Here is a quote proposing Sweden was best:
By contrast, much of Protestant Europe heroically resisted. Tiny Denmark fought off the Third Reich to the utmost of its abilities, protecting its Jewish population by evacuating them to neutral Sweden and elsewhere. Finland successfully defended its independence in the face of both Soviet and German machinations. As for Sweden, home to Scandinavia’s largest Jewish population, few if any countries did more to oppose the Holocaust. Swedes provided sanctuary to over 7,000 Danish Jews and over tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Remember When Fascism Was a Catholic Problem?
A historian’s perspective on religious dogma
Ben Freeland Jul 14, 2018 · 10 min read
https://medium.com/@benfreeland/remember-when-fascism-was-a-catholic-problem-ba3602d34437
As Hungarian Jews were mentioned, that refers to Raul Wallenberg.
However, when I bought a paperback about this hero, I noted that in Budapest, he and the Spanish diplomats were dividing the Jews between them : Ashkenazim to Sweden, Shephardim to Spain. It's years ago, but I have not forgotten.
As I don't recall the title of the book, here is a confirmation from elsewhere, via wiki, that Spain indeed did so. Franco's Spain.
During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the synagogues were closed and post-war worship was kept in private homes. Jewish public life resumed in 1947 with the arrival of Jews from Europe and North Africa.
In the first years of the World War II, "Laws regulating their admittance were written and mostly ignored."[71] They were mainly from Western Europe, fleeing deportation to concentration camps from occupied France, but also Jews from Eastern Europe, especially Hungary. Trudi Alexy refers to the "absurdity" and "paradox of refugees fleeing the Nazis' Final Solution to seek asylum in a country where no Jews had been allowed to live openly as Jews for over four centuries." [72]
Throughout World War II, Spanish diplomats of the Franco government extended their protection to Eastern European Jews, especially in Hungary. Jews claiming Spanish ancestry were provided with Spanish documentation without being required to prove their case and either left for Spain or survived the war with the help of their new legal status in occupied countries.
Once the tide of war began to turn, and Count Francisco Gómez-Jordana Sousa succeeded Franco's brother-in-law Serrano Súñer as Spain's foreign minister, Spanish diplomacy became "more sympathetic to Jews", although Franco himself "never said anything" about this.[71] Around that same time, a contingent of Spanish doctors travelling in Poland were fully informed of the Nazi extermination plans by Governor-General Hans Frank, who was under the misimpression that they would share his views about the matter; when they came home, they passed the story to Admiral Luís Carrero Blanco, who told Franco.[73]
Diplomats discussed the possibility of Spain as a route to a containment camp for Jewish refugees near Casablanca but it came to naught due to lack of Free French and British support.[74] Nonetheless, control of the Spanish border with France relaxed somewhat at this time,[75] and thousands of Jews managed to cross into Spain (many by smugglers' routes). Almost all of them survived the war.[76] The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee operated openly in Barcelona.[77]
Shortly afterwards, Spain began giving citizenship to Sephardic Jews in Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania; many Ashkenazic Jews also managed to be included, as did some non-Jews. The Spanish head of mission in Budapest, Ángel Sanz Briz, saved thousands of Ashkenazim in Hungary by granting them Spanish citizenship, placing them in safe houses and teaching them minimal Spanish so they could pretend to be Sephardim, at least to someone who did not know Spanish. The Spanish diplomatic corps was performing a balancing act: Alexy conjectures that the number of Jews they took in was limited by how much German hostility they were willing to engender.[78]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Spain#Spanish_Civil_War_&_World_War_II
All footnotes from 71 to 78 are referring to:
Alexy, Trudi. The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot: Oral Histories Exploring Five Hundred Years in the Paradoxical Relationship of Spain and the Jews, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. ISBN 978-0-671-77816-3, hardcover; ISBN 978-0-06-060340-3, paperback reprint.
Back to Ben Freeland.
The only Scandinavian country to truly succumb to fascist rule was Norway. Tiny Estonia and Latvia — which, like Finland, found themselves caught in the middle between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — were unable to muster much in the way of resistance to the Reich. Latvia was unique among majority Protestant countries for nearly annihilating its Jewish population. Meanwhile, over 75 per cent of Estonia’s small Jewish community succeeded in escaping to the USSR.
Could it have sth to do with fortunes of war, with how Latvia and how Estonia were placed in relation to German troops or near or far from Russian such?
Estonia was next to Finland's attackers, the Red Army. Latvia was next to German expansion East, troups trying to go to Moscow.
When it comes to Jews from either country, I have a special place in my heart for Latvia. There was a konversa who was still Jewish (of Israelite confession) while marrying whom I honour.
Even Germany itself, as much a Lutheran country as a Catholic one, has a paradoxically lower Jewish mortality rate than many of the countries it occupied before and during World War II. In his superb book, The Meaning of Hitler, German historian Sebastian Haffner argues that Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism was more typical of his native Austria and Central-Eastern Europe than of Germany proper, and that his anti-Jewish policies enjoyed less widespread support at home than they did in many of the occupied territories.
Nevertheless, votes for Hitler in 1933 were higher in Protestant parts, like 90 % or more in Berlin. Because they hated Jews? No, but because they loved Hitler's progressive manners and thought Antisemitism was a way to get votes in Bavaria (Austria was not involved) and that he didn't mean it seriously.
