As a Catholic who takes his religion seriously, E. Michael Jones is troubled, of course by the precipitous decline of the Catholic religion since Vatican II, but also by the very disproportionate influence that Jews have been acquiring in Western culture and politics, and now even within the Catholic Church itself, which formerly was the main entity keeping Jewish influence in check. For E. Michael Jones, when the Catholic Church loses its way, when the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit no longer faces formidable opposition, society as a whole suffers.

In societies such as the USA where there is “separation of church and state” (which Jones regards as a decadent condition) the Catholic Church has adjusted to this non-ideal arrangement by organizing moral watchdog groups to compensate for the lack of official regulation. The Catholic watchdog group that Jones most frequently discusses is the National Legion of Decency, which was organized in 1933 and used boycotts to force exclusion of immoral subject-matter and nudity from Hollywood movies. An analogous group is the German Volkswartbund founded in 1927 under the sponsorship of the Archbishop of Cologne, which according to Jones had its heyday fighting corruption of morals after 1945 in “liberated” Germany – at first successfully, but ultimately, like the Legion of Decency, losing the battle for decency in the 1960s.

Another important area of activism for the Catholic Church in the USA has been in galvanizing public opposition to foreign military interventions. The Church successfully lobbied against allowing sales of US-produced weapons and materiel to the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that the extension of credit therewith would lead to military intervention to rescue the investment (Blanshard 283-284).  The Church also helped to establish the overwhelming majority of public opinion opposing intervention in the Second World War (Blansharf 288-289). The most conspicuous example of Catholic anti-war leadership was the weekly radio broadcast of Father Charles Coughlin, who talked about Jewish agitation for war and Jewish control of mass-media that gave a distorted picture of the world. Coughlin's perspective on Hitler's Germany in 1938, approved (or in a very few instances rejected) for broadcast by an oversight committee, seems to have been very similar to the one that Jones espouses today: that is to say, Hitler's state was not ideal from a Catholic perspective, but it was understood as a defensive reaction to the (very real) Jewish Communist menace, and should be judged with those considerations in mind.

Not unrelated to the organized Catholic opposition to American military interventions was the Church's anti-Communism. The strongest support for Senator Joseph McCarthy was among Catholics (Blanshard 296).

The promotion of pornography and sexual immorality, the USA's ever more frequent waging of foreign wars for the benefit of Jewish interests, the simultaneous increase of both chaos and oppression within the USA – all of these phenomena E. Michael Jones sees as manifestations of the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit that the Catholic Church formerly combated. Today however, instead of recognizing and opposing the Jewish enemy, the Church is hors de combat. The Church has now given up its former opposition to Jewish mischief.

This is a gigantic disaster.

E. Michael Jones has long regarded the Catholic Church's resignation from the anti-Jewish struggle as in some way related to the Second Vatican Council's declaration on the Church's relationship with Jews, Nostra Aetate. Formerly he emphasized that the meaning of the document was being distorted by Jews and by mass-media to make it concede more than it did: this is certainly true; a mainstream journalist, senior editor Joseph Roddy of Look magazine, noted this already in January 1966. But recently Jones has been more concerned with the ambiguous verbiage in Nostra Aetate that makes such destructive interpretation possible, and asking how this could have been approved.

Perhaps the most important ambiguity in Nostra Aetate -- one that especially bothers Jones -- is its condemnation of “all forms of anti-Semitism,” where no definition of “anti-Semitism” is given. This is highly problematic, because there is disagreement about what that term should mean. The Catholic Church has long used the term anti-Semitism to mean bias against Jews strictly based on their race or ancestry, so that criticism of the Jewish religion or factual criticism of the behavior of certain Jews would not be anti-Semitism. Organized Jewry and mass-media however promote an entirely vague notion of anti-Semitism, which transforms Nostra Aetate's condemnation of “all forms of anti-Semitism” into a repudiation of formative figures in the Church's history like John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo. It becomes a general admonition against criticizing Jews or anything Jewish.

The fact that the Second Vatican Council approved Nostra Aetate with such ambiguities, and the document's overall philojudaic tone, Jones for roughly the past year has been attributing to the influence of Holocaust-propaganda.

Nostra Aetate's philojudaism and condemnation of “all forms of anti-Semitism” has induced Catholics to lower their guard against Jewish influence, allowing their traditional enemies to exert great influence over them. Jones complains especially about the co-opting of conservatism in the direction of supporting Middle-East wars. The putatively conservative American Enterprise Institute, which came under Neoconservative (Jewish) influence in the 1970s and now issues an annual Irving Kristol Award, Jones sees as generating propaganda to undermine Catholic Social Teaching. Pat Buchanan, certainly a very serious Catholic, talks in his important book Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (2001) about the disastrous blunder of welcoming Neoconservatives (i.e. warmongering Zionist Jews) into the Republican Party, and his regret of the role that he played in this. Without the Catholic Church's change of orientation toward Jews, Buchanan surely would have been less likely to make this blunder, and AEI's propaganda would perhaps encounter greater skepticism from Catholics.

Nostra Aetate is not however the exclusive avenue whereby Jones sees Jews using Holocaust-propaganda to undermine traditional Catholic positions. He sees the Holocaust as a general purpose weapon that Jews use to get their way.

At least since 2008, E. Michael Jones has been saying that a “Holocaust film,” The Pawnbroker (1964), was used as a “codebreaker” to allow Hollywood to breach the 31-year-old prohibition against showing women's bare breasts in feature films. Whatever sacred-cow status the gas-chamber story had at that time allowed the movie to get away with female nudity. This, says Jones, opened the door for a flood of hardcore pornographic movies only a few years later.

Jones has also said that Nostra Aetate induced the Legion of Decency to lower its vigilance, but this cannot be precisely true because the declaration came in October 1965, months after the movie was released. Rather, the lapse of vigilance in the face of “Holocaust porn” as Jones calls it, and the manifestation of weakness in Nostra Aetate, must both be effects of a deeper cause, of an aversion to offending Jews or an eagerness to serve Jews, that preceded the Second Vatican Council. This was evident already in 1959 with John XXIII's revision of the Church's ancient Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews, removing a word that the Jews found offensive.

