• Predominantly Muslim Bulgaria saved most of its Jews
• Predominantly Muslim Albania saved most of its Jews
• Predominantly Lutheran Denmark saved most of its Jews
• Predominantly LutheranNorway saved most of its Jews
• Heroic individuals who saved numbers of Jews
• The leaders of Japan, the least Christian of the Axis nations,
  refused to persecute any of its Jews.

        "There were only about 200 Jews in Albania before the war. More than 70 per cent of the population of about 900,000 was Muslim. By the end of the war, it was home to more than 2,200 Jews who had come from neighbouring Italy, Macedonia, and Serbia, and even from as far as Austria and Poland, to escape Nazi persecution.
        It wasn’t just the Albanian farmers and villagers who shielded the Jews from the Nazi occupiers. The government at the time also issued them Albanian passports to help them blend in with the local population and offered them employment.
        The State of Israel has granted dozens of Albanians the title of Righteous Among Nations, the highest honour awarded to "the few who helped Jews in the darkest time in their history." Their names are inscribed on the Righteous Honour Wall at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem."

Leni Yahil writes:
        "The struggle of the [Danish Lutheran State] Church against Nazism in general and anti-Semitism in particular is a chapter in itself.  We have already seen how the priests organized themselves within the underground movement even before the crisis broke out.  But they did not hesitate throughout the entire occupation to express their views publicly and from the pulpit.  Kaj Munk said in one of his sermons that in the event of the Germans trying to behave towards the Danish Jews as they had behaved toward the Norwegian Jews (who had been persecuted and deported), the Christian citizens of Denmark would publicly declare that the Nazis had thereby canceled all rights and turned the social order into chaos.
        Many of the priests also found a way to express their views in articles published in newspapers or in the ecclesiastical press.  In one such article Pastor Johannes Nordentoft called for an active struggle against anti-Semitism.  He wrote that to stand aside was the same as participating in anti-Semitic activities."
        The Danish Lutheran State Church, in the person of Bishop Hans Fuglsang-Damgaard of Copenhagen, supported by all its bishops, also sent a letter of protest to the German authorities before the deportations began, which their pastors read from every pulpit in Denmark on Oct. 3, 1943, thereby helping to mobilize national sentiment and to move ordinary Danes to act on the Jews' behalf, secreting them away and ferrying them to safety in neutral Sweden:

        What did the Germans do to the Danish Lutheran Church with all of its activities in defense of the Jews, including its ringing call for a national "struggle" against the Germans on behalf of the Jews?  Nothing.  What did Danes suffer for their collective thwarting of the Germans' exterminationist onslaught?  Nothing."

Lesley Pearl, Bulletin Staff-member
San Francisco Jewish Community Publications Inc.,
dba Jewish Bulletin of Northern California.
October 20, 1995

