Also, some of the Nazis smuggled out of Europe were wanted by the Soviets. I think it was wise to keep them out of Soviet hands.—–”That is, these were suspected war criminals and Quislings from areas occupied by the Red Army—legally US Forces were obliged to hand them over for trial to the Soviets. They were reluctant to do this partly because fair trial could hardly be expected in Stalinist USSR (see Operation Keelhaul). The deal with Draganovi? involved getting the visitors to Rome: “Dragonovich handled all phases of the operation after the defectees arrived in Rome, such as the procurement of IRO Italian and South American documents, visas, stamps, arrangements for disposition, land or sea, and notification of resettlement committees in foreign lands.”[15] US intelligence used these methods in order to get important Nazi scientists and military strategists, to the extent they had not already been claimed by the Soviet Union, to their own centres of military science in the US. Many Nazi scientists were employed by the US, retrieved in Operation Paperclip.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_(history)

The Soviets were allies of the Nazis, at that time, due to the Moletov-Ribentrop treaty.

The historical truth is that the Soviet Union has more to apologize for, than any other nation but Germany, in allowing Hitler to terrorize the world.

Also, MRS Weisenthal survived by pretending to be a Catholic, with the help of the Catholic Church.—-Getting Nazis to leave Europe, as Germany was falling, made sense. It helped in the war sooner. It protected those in prison. Ever wonder why anyone was left alive, in the camps?Weisenthal had ever right to go after the war criminals.The Church, on the other hand, had a right and an obligation to strike the best deal it could, at the time, to protect the most people.—-How many of you think that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to go into exile, instead of fighting a war to remove him? I hear that, at times, from the left. WW2 had already taken enough blood. Those in Europe just wanted it to end.

“Elie Wiesel played an important role in Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (novel) hoax. The book describes Eastern European peasants engaging in incest, drowning, and meaningless violence – such as eyeballs being plucked out. Kosinski shows his deep hatred toward peasants and his complete ignorance about their life. He describes them using the same paint as Anti-Semitic books described Jews.

The real wartime experiences of Jerzy Kosinski were as follows: he survived under forged identity in the family of Catholic Poles in relatively safe and warm conditions. A Catholic priest had issued a forged baptism statement, that was the common practise in the Polish Catholic Church during the WW2. He was reunited with his parents after the war, but he has never showed any gratitude towards his rescuers. According to Kosinski’s biographer, his family survived the war by pretending to be Christians, and this may have instilled in him a propensity to dissemble.

According to Janusz Glowacki, the idea to pretend that Painted Bird is based on his experience came to Kosinski, when Elie Wiesel informed him, that the review he wrote would not be very positive. During private meeting, Kosinski was able to convince Wiesel that his novel is one of the documentary about the horrors of Holocaust. Based on this assumption, Wiesel wrote enthusiastic review, that made Kosinski’s novel famous. Painted Bird was even used during official lessons on Holocaust. This contributed to the false impression, that cruel peasants of Eastern Europe were one of the important actors of Holocaust. Reality was quite opposite: 98% of Jews were killed either in Gas chambers or killed by special squads of German police (”Einsatzgroupen”) formed mostly by city dwellers from Germany.”

http://www.thebestlinks.com/Elie_Wiesel.html

Travel upthread, and you will see someone call the Pope a Nazi.

Did you mean Elie Wiesel?OrDid you mean Simon Wiesenthal?

There are probably a few people, in history, named Simon Wiesel and named Elie Wiesenthal. They arent often quoted on the Holocaust, however.

Elie Wiesel, by the way, had a son who was protected by a Catholic nurse:

http://isurvived.org/TOC-III.html

What was the biggest motivator of that?

Jews died. The Catholic church survived.

BOTH were in the same place same time.

As I have said, the dynamic is more complicated than your defensive simplicity.

And you pauliecon are not a Jew.

Why do you come to use them and their suffering here?

I hadn’t paid much attention to this thread but I ALWAYS read your posts.

You alerted me to a shot on me by…

yup pauliecon!

The whiner who gripes about me bullying him slides in to damn me with faint praise.

Excuse me? How exactly do you figure that helping war criminals escape justice AFTER THE WAR saved thousands of Jewish lives?The exact figures are no doubt a Vatican state secret, but Elie Weisenthal’s estimates placed the number of war criminals that escaped Europe after the war through several Catholic Church ratlines at about 10,000. They included such wonderful humanitarians as Eichmann, Barbie and Mengele. Further, these criminals received financial support for decades, funnelled through the Vatican Bank and the Argentine government. Look it up!

It doesn’t take a genius to know that the Catholic church had to have played a little ball with Hitler. They didn’t have much choice. Hitler controlling the entire continent and all.

On the other side of things, Hitler was smart enough not to take on the Church. Too, Italy began the war as an ally.

It is a complicated dynamic that isn’t interesting enough to go into.

It IS worthy of more than your simplistic and defensive analysis.

(Most bigots are idiots)

Have you read ANY of my links?Do you deny that Jewish Rabbis, and the State of Israel, have THANKED the Catholic Church, and praised the Pope, for the Church’s resistance to Hitler?

You are wrong.

Being wrong is forgivable.

You have been given the tools to correct your error, but, sadly:

You are also deliberately, hatefully ignorant.

You will have to take that one up with God.

The Catholic Church tried to help millions, all across Europe.

Have you read the estimates of the number of Jews that the Vatican, alone protected?

The estimates are 300,000 at the LOW end, and, perhaps, as many as 860,000. We can not be sure how many of those Jews that the Vatican tried to protect, actually made it out of the country.

However, Since you challenge MY claim that the VAST majority of people that the Vatican protected were Jewish — please give me YOUR numbers?

Do you honestly contend that the Vatican guaranteed safe passage for 300,000 or more Nazis?

Also, do you have a problem with the Vatican offering protection, to a Nazi, if that protection saved thousands of Jewish lives?

Again, bone up on your math skills.

And your research.

I sincerely doubt that you can come up with very many Nazis that the Vatican helped to escape.

Again, do you have a clue what the Vatican got, in exchange?

No, you do not.

So shut up until you know what you are talking about, ok?

I’m not so sure about that; what about all the Nazi war criminals that the Vatican provided with false papers and money through the Peron pipeline for decades after the war?

The Catholic Church recognizes this Catholic Nun, who converted from her Jewish Faith, as a Saint.

http://www.holycross.edu/departments/history/vlapomar/hiatt/catholic.htm

However, those Catholics, Lutherans and others who resisted Hitler were also protected by the Church.

The State of Israel is officially very grateful to the Pope of the time.

Who the hell are you to question the official position of many Rabbi’s and Israeli officials?

The Catholic Church was heroic during this time.

The Vatican helped thousands excape. I trust the judgement of the Church, if the Church promised to protect a Nazi, in exchange for the Nazi protecting innocent lives.

What the hell did YOUR religion do, you pompous ass?

“According to the Nazi theory, Christianity’s roots in the Old Testament meant that whoever was against the Jews should also be against the Catholic Church. And ample documentation, gathered by Löw, records Catholics’ assistance to Jews, which angered the Nazis.

The author cites how the Nazis invoked “the unconquerable arm of the spirit of blood and earth against the Hebrew plague and Christianity.”

Löw recounts in detail what Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann said and wrote about Jews and Catholics. In particular, Hitler wished to trample the Catholic Church “as one does a frog.”
http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=32525

Again, those who bash the Catholic Church, over the Holocaust or the 3rd Reich, are ignorant, hateful jerks.

No other non-military organization on the planet did more to stop Hitler, and protect the innocent, than the Catholic Church.