How many people, outside of those actually close to the concentration camps, actually knew what exactly was going on? The Nazis were brutally efficient, and circulated a lot of misinformation to muddy the waters. And remember, although Jews were the single largest group of victims of the Holocaust, they accounted for less than half of the total.
You ask, But why were most Catholics and Christians silent as 6 million Jews walked into gas chambers?
If it were Catholics or Christians instead of Jews those hunted to be executed by the godless Nazis, How many of those who made the previous question were going to risk their own and their family lives to save the life of Christians?... It is a fact that to save close to one million Jews, thousands of Catholics risked their lives and thousands were murdered by the Nazis.
Did the Church do enough to save the Jews? As usual those who do the less complain the most and those who do the most always think they could have done even more. When Michael O’Carroll, author of the scholar book “Pius XII: Greatness Dishonoured” related in the Foreword that in 1957 he met Dr. Isaac Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Israel, and he told him with emotion of an audience he had with the Pope and how they discussed the prophet Ezechiel. “My blessing to him” said the saintly old man, and O’Carroll promised to be the bearer of the message of his goodwill. When O’Carroll gave the message to Pius XII he added “I think Jews everywhere are grateful for what you did for them during the war.”
The relationship of trust and collaboration during WW II between the Holy See, the Jewish organizations, the Allies’ intelligence services and their governments, including the anti-Nazi German Generals, is well proven and documented. However, there is not the slightest thread of evidence to substantiate the preposterous and vicious allegations raised against Pius XII and the Catholic Church of collaboration or sympathizing with the Nazis.
To those seeking the truth, what a better witness than the testimony of Albert Einstein, the great Jewish physicist, who had firsthand experience of the horrors of Nazism? In 1944 he said: “Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, but the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of newspapers, but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks. Then I looked to individual writers…they too were mute. Only the Church,” Einstein concluded, “stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth…I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel great affection and admiration…and am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.”
Just as the evils of the Holocaust must never be forgotten, neither should the kindness of those spiritual brothers from another faith who tried to help the Jews, at the risk of their own lives, under the most enormously dangerous travails be forgotten. The truth will prevail and with it, a greater understanding and brotherhood among Jews and Catholics.