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March 29, 2007

"So We Said, 'Hey, Where Is The Shoah?'"

N
early a year ago, I posted "The Pope's Disastrous Speech at Auschwitz." The post took Pope Benedict to task for depicting the Volk of the Third Reich as a group of innocents coerced and intimidated by a "cabal of criminals," for characterizing the attempted Nazi eradication of Judaism as an attack on Christianity, and for finding special meaning in the gassing of a Jew who had converted to Christianity.

It was a bad speech.

I see in this week's New Yorker magazine (Jane Kramer's "The Pope and Islam," not available online) that the speech could have been much, much worse. Writing about the Pope's incendiary speech about Islam in Regensburg last September, Kramer reports that Vatican correspondents

"received copies of his speech at six in the morning of the day he gave it, and, at ten, they assembled in the university's makeshift pressroom and informed the Vatican spokesman ... that the passage [disparaging Islam] was going to be incendiary. "The point is that at 10 A.M. somebody got the message that the text was explosive," [a Vatican correspondent] told me, adding that when the Pope had gone to Auschwitz to speak, last May, "we got copies of that speech, too, and it never mentioned the Shoah, so we said, 'Hey, where is the Shoah?,' and he changed it."
Got that? A Vatican reporter says the penultimate draft of the Pope's Auschwitz speech didn't mention the annihilation of Europe's Jews.

UPDATE: A commenter asked for a link to the text of the speech. Here it is.

Posted by Eric at March 29, 2007 6:22 PM

Comments

Well, I suppose it is understandable (albeit still inexcusable) that a former member of the Hiterjungend would wish to "depict[] the Volk of the Third Reich as a group of innocents coerced and intimidated by a 'cabal of criminals.'"

Posted by: debris at March 30, 2007 1:20 AM

Eric,

Would you please post a link to the speech? Have you read the complete speech?

ELM: Yes, I have read it. I'll try to find a link to the speech.

Posted by: anon smith at March 30, 2007 9:45 AM

Is it this speech?

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/may/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060528_auschwitz-birkenau_en.html

Posted by: AWS at March 30, 2007 10:20 AM