How did they speak to you about what happened, about how they felt about surviving, or about how they miss their brothers and sisters, their family? To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video that ended abruptly through this killing machine in Auschwitz. However, when you tell people, 'My great- grandfather was killed here, and I think the mother and the brothers, sisters of my grandfather,' - those victims are getting names those victims are getting faces, and each one had its own life. You know, people listen to my 'half-million children and 6 million human beings,' and it's a number which does not register with normal people. It's the problem of the Holocaust. It's the numbers. Can an outsider even empathize with such a loss? We stood there in the freezing cold, and then we were silent for a long time. And you told me that more than 40 of your relatives were murdered there by the Germans. In an interview with DW, the 58-year-old described the fate of his ancestors and gave his advice for the generations to come.ĭW: Rabbi Goldschmidt, seven years ago we met at the commemoration of the liberation on January 27 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp memorial. The new documents are helping us to find a way among the fog of our false myths or preconceptions.The horror of Auschwitz is part of Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt's family history. To do more is always possible, but in general we often realize it later. He was going to go forward with his genocidal program.” As Coco puts it: “We ask ourselves the question and it is not simple to answer. Hitler, as Brown Fleming puts it, “wasn’t going to be controlled by anything a Pope said or did. Whether the Catholic Church could have done more to prevent the atrocities of the Holocaust is not a question likely to be answered definitively from files. “Six million Jews are murdered they’re certainly not in a position to be taking over the American military presence in occupied Germany.” Overall, Brown-Fleming sees “a lot of fear” in the papers she’s read so far, fears of “a mythical threat that Jews and Judaism pose. “That was shocking to me,” says Brown-Fleming. After the war, in the late 1940s, there were fears at the highest levels of church leadership that Jewish leaders did not have Catholic interests in mind and held huge sway in American military policy. In 1944, Catholic leadership halted an attempt to host a dialogue between Christians and Jewish rabbis organized by a priest known as Father Marie-Benoît, who risked his life and saved hundreds of Jews. Some of the documents also reveal widespread anti-semitism within the church. Some German generals later convicted in the Nuremberg Trials had helped to defend property and valuable art and tried to avoid damaging Vatican property and cultural treasures in Rome.” “I’m finding that the Holy See wanted to show gratitude for the protection of the city of Rome during the occupation of Rome under the Nazis in 1943. “The justification given for aid to Nazi war criminals was Christian love and mercy,” says Brown-Fleming, whose research focuses on this effort. The Catholic Church worked to win clemency for convicted Nazi war criminals after the war. At the same time Catholic rescuers were helping Jews, some of those same people were also helping Nazis. In some ways, researchers have found more contradictions than clear answers. “The Vatican dealt mainly with distribution of economic relief and by helping emigrate to North or South America,” according to Giovanni Coco, Staff Archivist in the Vatican Apostolic Archives. There are hundreds of thousands of letters to the Pope from Jewish families begging for help. Over 6,000 Jews were hidden in Rome and on Vatican property. But while the Catholic Church’s top leadership shied away from publicly condemning the atrocities in Germany, the documents also provide information on the Catholics who hid thousands of Jews across Europe.
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