Dear DovBear:
Real historians know that Dalin's defense of Pius XII is fraudulent. Pius was not an evil man but he was most concerned with the institution of the church and what would happen to it after the war. While he knew intimatedly about German affairs and how he himself had helped to destroy the earliest enemies of Hitler, the Catholic Center Party, he feared Boshevism more. Like many on the Right the fear of Bolshevism prevented any meaningful help for the Jews, even when this fear was not coupled with the tradition anti-semitism of the Church.
One has only to ask one question: do you really think that in less than 10 years of Hitler's regime, from 1933 to the start of extermination in occupied Russia, Hitler was able to turn normal Germans into muderers? It needed the 1800 years of preparation through Christian hatred of Jews.
Our rightists want to defend Pius XII because they see him as a bulwark of anti-communism. They are not interested in truth, only in propagands.
Norman Ravitch
Emeritus Professor of History
Univ. of California, Riverside
Thank you for your letter Dr. Ravitch. To your final point, I'll add only that our rightists (by which I mean the GOP-Jews) wish to defend Pius because they see him as a religious, god-fearing man, and their limited imaginations simply can't conceive of a religious, god-fearing man behaving improperly.