Author: Vladimir Dedijer Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 456
Book Description
Firsthand testimony of survivors and eyewitnesses dramatizes this graphic account of the crimes committed during World War II at Jasenovac, the largest death camp in Yugoslavia. Dedijer's evidence attests to thousands of atrocities and to the complicity of the Catholic Church.
Author: Paul L. Williams Publisher: Prometheus Books ISBN: 1615921427 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
Over 50 billion dollars in securities. Gold reserves that exceed those of industrialized nations. Real estate holdings that equal the total area of many countries. Opulent palaces containing the world's greatest art treasures. These are some of the riches of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet in 1929 the Vatican was destitute. Pope Pius XI, living in a damaged, leaky, pigeon-infested Lateran Palace, could hear rats scurrying through the walls, and he worried about how he would pay for even basic repairs to unclog the overburdened sewer lines and update the antiquated heating system. How did the Church manage in less than seventy-five years such an incredible reversal of fortune? The story here told by Church historian Paul L. Williams is intriguing, shocking, and outrageous. The turnaround began on February 11, 1929, with the signing of the Lateran Treaty between the Vatican and fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Through this deal Mussolini gained the support of the staunchly Catholic Italian populace, who at the time followed the lead of the Church. In return, the Church received, among other benefits, a payment of $90 million, sovereign status for the Vatican, tax-free property rights, and guaranteed salaries for all priests throughout the country from the Italian government. With the stroke of a pen the pope had solved the Vatican's budgetary woes practically overnight, yet he also put a great religious institution in league with some of the darkest forces of the 20th century. Based on his years of experience as a consultant for the FBI, Williams produces explosive and never-before published evidence of the Church's morally questionable financial dealings with sinister organizations over seven decades through today. He examines the means by which the Vatican accrued enormous wealth during the Great Depression by investing in Mussolini's government, the connection between Nazi gold and the Vatican Bank, the vast range of Church holdings in the postwar boom period, Paul VI's appointment of Mafia chieftain Michele Sindona as the Vatican banker, a billion-dollar counterfeit stock fraud uncovered by Interpol and the FBI, the "Ambrosiano Affair" called "the greatest financial scandal of the 20th Century" by the New York Times, the mysterious death of John Paul I, profits from an international drug ring operating out of Gdansk, Poland, and revelations about current dealings. For both Catholics and non-Catholics this troubling expose of corruption in one of the most revered religious institutions in the world will serve as an urgent call for reform.
Author: Charles R. Gallagher Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300148216 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
In the corridors of the Vatican on the eve of World War II, American Catholic priest Joseph Patrick Hurley found himself in the midst of secret diplomatic dealings and intense debate. Hurley’s deeply felt American patriotism and fixed ideas about confronting Nazism directly led to a mighty clash with Pope Pius XII. It was 1939, the earliest days of Pius’s papacy, and controversy within the Vatican over policy toward Nazi Germany was already heated. This groundbreaking book is both a biography of Joseph Hurley, the first American to achieve the rank of nuncio, or Vatican ambassador, and an insider’s view of the alleged silence of the pope on the Holocaust and Nazism. Drawing on Hurley’s unpublished archives, the book documents critical debates in Pope Pius’s Vatican, secret U.S.-Vatican dealings, the influence of Detroit’s flamboyant anti-Semitic priest Charles E. Coughlin, and the controversial case of Croatia’s Cardinal Stepinac. The book also sheds light on the powerful connections between religion and politics in the twentieth century.
Author: Robert Hayden Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004241906 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
Reflecting more than two decades of research on Yugoslavia’s collapse and based primarily on sources from the region itself, this book consistently challenges commonly-held beliefs about the Balkans wars, and about European integration, international law, human rights, and politics in multi-national societies.
Author: Esther Gitman Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1036405001 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 355
Book Description
In this book, Esther Gitman, a Holocaust survivor from Sarajevo, documents the saga of the Jews of Yugoslavia with a focus on Sarajevo, her birthplace. The book features an examination of archival documents from Sarajevo, Zagreb, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and more. The ground-breaking work reveals the many facets of Jewish life in Yugoslavia from the time of their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in 1492. This book provides an in-depth look at the integral role the Sephardic Jews, from the Hebrew word for Spain, played in the broader development of the city. More broadly, the book provides readers with a glimpse into a community which saw seventy percent of its members annihilated during WWII.
