Any fair discussion of this issue would need to include them. Any fair discussion of the issue.
Yes--that was the tip of the iceberg. Get Fr. George Rutler's eye-opening book on the year 1942 in WWII called Principalities and Powers. It's a story of the encounter with the evil of Progressivism--in the persons of the Nazis and the Soviets and the Italian and Japanese fascists, who were all Progressives. That is, they believed the past knows nothing, and that they could be their own god.
The story is told through news reports, comments, and speeches recorded in Catholic newspapers around the world, the fascist press, The London Times, The New York Times, and other mainstream sources.
What emerges is that the Vatican had the bad guys' number from the start--having a historical memory about 2000 years old--and fought the Axis covertly and overtly, starting with condemnations of Mussolini and of National Socialism in the 1920. It's true that parts of the Church hierarchy in occupied France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Axis countries rebelled and bought the Nazi line. But the Vatican, in the middle of Nazi-occupied Italy, held the line, as did most of the Church around the world.
Not many people know the appalling sacrifices made by nuns, priests, bishops, and cardinals for opposing the Nazis and in particular, for hiding Jews and transporting them to safety. Tens of thousands of clerics were executed by the Nazis in prisons, in concentration camps, on work farms, and in Nazi gas chambers--as were Catholic laymen by the millions, for the crime of failing to discard that ancient religion of theirs and embrace the future, that is, fascism and party-line thinking.