Very recently Jones has repeatedly ridiculed the statement of a Jewish member of the Canadian parliament, Ya'ara Saks, who attacked the truckers protesting coronavirus restrictions by alleging that a trucker's sign “Honk, honk!” really meant “Heil Hitler!” Jones points out that the Holocaust is the foundation of rhetoric used to justify extreme measures against people that Jews regard as adversaries. Because of Holocaust-propaganda, the accusation of “anti-Semitism” becomes equivalent to an accusation of wanting to mass-murder Jews. Jones notes that not only criticizing but merely disagreeing with Jews now suffices to provoke this label. A difference of opinion can become a matter for the police. E. Michael Jones has been making his listeners aware that the Holocaust is a weapon used by Jews not only to undermine the Catholic Church but to bully the non-Jewish world, and for these reasons it must be disputed.

This represents a change from Jones' position of a few years ago, which was closer to mainstream Catholic rhetoric that tries to defend the Church against imputations of guilt for the Holocaust, not by combating the fable itself but by emphasizing (or exaggerating) differences between the Church and Hitler's government, while leaving the accusation itself intact.

Katharina Volckmer's novella The Appointment made Jones aware of the ethnic self-hatred that Holocaust-propaganda can induce, and, given that Germans are hugely influential in the Catholic Church, Jones evidently concluded that sidestepping the Holocaust-accusation and leaving it intact was not a good response. Holocaust-propaganda affects not only "Nazis": it affects Germans, and through them it affects the Catholic Church.

Jones has suggested that Benedict XVI, as a German pope, should have used his authority to dispute the Holocaust, championing his people against the Holocaust myth in the same way that the Polish pope had championed his people against Soviet Communism. He believes that Pope Benedict XVI should have directly and openly challenged the Federal Republic's restrictions on speech. Jones even claims to have inside information (from a friend of his who knew Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago) to the effect that the German pope had been elected precisely for that purpose. Benedict's neglect of the task was a terrible blunder:

“Because he didn't kill the Holocaust, the Holocaust killed him.” (E. Michael Jones on Our Interesting Times 16 August 2022, 45:15)

This refers to the affair of Bishop Richard Williamson, whose disputation of the Holocaust was made a focus of controversy after Benedict lifted his (unrelated) excommunication from the Church in 2009. Such an assessment is applicable however to the Catholic Church in general, not in the first few years after the war but since the era of the Second Vatican Council.

No Doubt, Holocaust-Propaganda has been Harmful

To say that Holocaust-propaganda influenced the formulation of the Second Vatican Council's 1965 declaration on Catholic relations with the Jews (and other religions), known as Nostra Aetate, is not a controversial proposition. Contemporary observers said it, and today it is openly admitted during "Catholic-Jewish dialog."

To suggest that defense of the Church requires disputation of the Holocaust is also not entirely new. Viscount Léon de Poncins went so far in his book Judaism and the Vatican (1966) as to include a twelve-page appendix that summarizes Paul Rassinier's findings about the gassing-accusation, and Poncins concluded already at that early date:

“The question of six million Jewish victims who died in Hitler's camps can no longer be considered an article of faith.” (Poncins 190)

Because of all the expertise assembled for Ernst Zündel's defense in the Canadian “False-News Trials” from 1985 to 1992, and the various follow-up investigations that it inspired, the refutation of this Jewish fable is much more conclusive today than it was when Poncins wrote in 1966. If, as Poncins suggested, Catholics should have been disputing the Holocaust at the time of the Second Vatican Council, there is all the more reason now, because it is certain that truth and, if they make use of the Revisionist findings now available, clarity will be on their side. Holocaust Revisionism in its current state of development will prevail, if it can manage to be heard.

How Nostra Aetate Happened

The causes of the Church's submission to Holocaust-propaganda can be broadly divided into internal factors and external factors.

 

External Factors

There is not much controversy about what external factors influenced the Church to change its teaching about Jews: those factors are most notoriously (1) the petition and the propaganda of the eminent Jew Jules Isaac, who argued (spuriously) that the Church's anti-Jewish traditions had caused the Holocaust, and (2) a stage-play called Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy) that was heavily publicized during the Second Vatican Council. It accused the recently deceased Pope Pius XII of having failed to oppose the Holocaust although supposedly knowing about it. Pressure exerted on the Council by mass-media also has been widely acknowledged.

An important external factor that is very little discussed, probably because it requires an uncomfortable admission of facts swept down the Memory Hole, is that the outcome of the Second World War was highly unfavorable to the Catholic Church. The outcome of the war in 1945 produced an awkward situation, where the Church's traditional enemy Jewry became highly influential and the anti-liberal politics that the Church had espoused since Pius IX were now extremely unfashionable. Even the Church's staunch anti-Communism was problematic for a short time, until the Cold War started.

The Church became in some ways self-destructive as it tried to distance itself from elements of its own past. The self-destructive process did not begin after Nostra Aetate in 1965 but after the Axis defeat in 1945. Here is some detail about this change of posture and the awkwardness of it.

Before 1945 the Catholic Church did not entirely eschew what could be called racial discrimination against Jews. The Fifth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus in 1593 banned recruits “descended of Hebrew or Saracen stock” whose parents had converted, because such persons “have routinely been in the habit of inflicting a great deal of hindrance and harm on the Society.” In the Sixth General Congregation fourteen years later the ban on Jewish or Saracen ancestry was extended farther back. By the Twenty-Seventh General Congregation in 1923 the prohibition against Saracens had been dropped, but the ban on members of “the Jewish race” remained:

“The impediment of origin extends to all who are descended from the Jewish race, unless it is clear that their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather have belonged to the Catholic Church.” (quoted by J. Carroll, Constantine's Sword 382-383)

The Jesuit order's observation from experience that converted Jews tended to be troublesome was observed not only by them. Michael Phayer tells us that in angeschlossen Austria in 1939:

“... the Catholic weekly Schönere Zukunft [19 February 1939 and 7 May 1939] warned that conversion to Christianity did not expunge the Jew's race. Christian nations had to be on guard, because even good Jewish converts could ruin a country's social and economic life.” (Phayer 10)

Phayer tells us that although the majority of the Catholic press rejected the hereditarian view of the Jewish problem, many rank-and-file “brown Catholics” in Austria agreed with Adolf Hitler that the Jewish problem was not solved through baptism.

