SIO15: Did the Catholic Church Support Hitler? with Tim O'Neill

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 15, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. All right, got a really cool episode for you today. Tim O'Neill is going to be on to talk about the historical question of whether or not the Catholic Church and the Pope was pro-Nazi and different shades of that too. Well, was he pro-nazi? If not, did he, was silent on the question? All those possible misconceptions, I won't, I guess no spoilers, but all those historical questions of just how pro- Nazi or neutral neutral to anti-Nazi, Pope Pius XII was, and the Catholic Church in general was. Really cool episode, especially if you're a fan of something like Hardcore History, Which I'm a fan of taking relevant questions, some backstory, a lot of cool stuff.

0:01:20 Thomas: I am, as I say multiple times, I'm terrible at history, but I enjoy it so much. So I really enjoyed speaking to Tim. He also stayed on for a bonus content. We did 30 minutes extra on specifically the Holocaust and whether or not the Pope was silent on that. That different than silent on Hitler, supportive of Hitler, slightly different question, related, of course. But anyway, if you want to find that, it will be up at patreon.com/seriouspod. So thanks to Tim for doing that. It was really cool. And it's a cool benefit for patrons. Just a quick little thing before we get to the interview. I know last week in Thursday's episode I believe I mentioned Andrew over on Opening Arguments and us talking about the executive order.

0:02:06 Thomas: Well, you may have gotten the impression from what I said, and I certainly might have been under a misconception here, a misunderstanding that the three-judge panel turned down the sort of the opportunity to lift the stay on Trump's executive order now Now, again, I don't I'm not going to preempt or spoil opening arguments tomorrow's episode. You just need to listen to it. But I bring it up not just to keep plugging my other show, which I would almost do anyway, because it's a great show. But you already are aware by now. But just to let you know that there's... there's some fine print and some not so fine print, actually, some overt print in in that decision. And it's it's not being reported correctly. So this isn't the case of that, you know, Trump's ban was found unconstitutional.

0:02:55 Thomas: Like I've seen that headline. That's not what happened. There's some very intricate details of what happened I didn't quite understand myself But I was able to ask all my questions to Andrew And get a full picture of what went down in the Ninth Circuit Court So look for that episode tomorrow It really cleared up a lot of stuff for me So I'm so glad to have Andrew there to do that So look für that But in the meantime, let's talk about some history History, Tim O'Neill on whether or not the Pope and the Catholic Church were pro-Nazi.

0:03:32 Thomas: Joining me right now is Tim O'Neill. Tim is back for, I believe, probably the third time. Is that right, Tim? Yeah, awesome. Tim has the blog History for Atheists, and I will definitely link it in the show notes if you want to toss out the URL right now, Tim. That would be good, too.

0:03:37 Tim: It is, yeah, it is, yes, that's, gee, I should know this, shouldn't I, um, History for Atheists, historyforatheists.blogspot.com, yeah.

0:03:52 Thomas: He knows his history. He doesn't know his URLs. That's fine. I? Cool. And this is going to be another series of sort of misconceptions that people have on history. I've really enjoyed each one that we've done here because I've often admitted, and I will admit it now, that again, that history is my worst topic. I'm terrible at it. Bad public school education over here. I didn't learn a whole lot. And I try to read it, but because I'm I'm such a like a mathematics kind of guy, like a math and science and physics and that kind of thing. I can I'm aces at that. But when I read names and places and dates, I just it doesn't stay in my brain. It really doesn't. And so that's why I've got, you know, experts like you to come on and teach us something. So what are we talking about today?

0:04:42 Tim: We're going to talk about the topic of the Catholic Church in general and the papacy and its relationship with Nazi Germany and the Nazi regime, and this is a topic of interest to me, first of all, because I'm quite interested in the Second World War, but also because I'm interested in The History of Christianity, so the two kind of come together on this topic. But also because there is a lot of debate on this topic, and a hell of a lotof misconceptions.

0:05:11 Tim: Now, I think before we go on, we should, I think if we're going to do this before any topic, it should be this one. We should stress that I'm an atheist. I am not a Catholic, by by any stretch of the imagination.

0:05:21 Thomas: Yeah, you're not a Catholic Church apologist. So we've established that. I mean, eventually, when WikiLeaks leaks your bank statement, we're going to find out you were. But that's okay.

0:05:25 Tim: Oh, hell no. But we need to establish that. Those payments from the Vatican. Yeah, and anyone who knows me knows that I'm definitely not a Catholic. But it might sound as I'm going on as though I'm kind of defending the Catholic Church, and I'm not. I'm defending history. And I hope I'm gonna be scrupulously fair in the assessment that I give, because there are very partisan positions on both sides of this, of this topic, but you have the genuine Catholic apologists who are on one side and who really sort of exaggerate things in, in one direction, and then you've got some vehement anti-Catholic critics on the other side, some of them Jewish, some of the more sort of critics of the, of the, um, more conservative wing of the Catholic Church who exaggerate things on the other side. On the whole, I'm kind of in the middle on some aspects of this topic.

0:05:49 Thomas: Sure. All right.

0:06:29 Tim: But before

0:06:29 Thomas: That's a good place to be. I don't mind that.

0:06:31 Tim: We go on, I mean, if someone were, you just said that history is not your greatest topic, but if you were to give a summary of your understanding of the relationship between the papacy and the Nazis, just from what you've picked up from popular culture and what you absorb, what would that be?

0:06:36 Thomas: Right.

0:06:48 Thomas: Sure, I get the feeling, again, this is, like you said, just kind of through osmosis, not through any studying. But I would get the feeling that it was kind of like a live and let live kind of thing, like they weren't too shy. I wouldn't I don't picture any, you know, Nazi fighting Catholics happening like an army of secret army of Catholics and led by the pope trying to take Hitler down. But I also, I mean, I don't imagine that they were, you know, hand in hand with them in the Holocaust. I would, I would picture them as kind of neutral to not maybe, you know, varying levels of knowing what was going on and possibly some embarrassing levels of not knowing what, what was going on. That's what I would picture.

0:07:04 Tim: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's a very common conception of, of, of the whole topic, I suppose, just to illustrate how common that, or, or even a more, more sort of extreme version of that, you know, the idea that there was a collaboration between the Catholic Church and and the Nazis, um, a couple of years ago, um,

0:07:42 Thomas: I've Certainly. Heard that I've also heard something like, I mean, did, did Hitler meet with the pope, and did, did he give any, give him any kind of sort of blessing or endorsement or at any time? I mean, I've heard stuff like that, I thought, okay.