        Preben Munch-Nielsen has been telling his story for 10 years, and he still doesn't understand why people make such a fuss over it. . .  "Frankly, I'm embarrassed at the responses.  I don't understand that to act in a decent way is so unique."
        As a member of the Danish resistance in his youth, he helped save nearly 7,000 Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. . .  Like many Danish teens living in war-torn Europe during the 1940s, Munch-Nielsen "did what we had to do.  We couldn't do anything else."
     During the early years of World War II, Denmark remained mostly unscathed.  However, when Germany interned the Danish Army and Navy personnel, in 1943, the Danish Resistance quickly took action. Young men and women like Munch-Nielsen published underground newsletters "to tell the real truth," he said.  They issued warnings of Nazi intentions that were often disclosed by disloyal Germans. . .  And so, the Resistance mobilized its rescue of Danish Jews, hiding them in churches and homes until they could ferry them across the North Sea straits to Sweden.  At night, 12 at a time, the Jews would sail in 21-foot boats to freedom.  The nearly 30-minute boat ride could take hours, as Munch-Nielsen and other Resistance members had to evade German ships at sea.
     Of the country's 7,200 Jews, only 60 were not saved.  The resistance also saved 700 non-Jewish relatives of Jews.
     There were no passenger lists.  In fact, Munch-Nielsen doesn't know the names of any of the people he helped save. "Why should I?  They don't know my name.  This was all done in secrecy." Besides, he added, "Some people talk too much."
     Munch-Nielsen did not speak publicly about the rescue until 10 years ago, when a friend asked him to share his story with a group of Jewish travelers in Denmark.  At 59, his speaking career began.
     Now he talks about the rescue at least once a month to groups in Denmark, Israel and the United States.  He tells audiences of his childhood home near the beach, the first boat he owned at age 10 and a life spent sailing.  He speaks of a government with a history of making necessary reforms without the pressure of revolution or uprising. He emphasizes that Danish Jews were considered neighbors, friends, schoolmates and nothing else.  "This is our history.  We have no scapegoats.  No pogroms.  No Holocaust.  It's so simple," Munch-Nielsen said.  "We didn't think of Jews as Jews, but as Danes," he added.  So when word got out that the Germans were planning to round up the Danish Jews to take them to concentration camps, Danes actively resisted what they saw as wrongdoing.
     "The Jews were not criminals.  For the most part they weren't members of the Danish Resistance movement.  They were victims of an insane movement created by lunatics," Munch-Nielsen said.  "If you wanted to retain your self-respect, you did what you could.  "That your fellow citizens should be doomed because their human value was considered nothing [by Nazis] because of their race is an impossible thought."
     Following the war many Danish Jews returned to Denmark.  Munch-Nielsen is uncertain how many came back because, as he stresses, he doesn't think about who is a Jew or non-Jew.  But now that Jews have returned, he added,"Denmark is complete again."

        "On September 28, 1943, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a German diplomat, secretly informed the Danish resistance that the Nazis were planning to deport the Danish Jews.  The Danes responded quickly, organizing a nationwide effort to smuggle the Jews by sea to neutral Sweden.
        Warned of the German plans, Jews began to leave Copenhagen, where most of the 8,000 Jews in Denmark lived, and other cities, by train, car, and on foot.  With the help of the Danish people, they found hiding places in homes, hospitals, and churches.  Within a two-week period fishermen helped ferry 7,220 Danish Jews and 680 non-Jewish family members to safety across the narrow body of water separating Denmark from Sweden.
        (In the end, of the 8000 Danish Jews) all but 51 survived the Holocaust, largely because Danish officials pressured the Germans with their concerns for the well-being of those who had been deported.  The Danes proved that widespread support for Jews and resistance to Nazi policies could save lives."

        "The contrast between the general failure of the Catholic Church and, for that matter, of most ordinary Germans, whether Catholics or Protestants, to act well regarding Jews, and the exemplary conduct of the Danish church and the Danish people toward the Jews could not be starker.  The cause of these differences is equally clear.  The Danish Lutheran State Church and the Danish people understood that the Jews were innocent.  So they defended them as people, not merely as the despised objects of overly harsh and morally impermissible punishment.  They defended them not only at the last moment - immediately before the Germans were about to deport and kill them, or well after the Germans and their helpers had already killed millions across Europe - but at the first moment, when the Germans occupied Denmark.  The Danes neither aided nor supported the initial eliminationist measures; they did not stand by or remain silent, and they did not allow the Germans to implement such measures."
        All this they did because the Jews were innocent.  And when the moment of peril came, Danes easily, immediately rose to the Jews' defense and aided them with determination, insistence, and fervor.  And, as we know, they succeeded in their rescue operations." {Goldhagen,  p. 118 |

