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Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
They had a fairly well-known alliance with the Vatican, though. And their scapegoating of Jews basically just stood on the shoulders of thousands of years of anti-semitic church teaching and tribal religious attitudes. Nazism leaned on religion pretty heavily, let's not kid ourselves.
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The Nazis themselves aggressively attacked Catholic institutions in Germany. A major issue was that Austria, which Germany annexed, was largely Catholic while Germany proper was largely protestant. In order to establish a "German" culture they wanted to do undo the influence from Catholicism, which was seen as non-German.
The Vatican definitely looked the other way to the Holocaust, but the relationship between them and the Nazis was far more complex. There were lots of countries and institutions that cooperated with the Nazis at various points, but a lot of that was due to duress. In Italy, on the other hand, the Catholic Church cooperated and signed treaties with the local fascists, but the same wasn't really true of Germany.