0:07:53 Tim: Right. Okay, well, yeah, okay, just to answer the question as a matter of fact, no, Hitler never met with the pope, the pope never met, met with Hitler, which is interesting because they actually were both in the Pope, who was the Pope during the Second World War, Pope Pius XII, one of several Piuses we'll be talking about today, was Papal Nuncio, so he was to the previous Pope, Pius XVI, so they were sort of like papal ambassador to Germany and was based in Munich and in Berlin when Hitler was coming to power.

So they were actually very close, but they never actually, you know, in proximity, but they never really met. No, nothing like that. But I suppose just to illustrate how common this whole idea is, a couple of years ago, I went to the opera. A friend of mine is an opera singer with Opera Australia. So I went and saw him performing in a production of Tosca at the Sydney Opera House. Lavish production. And I don't know if you're an opera fan, but Toscar is set in Rome and it's set in Rome in the early 1800s. So it's during the Napoleonic occupation of Rome.

0:08:59 Thomas: All. Right.

0:08:59 Tim: And the story is that the hero of the story is on the run from Napoleon's secret police. And this production kind of took that and set it in Rome in 1944 during the Nazi occupation of Rome just to kind of make it a bit more current and a bit mehr accessible.

0:09:17 Thomas: Now. They always do that. I, I'm not a opera person, as much as I do a little bit of theater, and that's, that's a very common Shakespeare thing. Oh, let's set Hamlet, but it'll be in Trump's White House. And then, you know, as there's always a different thing like that. But yeah, I understood.

0:09:32 Tim: So that's what they did. It was actually a very, very effective way of doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Act one of Tosca is set in a particular church, or the end of it is set in a particularly church in Rome, Sant'Andrea di Valle, a beautiful Baroque church. And it ends with Scarpia, the bad guy, who in this production was a kind of a Gestapo officer, swearing that he would track down the hero. And it ended with this sort of this great crescendo. And in this production, as he gets up here, comes to the end of his piece, all of the German and SS officers who were in the church give the Hitler salute. And

0:09:35 Thomas: Yeah. Sometimes it's really cool.

0:10:13 Thomas: Yeah,

0:10:14 Tim: Then all the priests and bishops and clergy who are in the Church also give the hitler salute. And it's quite a sort of chilling scene. And then the curtain came down. And while I was sitting there waiting for the people in my row to kind of move out so I could go and get my glass of champagne in the interval, I heard the man in front of me talking to his wife and assuring his wife, oh, yes, the Catholic Church were collaborators with the Nazis and they were all working together and the Catholic church is evil because they were Nazi collaborators.

Collaborators, and then as I was going down the stairs to uh to the bar again, I heard two men behind me assuring each other how appalling it was that the Catholic church got away with collaborating with Adolf Hitler, um, so this is a common idea, and and and I can see why it's a common idea, because it's a good story. I mean, everyone loves to hate the Catholice church, they're a pack of pricks, so I understand if you see something like that, um, or if you hear someone one saying it, then I can understand people who haven't studied the topic would say, oh, yeah, well, that makes perfect sense. You know, one evil institution working with another evil institution.

0:10:20 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:11:21 Thomas: Well, when you've got a history, a recent history of covering up child abuse, it's not hard to, yeah to, to stretch that into to anything I guess of

0:11:27 Tim: Exactly. Exactly. Precisely. And that's one of a number of heinous things that the Catholic Church has done over the years. But I suppose as a rationalist, I try to be scrupulously fair. And what I think is that you should indeed condemn institutions for things that they have done, but you shouldn't condemn them for things they didn't do.

0:11:51 Tim: And the idea that the Catholic Church collaborated with the Nazis and the Catholic church were good friends of Adolf Hitler and so on is, to put it very bluntly, complete bullshit.

0:11:51 Thomas: Course really

0:12:02 Tim: It is not true. But it is one of the reasons why I suppose through my blog I've done a lot of work on it. I haven't actually posted anything on my blog about this, but I'm kind of going to be doing that in the future, is that it's a mainstay of new atheist polemic that the Catholic Church did collaborate with the Nazis. So Christopher Hitchens in his book, God is Not Great, page 286, is quite emphatic on this. And I'll give the quote in full, but we'll come back to this quote because this is a good encapsulation of this whole idea. Hitchens says, the very first, his emphasis, the Very First Diplomatic Accord undertaken by Hitler's government was consummated on July 8th, 1933, a few months after the seizure of power, and took the form of a treaty with the Vatican. He goes on to say in the same passage, He's got a way with words, Hitchens.

0:12:01 Thomas: Okay yeah yeah yeah oh I

0:13:29 Tim: And that's pretty damning stuff. He says quite a number of other very damning things as well and goes on to basically say, to quote him, that Pius XII was a pro-Nazi pope. That's on page 288. Sam Harris kind of gets in on the act as well. Harris concentrates on one aspect, though, in the end of Faith on page 103. He says, not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after the war, after committing crimes as great in any human history. He's quoting a Jewish historian.

0:14:04 Thomas: Should have added that, that's something I've heard a lot, like, oh, they didn't excommunicate, uh, yeah okay, I'll be interested to hear more about that, yeah sure

0:14:08 Tim: Communicating one. We'll get back to that later on. Harris says, this is an extraordinary, really an extraordinary fact. Throughout this period, the church continued to excommunicate theologians and scholars in droves for holding unorthodox views, yet not a single perpetrator of genocide succeeded in furrowing Pope Pius XII's censorious brow. So this all sounds pretty bad, and I can imagine if anyone read that and just sort of accepted those quotes. Quotes, and there are several others. Richard Dawkins once forgot Pius XII's name in a speech here in Australia a few years ago, and so just called him Pope Nazi, and he was talking about. So this is really, I suppose, an encapsulation of the idea that is quite common, that the Pope was a good pal of Adolf Hitler's.

0:14:13 Thomas: Sure, yeah

0:15:03 Tim: So I think probably there are two main claims claims that are made that we can look at, they're overlapping and not mutually exclusive. One is that the papacy, the pope in particular, and the church were pro-Nazi, and that they were also, that they were silent on the Holocaust and did little or nothing to save Jews. Sometimes you get people say, well, the papacies were pro Nazi and they were silenced on the Holocaust. Sometimes you give people say well, they weren't pro Nazi, but they were solid on the Holocaust and they did nothing to help save Jews, so they were kind of neutral, completely neutral, which is sort of your conception is Understanding. Let's take those in order. Let's, let's say first of all, were they pro-Nazi, which Hitchens states. He said, you know, in past the the 11th was was sort of, you know, kind of anti-naazi, but past the 12th was pro-Nazi.