Also, Hitler openly announced Antisemitism in 1933, when getting to power, but didn't get started all that much with camps prior to the war, so the German Jews had plenty of time to get elsewhere.
Also, when the French film Rafle came, a news article (LeMonde, I think) stated that Laval (the guy who delivered Jews to German camps) had stated he was proud the Jews were going to get "if not the love, at least the habit of hard work" - in other words, many people who sent Jews to German camps had the impression they were sending them to a Lao Gai, not to a death camp proper.
And Laval was not a devout Catholic:
Laval was born 28 June 1883 at Châteldon, Puy-de-Dôme, in the northern part of Auvergne. His father worked in the village as a café proprietor, butcher and postman; he also owned a vineyard and horses. Laval was educated at the village school in Châteldon. At age 15, he was sent to a Paris lycée to study for his baccalauréat. Returning south to Lyon, he spent the next year reading for a degree in zoology.[3]
Laval joined the Socialists in 1903, when he was living in Saint-Étienne, 62 km southwest of Lyon. "I was never a very orthodox socialist", he said in 1945, "by which I mean that I was never much of a Marxist. My socialism was much more a socialism of the heart than a doctrinal socialism... I was much more interested in men, their jobs, their misfortunes and their conflicts than in the digressions of the great German pontiff."[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Laval
Austrofascists may have had a greater dislike of Jews than National Socialists, but Austrofascists being devout Catholics, did not so much about it. Also, they defined Jew confessionally, so the few restrictions (no Lao Gai camps!) were not bothering konversos.
Freeman again:
Catholicism’s fascism problem did not go away at the end of World War II. While it did bring an end to the Nazi puppet states of central and eastern Europe, the neutral dictatorships of Franco and Salazar persisted until the mid-1970s.
And Franco and Salazar did not discriminate against Jews, and both had provided shelter for Jews. Freeman seems to like to jump back and forth between "fascism" and partifipation in German camps for Jews. As if they were equivalent, when they were not.
Also, Italy had few Jews deported to German camps, thanks both to first hour Fascists who did not like the turn to Racism in 1938, at least not as applied under Salò Republic, and, not least, to the Catholic population.
Get the book The Assisi Underground: Assisi and the Nazi Occupation, by Alexander Ramati. - I did not know about the Mayor of Assisi:
The rescue of Jews who sought refuge in Assisi, beginning in the spring of 1943, was organized by Bishop Placido Nicolini, his brother Ruffino Niacci, and Father Aldo Brunacci. Only Father Brunacci is alive today and was on hand for the ceremony of thanks. But the entire population of the village collaborated in the rescue, including its fascist Mayor, Amaldo Fortini.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency : Honor Townspeople of Assisi Who Saved Jews During World War Ii
[internet version of a bulletin from March 16, 1982]
https://www.jta.org/1982/03/16/archive/honor-townspeople-of-assisi-who-saved-jews-during-world-war-ii
I had never called myself a Fascist prior to reading about Amaldo Fortini. I do not regret it, since it involved lately also reading about Aldo Finzi. Ben Freeman is simply oversimplifying things to demonise more than can be tied to demonic behaviour, like putting Jews (or anyone else) into Lao Gai type or worse camps.
And if Jews seeking refuge started in 1943, this is because prior to 1943, Jews had not been in any danger in Catholic and Fascist Italy. Except of course the few who wanted to marry non-Jews, like when converting to Christianity, having to get somewhere else to do that since back in 1938. As I already stated elsewhere, Italian Fascism was at its best before Carta della Razza ... except for guys like Amaldo Fortini, of course.
I wonder where Ben Freeman earned his degrees in history ...? Wait, I have a hunch, he only studied Social Sciences to become a Secondary Education teacher. Such incompetence being encouraged is of course a wider, if less acute, argument against widespread near compulsory secondary schooling than Columbine High Shooting.
Riverside High School : FREEMAN, BEN - SOCIAL SCIENCE
https://www.lcps.org/domain/4743
"down by the Riverside, I'll study war no more"
Perhaps that school should quit studying World War II, until they get competent, if it is the same Ben Freeman - I'll ask.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Bagnolet
St. Henry, Emperor
Sts. Joel and Ezra
13.VII.2019
PS: I also read this on Canada:
Even in Canada, support for authoritarian and fascist ideas reached its pinnacle in uber-Catholic Québec. This was thanks in no small part to the ultramontane views of influential cleric-historian Lionel-Adolphe Groulx and the explosive rhetoric of journalist-turned-fascist-agitator Adrien Arcand. Even former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that paragon of secular Canadian liberalism, acknowledged in his memoirs that his early education in the 1940s at the Jesuit-run Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal instilled him with a positive view of Mussolini and other European Catholic Fascists of the era.
So, liking Mussolini is supposed to have been a worse problem than sterilising, maiming, unmanning or unwomanning, hundreds if not thousands of people who happened to be the wrong ethnicity in Alberta and in British Columbia? Authoritarian is then worse than Totalitarian to that author. Not to me. To me, authoritarian is no big deal, sometimes good, but totalitarian is evil./HGL
PPS, that was Ben Freeman again. And, if you did not get it, sterilisation by force is part of what I count as totalitarian, and it did not happen in Italy from 1922 to 1937, and probably not even from 1938 to the end./HGL
PPPS, sorry, it is not "Raul Wallenberg" but "Raoul Wallenberg" - French spelling of first name./HGL
