Europe
After the war, Pius rejected the concept of “collective guilt”. Pointing to the enormous crimes committed, he demanded punishment of the guilty and stiff penalties for persons guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity. He supported the Nuremberg trials with documentation, and was repeatedly quoted in the proceedings against Nazi war criminals. One year after the German capitulation, in June 1946 he challenged the Allies to finally close the Nazi concentration camps, which they had kept running to accommodate POWs and DPs. Pius did not protest the expulsion of millions of Germans from their homes by Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union due to the diplomatic deadlock with those (then) Soviet-bloc nations. His material assistance from the Commissione Di Assistenza reached many. He did not support changes of borders. Throughout his pontificate, he refused to engage in border issues, such as the Polish-German border disputes.
Read more about this topic: Pope Pius XII Foreign Relations After World War II
Famous quotes containing the word europe:
“Of one thing I can assure you with comparative certainty, whoever wins, Europe will be economically ruined. This war is America’s great opportunity.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into the heritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony—unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe’s declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.... [The Nazis] have made it clear that not only do they intend to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)