He quotes past the twelfth, um, letter of congratulations to uh to Hitler, uh, on, I think it was on his accession as chancellor, and and this is the kind of of, you know, past 12 of that stage, Eugenio Pichelli was the was the papal nuncio to Germany, so it was his job to to do things like, uh, like congratulate, um, uh, Hitler, uh, on his succession as chancellor. Um, it's the kind of letter that you would you would see, uh, maybe Obama sending to to Vladimir Putin on

0:15:24 Thomas: Right yeah yeah

0:16:25 Tim: Him becoming president of Russia. It doesn't mean Obama thinks Vladimir Putin's a great guy. So that's actually a bit of a shifty tactic.

0:16:32 Thomas: So you think it's like a sort of standard or diplomatic kind of thing. Like his secretary typed it up. It was like, sure.

0:16:38 Tim: Pretty much, hell yeah. And it was written in the kind of diplomatic language, we're looking forward to working with you and mutually beneficial relationship and all that sort of crap. But when you look at it in context, the relationship between the papacy and Germany generally was and had been for a long time hostile. Style. And to understand this, we kind of need to go back a little bit and get a little bit of context. So Germany as a nation effectively came together initially as a kind of a federation of German-speaking principalities, states, and kingdoms in 1814. So in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, various little German- speaking states thought, you know, it would It would probably be better if we kind of all came together. So at the Congress of Vienna, they formed the German Confederation. It wasn't really a nation. It was more of a kind of a club, and it was dominated by Austria.

0:16:39 Thomas: Okay. Yeah.

0:17:31 Tim: The king of Austria was its president. But really there was a rivalry within that initial German ConfEDeration between the north and the south, between Austria, which was a very powerful state, and Prussia, which was the most powerful northern German state. And that rivalry went on for quite a while until eventually in 1871, the Prussians kind of won the struggle, kicked the Austrians out of the federation and formed Germany as a nation state that we know today. But it was dominated by Prussia. Now, the reason that's interesting is that Prussia was, first of all, highly militaristic, disciplinarian sort of a regime, but also was fiercely Protestant.

0:18:16 Tim: And while they were quite happy that they were now dominating the new state of Germany, this is what we call the Second Reich, Otto von Bismarck, who was the Chancellor and effectively the ruler of the new German state, was a ferocious Protestant and a bitter anti-Catholic. He hated Catholics, and he was quite disturbed by the fact that particularly in the south, and to an extent the west, of this new nation of Germany, there were a hell of a lot of Catholics.

And that was also where the centre of anti-Prussian opposition was. And the Catholics in those, in those areas, started to organize themselves, and they formed their own party, their own political party, called the Center Party. And the Center Party went on to become a major force in in German policy, politics, for the next 70 years. So Bismarck was, was worried about these very Catholic areas, and they were not just very Catholic, they were almost like 80, 90 percent Catholic. He was, he was sort of concerned about. He was also very concerned about something that happened in Rome in the same year, in 1871. In 1871, the First Vatican Council came to an end. This was an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church where all the bishops and cardinals and so on get together and work out new doctrines and policies and directions for the Catholic Church. They only happen once every couple of centuries or so. So, and the First Vatican Council was significant because the Pope of the time,

0:19:51 Tim: Who was one of a number of that we're going to talk about, this is Pius IX, it's going to be difficult to keep track of, but anyway, Pius VII, Pias IX promulgated a doctrine of papal infallibility. So the doctrine of, right, so infallibility says, papal infallability says, when the Pope is speaking ex cathedra, so from the chair, cathedrara being the the bishop's throne, which is where we get the word cathedral. So when they're speaking ex cathadra on matters of of Catholic faith and morals, um, they are infallible. What the Pope says in that capacity is the word of God. Now, this was was a pretty controversial idea, even for Catholics, 1871.

0:19:58 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:20:32 Thomas: So when are we talking on this again? What year is this? Oh, so that didn't come around until then. Wow. I guess I didn't know that. Hmm.

0:20:39 Tim: No, no, a lot of people think that that's always been the case. No it's actually quite recent, it's a very recent thing.

0:20:42 Thomas: Yeah so popes were fallible as anybody until then, I guess.

0:20:47 Tim: Well there was a debate about how fallible they were, and the concept of papal infallibility had been kicking around for centuries, but no one had the balls big enough to actually big Pope who stood up and said, I am infallible, because that's a pretty gutsy move.

0:20:49 Thomas: Sure. Okay. Then codified it. Yeah. Right.

0:21:02 Tim: So, yeah, that was 1871, and that caused a lot of concern within the church. A lot of people weren't happy with that. Effectively, it was the conservative wing of the church was, under Pius IX, that had really sort of taken control. But remember, the Catholic Church is a big organization that's got lots of factions, and there's a lot of variety of belief within the church. Caused a lot of consternation within the Church, and there were many bishops who were against it, including quite a few of the German bishops. But it caused a hell of a lot of concern amongst Protestants, because effectively they said, well, look, now the Pope can tell any Catholic in the world how to vote, who to support, what to do, which is not how papal infallibility actually works and Certainly it's

0:21:48 Thomas: But it was kind of like a misconception that spread among Protestants.

0:21:48 Tim: Yeah And Yeah, exactly. And and Bismarck, of course, was one of the ones who panicked over it, so he decided what he needed to do is he needed to separate church and state quite vigorously within Germany, and he needed to, he really sort of remove the Catholic Church from the political system. So he started what was, what was referred to as the Culture Kirkham, or the culture war, and from 1871 to about 1875 he passed a series of anti-Catholic laws. A lot of them are laws that we would look at and think, well, that's perfectly reasonable, and really was sort of, they weren't so much anti-Catholic laws as separating church and state, but really were separating a particular church, the Catholic Church, from the political system. Um, so it meant that priests couldn't hold, uh, couldn't own any kind of political office. They couldn't speak politically from the pulpit.

0:22:43 Tim: A lot of Catholic schools were closed down. The entire order of Jesuits was expelled from Germany. A great many priests were imprisoned. A very many thousands of priests were exiled. And it really shook things up within Germany. As a result, there was a backlash. And actually, the whole thing backfired quite badly. The Centre Party, rather than becoming less powerful, became more powerful. The moderate Catholic bishops who had actually been critical of the Pope before now went, swung the other way, and we came quite supportive of the Pope. And a lot of people were kind of disturbed at the way in which the laws were applied, because one of the things that happened was that secularists and atheists thought this is great, and they started taking these laws and applying them across the board to all churches. And Bismarck wasn't very happy with that, being a Protestant.

