"The discrediting and eclipse of Communism as a world ideology also put in crisis a certain way of writing history. That is why, a half-century after the end of World War II, the search is on for a fresh look. The European intellectual class is dismayed and disoriented. Their world, so dependent on Marxist-Leninist ideas, collapsed around them. In the United States writers never took the measure, ideologically, of the war. Rather, they allowed others to introduce Marxist-Leninist interpretations. The legacy is a massive load of manipulated history and arbitrary readings, with a more or less hidden agenda. Worse still, given the conditions of war, it was easy to put into circulation various hoaxes that got credence then and even later, undetected because they fitted into the conventional Communist way of seeing reality.

One of the victims of this process was the Catholic Church, specifically the Vatican, the Pope. These historical essays illustrate, with chapter and verse, how the Communist interpretation grievously corrupted the record. Communism and its sister ideology, National Socialism, had this in common: a radical and venomous hostility to religion. This showed up at every phase of World War II. It is time for cleaning up the fallout of the defunct ideologies of World War II. The perpetrators of this tenacious campaign of anti-Catholic propaganda were not merely men of Moscow but also their allies and sympathizers abroad. Diplomats and journalists with prepossessions of their own contributed their share.

The material developed here is derived mostly from studies published by the writer over the years in the Rome-based fortnightly La Civilta Cattolica. That work in turn was based on research in the Vatican archives and in official archives of Europe and the United States. It was thought appropriate to make at least part of the documentation available in English."
-From the Author's Preface

Robert A. Graham, S.J., is a Jesuit priest who has spoken and written widely on the Church's role during World War II. He is the author of Vatican Diplomacy, Pope Pius XII and the Jews, and co-editor of Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War.