        'The struggle of the [Danish Lutheran State] Church against Nazism in general and anti-Semitism in particular is a chapter in itself.  We have already seen how the priests organized themselves within the underground movement even before the crisis broke out.  But they did not hesitate throughout the entire occupation to express their views publicly and from the pulpit.  Kaj Munk said in one of his sermons that in the event of the Germans trying to behave towards the Danish Jews as they had behaved toward the Norwegian Jews (who had been persecuted and deported), the Christian citizens of Denmark would publicly declare that the Nazis had thereby canceled all rights and turned the social order into chaos.
        Many of the priests also found a way to express their views in articles published in newspapers or in the ecclesiastical press.  In one such article pastor Johannes Nordentoft called for an active struggle against anti-Semitism.  He wrote that to stand aside was the same as participating in anti-Semitic activities.'
        The Danish Lutheran State Church, in the person of Bishop H, Fuglsang-Damgaard of Copenhagen, supported by all its bishops, also sent a letter of protest to the German authorities before the deportations began; which their pastors read from every pulpit in Denmark on October 3, 19, thereby helping to mobilize national sentiment and to move ordinary Danes to act on the Jews' behalf, secreting them away and ferrying them to safe in neutral Sweden:
        Whenever persecutions are undertaken for racial or religious reasons against the Jews, it is the duty of the Christian Church to raise a protest against it for the following reasons:

        The Norwegian Protestant churches, upon the impending deportation of the Jews of Norway, also protested pointedly in a letter to Vidkun Quisling, the nation's collaborating leader.  The letter was read from the pulpit twice in late 1942 all over Norway, and ministers led their congregations in saying prayers for the Jews.  The letter was also published as the New Year's message for 1943, and broadcast to Norway and Sweden:

        "In Holland, the first deportation of Dutch Jews was denounced by the Bishops in strong, condemning terms, and in Belgium the local priests were active - with the support of their Bishops, in hiding Jewish children.
        These condemnations by locally influential clergymen did not, however, cause the Germans to abstain or in any way change the measures they took.  (because) They knew that the Vatican would back them up whatever the locals said, and the cooperation they received in Poland, the Baltic countries - in fact wherever Catholics worked with them on the extermination plan - was not endangered.  Only a firm announcement by the Holy Father could have influenced Germany's partners in the annihilation process. . . 
        The protests by some courageous Catholic clerics against what they saw happening all around them appears not to have given the Pope the feeling that in regards to the Holocaust he was out of step with the main body of the Catholic hierarchy.  (Pope Pius XII) never condemned what happened in Germany as far as Hitler's program to murder all Jews went.  His position was well known to the conclave that in 1939 elevated him to the papacy.  Of all those eligible, the cardinals elected the one who had since its birth observed the National Socialist party, and knew Hitler's and the party's determination to solve the 'Jewish problem' in the way Hitler had promised.   In electing him to be the new Pope, the cardinals were aware that they were putting into St. Peter's chair a man who would not take a stand against the plan to kill all the Jews of Europe. Certainly most of the cardinals assembled for the conclave were ready to take the German annihilation plan into their stride. The question may be asked to what degree this cardinals assembly made itself co-responsible with Pius XII when he continued to act in regards to the Holocaust after the election as he had done before as Secretary of State.

"Holy See" ?     Isn't it amusing how English-speaking Catholic churchmen insist on translating the Latin "Sancta Sedes" into the meaningless "Holy See", instead of the correct, but silly-sounding "Holy Seat"? a papal throne

        How did the Jews fare during the holocaust in the more Catholic countries?  According to Rabbi Dalin, those were the better countries to be Jewish.