0:23:37 Tim: So that was one thing. I was like, oh, no, no. We meant those guys over here, not these guys.

0:23:43 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. It's all a matter of perspective, I guess, on how secular you want to be. If the other religion's in power, then it's like, like, oh yeah, we need secularism for sure.

0:23:46 Tim: That's – so that's Right. So what happened was that Bismarack in the end realized that this thing was starting to backfire, and he beat back down quite a bit. But this was all happening. The reason I've gone back to this is this was all happening kind of within the lifetime of the parents of the people who were around when Hitler was rising to power, and they had a long memory. They had a long of how the Kulturkampf had gone and how it could have gotten even worse because there was a fear that basically the Catholic Church was going to be persecuted into out of existence in Germany. So all this was in people's memories when you get to the post-World War I period, and Germany was in quite a messy state. There was an uprising, a communist uprising in 1919 directly after the war. The Bolsheviks almost seized power in Germany as they had just done in Russia.

0:24:48 Thomas: Russia.

0:24:48 Tim: Russia. But in typical sort of communist style, they started fighting amongst themselves and it all fell apart. But out of that, the Weimar Republic was established, so a proper democratic government. But it was quite a weak government in many ways. And when the Great Depression hit, it hit Germany particularly hard. And that's when we got a period of extreme political instability and the Nazis came to power in that period.

0:24:48 Thomas: Yeah.

0:25:17 Thomas: Right. That's, I, you hear a lot about that these days. A lot of comparisons to the Weimar, uh, Republic.

0:25:23 Tim: I must I've been reading a lot of stuff on this over the last couple of weeks, the parallels have been quite chilling, I can assure you.

0:25:32 Thomas: Could be, that could be another topic, but yeah.

0:25:34 Tim: Maybe. But I suppose the point on all this is, what was the Church's attitude to the rise of the Nazis? It's interesting that the guy who later went on to become Pope Pius XII, So the guy who was pope during the Second World War, before the war, was papal nuncio to Germany, as I mentioned before. So he was initially papal numcio to Bavaria, to the state of Bavavia, and then to the German nation overall. And so he was there. And he was in – for example, he was in Munich in 1922 when the Nazis staged their coup and they tried to seize power through military means and almost succeeded. But when that got quashed, Inegio Pacelli, the papal nuncio, was very happy.

0:26:21 Tim: He was an outspoken critic of the Nazis really from the very earliest days, because he was there on the ground and he saw what was going on. And as early as 1921, so even earlier than that, he wrote an article in a Bavarian newspaper and said, the Bavavian people are peace-loving, but just as they were seduced during the 1919 revolution into the extremes of Bolshevism, so now other non-Bavarian elements of the entirely opposite persuasion, that's the Nazis, have likewise thought to make Bavaria their base of operations. So this is very, very early on, while the Nazi party was very, very small, he, he, he spotted them as being, as being potentially the, uh, you know, a real problem.

Um, in 1924, so while they were still quite a small, a small party, he wrote in a report back to Rome saying, Nazism is probably the most dangerous heresy of our time. And three days later, in another note, he said the heresy of Nazism put state and race above everything, above true religion, above the truth, and above justice. This guy was not pro-Nazi, I think it's pretty clear. Some people said, well, he didn't like the Nazis, but he hated the communists more, and so he actually let the Nazi's do what they wanted to do because he thought they could, they could deal with communism. And when Hitler came to power in in January 1933, by this stage, Pacelli was back in Rome. He was now Secretary of State of the Vatican, so basically second in command to the Pope and second in line to the Pope.

And a friend of his, and he were having dinner, and the friend recorded in his diary at the time that he commented to Paceilli and said, well, at least Hitler's a strong leader who could keep the communists in line. And Paceelli said, quote, "Don't talk such nonsense. The Nazis are infinitely worse."

0:27:34 Thomas: Yeah, I'm

0:28:16 Tim: Right, so this is a guy who had firsthand, early firsthand, uh, experience of, of who and what the Nazis were. And he, he, uh, he recognized them before most people in in the West recognized them as being, a as being a genuine danger. And he always, he always hated them. Right, so this obviously doesn't fit with the idea of, of him being a, uh, being a pro, pro-Nazi guy.

0:28:45 Thomas: Starting to wonder how that could be such a gross misconception. Like, where do you think that comes from then? Are you getting to that? Yeah,

0:28:52 Tim: Well, yeah, I will, but I suppose, you just, just to emphasize how anti-Nazi he was in that period in which he was, uh, he was papal nuncio, uh, in, in Germany, he gave, uh, I think it's like something like 45 speeches, official speeches, of which in 40 he condemned Nazism or some aspect of Nazi ideology. So these aren't just some passing comments that he made. It was a consistent theme that he disliked, and he basically hated the Nazis. So one of the reasons that people point to, and Hitchens did it in that quote that we talked about before, ofthe reasons they say, well, he was a friend of the Nazis, is that it's true that in July 1933, so about seven months after Hitler came to power, he signed a concordat with the Nazi, the new Nazi regime, um, so he, as as secretary of state of the, of the, uh, of the Vatican, negotiated this agreement with the Nazi regime on behalf of Pope Pius the 11th, who was still, who was still Pope at that stage.

And and people point to that and say, as Hitchin says, well, look, you know, they came to this, this agreement, mitzvah, with, with, with the Nazi regime, where they, where they basically said, well, look, you know, we'll, we'll look after our bit over here, you know, will keep our schools, and and we'll, will uh we'll continue to do what we want to do, but, you know, it will give you legitimacy in return. So this is kind of where the idea that he was pro-Nazi comes from.

And and people like Hitchens point to the Concordat, as he does in that quote, and and paint it as a cozy, friendly deal. The reason I was talking before about the Kulturkampf and this background of hostility between the Catholic Church and the German state is that when you look at it in that context, the Concordat is not a cosy, friendly deal of, you know, let's all be friends.

0:28:54 Thomas: Yeah, Okay.

0:30:47 Tim: The Catholic Church only concordats with regimes that were unfriendly. So a concordate was a way of limiting the degree of unfriendliness, right? So it's sort of saying, well, okay, we're not friends, but we set the parameters like this. We're going to maintain our own schools. We're gonna be able to allow our clergy to operate without being hindered and so on. So that's really what the Concordat was all about. The Concordats wasn't originally negotiated with the Nazi regime, which is how it was signed so quickly, because these things usually took years to put together. This was negotiated way back in 1925 with the Weimar Republic. It just hadn't been brought to a conclusion. It hadn't being signed and ratified because the Weimark Republic was still quite cautious about it. So effectively what happened was that the Nazis sent an emissary, a Catholic politician who was an ally of theirs, von Papen, sent him to Rome with the concordat that had been negotiated back in 1920.

