It seems to me that you are rewriting history here. Let me remind you
Mit brennender Sorge and that about 5000 catholic and protestants priests ended in the camps (as political prisoners, red triangle), that about 3000 Jehovah's Witnesses were interned as well (purple triangle) and that Himmler established a special unit in the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) to identify and eliminate Catholic influences. Dachau had a special "priest block" with almost 3000 priests.
Jerome, I don't mean to diminish the testimony concerning nor the respect one should give to those outspoken Catholics who were also interned, humiliated and even tortured and killed in places like Dacheau. I have visited Dachau twice and know very well this part of the sad tragic losses some non-Jews also suffered in addition to the Gays, mentally unfit and Gypsies/Roma I have already mentioned.
I'm not rewriting any history, just by looking at the more than two thousand year doctrinal origins of anti-Semitism. I'm pointing out the complicity or else silence from the conservative powers in the Church. By putting Nazism at Germany's feet and even then referring to Nazis as the real home address for the crimes of the the holocaust, we take a simplistic view and to miss this cardinal point: the slaughter and the systematic and organized extermination of 6 millions Jews was the consequence of the doctrines of the Churches, both Lutheran and Catholic. In fact, the holocaust was nothing more than the customary everyday church culture-stoked pogroms, but with 20th Century industrial efficiency and therefore on a terrifying scale*. It was no more German than Austrian, French, Polish or Lithuanian! For sure it was not from anywhere but Christian teachings as thought up, enjoyed, decreed and promulgated by figures like Constantine and propagated throughout the Churches subsequent history. Read
Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History. Also see footnote **, below. BTW, the attempts by Himmler to create some rewritten Krist Germanic history to remold the New Testament to ancient German and neighboring tribal mythology, was limited to providing a working cohesion without priest's interference in the psyche of the SS. It was not, AFAIK, pushed into the Wehrmacht or German Christian population to any important or practical degree and is just a footnote to the self delusion of those odd people!
The later gradual objections to Catholicism in Hitler's Germany itself, was not, in the main part, an antithesis to the Catholic tradition, to the Trinity, to Jesus as Savior, but to individual anti-Nazi stands. It was political for the most part, an attempt to remove "the arteries and veins" of church political and social influence throughout Germany. Yes, in Germany itself, Hitler shed his pro-Christian labeling to have freedom from the opinions of priests. Yes, some thousands of Priests were indeed in concentration camps. However in occupied Europe, the Catholics held sway and even expanded with the arrival of Pope Pius XIII and new bargaining and concordat between these two powers.
"First, the Curia was a valuable ally against the Communists. Second, it was a reliable "emergency airfield" in case of failure. In exchange for loyalty, the leadership of the Third Reich promised Rome freedom in the occupied territories. Berlin fulfilled its promises. The mass Catholicism of the Serbs in Yugoslavia would hardly be possible without the authorization of Berlin."
Many prelates benefited from the Holocaust. For example, the gold looted from the Jews in Croatia and Bosnia was given to Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb by the fleeing Nazis. The "Rat Line" that then was used by Nazi criminals fleeing overseas was established by the Vatican. At any rate, the Curia, thanks to Pius XII, became involved in the Nazi crimes.
"Read more from this excellent essay
here.
In the struggle for total control over German minds and bodies, the nazis developed an anti-christian agenda and turned themselves to a neo-paganism with Teutonic symbolism. You may want to read the wikipedia articles on the
Ahnenerbe or on
Heinrich Himmler.
That's entirely true, but still not related to the
origin and underpinnings of the Nazi drive against Jews which was the the churches' repeated teachings in practically every village and town in the continent, in every school and from every pulpit.
As to the idea to bomb railway lines, which were primarily used to transport soldiers and ammunitions, I would suppose it had occurred to the allied air forces that it might be a good idea, don't you think so?
