WASHINGTON, May 22 (UPI) --

A leading historian of the Holocaust is uneasy about Christian apologies for Nazi genocide. "It's somehow a mistake to associate a long Christian tradition to convert Jews and other persecutions with what we call the Holocaust, which was conceived and carried out by people who certainly were not Christians and were hostile to every Christian value and were abhorrent to churches and to many devout Christians," Sir Martin Gilbert told UPI. Gilbert, who lives with his family in London, was interviewed here while on tour promoting his new book, "Never Again: A History of the Holocaust" "Christians were among the very first victims of the Nazis," said Gilbert, who is Jewish.

"One of the things I try to bring out in the book is that the Christian churches took a very powerful stand - other than the German church, which was under Nazi control. Even the dependent German churches that struggled to maintain their independence and were actually destroyed took a very strong stand," Gilbert said. "At every stage of the Holocaust, the church had no hesitation. In every (occupied) country you have extremists (who collaborated). In the main, these extremists had already been denounced by the mainstream politics of the country and by the churches." Gilbert said all the great bishops of France protested the deportations, and he spoke of the sheltering of Jews even in traditionally anti-Semitic countries.

In Europe "Christian anti-Semitism is graded the farther east you go," the historian said. "By the time you are in Ukraine, you are said to be in an area where it's a part and parcel of society." But even there, Gilbert said, Archbishop Andrey Sheptytski and his sister Josepha, mother superior of the Uniate order of nuns, prevailed upon Ukrainians to resist the genocide, and they themselves hid Jews. Gilbert said that Poland, where "the church had a tremendous tradition of historic anti-Semitism, had more 'Righteous Gentiles' - Catholics who risked their lives to save Jews - than any other country." While there is a traditional Catholic hierarchy, Gilbert said, each national Catholic church has within it a strong independent potential for moral leadership.

In this context, some Catholic leaders did well or did badly. Among those who did badly are the Slovak ruler, Father Joseph Tiso, and the leadership of the Croatian Catholic Church. But Gilbert called Hungary's Adm. Miklos Horthy "a great Catholic ruler" and "a devout Catholic." Hitler twice summoned the admiral to see him, giving Horthy "terrible lectures," but Horthy twice refused to deport the Jews of Hungary. "Only when the Germans occupied the country in March 1944 were the Gestapo free to round up Jews," Gilbert said. What about Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, who has been criticized for being "silent" on the genocide? "Rather than being indignant about what the pope didn't do," Gilbert said, "I try to find out what the Catholic churches and churchmen and Pacelli himself actually did do. "So the test for Pacelli was when the Gestapo came to Rome in 1944 to round up Jews. And the Catholic Church, on his direct authority, immediately dispersed as many Jews as they could. "The Vatican hid the vast majority of the Jews of Rome," Gilbert said. Some were sheltered within the Vatican itself, and others were dispersed among the monasteries and nunneries of the eternal city. In this way, about 4,000 were saved. "If the (current) pope has to apologize," Gilbert said, "perhaps someone could also thank him. In fact, my book does thank him for what the Vatican did to save Jewish lives."