0:31:00 Thomas: Yeah,

0:31:50 Tim: In '25, who put, and he put it on the table and basically said, we're going to accept this, but here's the conditions. This is a one-time offer. If you say no, we're never going to offer it to you again. Two, you've got a week to decide, otherwise it's off the table. And he basically said, von Pappen said, look, Hitler is going to to oppress the church anyway, so basically this is the best do are you going to get, this will limit what he can do.

Um, number two, um, if you don't do this, he's going to oppress the church way more, and he will be able to, if anyone complains, he'll be able to point to this and say, we, we gave this to the Pope, and the Pope told us to fuck off, so the Pope can't complain. So they were in a bind, they were really. And at the same time, they, the, the Nazis, I mean, the Nazis were pricks. At the same time that this was happening, in that the weeks leading up to, the three weeks leading up to this, this ultimatum, the Nazi shut down non-Catholic newspapers and publications. They searched 16 Catholic youth clubs, making allegations of sexual immorality, and they arrested, and 97, 92 priests, and put them in concentration camps. So they were basically saying, this is a taste of what you'll get if you don't give us what we want. Do you do?

And I suppose Pacelli and the Pope were in quite a difficult situation. And the British ambassador to the Vatican, Yvon Kirkpatrick, a couple of months later, wrote back to London to sort of explain the context. And he said, look, basically the way he put it, is a pistol had been pointed at the Pope's head.

0:33:31 Tim: So the German government had offered him concessions. He said, "Concessionalism must be admitted wider than any previous German government would have agreed to." And he had to choose between an agreement on their lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich.

Not only that, he was given no more than one week to make up his mind, and if the German government violated the Concordat, and they were certain to do that, the Vatican would at least have a treaty on which to base a protest.

So when the Vatican chose to sign the Concorde and ratify it, they effectively, that was what they were saying, this is the best of a series of potential bad deals that we could have, and and and effectively they were sort of saying, well, at least now we've got something that we can hold them to account to. And they did, in the first three years of the Concordat, they filed more than 50 protests about violations of the Conchordat, um, so much so the Nazis actually got a bit sick of it and were complaining that it should be abolished, some, some Nazis. And then by 1940, effectively it was a dead letter, people weren't even referring to it. The, the U.S. correspondent in Berlin, William Shira, talked about it in one of his reports and used the past tense, you know, it was effectively dead.

So when you put this stuff in context, what Hitchens is saying, and what people say about, well, they signed an agreement with the Nazis, therefore they were pals, they weren't pals. When you look at it in context, the reason they signed the Concordat was because they really didn't have too many other choices. Now, some people say, well, yeah, you're stupid to have have signed an agreement with the Nazis.

0:35:04 Tim: I think in retrospect that makes sense, but of course we've got 70 years of 2020 hindsight and we can see who the Nazis became and what the Nazis mean. So it wasn't they signed an argument with the Nazis that we know. They signed an agreement with The Nazis of 1933 and at that stage, sure they were bastards, but no one knew exactly what a pack of bastards they that we're going to turn out to be.

0:35:11 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, I think what's amazing, in in my, again, completely ignorant conception of it, is when you look back on this and you see how long it took for people to really know what was going on, I mean, it makes sense, but just, you know, with a with a naive conception of it, you're like, well, they're the bad guys, you know, like Hitler, his name is Hitler, come on, he's Adolf Hitler, how did you not know, but it's like well, yeah, exactly, I always think about like the Great Dictator, you know, was made in like what, 1940 or something, and It was like he had to be arguing for it, like it wasn't like, oh, this is an obvious, you know, I'm just making fun of the worst person in the world. It's, no, look, everybody, like, he's the worst person in the world anyway. It's, it's interesting.

0:35:48 Tim: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Come on. Yeah. How did you not realize? Well, this is the thing. Hitler was a... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:36:15 Tim: We're going back to your... And this is why the Trump comparison gets more and more chilling. Hitler in the 1930s was really sort of regarded in two ways. He was regarded as a bit of a buffoon who was also a thug, or he was regarded as the great hope who was a, it was a person to be admired, who could, who could lead, lead a third way, that because everything else seemed to be failing and communism wasn't, didn't look like a great idea, and they'd just come out of the great, great depression, um, so maybe, maybe this was a third way that we could, that we could take, um, so it, it's, as I said, they didn't sign an agreement with the Hitler that we know, they signed an agreement that with Hitler that they knew in 1933, who they did not trust. But the other thing is, German governments had been rising and falling, sometimes lasting only more than a couple of months.

0:36:28 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:37:07 Tim: So they didn't know that this guy was going to become a dictator, have established the Third Reich, start the Second World War, and all the rest of it. And they weren't alone in the 1930s, the people who entered into agreements with Hitler and then found themselves double-crossed. There were quite a few I mean, Hitler came to power through one of those agreements. They effectively said, well, who are we going to make chancellor of? Let's try this guy. Okay, he's not very popular. Well, there is Hitler. He's quite popular. He's an idiot, but he's an Idiot that we'll be able to manipulate and control. You know, again, shades of Trump.

0:37:38 Tim: And then when he got into power, he backstabbed all those guys, and a couple of them ended up in concentration camps and dead. So, you know, they were double-crossed by Hitler. Joseph Stalin was double- crossed by Hitler, Hitler signed the Pact of Steel with Hitler in 1939 where the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were going to be best buddies and they merrily divided Poland and Eastern Europe up between them and everything was hunky dory until Hitler backstabbed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Neville Chamberlain signed an agreement with Hitler, the Munich Agreement in 1938, got off the plane in London waving a piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler saying this is peace in our time. 18 months later, the biggest war in human history started. So these guys weren't alone in being deceived by Hitler.

0:37:21 Thomas: Right. Yeah, yeah.

0:38:26 Tim: Hitler was actually boasted just before the Concordat was signed, boasted to one of his subordinates, "I will be one of the few men in history who has deceived the Vatican." He was quite blatant about it. So this is why what Hitchens says is a distortion of history. Um, it's also fundamentally wrong on a number of fronts. He says the very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler was consummated on July 8th, 1933. Well, first of all, error of fact, it was July 20, Christopher H, and sorry, but more importantly, it wasn't the very 1st.

