whats in a name?

Hitler thought that homosexuality is an inherited trait--as some people still do today. Even though some people are disabled by accident, he assumed (or at least preached) that from a statistical perspective disabilities tend to be the result of genetic "weakness." So as far as gays and the disabled are concerned, based on what he believed (or claimed to) he was practicing genocide: culling of a gene pool.

Catholicism is not inherited genetically, but it is still passed down from parents to children, so it is "inherited." It is a community greatly defined by bloodlines, which could therefore be construed as a "race" even if the mechanism of inheritance is not biological.

So to call these killings genocide is only a little imprecise.

If the Serbs tried to kill off the Croats (or vice versa), or the Indians the Pakistanis (or vice versa), despite the fact that it would be hard to tell the bodies apart by their DNA, I think the world would call it genocide.

Did Hitler try to kill the Catholics in his own country? I thought one of the reasons the Pope didn't take him on was that the Nazis and Fascists left their Catholics alone. He went after the Bohemians and the Poles because he thought Slavs were inferior, not because they were Catholic.

 

I can find nothing on the internet to support this statement. Also, I was born during WWII and my mother's family was Bohemian (or "Czech" as we call them now because it's easier to spell) and I met my share of refugees as well as people who lost loved ones in the Holocaust. No one ever accused the Nazis of going after Catholics. They killed about 3,000,000 Polish Catholics, but as I said earlier that was because they thought the Slavs were inferior, not because they were Catholic.

Hitler tried to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church for the same reason the Chinese communists did: it was way too big and a challenge to their authority. But he never targeted members of the Church and in fact the Nazi leadership had its share of Catholic Germans.

No one's suggesting that the Church should have taken a principled stand against Nazism and Fascism. But it could have come out against the Holocaust. The Italian people did not have nearly as much enmity toward the Jews as the Germans did. They would have been quite happy to see them put in true prison camps--like we did with our Japanese-Americans--and treated with the minimal decency and respect any prisoners deserve. Much like what Hitler allowed the Orthodox Bulgarians to get away with.

Hitler could not have attacked Vatican City or killed the Pope, you can take my word on that. He was able to get away with killing Jews in "the fog of war" because until the war ended and the death camps were liberated, most people in the unoccupied Allied countries--even our Jews--honestly didn't know it was happening. In any case, Jews were not exactly popular in our countries; even in the USA and the UK, where they fared the best, I really hate to speculate on how the average Gentile citizen would have reacted to news of Hitler's attempt to exterminate them--considering that our own unreconstructed Confederates were still lynching African-Americans. It probably would have been considered just one more of Hitler's evils.

The Czech side of my family was horrified by his slaughter of Czechs, but our neighbors just regarded them as one more casualty of the war and one more reason why the Allies had to win. The Jewish side of my family would have been equally horrified if they'd known about the Holocaust... and our neighbors would surely have felt exactly the same way as they did about the Czechs. Too bad folks, let's just whip his ass and put a stop to all of it.

But if he had begun to kill Catholics? The Pope himself? Destroy Vatican City! There were fifty times more Catholics in America or England than there were Jews. The Pope was their spiritual leader. Every American family had Catholic friends and many even Catholic in-laws.

The Catholics in Germany and Austria would have revolted if he'd done that. Not tomention the entire population of Italy! The 99.9% Catholic populations in rather large neutral countries like Mexico, Brazil and Argentina--not to mention the rest of Latin America as well as Spain and Portugal--would have forced their governments to join the Allies. Hell, even the Swiss would have had a hard time staying out of it!

The Pope did NOT pussyfoot around the persecution of Jews because he was afraid of an attack on the Vatican. That leaves all of us wondering whether the reason was that he really just didn't give a damn about the Jews. Remember, before the Holocaust the Christian community was not nearly as sympathetic to the Jews as they are today. There was discrimination against them even in some countries where they were treated "very well" by historical standards, like England and the USA. Nobody was killing them but there were neighborhoods where they weren't allowed to live.

Antisemitism was alive and well throughout Christendom. It just happened to be much worse in Germany and Austria, but it was pretty bad in Poland and many other European countries. There's no reason to think Pope Pius XII was not as antisemitic as his predecessors. Even Benedict XVI has made some remarks that angered today's Jews.

It is sadly possible that the reason the Pope did not take a stand against the Holocaust is that he just didn't want to.