Partners in Crime

THE ROLE OF the Roman Catholic Church in the genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany has long been de­bated. On September 10, 2023, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published evidence from the Vatican’s ar­chives of the Catholic Church’s silence on the Holocaust.

Pope Pius XII, the newspaper alleged, knew about the Nazis’ Jewish death camps as early as 1942. If the Pope had spoken up instead of choosing silence, would Hitler have been deterred in his meticulously planned campaign that killed six million Jews during World War II?

The Washington Post reported: “A newly revealed let­ter from the Vatican archives suggests that World War II-era Pope Pius XII was aware thousands of Jews were being killed in gas chambers in occupied Poland, undercutting earlier Vatican arguments justifying the Pope’s wartime si­lence on the Holocaust.

“The newly unveiled document is a German letter sent by a German Jesuit member of the anti-Nazi resistance, Reverend Lother Koenig, and addressed to the Pope’s trusted private secretary Rev Robert Leiber. In the letter dated December 14, 1942, Koenig wrote that up to 6,000 people, “above all Poles and Jews”, were dy­ing every day in “SS-furnaces” at the Nazi-run Belzec concentration camp in what was then occupied Poland.”

Hitler shared a difficult relationship with the church. His father Alois Hitler believed religion was an “emotional crutch”. While Hitler’s own be­lief in Christianity wavered from time to time, his antago­nism towards Judaism never did. To him, the extermination of Jews would be what came to be infamously known as the “Final Solution”—the code that underpinned the Holocaust.

Till World War I, Germany was part of the Anglo-Saxon Christian Brotherhood. The Brotherhood comprised the British Empire, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

In 1884, Germany’s capital Berlin hosted a conference of European colonial powers to carve out Africa amongst themselves. Early in his career, Winston Churchill praised Germany as being culturally and racially closest to Britain.

He was right. The three tribes that settled in Britain af­ter the fall of the Roman Empire were all German—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

The British Royal Family is German. It was forced to change its centuries-old German name, Saxe-Coburg- Gotha, to Windsor in 1917 following public outrage in Britain against Germany during World War I.

Hitler was content to let Britain keep its overseas em­pire as long as Germany was allowed to expand eastwards into German-speaking Sudetenland in Poland and the for­mer Czechoslovakia.

Today’s Christian Brotherhood is Protestant, English-speaking, and closely knit. The five members of this Brotherhood share intelligence in real time. Dubbed the “Five Eyes”, they coordinate key policy issues in tandem.

Following the tit-for-tat expulsions of Indian and Canadian diplomats recently, the US and Australia were quick to support Canada, issuing statements using similar language—“deep concern” at the Canadian government’s allegation of Indian state “interference” in the murder of Canada-based terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

The Protestant Christian Brotherhood stands together and speaks together. It has several common features. Canada and the US usurped land from indigenous peo­ple who had lived there for millennia, forc­ing them into impoverished reservations.

Most US presidents till the mid-19th century were slave owners. African slaves were shipped to British colonies in North America by British businessmen from ports in Liverpool, Bristol, and Southampton.

To King Charles III’s distress, it was pointed out to him just before his corona­tion in May 2023 that his ancestor, King William III, had owned a slave trading firm called the Royal African Company. King Charles was quick to order an inqui­ry into this “horrific” finding but gave the inquiry com­mission three years to complete its investigation by when Buckingham Palace hoped, the matter would have been buried in public memory.

In October, Australians will vote in a referendum on giv­ing Australia’s original Aboriginal inhabitants a voice in their own lives. Though the referendum is only mildly crit­ical of historical Australian policy on Aborigines and is si­lent on reparations for the violence inflicted on them since the British arrived in Australia in the late 1700s, opinion polls suggest the referendum will be defeated.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the result of the referendum will reveal the sort of country Australia is.

It will of course do nothing to compensate Aborigines for the kidnapping of their children as part of official Australian policy or for over 300 officially documented massacres of Aborigines by British settlers.

On these, like the Roman Catholic Church, the Christian Brotherhood favours silence.

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