Auntie really cannot help herself. Last night, we got the full works: the Pope and the Hitler Youth (I think that the BBC has the global franchise on that one), Pius XII and the Holocaust (which “Jews say”, apparently – Rabbi Professor David G Dalin doesn’t, for a start), Richard Williamson as if his historical views had the slightest bearing either on his excommunication or on its lifting, the lot.
And then the Demjanjuk story. An interviewee was not questioned at all when he described the Israeli Supreme Court’s overturning of Demjanjuk’s conviction as how he “avoided justice”, and the strapline was still saying that he had been “convicted”. There was no mention of the Germans’ general amnesty all the way back in 1969, which is why they now feel the need to track down any poor Slavic squaddie in his extreme old age in order to “try” him, beyond absurdity, as an accessory to twenty-nine thousand murders, none of them committed in Germany, a country of which he has never been either a citizen or a resident.
Meanwhile, the Pope did not in fact advocate “a Palestinian State”, but a homeland including both Israelis and Palestinians, as is busily coming to pass anyway, with Muhammad now the single most common name for newborn boys inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, and with little or nothing discernibly Jewish about those being “Returned” from all over the place in a forlorn attempt to hold back the tide of history.
The Pope did not speak as a German, because he is not visiting as a German. He is visiting as the Pope. He holds no office in Germany. Anyway, just how many more leading Germans have to go through this ritual abasement, and for just how much longer? There will never be another Chancellor born before or during the War.
And while the transfer of the Holy Places to the Holy See would obviously be welcome, the plight of entirely Catholic villages within Israel, but shown on no map, seems rather more pressing. How about incorporating them into the Vatican?
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Return of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
ReplyDeleteThey are more likely to be Melkites, I expect.
ReplyDeleteI did hear the BBC explaining that the Germans had shown their contrition for the war by the way they are contiuning to pursue Nazis. Of course all the people they are after, like Demanjuc, aren't Germans - he being born Ukrainian now American. Clearly Nazism & the Holocaust had little to do with the Germans & the pressure Germany put on other countries such as Greece to release convicted Germans was fully justified.
ReplyDeleteThe unmentioned fact about the Nueremburg trials is that between 1950 & 1955, under pressure from German officers who were no longer Nazis but democratic allies in the fight against communism, almost all of those convicted were quietly released.
The exception being Hess, who had an alibi during the Holocaust, but had been sentenced to death by Adolf.