Apple has a trailer posted for As Seen Through These Eyes.

It's a documentary about art created by people who went through the Holocaust. In one of the archival clips about the middle of the trailer, you see a group of people on their way into one of the camps. If you look closely, you see several Catholic nuns. Anybody have any idea who these women were? I know some Catholic nuns went to the camps because they had Jewish connections - Edith Stein being the most prominent example. I know a lot of Poles went to the camps and that the Nazis were starting with the intelligentsia.They may also have been arrested for harboring Jews, maybe Jewish children.

Please - this isn't meant to denigrate or downplay the murder of all the Jews by the Nazis by pointing out that other people went to the camps also. It's a tender point, and I apologize if I have offended anyone with a poor choice of words.

the Jews were victimized in the greatest numbers (by far), but that there were a handful of others who met the same fate. I seem to remember reading somewhere that political dissidents and homosexuals were targeted as well.

I could well be mistaken on my facts. Perhaps there is someone here who can shed more light on the issue.

The Roma (you may know them as "gypsies") were almost entirely exterminated from central Europe. Other populations targeted were homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, persons with disabilities, and a few dozen other groups.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/persecution/pch0229.htm

But what many people don't know is that the Church itself was a target of the Nazis. On June 6, 1941, Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, private secretary to Adolf Hitler, and one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich, issued a secret decree for all Gauleiters (or regional party leaders) of the Reich regarding the true intentions of the Nazi regime toward the Christian churches.

More and more the people must be separated from the churches and their organs the pastors . . . Just as the deleterious influences of astrologers, seers and other fakers are eliminated and suppressed by the State, so must the possibility of church influence also be totally removed . . . Not until this has happened, does the state leadership have influence on the individual citizens. Not until then are the people and Reich secure in their existence for all time. ("Relationship of National Socialism and Christianity")

The truth is many thousands of Catholic men, women, and children died in concentration camps, SS and Gestapo torture chambers, or in fields and villages across Europe for the "crime" of proclaiming the truth to one of the most evil regimes in human history. The historical reality of this oppression does not in any way reduce the culpability of some Catholics in the Holocaust, nor does it suggest that the unprecedented genocide of the Jewish people should be forgotten or considered reduced in significance.

Regardless of the courage of individual Catholics and any secret diplomacy or secret actions to protect some Jews, Pius XII for whatever reasons did not speak out clearly and publicly to condemn the Nazi regime. Careful analysis to show that in line 32 of this letter on such and such a date he implied that he condemned the Nazis doesn't change the fact that he did not speak publicly and clearly.

Was he right to remain silent? After all, Edith Stein was arrested and sent to the gas chambers after the Dutch bishops spoke out? Still, today Pope Benedict is concerned that so many Europeans have abandoned the Church. I wonder how many walked away from a Church that made itself irrelevant by choosing cautious silence in a time of great evil?

As you say, many Catholics did go to the camps either because they were local leaders or because they did try to prevent evil and protect others.

One of them, Maximilian Mary Kolbe, was possibly someone I would find to be a real pain in the butt.
He founded the the Militia Immaculata, or Army of Mary, to work for conversion of sinners and the enemies of the Catholic Church through the intercession of the Virgin Mary. That kind of activity is generally the work of a real right winger. There are some hints that he may have written anti-Semitic material.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilian_Kolbe

(Let's be honest here. Official Church teachings were at least borderline anti-Semitic until Vatican II.) He was arrested and sent to the camps. There he volunteered to take the place of another man when the Nazis picked out ten men for group punishment. When push came to shove, he laid down his life for another man.


On edit: playing my pain is greater than your pain is a losing proposition because it distracts from the source of the evil and sets us against each other.

kindly e-mailed a link to Steven Spielberg's video archive at the Holocaust museum. The clip is actually of sisters assisting survivors at Auschwitz (I think). I've never heard of this and would like to learn more.