Rolf Hochhuth was a German author and playwright, best known for his 1963 drama The Deputy, which insinuates Pope Pius XII's indifference to Hitler's extermination of the Jews, and he remained a controversial figure both for his plays and other public comments and for his 2005 defense of British Holocaust denier David Irving.
Rolf Hochhuth, 2009
Rolf Hochhuth (right) at the awards ceremony of the Berliner Kunstpreis 1963 (from left to right: Klaus Kammer, Fritz Kortner, Rolf Hochhuth)
Hans Filbinger (centre) had to resign in 1978 as Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg after it became public via Hochhuth's novel A Love in Germany that he was responsible for death sentences as a Navy judge at the end of World War II
Rolf Hochhuth after a reading of his book McKinsey is Coming in Duisburg, 2005.
The Deputy, a Christian tragedy, also published in English as The Representative , is a controversial 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth which portrayed Pope Pius XII as having failed to take action or speak out against the Holocaust. It has been translated into more than twenty languages. The play's implicit censure of a venerable if controversial pope has led to numerous counterattacks, of which one of the latest is the 2007 allegation that Hochhuth was the dupe of a KGB disinformation campaign, later confirmed by both the Venona Project and Mitrokhin Files in declassification of the Soviet disinformation campaign Operation Seat 12. The Encyclopædia Britannica assesses the play as "a drama that presented a critical, unhistorical picture of Pius XII" and Hochhuth's depiction of the pope having been indifferent to the Nazi genocide as "lacking credible substantiation.". However, it has since been discovered that Pope Pius XII seems to have known about concentration camps.
Oberon books edition of The Representative
Maximilian Kolbe was imprisoned in 1941 and deported to Auschwitz where he entered the hunger block instead of a fellow prisoner (sculpture in Wiślica).