What about Slovakia?
        "In Slovakia the Catholic Church was not just extremely influential, its priests were political founders and leaders of the newly independent state.  The antisemitic Father Andre Hlinka established the Slovak People's Party in 1905.  After his death in 1938 Monsignor Josef Tiso became his successor, and then in 1939 the first President of the German satellite state of Slovakia and the avowedly devout Catholic Vojtech Tuka became Prime Minister.  Their government instituted comprehensive antisemitic laws modeled on Germany's and instigated the deportation of the country's Jews, by requesting at the beginning of 1942 that the Germans deport twenty thousand Jews. . .
        "In August 1942, during the first phase of the deportation of the country's Jews to their deaths, the president-priest Tiso preached in a holiday mass, using Nazi antisemitic idioms and arguments, that expelling the Jews was a Christian act because Slovakia had to free itself of 'its pests.'  He invoked the authority of his priestly predecessor, Father Hlinka, who, sharing the views of many Catholics of the time, had proclaimed - in violation of official Church policy - the racist doctrine: 'A Jew remains a Jew even if he is baptized by a hundred Bishops.' 
        Although individual Slovak bishops decried these policies, the majority of the Church leadership supported its country's eliminationist program. 
        They themselves said as much.  During the height of the deportations, in April, 1942, the Slovak bishops collectively issued a pastoral letter that essentially justified the deportation of the Jews as Christ-killers: 'The greatest tragedy of the Jewish nation lies in the fact of not having recognized the Redeemer and of having prepared a terrible and ignominious death for Him on the cross.' They complemented this with modern anti-semitic charges:  'The influence of the Jews [has] been pernicious.  In a short time they have taken control of almost all the economic and financial life of the country to the detriment of our people.  Not only economically, but also in the cultural and moral spheres, they have harmed our people.  The Church cannot be opposed, therefore, if the state with legal regulations hinders the dangerous influence of the Jews.'  Earlier the Slovak bishops had protested to their government, effectively, on behalf of Christians who had converted from Judaism but not on behalf of the Jews.  These Christians were subsequently not deported.
        It should therefore come as no surprise how one priest in Slovakia counseled a critical perpetrator about the deportation of the Jews.  Vojtech Tuka, Slovakia's mass-murdering Catholic Prime Minister, conveyed to a German diplomat that he had once told his father confessor that his conscience was clear about his deportation of Slovakia's Jews.  As long as his deeds were, in Tuka's words, done 'for the good of his people,' the priest was 'not opposed to his actions.'
        The bishops waited until March 1943 - almost one year after deportations, with all their visible brutalities, had begun and when three quarters of Slovakian Jewry had already been transported to their deaths - to issue pastoral letter against the deportation.  But they were clearly going on the record only because the war was going badly for the Germans, and even still, many bishops opposed the letter.  The Slovakian bishops chose to have the letter read in Latin, which few Slovaks understood, so the letter would be guaranteed not to rally many people to sympathize with or aid the Jews.  The letter was so opposed by the clergy that many priests refused to read it or altered its content so that it no longer condemned the anti-Jewish onslaught.
        The Vatican did privately protest, in vain, several times to the Slovak government, though mainly on behalf of Catholics who had converted from Judaism and those in mixed marriages.  It was acutely worried that this avowedly Catholic regime would implicate the Church and the Pope in mass murder because in Slovakia the Church's fingerprints were undeniably on the trigger.  The German government had earlier commented with 'undisguised gratification' that the Slovaks' antisemitic laws 'had been enacted in a state headed by a member of the Catholic clergy.  Pius XII's representative warned President Tiso in October 1944, when the Germans' defeat was around the corner, of the injury that further deportations would do to the Church:  'The injustice wrought by his government is harmful to the prestige of his country and enemies will exploit it to discredit clergy and the Church the world over.  ' This intervention, as the Church itself made clear, had much to do with the Church's selfish political interests and little to do with compassion for the soon-to-be slaughtered Jews.' As with the Pope's late appeal to Horthy in Hungary, the Church was donning a fig leaf of quarter-hearted intervention to cover up its indefensible stances for an expected postwar world under Allied domination.'
        What did the Catholic Church do to President Tiso, the priest who, explicitly invoking the Church's authority as justification, contributed to the mass murder of Jews?  What did it do to the Catholic clergy in the Slovak Parliament, not one of whom voted against the legislation legitimizing the deportation of the Jews to their deaths?  No public condemnation.  No excommunication.  Nothing.'  By allowing Father Tiso and the other priests to remain Catholics - not merely lay Catholics but priests who administered the sacraments - and by refusing to publicly and emphatically dissociate itself from him and the other priests who contributed to and gave their blessings to deportations and mass murder, and by refusing to excommunicate this man and the others acting publicly in the name of the Church, Pius XII and his bishops showed that they believed that people complicit in the mass murder of Jews were worthy of representing this Catholic Church in its most sacred duties."{Daniel Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning,  p. 49 - 54 }

