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Article: PIUS XII & THE HOLOCAUST : Sorting out a tragic legacy.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- December 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Pius XII's response or lack of response to the Nazi extermination of the Jews has been the subject of heated controversy since Rolf Hochhuth's 1964 play The Deputy depicted the princely Eugenio Pacelli as a miser and a coward. Last year John Cornwell's tendentious Hitler's Pope (Viking) reinvigorated Hochhuth's malevolent caricature, charging Pius with anti-Semitism, connivance with Hitler's rise to power, and, in case slow readers didn't get the point, even with starting World War I.
A stream of books published this fall tries to make sense of Pius's seeming indifference to the fate of the Jews. Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Our Sunday Visitor), by law ...