Vatican Newspaper Raps Italians And. Above All Jews, for Refusing to Forgive Former Nazi War Crimina

The Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, sharply criticized Italian survivors of Nazi brutalities, “above all members of the Jewish community,” for refusing to forgive Nazi war criminal Herbert Kappler who died in the West German town of Soltau last Thursday. Kappler, 70, was serving a life sentence for the war-time reprisal slaying of 335 Italians, 70 of them Jews, when he escaped from a Rome clinic last Aug. 15 and was smuggled out of Italy. He was being treated for terminal cancer at the time.

In a front page editorial yesterday, the Vatican organ accused the survivors of lack of “flexibility.” It referred to “Those who felt most directly joined to the victims by blood or spiritual solidarity: relatives, survivors, supporters of an atrociously trampled-on civil law and above all the members of the Jewish community.”

According to the editorial, “a large number of those involved seem to have lacked the moral strength to overcome themselves and forgive…. It is here that, as Christians and citizens, we feel we cannot praise that final inflexibility.”

The Vatican paper maintained that the basic question was, “If even the worst, most inhuman and hateful persecutor should not be given the chance of a final conversion, the right to a liberating redemption and, in any case, to human mercy.” Noting that Kappler was dying when he was smuggled out of the hospital by his wife, Anneliese, it said that the lack of vigilance by his guards was “understandable.”

About 200 mourners, and an unofficial honor guard attended the former SS colonel’s burial in Germany. Four of them gave the Nazi salute. An unidentified man at the graveside shouted, “You acted on orders. You did what every German officer would have done.”