Um, to be signed, I mean, I know that that gives it a little, it gives his, his, uh, his passage a bit of a bit rhetorical punch, but but the Concordat was just factually correct, signed on July 20, 1933. Back on May 5, 1933, Hitler's Germany had renewed and signed a new trade and friendship pact with the Soviet Union. So that was May 5th, so that was before. Same day, Britain signed an Anglo-German trade agreement with the Nazis. And the month before the Concorde, the Nazis signed an agreement with the Havara, Havara agreement with the Zionist Federation of Germany, a group of Jews.

So for Hitchens to be saying, well, they signed an agreement with Hitler, therefore they were pals, well okay, the Zionists Federation of German signed an agreement with him before the Catholic Church, but does that make them pals? No, what everyone was doing was saying, shit, this guy's in power now, what the hell do we do? Let's try and find some way to contain him if we possibly can. And most of them end up, I mean, the Zionist Federation of Germany probably regretted that agreement as well.

0:40:07 Thomas: You know, there's another, um, conception of, and there's argument over whether or not Hitler was religious or he used religion or he, you know, uh, do you have any opinion on that? Does that, does, does this have any bearing on that whole argument?

0:40:17 Tim: Yeah. Well, I'm glad you asked me that, Tom, because, yes, that's one that comes up all the time, and quite often you get people who come out with quotes from Hitler to be saying that he was a Catholic or seem to be saying that he was a Christian. Now, Hitler was raised a Catholic. His mother was devoutly Catholic, but Hitler himself stopped going to church at about the age of 17 and pretty much never darkened the door of a church again. But you certainly do see quotes, and people often quote these things that Hitler said. He says things like, for example, in 1922, my feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, was recognize these Jews for what they were and summon men to fight against them and who, God's truth, was greatest not as a sufferer, but as a fighter.

0:41:18 Tim: And people point to that and say, well, look, he's saying, you know, my feelings as a Christian. First of all, any Christian who read that would not recognize Christianity. He said, you know, Jesus wasn't a fighter and effectively what he's doing is he's saying is I'm like Jesus, a man in loneliness surrounded by a few followers as recognizing the Jews as the wicked evil creatures that they are. But the second thing is, he says he's a Christian. He didn't practice any form of Christianity. But what he did do is, I don't think he did, but he probably had about as good a knowledge of the Bible as our friend Trump.

0:41:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:46 Thomas: Did he quote two Corinthians or is that, yeah, Yeah. Yeah. Right.

0:41:56 Tim: But that's exactly what I suppose I'm saying. This guy would say anything in order to get himself elected. And if you look at these quotes, they start in 1922, and they go through to around about just after he came to power. But most of them are in that period from 1922 to 1933, which is when he came into power.

0:42:14 Thomas: Campaigning period.

0:42:16 Tim: Exactly. So What happened in 1923, he tried that military coup and failed, and then he went to jail. And when he got out of jail, he was sentenced for several years. He got out after a few months. But he got out after a few months because he promised that he was going to reform the Nazi party and reject any kind of attempt to seize power by violence. And he did. What the policy from then on was, let's win via the election votes.

But the problem was, the same problem that Bismarck had, he had to try and win votes from the centre party. And the centre part was dominated by its Catholic factions. And he had to try and win votes in the south and the west of Germany and the south of Germany was predominantly Catholic and the Catholic Church hated the Nazis. They preached against the Nazis, There were several bishops who basically excommunicated anyone who was a member of the Nazi party and if you look at a map of who voted for the Nazis in the final elections of the Weimar Republic in 1933, and then a map of where the greatest concentration of Catholics was in Germany at the same time, they're mirror images of each other. He effectively failed to win. He never won the popular vote, a bit like our friend Trump.

0:42:16 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:43:33 Tim: He, and he effectively failed to win the Catholic vote, but he was trying to. So he was saying things like, in 1928, "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. In fact, our movement is Christian." In 1936, "Providence has caused me to be a Catholic, and I therefore know how to handle this church." That one quite often gets quoted, but if you think about what he's saying there, he's not saying, "I'm a Cathlic and I love Catholics." What he is saying is, "I was brought up a Catholic, um, and therefore I know how handle these pastors," right? So that's not actually Hitler saying, "I love Catholics, Catholics and I are good pals," but this is what he was saying in in public, right? So what, this guy was a consummate liar. He was like the ultimate liar.

0:44:14 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:44:15 Tim: This is what he was saying in public. In private, he was saying something totally different. So Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary, 29th of December 1939, "The Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so, it's a branch of the Jewish race. This can be seen in the similarity of their religious rights. Both Judaism and Christianity have no point of contact to the animal elements, and thus in the end they will be destroyed," right?

So this is Gobel's recording Hitler's actual private views. Um, Speer, in his book, Inside the Third Reich, another one of the Nazi, uh, Albert Speer, no, one of them, the insiders, um, he's quoting Hitler, "Once I've settled my other problem," Hitler occasionally declared I, that's the war, by the way, my other problem "I'll have My, I'll have my reckoning with the church, I'll have it reeling on the ropes." Martin Borman, who was very vehemently anti-Catholic and anti-Christian, didn't like that idea. He wanted to tackle the church and Christianity right then and there. And so he used to do things like, according to Speer, take a document out from his pocket and begin reading passages from some defiant sermon by some Catholic priest or pastoral letter or something, and Hitler would get very angry.

So Borman would stir Hitler up and say, "No, we should, we should tackle them now." And Spears says Hitler would become so worked up, he would vow to punish the offending clergyman eventually. The fact that he couldn't immediately retaliate raised him to a white heat of anger. So this is what was going on in private. In private, it was absolutely clear to all of Hitler's subordinates, and there's plenty of other quotes along those lines, that Hitler hated Christianity and despised the Catholic Church.

0:45:03 Thomas: I

0:45:56 Tim: So these quotes that people come out with and say, "Say, look, Hitler was a Catholic, Hitler was friendly to Christianity," he was a liar. And that was what he was saying in public or what he was saying maybe occasionally in private audiences with people that he knew were devout and that he wanted to charm. So Hitler was clearly not a Catholic. He was also not an atheist, though, and people on the other side make that mistake, and they look at these anti-Christian quotes and say therefore he was an atheist. He wasn't an atheist He

0:46:21 Thomas: Was going to guess because the the Goebbels quote you said said he was deeply religious. But if he's not Catholic, he's Christian. He's I don't know. Was he Jewish? No. I mean, like what? What's left? Left, just a general theist.

