Springtime for Benedict

The ultimate motive of the Holocaust was to wipe out Christianity?

Um, I don't think so.

And you'd think that a pope with the nickname "The Nazi Pope" would be awful damn careful about attempting to recast the extermination of 6 million Jews as a pre-emptive strike against his own religion.

Especially when the Catholic church was hardly blameless in the matter.

But no.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners writing on the Pope's visit to Auschwitz in the LATimes:

Benedict falsely exonerated Germans from their responsibility for the Holocaust by blaming only a "ring of criminals" who "used and abused" the duped and dragooned German people as an "instrument" of destruction. In truth, Germans by and large supported the Jews' persecution, and many of the hundreds of thousands of perpetrators were ordinary Germans who acted willingly. It is false to attribute culpability for the Holocaust wholly or even primarily to a "criminal ring." No German scholar or mainstream politician would today dare put forth Benedict's mythologized account of the past.

Benedict did say correctly that the "rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people." But he then turned the Holocaust into an assault most fundamentally not on Jews but on Christianity itself, by falsely asserting that the ultimate reason the Nazis wanted to kill Jews was "to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith" — meaning that their motivation to kill Jews was because Judaism was the parent religion of Christianity.