Similarly, in a speech of 15 August 1942 at Holic justifying deportation of Jews from Slovakia, Father Josef Tiso quoted from pioneering Slovak nationalist Father Andrej Hlinka the following words:

“A Jew remains a Jew even if he is baptized by a hundred bishops.” (quoted by L. Rothkirchen, Yad Vashem)

Even Pope John XXIII seems to have believed this. According to an anecdote told by his personal secretary, Msgr. Loris Capovilla, Pope John once told a newly converted Jew:

“... by being a Catholic, you do not become any less a Jew.” (quoted by Jones 889)

This was after Pope John had tried to discourage the Jew from converting, which is remarkable in itself, for the questions that it raises about that pope's religious belief. (It contrasts sharply with the behavior of Pius IX in the case of Edgardo Mortara a century earlier.)

It was only after the Second World War, in 1946, that the Society of Jesus finally dropped its precaution against admitting persons of Jewish ancestry. The new postwar anti-racist imperative did not allow such exclusion.

The Catholic Church prior to 1945 was also not rigorously anti-racist where Blacks were concerned. In the United States wherever racial segregation was the norm, Catholic institutions tended to conform to that regional cultural norm. .

:

“As an institution, the Catholic Church in the South did not challenge prevailing race relations in the United States until the second half of the twentieth century. In the colonial era, and until the twentieth century, Catholic teaching generally accepted slavery, conditional upon slave owners attending to their slaves’ physical and religious welfare.” (Newman 3)

One particular case illustrates the change. Joseph Francis Rummel, born in Germany in 1876, had been Archbishop of New Orleans since 1935, and the traditional racial segregation of Catholic schools and churches in the region had been accepted – until the 1950s, when (perhaps eager to prove himself not a “Nazi”) Archbishop Rummel caused great consternation and protests among parishioners by ordering desegregation of the diocese (Blanshard 298). Under the new postwar anti-racist imperative, American Catholic bishops as a group declared their support for desegregation, and even excommunicated opponents of desegregation.

According to E. Michael Jones the Civil Rights Movement was a disaster for the Church, from his perspective because it contributed to the destruction of Catholic communities like the Irish neighborhood in Philadelphia where he grew up. (His book The Slaughter of Cities is about this.) Jones has gone so far as to suggest that the Catholic Interracial Council (although founded by a priest in the 1930s) was controlled by the federal government, and he contends that it was used by the government's social engineers to damage Catholicism in America.

Regarding what the Vatican was saying about race, there is a clear difference before and after the Second World War. Pius XI's famous German-language encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (1937) is not anti-racist at all compared to Nostra Aetate (1965). Mit Brennender Sorge in fact conceded that race had a “standard value.” It condemned only exaltation of race and other concepts “above their standard value … to an idolatrous level.” By today's standards, because Mit Brennender Sorge allows race as a value, it would be regarded as a racist document.

During the Second World War, the Vatican still was not rigorously anti-racist as the postwar order later would oblige it to be. As Allied occupation of Rome appeared imminent, Pius XII made a request which Britain's envoy Sir D'Arcy Osborne conveyed on 26 January 1944 as follows:

“The Cardinal Secretary of State sent for me today to say that the Pope hoped that no Allied coloured troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned at Rome after the occupation. He hastened to add that the Holy See did not draw the colour line, but it was hoped that it would be found possible to meet the request.” (quoted by Cornwell 319)

Father Peter Gumpel, making the case for beatification of Pius XII, said that the request was based on reports of rape by France's Black troops stationed in Germany following the First World War, and on similar, contemporary reports attending the northward progress of the American forces in Italy (Ibid.).

It is evident that the pope in 1944 was somewhat embarrassed about asking that Black troops not be stationed in Rome, but not too embarrassed to request it anyway. Such acknowledgment of reality and adjustment to it became a source of shame for the Church after the war, because of who won.

 

Internal Factors

By internal factors is meant people in the Church who were disposed to grant the Jews what they wanted instead of defending the Church. About this there has been disagreement.

 

E. Michael Jones during the past year has been promoting an imaginative hypothesis about how the young priest Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, was the real author of Nostra Aetate. The hypothesis is essentially a synthesis of what he read in Katharina Volckmer's The Appointment , which portrays German ethnic self-hatred, and Peter Seewald's biography of Benedict XVI, which credits Ratzinger with having been influential as an advisor in the Second Vatican Council -- plus a considerable amount of Jones' own imagination about what might have happened.

Frankly I have not found Jones' hypothesis convincing, but here is what he says.

Jones was able to imagine a scenario whereby Holocaust-propaganda combined with other “social engineering” (a favorite subject for Jones) inflicted upon Germans in general, and especially upon the young Joseph Ratzinger, had been carried through the Germans and especially through young Ratzinger into the Catholic Church, bending the Church in accord with the purpose of the social engineers who had inflicted this on Germany.

Jones sees two periods of social engineering, the period of the Morgenthau Plan (and radical denazification) from 1945 to 1947, and the period of the Marshall Plan after that, when the German people were socially engineered by corrupting their morals. It is entirely credible that corrupting the sexual morality of the German people was part of the plan for reorienting them away from “fascism,” since Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Sigmund Freud's who mixed Psychoanalysis with Marxism, had advocated this in his 1933 book The Mass-Psychology of Fascism. The Frankfurt School, a number of whose members became influential in the U.S. State Department and the OSS during the war, had similar ideas. One of them, Herbert Marcuse, was allowed to become the OSS's top (purported) expert on Germany, despite his obvious ethnic hostility toward the Germans as an émigré Jew.

Since Ratzinger is presumed not to have suffered a lapse of sexual morality, the relevant period of social engineering is the two years after the war when the German people were, as Jones always emphasizes, simultaneously starved and subjected to propaganda of collective guilt. Being traumatized by the combination of guilt-propaganda and starvation is supposed to have set Ratzinger on a lifelong path of ethnic self-flagellation (similar to what Katharina Volckmer portrays) that was represented in the final declaration of the Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate, and also in Ratzinger's weakness as pope.

