The feeling was mutual. In his first encyclical, in 1939, Pius XII explicitly condemned and rejected Nazism; the New York Times gave it a Page 1 headline.
On Pius's supposed later silence, Dalum quotes one Jewish survivor who argued such silence was exactly what Jewish leaders in Nazi-occupied countries advised; they thought open papal criticism would incite the Nazis to further atrocities.
Still, the Pope managed to communicate enough displeasure that in October 1942, the London Times praised Pius for his condemnation of Nazism and his public support for the Jewish victims.
As Rabbi Dalin writes, "for Jewish leaders of the postwar generation, the idea that Pope Pius XII could be smeared as 'Hitler's Pope' would have been shocking."
He points out the pontiff was acclaimed by Albert Einstein, Israel's first president Chaim Weizman, Israeli prime ministers Golda Meir and Moshe Sharett, the chief rabbi of Israel Rabbi Isaac Herzog and Dr. Alexander Safran, the chief rabbi of Romania.
Why does any of this matter? Because for all its faults or those of its adherents -- and on this atheists are no exception to mankind's tendencies -- religion has a positive side. Honest atheists -- of whom, yes, I count many as my friends -- know this.
It's the missionary atheists such as Richard Dawkins who seem unable to grasp that truth.
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