Author: Peter C. Kent Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 0773569944 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
In The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII Peter Kent shows how the Catholic Church was able to continue to exist on both sides of the Iron Curtain in spite of the division of Europe after the Second World War. Although Christian democracy became increasingly influential in western Europe, the struggle to preserve the position and rights of the Church in the east was much more difficult. When east European governments, under Moscow's direction, began their offensive against the independence of the Church in 1948, the papacy found that it stood alone, with little assistance from the U.S. Kent offers a new assessment of Pius XII, extending the study of his career and papacy beyond the Second World War. He also examines the origins of the Cold War, the European perspective on American and Soviet policies, and the diplomatic role and influence of the Roman Catholic Church.
Author: David G. Dalin Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739145967 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
In the brutal fight that has raged in recent years over the reputation of Pope Pius XII_leader of the Catholic Church during World War II, the Holocaust, and the early years of the Cold War_the task of defending the Pope has fallen primarily to reviewers. These reviewers formulated a brilliant response to the attack on Pius, but their work was scattered in various newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals_making it nearly impossible for the average reader to gauge the results. In The Pius War, Weekly Standard's Joseph Bottum has joined with Rabbi David G. Dalin to gather a representative and powerful sample of these reviews, deliberately chosen from a wide range of publications. Together with a team of professors, historians, and other experts, the reviewers conclusively investigate the claims attacking Pius XII. The Pius War, and a detailed annotated bibliography that follows, will prove to be a definitive tool for scholars and students_destined to become a major resource for anyone interested in questions of Catholicism, the Holocaust, and World War II.
Author: Nicholas A. Robins Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253220777 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
In the last two decades, the field of comparative genocide studies has produced an increasingly rich literature on the targeting of various groups for extermination and other atrocities, throughout history and around the contemporary world. However, the phenomenon of "genocides by the oppressed," that is, retributive genocidal actions carried out by subaltern actors, has received almost no attention. The prominence in such genocides of non-state actors, combined with the perceived moral ambiguities of retributive genocide that arise in analyzing genocidal acts "from below," have so far eluded serious investigation. Genocides by the Oppressed addresses this oversight, opening the subject of subaltern genocide for exploration by scholars of genocide, ethnic conflict, and human rights. Focusing on case studies of such genocide, the contributors explore its sociological, anthropological, psychological, symbolic, and normative dimensions.
Author: Dan Porat Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674243137 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel prosecuted and jailed dozens of Holocaust survivors who had served as camp kapos or ghetto police under the Nazis. At last comes the first full account of the kapo trials, based on records newly declassified after forty years. In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a Tel Aviv bus recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man as a collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by passengers intent on beating him to death. Five years later, to address ongoing tensions within Holocaust survivor communities, the State of Israel instituted the criminal prosecution of Jews who had served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration camps. Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen little-known trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and trial records, he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp functionaries who harassed, beat, robbed, and even murdered their brethren. But as the trials exposed the tragic experiences of the kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted from seeing them as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to prosecute them abated. Porat shows how these trials changed Israel’s understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the suppression of the trial records—long classified by the state—affected history and memory. Sensitive to the devastating options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet rigorous in its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to rethink our ideas of complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be a victim in extraordinary circumstances.
Author: Alexander Henry Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000410099 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 160
Book Description
There is a popular notion that the Italian armed forces of the Second World War were an inferior fighting force. Despite the vast numbers taken prisoner, detailed studies of the experiences of these soldiers remain relatively uncommon and the value of this group to furthering our understanding of the Italian experience of war under Fascism is also rarely acknowledged. The existence in the National Archives of hundreds of pages of transcripts of covert British surveillance of Italian POWs has made it possible to engage with their experiences and opinions in much greater depth. The euphemistically termed ‘Special Reports’ present historians with a unique insight into how all levels of Italian soldiery viewed Fascist Italy’s experience of war, 1940-1943. This book examines reactions to Italian political leadership, the progress of the war, as well as Italian soldiers’ ‘everyday’ views on sex, war, the enemy, death, food, their allies, bravery, race, and killing. These fascinating documents reveal the complexity of the outlook of these men, which persistent – and influential – national stereotypes and historiographical trends fail to acknowledge.
Author: Vladimir Dedijer
Author: Paul L. Williams
Author: Charles R. Gallagher
Author: Robert Hayden
Author: Esther Gitman
Author: Peter C. Kent
Author: David G. Dalin
Author: Nicholas A. Robins
Author: Dan Porat
Author: Alexander Henry