This narrative however lacks evidence, and some not-widely-known facts about the postwar period even make it appear unlikely.

What Jones evidently did not know when he imagined how someone might have reacted to the hardships inflicted during 1945-1947 is that the program of inculcating collective guilt in the Germans at that time backfired. The occupiers damaged their own credibility by trying to impose a collective guilt that was blatantly unfair, since (1) the Germans might accept the proposition that some of their countrymen had been criminal monsters but knew very well that most were not, and since (2) the prison-camps operated by the victors created an impression very similar to what was portrayed in the victors' propaganda about German concentration-camps – or even worse, insofar as the Germans held in the American Rheinwiesenlager did not even have barracks where they could get out of the weather. German cities had been bombed to rubble, which was an enormous war-crime. The Germans knew that they were certainly not all war-criminals while some of those trying to impose collective guilt on them were conspicuous war-criminals on a massive scale.

The concentration-camp movie made for the American occupational government specifically to be shown to German audiences, and shown to them in 1945, was Die Todesmühlen (Death Mills), made by Billy Wilder and Hanuš Burger. This short film makes the extravagant claim that 20 million were killed in German concentration-camps, and makes no specific mention of Jews. How did German audiences react to this propaganda?

Even before the film was shown, some of Billy Wilder's superiors were skeptical about what Die Todesmühlen would accomplish. Wilder was told that the Germans would say that scenes were staged with extras because Hollywood Jews wanted to demoralize the German people. To overcome this objection, Wilder staged a test-screening in Würzburg in the autumn of 1945. Some light entertainment was offered to draw an audience into the theater, and Die Todesmühlen was shown after that. Pencils and cards were supplied for the audience to write their reactions. The result was disappointing for Wilder:

“Der Film läuft an, die Leute im Kino wurden unruhig, sie drehen sich um, schauen sich an. Einige stehen abrupt auf, verlassen das Kino. Von den vierhundert Besuchern sind am Ende vielleicht noch zwanzig im Kino.” (H. Karasek, Billy Wilder: Eine Nahaufnahme)

“The film begins, the people in the cinema became restless, they turn around, look at each other. Some abruptly get up and leave the theater. Out of the four hundred attendees, maybe twenty are still in the theater at the end.”

It turned out that not many Germans in 1945 would voluntarily sit through an anti-German film produced by their conquerors. Wilder however came up with a solution that exploited the restrictions on food at the time:

“… habe ich einen Vorschlag gemacht: Da es damals für die Deutschen Lebensmittelkarten gab, ohne die man weder Brot noch Fleisch kaufen konnte, sollte man, so meine Idee, diese Lebensmittelkarten nach dem Kinobesuch der TODESMÜHLEN mit einem Stempel versehen, der sie erst gültig machte. Das geschah dann in einigen Kinos in und um Frankfurt.” (Ibid.)

"... I made a suggestion: Since the Germans at the time were being issued food ration cards, without which they could buy neither bread nor meat, I had the idea of making the validity of these ration cards conditional on being stamped at the theater after watching DEATH MILLS. That then happened in some theaters in and around Frankfurt.” (Ibid.)

If Germans were so unreceptive to Wilder's 22-minute film that they had to be coerced to sit through it by withholding food-rations, it seems highly unlikely that many found it convincing. Wilder's superiors, it seems, had correctly appraised the German skepticism toward anti-German propaganda at that time.

This reaction in 1945 makes perfect sense, because Germans had just seen their relatives killed and their cities reduced to rubble in a massive war-crime perpetrated by the very people now telling them that they were villains. Films showing dead bodies in concentration-camps were supposed to prove that the Germans were a guilty people, but Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, wrote to Pope Pius XII on 17 May 1945:

"Es wären nicht weniger erschreckende Bilder, wenn man die Leichen der Menschen, die bei einer Fliegerangriff der Amerikaner lebendig begraben und in Stücke zerrissen wurden, in einem Film zusammenfassen könnte." (quoted by Dyrssen 191)

"No less terrifying would be the scenes if one could survey in a movie the corpses of the persons that were buried alive and torn to pieces in an American air-raid."

Apart from the war, six million Germans (Adenauer's figure) also died during brutal ethnic cleansings from what had been eastern Germany. Konrad Adenauer, although in some ways a puppet of the USA , strongly criticized the mistreatment of Germans in the Rhine-meadow camps, and observed:

“The impression made on the Germans by the publication of facts about the concentration camps was very much weakened by this fact.” (quoted by Bacque, Other Losses, p. 186)

In addition to the fact that the Allies clearly had blood on their own hands, there was also a problem of credibility. Many Germans still alive in 1945 would have remembered the false atrocity-accusations of the First World War (ultimately acknowledged as falsehoods by the British parliament), and the broken promises of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, and the blockade of Germany that was extended until June 1919 (seven months after the end of fighting) to force acceptance of the harsh and unjust Treaty of Versailles. The perfidy and ruthlessness of the Allies were already well known.

During a visit to the United States in 1948, Eugen Kogon (a Jew by birth who was the editor of the new Catholic-left monthly Frankfurter Hefte) observed:

“Unfortunately, the suspicion that the Americans have obtained at least some of their convictions in Germany by coercion of witnesses is very widespread.” (Catholic Weekly (Sydney) 18 November 1948)

This was not merely a suspicion: it was known to be true. On 26 April 1946 during the International Military Tribunal, which was broadcast on radio, Julius Streicher described beatings and degradations that he had suffered as a prisoner in American hands. A noteworthy case of American abuse of prisoners that had attracted enormous public attention just a few months before Kogon's statement was that of the 74 Germans accused of the Malmèdy Massacre. In response to this the Secretary of the Army commissioned two judges to compile what became known as the Simpson-Van Roden Report, which documented extreme physical abuse of German prisoners by American personnel. (Van Roden wrote an article about the report for The Progressive.)

