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CARL STEINHOUSE
Improbable heroes
Improbable heroes
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Pope Pius XI died hours before he planned to issue the just-completed encyclical condemning Hitler’s persecution of Jews. It never saw the light of day. The encyclical was scuttled by his successor, Pope Pius XII who, fearing for his fellow Catholics in Germany, elected to pursue a policy of silence. Yet the ambivalent Pope’s own Catholic Church in Italy had led the effort to save the Jews.
The book details the antics of the vainglorious, strutting and often delusional Mussolini who first swore to his Jewish mistress that he would never harm the Jews, but later, to ingratiate himself, copied Hitler’s anti-Semitic programs and laws. However, unlike the German citizens and clergy, the majority of Italians would not only refuse to participate in the persecution of the Jews, they would, at considerable risk to themselves, actively protect their Jewish brethren from Nazi attempts to exterminate them. Improbable Heroes is the true story of how most of the Italian Jews—and foreign Jews who, with the help of the Italian military, had fled into Italy to escape the Nazi onslaught—were saved by extraordinary acts of bravery by ordinary Italians and clergy.
Learn about the massacre at Ardeatine Caves, where the Germans, in reprisal for a partisan attack on an SS unit in Rome, and furious at their inability to round up significant numbers of Jews, slaughtered, under orders from Hitler, civilian men, woman and children who took no part in the attack.
After the German takeover, experience the terror of Italian and non-Italian Jewish families, routed out of their homes by the SS for extermination; discover how Italian citizens hid Jews and frustrated German attempts to find them; Catholic and Jewish artisans counterfeited false papers, baptismal certificates and ration cards; Catholic clergy concealed, disguised and spirited Jews out of anger areas, hiding Jews, dressed as priests and nuns, in convents, churches, abbeys, and even the Vatican. Gentle monks from Assisi escorted “pilgrims”—Jews and their rabbis dressed as clergy—through German lines to safety. Other Jews joined the partisans and fought alongside the Jewish Brigade from Palestine to kill German SS troops.
Read how an Austrian Jewish woman hiding in a convent dressed as a nun, brazenly walked into Gestapo headquarters posing as a German nun, and shamed the commander into releasing a priest and two boys they were about to execute; how non-Jewish and Jewish partisans staged daring raids on concentration camps to free Jewish inmates destined for extermination.
From the acts of these improbable heroes, over 85% of the Jews in Italy survived, a survival rate unmatched in any other German-occupied European country. This, then, is their proud story.
The book details the antics of the vainglorious, strutting and often delusional Mussolini who first swore to his Jewish mistress that he would never harm the Jews, but later, to ingratiate himself, copied Hitler’s anti-Semitic programs and laws. However, unlike the German citizens and clergy, the majority of Italians would not only refuse to participate in the persecution of the Jews, they would, at considerable risk to themselves, actively protect their Jewish brethren from Nazi attempts to exterminate them. Improbable Heroes is the true story of how most of the Italian Jews—and foreign Jews who, with the help of the Italian military, had fled into Italy to escape the Nazi onslaught—were saved by extraordinary acts of bravery by ordinary Italians and clergy.
Learn about the massacre at Ardeatine Caves, where the Germans, in reprisal for a partisan attack on an SS unit in Rome, and furious at their inability to round up significant numbers of Jews, slaughtered, under orders from Hitler, civilian men, woman and children who took no part in the attack.
After the German takeover, experience the terror of Italian and non-Italian Jewish families, routed out of their homes by the SS for extermination; discover how Italian citizens hid Jews and frustrated German attempts to find them; Catholic and Jewish artisans counterfeited false papers, baptismal certificates and ration cards; Catholic clergy concealed, disguised and spirited Jews out of anger areas, hiding Jews, dressed as priests and nuns, in convents, churches, abbeys, and even the Vatican. Gentle monks from Assisi escorted “pilgrims”—Jews and their rabbis dressed as clergy—through German lines to safety. Other Jews joined the partisans and fought alongside the Jewish Brigade from Palestine to kill German SS troops.
Read how an Austrian Jewish woman hiding in a convent dressed as a nun, brazenly walked into Gestapo headquarters posing as a German nun, and shamed the commander into releasing a priest and two boys they were about to execute; how non-Jewish and Jewish partisans staged daring raids on concentration camps to free Jewish inmates destined for extermination.
From the acts of these improbable heroes, over 85% of the Jews in Italy survived, a survival rate unmatched in any other German-occupied European country. This, then, is their proud story.
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