Michael Burleigh
Rent-A-Moralists At Bay
The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis
By David G Dalin
Regnery Publishing 209pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis
By Ronald J Rychlak
Spence Publishing 378pp $29.95 order from our bookshop
Several weeks ago, David Irving was arrested on an outstanding warrant by the Austrian authorities; he is currently on remand awaiting trial. One of the few aspects of this affair not to attract press coverage was that Irving was visiting one of his soul mates, the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, author of the 1963 Schillerian drama, The Deputy, with its factitious claims about Pius XII.
It is sometimes claimed that Hochhuth’s play began the sinister campaign of denigration against the ‘wartime pope’. This is untrue: Hochhuth drew from an existing pool of Communist-inspired poison against the Pope. Pius, who died in 1958, was also the ‘Cold War pontiff’, responsible in early 1948 for mobilising the
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