The Catholic hierarchy did not fail to notice such facts. Catholic bishops played an important role in supporting a sense of indignation toward the powers trying to impose collective guilt on the German people. The Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, gave a speech in Vatican City excoriating Germany's conquerors for their behavior in the ensuing peace. Among other things, he said the following:

 

"The Allies have always emphasized that they would reestablish the sacredness and dignity of justice after the war. […] Unfortunately we must affirm that the wounds that have been inflicted on injured justice are not being healed but instead are lacerated and deepened through the current administration of justice in Germany.

Propaganda does not balk at declaring that there is no good German whatsoever, In the most widely read publication, the Illustrator of 29 May 1945, the journalist Edwin Rosenthal declared that there is only one good kind of Germans, namely dead Germans. [...]

The Allies generally follow exactly the National-Socialist practice, insofar as they remove former National-Socialists from their offices because they were National-Socialists. They not only removed them from their offices, but denied them all sustenance, all pension, all opportunity to receive another position. Of course the National-Socialists removed many women and men from their government positions but they in most cases at least acknowledged their claim to compensation. They paid pensions to both Social-Democratic and Conservative ministers, if also perhaps in an illegally reduced form. In any case it is a flagrant violation of justice when the military government removes officials because they were national-socialists or [members of a nominally National-Socialist organization]."

The occupation police, Galen says, arrest German citizens without court-orders.

“They arrest men and women if they belonged to a party organization or worked in it according to the military police. They arrest women who ... made winter clothes for soldiers or for refugees. They arrest thousands of men who took low positions in the party without being infected in the slightest with the National-Socialist way of thinking... […]

Also exactly like the Gestapo they arrest men at night, take them from their homes without stating a cause of arrest, take them away without notifying the family where they are brought, cut every communication between the prisoners and the family, hold them in camps for months without a hearing. Briefly stated, they have taken over the methods of the Gestapo, only with the difference that among the officials of the military police very many are humane, honorable, and outstanding men who do not themselves approve these methods. But the people's sense of justice is suffering a new blow, from which it will not recover very soon. [...]

According to reports in the English dailies about half a million people, prisoners, men and women, are currently found in former concentration camps. There are not only criminals in the camps but even people suspected of having been National-Socialists. In these concentration camps of course there are no longer torture chambers but it is a practice irreconcilable with humanity, to leave these prisoners to starve and to freeze en masse so that they face certain death. [...]

The horrors of these concentration camps, but also the National-Socialist concentration camps, are meanwhile far surpassed by what is taking place in eastern Germany. […] When an English correspondent declares that the atrocity of the concentration camps, if they even happened, are overshadowed by what is happening in the east, we need not add another word. When the Allies declare that they will never do territorial adjustments without the will of the population, but at the same time permit that millions of Germans are driven from their houses and farms … they must not be amazed if the Germans have lost all confidence in being treated fairly by the Allies.”

Note that Cardinal Galen twice indicates that he believes that the reports about supposed crimes in German concentration camps are highly exaggerated or false. This must be highly influential coming from Galen, because he had (and still has today) a reputation for moral courage, having caused considerable inconvenience for Adolf Hitler. This criticism of the conquering powers was published in Rome, in March 1946. Cardinal Galen, who lived in the British zone, died later that month.

The bishops' direct response to the propaganda of collective guilt is something that Jones seems not to have investigated adequately. Jones likes to talk about Cardinal Frings, and gives Frings credit for telling the Germans in a sermon, on a very famous occasion on the last day of 1946, that it would not be a sin for them to take food and coal from the occupiers' stockpiles in order to avert starvation and freezing. Jones seems however to have nothing to say about the bishops' direct response to anti-German guilt-propaganda.

Catholic bishops including Cardinal Frings and Johannes Neuhäusler (who had been a prisoner in Dachau during the war) were among the influential supporters of Stille Hilfe für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte, a nonprofit oganization founded in 1951 to assist Germans targeted with accusations of war-crimes.

Why, then, should young Joseph Ratzinger have been deeply affected by the guilt-propaganda of 1945 to 1947 when the injustice of this propaganda was widely unsderstood at the time?

Furthermore, Ratzinger was not one who would have participated in any German collective guilt, since he had never participated much in any German collective sense. He and his family were peculiarly hostile toward Hitler's government, according to his memoir Milestones, and even more in Peter Seewald's biography of him. The father of Joseph Ratzinger had exhibited so much hostility toward the Brownshirts, even before Hitler became chancellor, that the family had to relocate to escape repercussions. A lack of any sense of allegiance seems to have more or less persisted with young Ratzinger throughout the war, until he deserted from the anti-aircraft battery where he was posted in 1945.

Ratzinger may have supported a philojudaic shift in the Church's doctrine, but there is no evidence that ethnic self-hatred derived from postwar trauma was the cause. It is not evident that Ratzinger had to change his ideological orientation after the war, since he had been a misfit in Hitler's Germany. Ratzinger studied under a famous modernist professor, Romano Guardini, and he became part of a faction of German modernists at the Second Vatican Council. So, he was part of a movement. Robert de Mattei named some of them:

“In the 'marching flank'of progressivism a patrol of German theologians distinguished themselves, led by Father Karl Rahner, of the Society of Jesus. And by two younger professors, Hans Kueng and Joseph Ratzinger. Rahner was the advisor of the cardinal of Vienna, Kiebug, Jyebg – of Bishop Leiprecht of Rottenberg, and Ratzinger – of Cardinal Frings, archbishop of Cologne. They were joined by Father Otto Semmelroth, the theologian of Bishop Hermann Volk of Mainz, who in turn was closely connected with Father Rahner. They criticized the Roman 'conceptual theology,' which they disparagingly described as 'Denzinger theology,' and looked forward to a new 'theology of existence,' in which knowledge and life were supposed to merge in a single act of hope and faith.” (Mattei 206)

Mattei suggests that trauma may have influenced the direction of the Church, but not from the postwar “social engineering” in Germany during 1945-1947 that Jones proposes as the cause. Rather, the war itself was traumatic.

The internal factors leading to the Catholic Church's adoption of Nostra Aetate are broader and deeper than Jones represents. This is not a matter of a quirk of one individual. There was a subversive “modernist” movement within the Church that the popes from Pius IX through Pius XII tried to suppress. With John XXIII in 1958 however modernism took the papal throne.