What about Croatia?
        "This incredible state of affairs was even more starkly etched in Croatia, where many priests themselves committed mass murder, including as commanders of approximately half of the twenty death camps set up by the Nazi-like Ustasha regime: 'Dozens, perhaps even hundreds of priests and monks shed their priestly apparel and donned Ustasha uniforms, in order to share in the `sacred work' of murder, rape and robbery.'
        The most notorious camp was Jasenovac, where the Croats killed 200,000 Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies.  Forty thousand of them perished under the unusually cruel reign of 'Brother Satan,' the Franciscan friar Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic.  Pius XII neither reproached nor punished him or the other Croatian priest-executioners during or after the war.  Instead, Pius XII supported their country's mass-murdering regime."{Daniel Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning,  p. 49 - 54 }

What about Lithuania?
        Why is it that, thanks to the very active role played by the local population, the highest percentage of success in making their country "Jew-free" goes to Lithuania, which managed to murder more than 95% of its Jews?  In 1939, 85% of that country's citizens identified themselves as "Roman Catholic" (according to Gabriel Wilenski, the author of Six Million Crucifixions.
        "In Lithuania in August 1941, when the Germans' and Lithuanians' slaughter of the country's Jews was in full swing, the leaders of the Lithuanian Catholic Church, in the words of a contemporaneous German report, 'forbade the priests to help Jews in any way whatsoever';  and they issued this prohibition after representatives of the Jewish community had approached the Church leadership begging for help.  Although some individual priests helped Jews, the Lithuanian Church as a whole collaborated with the Germans until the war turned against Germany (when a greater number began to help Jews, especially Jewish children). . ."{Daniel Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning,  p. 49 - 54 }

        "As of (early) September 1943, not a single Jew had been deported from the Italian sphere of occupation in Yugoslavia, southeastern France, and Greece. . .  it was not in the nature of Italians to countenance, or to collude in, the liquidation of the Jews; in fact, the overwhelming evidence is that they did all in their power to hamper and thwart the process." (Cornwell, p. 302 - 03 )
        As bad as Mussolini was, it wasn't until his dictatorship ended and the German Nazis occupied parts of Italy that the extermination of the Jews of Italy began.

