Hitler's Priests
By Kevin Spicer
Northern Illinois University Press, 2008
369 pages, $62.08
Kasztner's Train: the True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust
By Anna Porter
Scribe, 2008
548 pages, $32.95
Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto & the Oyneg Shabes Archive
By Samuel D. Kassow
Indiana University Press, 2007
523 pages, $66
The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
By Art Spiegelman
Pantheon, 1996
296 pages, $54.95.
In October 2008, the Catholic Synod of Bishops convened in Rome for a four-day theological discussion. Without warning, Pope Benedict XVI suspended discussion and ordered the 200 participants to attend a special commemoration mass for Pius XII, who was the pope between 1939 and 1958.
The sudden decision was part of an attempt to force the Catholic Church into accepting the beatification of Pius XII. That Benedict had to resort to such bizarre tactics is a small measure of how the decisions made during the Holocaust still resonate today.
In Hitler's Priests, Kevin Spicer meticulously shows at least 180 Catholic priests actively supported the Nazis, including spying on other clergymen for the fascists. Beyond them, there was a vast network of sympathetic priests and bishops who quietly supported the Reich.
How these priests could be won to fascism and be tolerated by their superiors was due to a commonality between Nazism and Catholicism: hatred of Jews. Where they differed was in how to deal with Jews. The Nazis wanted to kill them, the Catholics wanted to baptise them and "save their souls".
Not all priests were collaborators. Previously, Spicer has written of priests who opposed the Nazis, at the expense of their lives.
SS Einsatzgruppen (special forces) shootings of Eastern-European Jewish men started in June 1941. In July, they began murdering Jewish women and children, and in August and September they annihilated whole Jewish districts.
It was here that Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Becher of the SS Death's Head division started to rise through the ranks. He was later featured in the mass slaughter of Hungarian Jews, and his alliance with the Zionist Rezso Kasztner is central to Anna Porter's Kasztner's Train.
In 1946, Kurt Becher was arrested and charged with war crimes for his part in the mass murder of Hungarian Jews. Luckily he had Kasztner, a skilled lawyer, to speak in his defence at the War Crimes Tribunal, in effect acting as his defence attorney. Kasztner was "repaying a debt of honour", says Anna Porter.
According to Porter, Kasztner owed Becher. While Becher had been working with Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann to kill Jews, Kasztner had been working with Becher to save them.
The accusation had hung over Kasztner ever since that he connived with Becher to save some wealthy and influential Jews in exchange for collaboration in the murder of masses of other Hungarian Jews.
Becher got off, returned to Germany, and within a year mysteriously acquired great wealth and rose to be a confidant of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. It can be safely assumed that Becher's riches came from the treasure trove of bribes he took during the Holocaust.
After WWII Kasztner was denounced in a world-famous Israeli court case. It was said that he was a collaborator who connived with Adolf Eichmann to facilitate the transport of Hungarian Jews in exchange for money as well as some Zionists, destined for Palestine.
He was also denounced as the saviour of mass murderer Becher at Nuremberg.
Novelist Anna Porter has written what she calls a "popular history" in order to exonerate him. Porter argues that Kasztner was in fact responsible for saving the lives of more than 20,000 people, doing the best in impossible circumstances.
While other Hungarian Jews starved, Krasztner, head of the Hungarian Jewish Agency Rescue Committee, clubbed with Nazis all night, eating and drinking the very best. Later, in the 1950s, in an Israeli courtroom, survivors said that Jews boarded Nazi trains to the camps unaware of their doom because Krasztner withheld the information he had about the gas chambers.
When, Kasztner, who Porter says was an extremely intelligent and eloquent lawyer, had the courtroom as his forum in which to demonstrate that he had acted with the best of intentions, he was completely demolished.
Porter offers a series of excuses for this, none of which are persuasive.
She says Kasztner was responsible for saving the lives of more than 20,000 people. Yet, these survivors failed to step forward to speak on his behalf while others who did speak denounced him.
After the judgement, Kasztner was assassinated in what appeared to be a political hit carried out by people associated with Israel's secret police Mossad, possibly because he was an international embarrassment.
After his death, in a divided opinion, Israel's Supreme Court overturned part of the lower court's verdict, thus allowing Porter to say that Kasztner's name had been cleared. But Porter's book opens as many questions as it seeks to close.
Porter is not denying that Kasztner got as close as he could to the Nazis, that he had early knowledge of the death camps and chose to not pass that on to others.
This is murky business and Porter puts as good a gloss as possible on all of it. However, her history with novelistic flourishes actually raises the ghosts of the Hungarian Holocaust rather than settles them.
In early August 1942, a 19-year-old member of the Jewish underground resistance wrote feverishly, deep inside the burning Warsaw Ghetto about another, different trove of riches: "What we were unable to shriek to the world we buried in the ground … May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened …We may now die in peace … May history attest to us."
The treasure that David Graber and his revolutionary comrades were toiling to bury was the Oyneg Shabes Archive, a massive collection of essays, historical investigations and contemporary publications that preserved the story of ghetto life. The leader of the secret group of archivists was the radical historian Emanuel Ringelblum.
Ringelblum was a stalwart member of the Jewish revolutionary group the Left Poalei Zion (LPZ) — the radical faction of the Poalei Zion (Zionist Workers) party inspired by Ukrainian-born thinker Ber Borochov. Borochov sought to develop Marxist theory to address Jewish oppression.
Ringelblum's political formation, based on faith in the masses, proved essential for the most demanding role of his life within the Warsaw Ghetto as leader of the legal Aleynhilf (Self-Help Society) and the clandestine Oyneg Shabes Archive.
Interestingly, Ringelblum was at a conference in Switzerland at the beginning of WWII and could have sat out the war there. He chose to return to his family and his revolutionary duties in Poland.
Ringelblum was determined for the record to be meticulously objective so that future generations could understand the suffering of the Jews. It was his contribution to a future in which racism and anti-Semitism would be no more.
"Convinced that dying capitalism had spawned Nazism and, with it, the murder of European Jewry, this belief in world revolution gave Ringelblum a rare glimmer of hope," Samuel D. Kassow writes in Who Will Write Our History?.
The Oyneg Shabes Archive produced documentary evidence of the gas chambers that was smuggled out to the Allies, demanding action be taken to stop the death trains.
The Allies' choice to not bomb the rail lines echoes down the years as an unanswered question from WWII.
Eventually, Jewish youth groups, led by Zionist youth, armed themselves and led the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.
Ringelblum and the LPZ encouraged the uprising, which lasted for months. Funds were collected by armed expropriations from rich Jews in the Ghetto.
After hiding in an underground bunker for a long time Ringelblum was captured by German soldiers on March 7, 1944, with his wife and son. He was tortured for his contacts in the underground.
Some days later, thought to be around March 11, 1944, Emanuel Ringelblum, his wife and son, along with others, were shot by the Nazis in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. Presumably their bones are under the foundations of modern Warsaw.
Art Spiegelman is one who has lived with such Holocaust demons all his life. The child of two survivors he became an early leader of the Zap comic graphic style in the US and editor of Raw magazine. Beginning in the 1980s he started interviewing his father and translating the conversations into graphic form. The Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel, The Complete Maus, has been rewarded with many reprintings.
Spiegelman's style is deceptively simple. Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs and so on.
It is Spiegelman's unwavering honesty, exposing both himself and his father, which makes this work essential for understanding the Holocaust and its consequences.
It stands in such contrast to the manoeuvrings of Pope Benedict and Anna Porter. It stands in the tradition of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive and the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
[Abridged from www.links.org.au/node/1172.]