The Catholic Church is generally understood to have faced a crisis after the French Revolution of 1789.
A modernist faction developed in the Church, and a harsh – but ultimately ineffective – reaction against this modernism became institutionalized under Pope Pius IX (r. 1846-1878), who introduced the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. The posture of the Catholic Church in some ways resembled the definition of a conservative from the 1955 mission statement of William F. Buckley's National Review: “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” This posture is articulated in documents such as Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors and the Anti-Modernist Oath of Pius X.

Modernists were however able to persist as a covert subversive force in the Church, sometimes with the unwitting cooperation of popes. In 1909 Pope Pius X, a stern anti-modernist, established the Pontifical Biblical Institute (a.k.a. the Biblicum) , where members of the (according to traditionalists like E. Michael Jones, notoriously infiltrated) Jesuit order would make close studies of scripture using current scholarly methods, leading to the undermining of faith in Catholic doctrine and in the scriptures themselves. It was hard to oppose this kind of subversion, because it took the form of honest scholarship.

Robert de Mattei states:

“The Pontifical Biblical Institute, directed by Father Bea, had become one of the principal centers for the dissemination of the new rationalistic exegesis. In fact, as the historian Mauro Pesce points out, from the 1930s to the 1960s, impelled by Bea, historical exegesis managed to bring about 'profound changes in Catholic theological thought, without even directly venturing a reform of theology as such.' Bea's work was continued by Father Ernest Vogt, who in 1949 succeeded Father Bea as head of the Biblical Institute. Monsignor Francesco Spadafora recalls that at the Biblicum there was at that time the atmosphere of a mystery religion, 'in which the devotees of the 'innovations' considered themselves the custodians of truths unknown to the others, which it was necessary however to spread by any and all means.” (Mattei 142)

Mattei says that the ideological framework of the modernist movement had been established by George Tyrrell (1861-1909), who confided in a letter:

"Rome cannot be destroyed in a day, but it is necessary to make it fall into dust and ashes gradually and inoffensively; then we will have a new religion and a new decalogue." (Mattei 60)

Augustin Bea was an enormous but, for most of his career, stealthy influence for the modernist cause. He arrived at the Biblicum in 1924, and was its rector from 1930 to 1949. Mattei says that Bea used opportunities to pack the hierarchy with his allies. (Mattei 42)

Modernism got a boost from the outcome of the Second World War, because in the postwar period it suddenly became desirable not to have been friendly with the side that had lost. It seems that those who objected to an authoritarian church curbing decadence and subversion, and those who objected to an authoritarian government curbing decadence and subversion, turned out to be largely the same people.

The new pope John XXIII, himself reputedly a partisan of the modernist cause, made Bea a cardinal in 1959, and then made him effectively president of the new Secretariat for Christian Unity (shortly thereafter becoming a commission), and thereby, with the authority granted to that body, effectively the overlord of the Second Vatican Council.

The Chief Rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff reports an indication of German collective guilt from Augustin Bea, with whom he happened to become acquainted as a consequence of visits to the library of the Pontifical Biblical Institute:

“Our acquaintance very quickly turned into friendship, and one day Monsignor Bea confided in me that, since he was German by birth, he felt the whole weight of the evil that his people had done to the Jews, and he wished to do something to make up for it, even if only in a small way. Thus the idea occurred to him of an ecumenical council in which a document on the Jews would have to be approved. He himself wanted to be its promoter and author.” (Elio Toaff, quoted by Mattei 383)

The wording of Toaff's report suggests that Augustin Bea was very likely the chief instigator of the Church's changed teaching regarding Jews. That Bea became the president of the ecumenical body that authored Nostra Aetate was no accident: it was something that Bea had been yearning to do, evidently before the actual possibility of it could materialize under a new pope, John XXIII.

This is not the only account of Bea's friendships with Jews. Look of January 1966 mentions that two members of Bea's commission were converted Jews, John Österreicher and Gregory Baum. While the Second Vatican Council was in progress, according to Look, Bea made a secret journey across the ocean to New York City where he addressed a group of Jewish leaders about the progress and prospects for modifying the Church's stance toward Jews.

If Bea had much more association with Jews than an ordinary German at the time would have had, it could explain why the treatment of the Jews during the war, whatever it was, would have grieved him to an unusual degree.

Such a profession of ethnic guilt is not, however, necessary to explain why Bea behaved as he did, since as a modernist he necessarily already had a sense that the Church had done wrong to Jews for centuries. E. Michael Jones observes:

“The one area in which the Church was most glaringly out of sync with the modern world was its attitude toward the Jews.” (Jones 888)

Augustin Bea thus may have embraced German “collective guilt” as an additional justification for what he already was inclined to do.

There are two very obvious ways that Holocaust-propaganda was brought to bear on the Council.

Catholicism Blamed for Causing the Holocaust

First, there was the agitation of Jules Isaac, who wrote two books blaming Catholicism for anti-Semitism in general and especially the supposed mass-murder of Jews in the Second World War. His two books are Jesus and Israel (1946, reprinted 1959) and The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (1948, reprinted 1956).

Jules Isaac did not begin making this kind of argument because of the supposed mass-murder of Jews: he had begun writing Jesus and Israel in the spring of 1943 (Tobias 80), at a time when he supposedly had not even heard of such a thing:

"... of the 'final solution' adopted as early as 1941, I was ignorant and I was not the only one to be so. Despite the B.B.C., ignorance [of the death camps] was more common than was knowledge." (J. Isaac, quoted by Tobias 83)

This contrasts with Eva Schloss, who admits that she had heard such rumors, from the BBC and otherwise, but says that she did not believe. Isaac may have not wanted to admit that he doubted the rumors, and it seems doubtful whether he ever really could have believed in a systematic murder of all European Jews. In the first place, French Jews in general were not rounded up. There was a special reason for the roundup of Jules Isaac's family in October 1943. His son Jean-Claude was arrested by the Gestapo at a meeting of a resistance cell chaired by son-in-law Robert Boudeville. Thereafter the Gestapo came for the rest of the family, but Jules Isaac happened to be away: consequently his wife, daughter, and one son ended up in Auschwitz, while Jules Isaac went into hiding. The three deported members of Jules Isaac's family were not all killed: although wife Laure and daughter Juliette did not return, son Jean-Claude arrived back from Auschwitz in May 1945. (Tobias 81-84) Jules Isaac therefore knew that French Jews were not all deported, and that deported Jews (even Jews who had participated in resistance cells) were not all killed. For his rhetorical purpose of forcing a philojudaic reform of Christianity, however – a purpose which he had begun to pursue before supposedly knowing about the Holocaust – it was useful to allege this direst possible consequence of “Christian anti-Semitism.”

