Saint of Silence?(The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944)(Book review)

Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, June, 2006 by Brown-Fleming, Suzanne

The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944, By ROBERT KATZ, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

In 1942, the British ambassador to the Holy See, D'Arcy Osborne, wrote in his diary, "The more I think of it, the more I am revolted by Hitler's massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand, and, on the other, the Vatican's apparently exclusive preoccupation with the ... possibilities of the bombardments of Rome." (1) Today, historians still debate--viciously--the role of the Holy See, and of the wartime universal leader of the Roman Catholic church worldwide, Pope Pius XII, during the occupation of Rome (Sept. 8, 1943, to June 4, 1944).

In this symphonic, well-crafted book, Robert Katz capitalizes on...

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