They would back out of the agreement later, and the pope also denounced the Nazi and Italian regimes that surround and protected the Vatican. Saying that the Vatican compromised is ridiculous, given that they were willing, with thousands of guns aimed at them, to denounce the actions of the people holding those guns, and even take direct legal and illegal actions to sabotage them, such as providing "fake/real" visas (real in the sense that a state issued them, but with false names, false details, "proof" they weren't Jewish, etc), physically hiding Jews, falsify medical documents (Nazis executed cripples and metal patients first), falsify school records, threaten to shut down Rome in protest, the Vatican escape network, all on an enormous scale. The Vatican was, for years, the only organised resistance against the Nazis. And yes, those guns didn't fire as a result of their actions, or at least, not at the Vatican itself (they did shoot plenty of members of the lower ranks of the Catholic church. They got "the honor" of having their own section inside Auschwitz, with "special attention" of the guards. The rumour is that imprisoned priests physically shivered any time any rumour of actions of the Church made it to the inmates, for that special attention of the guards was sure to follow. Most of the people in there had committed crimes to save people from those camps, knowing the consequences, and less than 20% survived those consequences). Would you be willing to violate the law to save a few people you don't like knowing there's an 80 percent chance it'll cost you your life ? But yes, they're a European state and they will negotiate and talk to whatever government comes to power anywhere in Europe. They even hosted Hitler's ambassador (and used him to protect Italian Jews).

As a leader of an organisation, would you be willing to organize crimes against the government if it did things you believe unjust ? Would you be willing and able to have an organisation continue those crimes when it's people were being executed ?

I don't think any of us can imagine what running organisations like the Catholic church, or any other resistance on the mainland, must have been like.

Here's a more complete summary: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/pi...

It is very easy to sit in 2016 and say that everyone saw it coming and anyone who didn't respond, did so out of cowardice or outright malice. This isn't true. Self-preservation was by far the main driver of most people's actions.

Why did "so few resist Hitler". Here's a video from yesterday : http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws/videozone/programmas/journ... (seems to be censored on youtube, or at least, I can't seem to find videos with the massive crowds cheering his "I killed those dumb criminals" statements. The -many- videos showing Duterte's people arriving on motorcycles to people's homes dragging men and women out of their homes, sometimes leaving behind crying children, are disappearing fast. Here's a video with some -shocking- imagery about what's happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atuqx5Ubr5o watch it, because all these videos become "not available" within a few days)

The socialist international celebrated the membership of the Nazis to their organisation in 1938 and were unwilling to kick them out until 1940.

Or should we point out that members of American academia were publishing articles in New York in support of the Nazis in ... april 1941 (a time when rumours of the holocaust would have known far and wide, even if the scale and cruelty was still hidden, the article in fact mentions and dismisses the rumours as not something leftists would do). The exact authors were leftist, but let's not kid ourselves, it doesn't matter, because both left and right on the American side were mostly in favor of leaving Europe be at the time.

Or perhaps we should point out that the leader of islam, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, at the time organised a few extra Jew-hunting SS divisions manned by muslims for the Nazis (21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg, 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfLvP2jTVq8&bpctr=1482035683 ) ? Islam, the organisation, recruited for the SS ! They recruited Jew-hunters knowingly. They did this, incidentally, when they already knew about the holocaust (even if of course it wasn't officially confirmed at the time). This [1] is an islamic SS division logo.

I feel also obliged to point out that the leader of islam did this partly to protect muslims in Yugoslavia, partly to gain political control of Albania and parts of Yugoslavia, and ... partly to eliminate Jews.

A lot of things happened because of alliances with the Nazis. At least 4 Northwest European universities (most, but not all, of the atheist ones) have their existence to thank from an alliance between them and the Nazis. At least one university has it's existence to thank to vehement disagreement with the nazis (a set of professors so unwilling to even talk to the nazis that they left their university when the Dean did talk to the nazis and worked for free for years to create a new university - and yes, they were French Catholics (and beggars, for the last 2 of those years). And no, that was not their only motivation, just the main one).

The dutch state, including several parties currently in power, were allied with the Nazis. I believe it's 3 current ministers were mentored by people who personally allied with the Nazis. For decades, several Kapo (let's just say that means particularly bad collaborators) held high offices in the Netherlands. More telling is that this is not of any real concern to the population. Similar things can be said about the Austrian, Swiss, Italian and even Greek states, and ...

About the US government, IBM, with explicit permission from the US government (they asked), provided the system that did the bookkeeping for the holocaust. They even programmed the rules for deciding if someone was sufficiently Jewish to be sent to the gas chambers. Yes, seriously, IBM was the organisation that made, for millions of people, the decision if they were to be ethnically purified for being "too Jewish" or not. They didn't make the rules, but they executed them.

You are trying to push an absolutist moral view upon a situation where people needed to compromise with adversaries with an army that were willing to commit mass-murder to push their point. You'll find that there are people and organisations you work with today that owe their social/financial position to the Nazis directly and indirectly.

Furthermore, you are demanding a moral standard that just isn't reasonable. Some of the people mentioned above did what they did because the alternative was death. Yes, after the war anyone that wasn't willing to sacrifice their own life to sabotage the Nazis was persecuted because of that. This is not a reasonable standard, and let's not pretend it is.

But frankly, the Catholic church behaved incredibly better than anything else in Europe in the runup and during the war. They put themselves above religious differences. Were they perfect ? No. Wasn't possible. But they helped far more than anyone could expect of them and they paid an extreme price for providing that help. Tens of thousands of catholics, priests, monks, and volunteers were executed because they participated in resistance organised from within the catholic church. Most of those would have been aware of the risk of being executed, and can therefore be said to have willingly sacrificed their lives. Hundreds of thousands of members of the Catholic church resisted the Nazis, at risk of their lives, and did not get caught. The Vatican saved more lives than all other organisations put together, by between one and two orders of magnitude.

And, as illustrated above, the same can NOT be said of either states, other religions, political parties, including many that still exist today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Waffen_Mountain_Division_...