Joseph McCabe
Hitler dupes the Vatican
Published by Good Press, 2020
EAN 4064066404703
Table of Contents
Chapter I - The Church Sells Austria To The Gunmen
Chapter II - The Approach To Munich
Chapter III - The Murder Of Czechoslovakia
Chapter IV - Why France Betrayed The Czechs
Chapter V - On The Eve Of The World-Tragedy
Chapter I - The Church Sells Austria To The Gunmen
H.G. Wells, who confessed to me a year ago that he had become convinced that I was right about the danger of Rome—he had more than once amiably ridiculed my preoccupation with it—said one of his superbly audacious things about it recently (September 27); and he said this to the most distinguished body the British Association for the Advancement of Science ever got together. This generation, he thought, might have to endure a series of wars waged "in the name of those dead religions that cumber the world today." And he went on to make a parenthetic remark which must have made learned eyes open wide behind their horn-rimmed spectacles:
"A dead religion is like a dead cat—the stiffer and more rotten it is, the better it is as a missile weapon."
It is obvious what religion he had in mind: the religion of Petain, Weygand, and Laval, of Leopold of Belgium, of De Valera, Vargas, and Salazar, of the Quislings of Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, and Croatia, the religion of that Black International which has for ten years helped the arch-criminals of history to dupe and enfeeble the democracies and to smirch our civilization with their foulness and brutality. In the day of reckoning it must stand in the dock with the other murderers.
In these little books I prepare the indictment and furnish the evidence. In the early stage's of this corruption of civilization the four masters of crime—Italy, Germany, Japan, and the Black International, which we may justly personify in the present Pope, Pacelli-Pius—were isolated, like crooks working in different quarters of a large city. Japan was brooding over an old plan to exploit Asia which had been drawn up when Mussolini was a ragged little country lad sweeping the floor of his father's saloon, and Hitler was begging nickels of his drunken and disreputable father in the sticks. The delicate Japanese nostrils would have quivered at sight of them. Even in 1922, when the industrialists and royalists of Italy raised Mussolini, for their own purposes and to his astonishment, to the position of a prince, Japan turned down the overtures of the Vatican. Seven years later the sharp-eyed Japanese statesmen saw the Papacy make Mussolini's tottering throne safe and win world-recognition of it for him by a formal alliance, and they now turned to the Vatican and asked it to—for a consideration—render the same service to themselves, which it did. Then Hitler, impressed by the value of this holy alliance, sought the same spiritual assistance of the Black International and got it.
So the plot, using the international organization of the Roman Church to lull suspicion in other countries, was unified and took on cosmic proportions. Germany, Italy, and Japan were to rule and exploit the earth. The Pope—he thought—would be the universal chaplain, with the plan in reserve, of a League of Catholic power's strong enough to cheek any trickery of Hitler. That will be cold history—or an epitaph—in a few years. I differ from Wells about those "wars of religion" in the future. If this generation which he and I will soon quit does not emasculate the Black International when this war is over it will deserve all it gets, but I have faith in it.
In earlier books I described the insidious preparatory moves in this collegial plot. Under the noses of the democracies, which actually applauded year by year except, for a time, in the case of Manchuria and Abyssinia, 200,000,000 folk were brought under what is politely called the authoritarian regime and added to the 200,000,000 of Germany, Italy, and Japan … Wait a bit, you protest. Where do you get these figures? Nobody in 1936 drew our attention to this remarkable development. I need say only: add up the populations of the stolen provinces of China, of Fascist South America, of Austria, Abyssinia, etc., and then find out why your oracles did not warn you in 1936 or 1937.
I have shown that the Black International played a very active and important part in this preparation for the launching of the plot in 1939. Can anybody even profess to doubt the value of the assistance it gave in destroying democracy in Austria, Spain, and Spanish America and supporting the annexation of China and Abyssinia? To this you must add its help in keeping Hungary, Eire, and Poland Fascist, in recommending Fascism (politely called the corporative state) in a solemn Papal Encyclical (Quadragesimo Anno 1931) to the entire Catholic world, in working on Catholic sentiment in France, Belgium, Britain, Holland, and America, and in sustaining the hatred of Russia. We return later to these points.
By 1938 the Axis on which Europe was to run was firmly constructed and ready to operate. Italy was to have Europe south of the Danube, and an African empire. Germany to have all north of that river. Mussolini, the Napoleon of the South, little dreaming that by 1941 he would be an old soldier on crutches begging coppers from Hitler, was blind to the emphatic statement in Mein Kampf that there is no room in Europe for two great powers. The rest of the world was still dreaming its dream of the benevolent and beneficent destruction of Socialism everywhere by these apostles of order and discipline. So Hitler made a bolder move: one that might provoke, and ought to have provoked, war.
He needed Austria and Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary was in the plot and very loyal to the Vatican; and in any case Pacelli was to visit it in 1938. With the control of Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary the conquest of the Balkans was assured, the broad road to Turkey and the East was open, and the blockade by the British fleet, on which small-minded British-statesmen relied, was deprived of its sting. The first step was to get Austria and the Danube, and in this the Black International was very useful.
In the summer of 1938 I discussed this annexation of Austria with an important German Nazi. He pleaded first that there was no annexation. It was an "adherence" (Anschluss) of the German people of Austria to their natural national unit. The facility with which America accepted this plea is dangerous. Germans will raise it strongly at the settlement—quite recently a German Socialist refugee insisted on it in conversation with me—and it is ominous that British statesmen never name the Austrians amongst the peoples they are going to liberate. However, the chief interest here is an incidental remark that my Nazi friend made. "If," he said, "you had gone to war over Austria, you would have found that we Germans had not enough petrol at the time to last more than ten days." He was an important industrialist, intimate with some of the leaders, and it was very clear to me that he was convinced of this.
How much the Vatican had to do with the criminal failure of France and Britain to begin arming at once—allowing that they were not in a position to fight in the spring of 1938—and drawing nearer to Russia we cannot say, but do not for a moment imagine that here I raise a wild and groundless suspicion. In 1937, as we shall see later, Pacelli had visited Paris—the first Papal Legate to do so since the fall of Napoleon—and on New Years' Day, 1938, Paris had the piquant spectacle of a representative of the Pope decorating and kissing its freethinking Premier and other Ministers. There was much besides this, but