0:46:31 Tim: Was a theist. I mean, technically Technically, he was a theist, so he kind of believed in a kind of a cosmic providence, so kind of divine providence. And in that quote, providence has caused me to be Catholic, he often refers to the Creator and he often, in his private conversations, he referred to the creator God and he also referred to it as providence when he was almost blown up in 1944, and we'll We'll get to this in a minute, but in an attempted assassination, he came out after and said, Providence has spared me so I can go on to achieve my sacred duty to the German people. The guy was a nutcase, and he genuinely believed that he'd been selected by this sort of divine spirit to rule the world. Well, so when you put all this in context, the quote from Hitchens about Hitler and the Pope being friendly and so on and the pope being a pro-Nazi pope is absolute nonsense.

0:47:35 Tim: The other bit about how the church ordered the Catholic Center Party to disband, that's factually incorrect. Correct, um, the Catholic Center Party disbanded on its own, uh, on its own devices, uh, about a month or so before, uh, the Concordat was signed, so it wasn't a consequence of it, uh, it certainly wasn't the consequence of any order by the pope to disband. The pope read about it disbanding in the paper, right? He was reading the newspaper one day and said, "All right," and that later that day he said, "It's a pity they did that because it would have given me a bit more negotiating power in this, you know, in these negotiations over the Concordat." So Hitchens is wrong on that as well. And he also says that the 23 million Catholics living in the Third Reich had been gutted and gelded as a political force because they weren't allowed to undertake any political activity.

0:48:25 Tim: That's garbage. The Concordats said that clergymen couldn't be politically active, but specifically said that lay organizations could continue to, so he just gets that completely wrong as well.

0:48:37 Thomas: Interesting.

0:48:38 Tim: So that probably sort of brings us, that I think that probably sums up the answer to the "was he pro-Nazi" and the answer is I think pretty clearly no. Okay.

0:48:47 Thomas: Yeah. It's just amazing that that could, I don't know. It just seems like such a wild misconception based on what you've told me. It's a, it's incredible. But what is there, is there any evidence of like, you oftentimes we think in these simplistic black and white terms, was there any events of people within the Vatican? Maybe individuals might've been pro-Nazi or anything like, yeah. I mean, there's got to be some kind of thing going on there.

0:48:53 Tim: Yep. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh. Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely, there was a bishop called Bishop Alois Hudal, who was a German bishop, and he was, he was definitely pro, he was pro-Germany, and even though he had some reservations about the Nazis, he was definitely inclined towards the Third Reich. He was quite prominent in the Vatican for a while, but his pro-Nazi tendencies really kind of put him further and further on the outer, and in the end he was marginalized and pretty much kicked out of the house, and he was quite bitter about it. He also used the Vatican's apparatus for helping war refugees, of whom there were millions. He used them to help Nazi war criminals escape.

Now, often you see people say the Vatican helped Nazi war criminal escape, as though the Pope was sitting there drinking goblets of baby's blood and signing orders saying, yes, please help my Nazi friends. The Pope had no idea that this was going on. Hudal was a pariah at this stage and had been marginalized, and Hudal himself was later very bitter about the way in which he was treated by the Pope and circulated a whole lot of false material about the Pope. And the Pope collaborating with the Nazis, which is how some of this stuff came about. Art. Hudal fed that to a guy called Rolf Hochhuth, who was a playwright in Germany in the 1960s, who wrote a play called The Deputy, which is really where this whole idea of Hitler's Pope and the Pope being the pro-Nazi and the

0:49:57 Thomas: Yeah.

0:50:42 Tim: The Pope turning a blind eye to the Holocaust, it really came about through this play that was published in, I think it was 1966.

0:50:50 Tim: Up until that point, if you asked anyone in the late 1950s or the early 1960s what was Pope Pius XII's role in the war, they would have told you that he was a brave voice of humanity in occupied Europe, that he spoke out against the oppression of the Jews, that he saved Jews, that he was a great man, he was a saintly Pope. And really the whole idea that the Pope was pro-Nazi came about in the 1960s and partly came about substantially from, both from this play and also from a KGB psyops operation that was trying to feed that idea into, particularly into Eastern Europe, particularly Czechoslovakia and Poland, to undermine the authority of the church. And that kind of fed out into the West via various sort of pro-Soviet leftist groups.

0:51:42 Tim: And then, you know, no one is going to go broke selling any idea that the Catholic Church is evil. So people accepted it. So you're asking quite a valid question. If this is all the case, as it clearly is, how did this idea arise? People like to believe what they want to believe. And so if you give them information that seems to – this happens all the time. Again, we see it with Trump. If you give him information that seem to confirm their prejudices, they will accept it and they'll latch onto it and then they'll resist any information that doesn't. I've presented people who are claiming that the Pope was a pro-Nazi and that the Church was collaborating with the Nazis with all of the information I've just given you, and they resist it. They tell me I'm wrong. They tell Me that this source is biased. Oh, yeah, when Golda Meir, the first prime minister of Israel, praised the Pope for saving Jews, she was just saying that because she wanted his support for Israel.

0:51:50 Thomas: Yeah, wow.

0:52:40 Tim: I thought, really? So she just lied publicly? Seriously? Seriously. But you know, yeah, as we know, when we're dealing with with fundamentalist beliefs, um, they're difficult to dislodge.

0:52:53 Thomas: Well, sure.

0:52:53 Tim: But you, you mentioned before, you know, I didn't get the you were saying I didn't get the impression of, um, of secret armies of Catholics trying to undermine the the Nazi regime and trying to kill Hitler and so on. Um, there was, there was, um, so that and and the papacy was heavily involved in it. There was a brilliant book that came out last year called Church of Spies, the Pope's Secret War Against Hitler, by a guy called Mark Riebling. Riebling is a historian of espionage.

He's worked with the CIA, but no, he isn't because he made a couple of comments in this, I believe he isn't, he made a couple of comments in this interview yesterday that indicated to me he's not a believer at all. He's a good historian, though, and it's a brilliant book. It's probably the best book I think I read of everything I read last year. Sam Harris, to his credit, read this book, and interviewed Riebling on his blog and said in that interview, I think I've got to change my view on the church. So to his credence, Sam Harris actually changed his mind. My question to Sam Harris is, why didn't you do your bloody homework in the first place?

0:53:27 Thomas: Is he a Catholic? Oh, that's good.

0:54:06 Thomas: Fair.