Yes it was discussed to bomb the railway approaches. There was no wish to divert bombers from targeting munitions trains to save the Jews. Also they had no wish to have responsibility for dealing with the whole issue of what on earth to do with millions of rescued Jews!
This is similar to creating a "no fly zone" over Syria, which in one stroke would save about 50 innocent civilians per day or 1,500 souls just in one month! The Western leaders are just too scared of the unknown consequences of Sunnis being free! That's essentially the kind of judgment meted out by the allied powers to the plight of the Jews, some 70 years ago during and even after the war.***
* Industrial Efficiency of Extermination: The Nazis had punch cards from IBM, telegraph lines and trains. The latter two had been tested in the deportations and slaughter of 1 million Armenian Christians with logistics facilitated by German technology throughout the Ottoman empire. In all provinces, towns and villages to be cleanses, "Appointed secretaries" of the "Young Turks", Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (or Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti), had telegraph connect, often installed by the German high command who's officers "advised" the Turkish Army. The railways also built by Germany, handled, on a small scale, more efficient transport than driving the Armenian villages and townsfolk to the roads that became almost impassable. The lessons of this chaotic genocide was not lost on the young officers, a few of which in later life might have even crafted the more efficient combination of punch card, telegraph, telephone and train scheduling, to keep masses of Jews flowing to extermination centers, something the Turks could not do efficiently in 1914 to 1917.
** "Carroll begins by restating, along the lines of the revisionist scholarship of the Jesus Seminar, the essential Jewishness of Jesus. Jesus was not, so far as we know, a man alien to the culture or politics of his time. He lived and died in a region controlled by an imperial power, and asserted in that context an intense form of Jewish spirituality, animated by a kind of love that was clearly shocking and inspiring to many of his contemporaries. It was only in the later context of the struggles between Jesus-following Jews and other variants of Judaism that the Gospel story came to be told as a conflict not between a Jewish rebel and a brutal Roman Empire but between the founder of a new religion and ''the Jews,'' a monolithic term that began the process of demonizing the other."
"Carroll's narrative picks up steam with the arrival of Constantine and the fusion of Christianity with imperial power. He neatly rebuts the notion of Constantine's conversion as some sort of divine intervention, seeing it more as a canny political move, shoring up support in Rome. And from Constantine's sword, designed in the shape of a cross, the fusion of a religion opposed to power with power itself is the core of the corruption of Christianity. When Christians used this secular power to persecute, banish, murder Jews, they were betraying not just the essence of the faith of Jesus, they were embodying the very power that killed Christ -- not the evil Jews, but the power of the state. Mercifully, the injunction to save Jews, to convert them, to see them as pre-eminently worthy of salvation, was a strong check on the demonization of Jews. But under the Inquisition, the church itself innovated another definition of Jewishness -- not of faith but of blood -- pioneering expulsions and then a demarcated Jewish ghetto in a quarter of Rome, to house refugees from elsewhere. The picture of the displaced Jews' arrival in the capital city is as fresh as the images from Srebrenica. One contemporary wrote: ''You would have thought that they wore masks. They were bony, pallid, their eyes sunk in the sockets; and had they not made slight movements, it would have been imagined that they were dead.'' Even then, Christian friars offered bread only on condition of conversion. After creating the ghetto, the church in the mid-16th century laid down what Jews could do and earn and how they could live. By the 17th century, the Jesuits had instituted the forerunner of the Nuremberg Laws, barring anyone from becoming a Jesuit ''who is descended of Hebrew or Saracen stock'' -- a baldly racist provision not formally ended until 1946." Read the entire review in the New York Times
here.
*** The great war hero, General MacArthur refused allow the emaciated Jewish survivors to leave the camps for fear of what would happen to good European Christian families! These remnants of highly cultures Jewish communities throughout Europe were the very last stoic but fragile holdouts from the death machine. It took personal disciplinary involvement by President Eisenhower, as supreme commander, to get
some level of humanity to those numb with hunger who breathed free air, but still within the same, or similar barbed wire.