Jules Isaac's attribution to Christianity of whatever actions were taken against Jews under Hitler's rule was also quite dubious. In the first place, Hitler stated in Mein Kampf his distaste, from an early age, for religious hostility toward Jews. So, Christianity was definitely not for Hitler a motive to act against the Jews – if anything, rather the opposite. His government was not especially Christian (although it attempted to keep peace with the two major Christian churches). If Christianity were going to cause a systematic mass-murder of Jews, it should have caused it perhaps in Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain or Salazar's Portugal, where the Catholic Church had a closer relationship to the government, but the fact is that since the First Crusade (when there was a massacre of Jews) a series of papal bulls known collectively as Sicut Judaeis has afforded a protected status to the Jews under Catholic rule.

In the second place, genuine antipathy toward Jews, whether Christian or not, arises not because a tradition told the people to hate Jews, but as a reaction to Jewish behavior. The book by Joseph Ratzinger's great-uncle Father Georg Ratzinger (published under the pseudonym Dr. Robert Waldhausen), Jüdisches Erwerbsleben (Jewish Economic Life) exemplifies a Catholic reaction to Jewish behavior, as do the broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, where Coughlin always emphasized that there were “good Jews” but also noted that certain destructive tendencies, especially Communism, were prevalent among irreligious Jews. Christian criticisms of Jews were not energized by the Church's traditions but by observation of what Jews were doing. The same is true of Adolf Hitler and even Heinrich Himmler: in his Second Posen Speech, Himmler explains that Jews must be rounded up and deported in order to prevent a repetition of the bad experience of the First World War when many Jews became revolutionaries and saboteurs after the war started to go badly for Germany. Jules Isaac was an eminent historian and if he really was interested in truthfully explaining why Hitler's government took measures against Jews he certainly should have found all this out.

Why, then, does Jules Isaac lay the blame for whatever was done to Jews at the feet of the Catholic Church? Obviously, he made this tortured argument because he had some special motive for putting this kind of pressure on the Catholic Church. The obvious purpose would be to benefit Zionism, which had for decades sought the support of Christian churches. The support of Protestants was sought by means of the Scofield Bible, a new edition of the Bible with pro-Zionist notes. Support of the Catholic Church for a Jewish homeland in Palestine was sought in 1904 when Theodor Herzl approached Pope Pius X. The pope responded that he could not recognize the Jewish people nor support the Zionist cause because they rejected Jesus – but that if Jews happened to settle en masse in Palestine anyway Catholic priests would assist by being there to baptize them.

To dispel Catholic opposition to Zionism, and to gain the Church's support, would require changing some of the Church's doctrines, especially (1) supersessionism, which represents Christianity as the New Israel and the new Chosen People of God (invalidating the old covenant that granted to Jews the Promised Land), and (2) the ancient Catholic idea that the Jews as a people were cursed to wander without a homeland as punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus. Both of these ancient Christian beliefs were obstacles to Christian support for the State of Israel, and for the benefit of Zionism they had to be gotten out of the way. This seems to have been Jules Isaac's mission.

If Christians could be induced to abandon supersessionism, to grant a continuing validity of the mythical covenant giving Palestine to the Jews, then gaining active Christian support for Zionism would be an easy matter, because under this conception, with Jesus regarded as merely a scorned prophet and not the Son of God conferring special status on his followers, the Christians would be at best God's stepchildren, and at worst followers heresy.

Robert de Mattei, while almost entirely avoiding any mention of Jews, does not fail to mention that the initiative embodied in Nostra Aetate was regarded in the Arab World as Zionist. Cardinal Tappouni, Patriarch of Antioch, speaking on behalf of a group of Oriental Catholics, told the Second Vatican Council on 29 September 1964:

“In our countries they will say that the council is pro-Zionist, which will do us great harm.” (quoted by Mattei 385)

That interpretation seems very well founded.

An essay by Israel's chief rabbi Yona Metzger, published in the Jesuit periodical America on the fortieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate affirmed precisely the document's facilitation of Zionism:

“Nostra Aetate rejected the accusation of deicide against the Jews at any time; it affirmed that the divine covenant with the Jewish people remained unbroken. In doing so, it eliminated in one stroke the theological objections to the idea of the return of the Jewish people to its ancestral homeland and to sovereignty within it. (Y. Metzger, America, 24 October 2005)

The chief rabbi indicates what, from the Jewish perspective, Nostra Aetate was supposed to accomplish: it should remove “in one stroke the theological objections” to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and should by implication confer theological legitimacy upon that state (so that it would have Christian support). That seems to be a true statement of the motive behind Jules Isaac's petition to the Vatican.

Apart from that, however, there is some astounding misrepresentation here. Although Nostra Aetate in section 4 absolved the Jews of perpetual collective guilt for deicide it did not erase every attribution of such guilt “at any time” as Metzger says. More importantly the Jews would continue, at least for the time being, to be regarded as followers of a false religion who should convert to Christianity, which means that the divine covenant is not “unbroken.” So, what Yona Metzger says here is not really what Nostra Aetate says, but what Jews wanted it to say, which it stopped just short of saying.

It is astounding also that Metzger's misrepresentation of Nostra Aetate was published in America magazine, an organ of the Society of Jesus. E. Michael Jones remarked on this at the time (Radio Roman Catholic, 28 October 2005). That the Jesuits would publish a Jewish misrepresentation of the Church's official position on Jews seems indicative of an obsequious posture toward Jews, and perhaps also the corruption of the Jesuit order (which is a real, longstanding concern that Jones has often discussed). Supersessionism, and therewith the mythical covenant entitling the Jews to Palestine, was not abandoned as Metzger claimed, but has continued to be a point of contention. To some extent however the point has become moot, since Pope John Paul II, in the obsequious posture toward Jews that characterized his later years, conferred diplomatic recognition on the Jewish State on 30 December 1993, reversing the position stated by Pius X. All of this awkward hesitation and retreat by the Catholic Church began with a not-very-credible argument blaming the Church for the Holocaust, which apparently no official of the Church was willing publicly to challenge.

