{"id":11762,"date":"2013-06-29T18:26:58","date_gmt":"2013-06-29T17:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=11762"},"modified":"2013-06-29T18:31:24","modified_gmt":"2013-06-29T17:31:24","slug":"how-an-ss-officer-tried-to-get-the-pope-to-condemn-the-holocaust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=11762","title":{"rendered":"How an SS officer tried to get the Pope to condemn the Holocaust"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Until this weekend, I had never heard of Kurt Gerstein.<\/p>\n<p>In the Second World War, he was a\u00a0SS officer\u00a0and member of the Institute for Hygiene of the\u00a0Waffen-SS who witnessed mass murders in the\u00a0Nazi extermination camps at Belzec\u00a0and\u00a0Treblinka. He gave information to the\u00a0Swedish\u00a0diplomat\u00a0G\u00f6ran von Otter, as well as to members of the\u00a0Roman Catholic Church including contacts to\u00a0Pope Pius XII in the Vatican, in an effort to inform the international public about\u00a0the Holocaust.<\/p>\n<p>His story is told in the 2002 film co-written and directed by Costa-Gavras which I have reviewed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/FilmsA-B.html#Amen\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You can read more more Gerstein himself on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kurt_Gerstein\">this Wikipedia page<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>To put the character and the events in some context, one should know something about the Holocaust itself and I have reviewed a book on the subject <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/history3.html#Holocaust\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Until this weekend, I had never heard of Kurt Gerstein. In the Second World War, he was a\u00a0SS officer\u00a0and member of the Institute for Hygiene of the\u00a0Waffen-SS who witnessed mass murders in the\u00a0Nazi extermination camps at Belzec\u00a0and\u00a0Treblinka. He gave information to the\u00a0Swedish\u00a0diplomat\u00a0G\u00f6ran von Otter, as well as to members of the\u00a0Roman Catholic Church including contacts [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11762"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11769,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11762\/revisions\/11769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}