Pope May Have Helped Jews Escape
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: POPE PIUS XII, the controversial wartime pontiff, may have saved thousands of Jewish lives by secretly securing visas so they could escape Nazi Germany, a historian says.

Pope Pius, who was labelled ''Hitler's Pope'' because of his silence during the Holocaust, may have arranged the exodus of about 200,000 Jews from Germany just three weeks after Kristallnacht, when thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

The claim was made by Dr Michael Hesemann, a German historian carrying out research in the Vatican archives for the Pave the Way Foundation, a US inter-faith group.

He said that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli - the future Pius XII - wrote to Catholic archbishops around the world to urge them to apply for visas for ''non-Aryan Catholics'' and Jewish converts to Christianity who wanted to leave Germany.

Elliot Hershberg, the chairman of the Pave the Way Foundation, said: ''We believe that many Jews who were successful in leaving Europe may not have had any idea that their visas and travel documents were obtained through these Vatican efforts.

''Everything we have found thus far seems to indicate the known negative perception of Pope Pius XII is wrong.'' >>> Simon Caldwell | Thursday, July 08, 2010

Queen to Meet ‘Britain’s Schindler’ in Second Stage of Tour [of the Former Yugoslavia]
Photo of Nicholas Winton, "Britain’s Schindler", courtesy of The Telegraph
THE TELEGRAPH: The Queen is to meet a man known as "Britain's Schindler" because of his work saving Jews from the Nazis as she continues her tour of the former Yugoslavia.

The monarch will meet Sir Nicholas Winton, 99, as she travels to the Slovakian capital Bratislava.

The Nobel Peace Prize nominee rescued around 670 Jewish Czech children in the run up to the Second World War.

In 1938, Winton, then a young stockbroker, cancelled a skiing holiday to Switzerland and went instead to Czechoslovakia on a friend's recommendation.

There he found camps full of Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi-occupied Sudetenland, and set about trying to help them.

He transported 669 youngsters to Britain before World War II broke out and, without his intervention they would almost certainly have died. >>> By Charlotte Bailey | October 23, 2008

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