Pius XII Blamed for Not Publicly Acknowledging the Holocaust

The other way that Holocaust-propaganda was applied to the Second Vatican Council was through the attack on Pope Pius XII for his supposed indifference or unwillingness to make any clear public declaration against mass-murder of Jews, of which he is presumed to have known (unreasonably, since it was not happening). The vehicle of this attack during the Second Vatican Council was Rolf Hochhuth's stage-play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy). Robert Faurisson explains:

“In the spring of 1962 Rolf Hochhuth, a German born in 1931, completed a play with the title Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy). The hero of the drama is a fictitious figure, the young Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana. He is shocked by what Kurt Gerstein has revealed to Pius XII about Nazi gas-chambers, and must confront the fact that the pope fails to condemn this horror. Accordingly this humble prelate dons a yellow star and accompanies a Jew-transport into a gas-chamber, there to meet his death.” (R. Faurisson, Pope Pius XII's Revisionism)

Faurisson tells us that although the drama was heavy-handed and not at all entertaining, nonetheless:

“The media managed to sell this questionable work, which was promoted in advertising like a new type of chocolate, as a deeply serious indictment of Pius XII.” (Ibid.)

The Second Vatican Council opened on 11 October 1962 and closed on 8 December 1965. In that era the propaganda about Adolf Hitler and the Second World War was generally not as focused on the alleged suffering of Jews as it has been since NBC's Holocaust miniseries in 1978 and especially since Schindler's List in 1993.

Jews were however working to build up their myth, with the kidnaping and showtrial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965), a mass-trial instigated in part by the attorney general of Hesse, Zionist Jew and Mossad informant Fritz Bauer, in 1959 (Stäglich 230).

The Deputy was a means of using this renewed propaganda about gas-chambers to stampede the Second Vatican Council into altering the Church's position regarding Jews. Phayer explains that a young bishop named Josef Stangl (appointed in 1957, when Pius XII's mental faculties had declined) suggested to the Council that they should approve a philojudaic draft of Nostra Aetate to avoid resembling Pius XII as portrayed in The Deputy:

“With the Council in a muddle over what action to take, a German bishop, not previously heard from, gave an electrifying address. Making direct reference to the recently released sensational play The Deputy, Bishop Josef Stangl told the Council Fathers that a storm of debate had arisen in Germany concerning the conduct of Pope Pius XII and the German church during the Holocaust.... Using the same word that Hochhuth had chosen for the title of his play, Stangl declared: 'If we speak in the name of God, in the name of Jesus Christ, as deputies of the Lord, then our message must be [a clear] 'Yes, yes!' or 'No, no' – the truth, not tactics. Stangl's moving address broke the ice; the Council Fathers moved ahead with deliberations on Nostra Aetate.” (Phayer 211-212)

Significantly, in the same era when the recently deceased Pope Pius XII was being accused of keeping quiet about the Holocaust, Paul Blanshard's polemic against the Catholic Church, American Freedom and Catholic Power (1st ed. 1949, 2nd ed. 1958), says nothing about the Holocaust. While attacking the Church for being illiberal, inflexibly opposed to abortion, decidedly anti-Communist, and generally positively disposed toward fascism – Blanshard says nothing about the Holocaust. Blanshard mentions the curtailment of Jewish rights (which certainly did happen) particularly by the wartime government of Marshal Pétain, a favorite of the Vatican (Blanshard 289-290), but says nothing about murder of Jews. Blanshard also points out that Adolf Hitler was never excommunicated (Blanshard 286). Blanshard seems (at least in the second edition) to have taken some care to avoid accusations that might not be true.

Doubt or outright disbelief regarding the Jewish gas-chamber fable seems to have been quite widespread among people who had lived through the war. Faurisson points out that neither Eisenhower, nor Churchill, nor DeGaulle ever mentioned this detail in their memoirs – very likely expecting that the story would become thoroughly discredited within a few years, as happened with the shocking propaganda-claims of the First World War, about a decade after that war had ended.

Holocaust-propaganda was thus an important force behind the issuance of the Catholic Church's philojudaic declaration Nostra Aetate, prior to the Council when Jules Isaac accused the Church of causing the Holocaust, and near the end of the Council when Pope Pius XII was accused of indifference as a way of goading the Council to prove that they were not "indifferent." Crucial prerequisites to the success of this pressure however were the Axis loss of the Second World War, and the increased influence of the modernist faction within the Church, which was both highly receptive to criticisms of the Catholic tradition and philojudaically disposed. The Jewish purpose, on the other hand, in badgering the Church to abandon supersessionism and the idea that Jews were guilty of deicide was most likely not to prevent another Holocaust (since the argument that Hitler's anti-Jewish measures were rooted in Christianity was really quite weak) but rather to facilitate Christian support for Zionism, which Theodor Herzl had sought from the Church in 1904 and been denied.

Bibliography

• James Bacque, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II, Toronto: Stoddart, 1989.
• Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power, 2^nd ed., Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.
• John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, New York City: Viking Penguin, 1999.
• Gottfried Dyrssen, Keine Träne Wert? Deutschlands Umgang mit seiner Kriegsgeneration, Graz: Leopold Stocker Verlag 2002.
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• Hellmuth Karasek, Billy Wilder: Eine Nahaufnahme, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2015
• Yona Metzger, “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” America, Manhattan: American Jesuits, 24 October 2005.
• Mark Newman, Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945-1992, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965, Indiana University Press, 2000.
• Léon de Poncins (tr. Timothy Tindal-Robertson), Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion, Palmdale, California: Christian Book Club of America, 1966.
• Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998.
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• Wilhelm Stäglich (tr. Thomas Francis), Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence, Fountain Valley, California: Institute for Historical Review, 1986.