0:54:06 Tim: But, you know, yeah. There was an underground resistance movement in Germany, and it was substantially Catholic. There were – it's quite a remarkable story, but there was a guy called Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. He was head of the Abwehr, which was the army intelligence unit. It, he was the head of a cell of anti-Nazis within the the Nazi regime, and he worked with a couple of other guys, um, Brigadier Hans Oster, who was also an Abwehr intelligence agent. And Canaris, there's quite a quite a dramatic bit at the beginning of of Riebling's book where Canaris is sitting in Bechtus Garden in in Hitler's country estate where a whole group of Nazi, uh, leaders and generals are discussing the then, this is 1939, September 1939, the invasion of Poland, and are basically planning wholesale massacres of civilians, roundup and massacred of Jews.

0:54:07 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:55:06 Tim: And Canaris was sitting there thinking, these people are evil. And he went home and said to his wife, we've got to do something to stop these guys. And so he, a very brave man, he and various others within the Abwehr started thinking about, okay, what can we do to overthrow Hitler, but not do so in such a way that we leave Germany open to be taken over by communists? Or since the war had started by that stage, we leave German open to basically torn apart.

Because remember, Germany is quite a new country to be effectively torn apart by the Allies. So what they wanted to do was preserve Germany but get rid of the Nazis and and the problem was they didn't have any channel of communication with with the Allies. So they were thinking, okay, who could we talk to, who could we talked through, and who could we use that would have in intelligence terms cover a reason to be moving backwards and forwards between us and someone else who would be our channel to to the Allies, and they thought, the Pope. Now, these guys were Protestants. These particular guys were Protestant, Canaris and Oster and so on. So they didn't actually know many Catholics.

But one of them knew a guy who was an Abwehr reservist, a Munich lawyer called Joseph Muller, who was a remarkable guy, and someone should make a movie about this bloke. His nickname was Ockensepp, which means Joey the Ox. He was a great big guy, looked like an ox, drank beer, loved his booze, smoked like a chimney.

0:56:40 Tim: Big, friendly fellow, the kind of bloke that everyone wanted to be friends with, could convince you to do anything. You know, terrific fellow. And he was a Catholic, a devout Catholic. And so they approached Joey the Ox and they said, would you be our go-between between us and the Pope? And so he became a secret agent with Abwehr. We had the very James Bond codename of Codename X, which I thought was pretty cool. So Agent X was then moving between Berlin and Rome.

And the Pope agreed. The Pope agreed, yes, I will help you overthrow Hitler. And so there became about a four or five year association between the German resistance and the Pope, with the Pope effectively being that the conduit, the channel, um, and helping the resistance as much as possible, uh, through the network of Catholic priests that they had through the whole of the whole of Germany. The Gestapo were kind of onto them, but it took until 1943 before they finally slipped up. Canaris should have destroyed a particular communication and he didn't, and the Gestapa got hold of it and they, all these guys got arrested and sent to concentration camps, some of them died. You might want to read the book, so I won't do any

0:57:56 Tim: Spoilers as to who didn't, but all I'm saying is someone should make a movie about Joey the Ox. He was quite an impressive guy, and it's not just that the Pope was acting as a conduit, so he wasn't a passive agent in this. They were going to the Pope and they were saying, look, they actually had a meeting in the crypt of St. Peter's, by the way, so they're sitting sitting down underneath St. Peter's with the Swiss Guard guarding all the doors, having this meeting with the Pope. And they said to him, sorry, with the Pope's Secretary of State, and they say to the Secretary of State, we might have to kill Hitler. And the Secretary of State didn't come out and say, yeah, I've discussed that with the Pope and he's cool with it. But he made it pretty clear that he discussed it with the Pope and the Pope was cool with it.

0:57:56 Thomas: Yeah Yeah. Wow.

0:58:43 Tim: Because and then they said, look, we may need to blow up his plane, innocent people might die. And again, the Secretary of State said, you know, the church actually has rules on tyrants. The church has got rules on everything, Right? But way back in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas sat down and said, OK, if you've actually got someone who was such a bad dude that the only way that you could save the lives of innocent people is by killing him, is it OK to kill him? So Thomas Aquinas came up with a checklist of, you know, yes, if he's this, he's this, then it's okay to kill the bastard, even if it means innocent people might also die in the process.

So effectively, the Catholic Church had checked Aquinas' checklist and said, yep, Hitler definitely meets all the criteria. Feel free if you must. I mean, they didn't come out and say this, but they made it pretty clear. Feel free. If you must kill the guy. And as a result, these guys and another conspiracy were responsible for several attempts to kill Hitler, including the one that almost got him in the July 20 plot in 1944, where they almost blew him up. And in that case, again, you had devout Catholics.

Klaus von Stauffenberg, who was the instrumental officer who actually put the bomb in the bunker next to Hitler, was a devout Catholic. And the reason he was opposing Hitler, apart from the fact he hated the guy, was that it was because of his religion, religion. So yes, there was a secret army trying to kill Hitler, and

0:58:54 Thomas: Yeah well

1:00:07 Tim: It was Catholic, and it was, and the Pope was up to his neck in it, uh, and

1:00:11 Thomas: It Well, it sounds like it was somewhat Catholic, but yeah, yeah, right.

1:00:12 Tim: Yeah, that's right, yeah, that' s right, but but the the, um, the network that they were using was was through the Catholic Church, uh,

1:00:22 Thomas: Well, it. I think you made a good case. Is there anything, um, closing, will have to, of course, as always, I'll have to do my homework, and also I look forward to, one thing that Tim is very good at, is if you guys have any questions, if you comment on the website or on the Facebook, Tim has been in the past has been very responsive. I know. Sorry if I'm signing you up for this against your will now. But Tim has been very responsive. So if you have any questions, or if you're going to try to say, well, here's this bit of evidence to consider, Tim in the past has been great at commenting and giving you his thoughts on that. So definitely do that. And that's something that I look forward to as well, because, again, this is not my subject. But you've made a great case. And I look forward to being able to have a more accurate view on this and check out maybe some of the different sources and quotes that you referenced and really

1:00:46 Tim: It's okay, sure no

1:01:18 Thomas: Have a better picture of it. It, so thanks, Tim.

1:01:20 Tim: Problem at all, happy, happy to be back on the show. So, okay,

1:01:22 Thomas: Absolutely As always, a really fascinating, I could sit here and just just learn from you for days, but That's it for the main interview, but as I said, Tim was able to stick around to talk for 30 more minutes on specifically whether the Pope could have done more to prevent the Holocaust. Really interesting historical question. He talks about some examples of what the Pope actually did and said and maybe what the thinking was there. So again, patreon.com/seriouspod. Thank you to all who have pledged. I hope you enjoy that bonus content. Well, that's all I have for you today. I will see you on Thursday for some Thursday inquiry, and thank you for listening. I'll see you then.