        "Did Pius XII know of the Danish church's protest (described above) ?  Of course he did.  It happened two weeks before the Germans began deporting the Jews of Rome, and months before the Germans' deported Jews from other parts of Italy, such as Trieste (Dec. 7, 1943, to Feb. 24, 1945), and from other parts of Europe, including Hungary (starting in May 1944).
        Here was a model of successful action against the annihilation of the Jews that Plus XII chose to reject.  Here is a model of successful action that Pius XII's defenders choose not to mention - all the more striking in light of the fact that (almost) 100 percent of the more than 7,000 rescued Jews of Denmark survived the war.  This cannot be said of the 1,900 Jews whom the Germans deported from Rome to Auschwitz in October 1943 and in the ensuing months.  If the Catholics in Italy who did take the initiative to help Jews, sometimes to the Vatican's displeasure, had instead followed the Pope's lead and done nothing, then the Germans would have killed thousands more.
        They took no retribution on (Roman Catholic) Bishop Antonio Santin of Trieste, who during a mass in early November 1943, with Germans and Italian Fascists present, denounced in the name of Jesus the roundup of the Jews as violations of "charity, goodness, and humanity' and urged that within his diocese "every hand offer help" to them.  The Germans did nothing to him, to his parishioners, to Jews married to Catholics or to Catholics who had converted from Judaism.  Having suffered no punishment for his actions, Bishop Santin wrote a letter imploring the Pope to help the Jews - - "I humbly beg Your Holiness to intervene with the German ambassador to the Holy See in favor of these unhappy people." Two weeks later he traveled to the Vatican to make the same plea - - all in vain.
        That the Pope would bring danger upon himself and the Church for speaking out was then, and is now, a convenient fiction.  Moreover, the Pope himself proved definitively that such considerations played no role whatsoever in his decisions to remain publicly silent while the Germans murdered Jews.  After the Allies liberated Rome on June 4, 1944, the Germans were in the process of gradually deporting the Jews of Trieste, which they still occupied.  The Pope and the Vatican were completely safe.  More than half a year had passed since Bishop Santin's appeal.  Yet Pius XII still did absolutely nothing to help Trieste's Jews.  Fifteen of the twenty-three trains that brought almost twelve hundred Jews mostly to Auschwitz departed Trieste when the Pope was safely under Allied protection.
        Quietly, behind the scenes, Pius XII personally could have also done many things to try to help the Jews, particularly of Italy, with no risk to himself or the Church.  He chose not to.
        "The notion that had the Pope spoken out and tried to mobilize Catholics, ecclesiastic and lay, and non-Catholics to resist the Germans' slaughters, then more Jews would have died is about as bizarre and nonsensical an argument as I have read by anyone writing about the Holocaust, except of course the fulminations of Holocaust deniers and their fellow travelers who blame the Jews for their own destruction or, now, for speaking the truth about the Holocaust after the fact' No one has ever demonstrated - or even plausibly argued - that papal silence and the Church's inaction saved Jews anywhere.  No one has ever demonstrated or even plausibly argued that there was a good reason at the time for the Pope to believe that abandoning the Jews to their German-ordained death sentence was the way to save them."{Daniel Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning,  p. 49 - 54 }

        "That the Holy See had no intrinsic objection to a policy of subjecting the Jews to discriminatory legislation became again clear when in June, 1941, Marshal Pétain's government introduced special 'Jewish statutes' (the French version of the infamous 'Nuremberg laws' stripping Jews of all rights and legal protections). The cardinals and archbishops of France made known their strong disapproval of these measures, but M. Léon Bérard, the Vichy ambassador to the Holy See, , was able to report to Pétain, after lengthy consultations with high Church officials, that the Vatican did not consider such laws in conflict with Catholic teaching.  The Holy See merely counseled that no provisions on marriage be added to the statutes, and 'that the precepts of justice and charity be considered in the application of the law.' ". ;(Lewy, p. 297)
        One doesn't need a degree in theology and / or philosophy to know that it is impossible to implement intrinsicly unjust or evil laws with 'charity' and 'justice.'

        In a neighboring diocese another bishop likewise defied the Nazis:
        "Pierre-Marie Theas (born in September 14, 1894) was ordained as bishop of Montauban France on July 26, 1940.
        He wrote a pastoral letter condeming the Nazi deportation of Jews in the summer of 1942 in which he said: "I give voice to the outraged protest of Christian conscience and I proclaim… that all men, whatever their race or religion, have the right to be respected by individuals and by states." For his attempts to prevent the Jewish deportations and persecutions he would become one of the few individuals who received the honorary title: "Righteous Among Nations"
        Pierre continued to oppose the Nazi policies culminating in a fiery sermon in his cathedral in which he condemned the "Cruel and inhuman treatment of one of our fellow men" in 1944. He was arrested the night after the sermon by the Gestapo. He was sent to a concentration camp where he spent 10 weeks and then was released and returned to his parish."

        "The contemporaneous French bishops' public protest of the deportation of Jews from France undermines any argument that the Church could have genuinely believed that silence in this context was golden.  The French bishops' protests did not lead to more Jews dying or suffering.  This was clear at the time.  On the contrary, their protests spurred Catholics, clergy and lay, to save Jews."  [ A Moral Reckoning, p. 50]