Vatican newspaper rips US State Department’s failure to act during Holocaust

August 14, 2009

In an article that appeared in the August 14 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, Raffaele Alessandrini strongly criticized the US State Department’s bureacratic indifference and inaction in the 18 months after it became aware that the Holocaust was taking place. Drawing upon a 1948 Italian Jewish journal article and the diaries of the late Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Alessandrini notes that the State Department was informed in August 1942 of the Nazis’ plan to exterminate millions of Jews.

Blasting the “radically false” characterization of Pope Pius XII as “Hitler’s Pope,” Alessandrini notes that the State Department failed to act during a time when Jews were being hid in convents with the Vatican’s assistance.

 

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Further information:

• Raffaele Alessandrini: Washington e Londra di fronte alla tragedia degli ebrei europei: Silenzi e omissioni al tempo della Shoah (L’Osservatore Romano)