When I said, we should look for shades of gray, I did not mean to deny that there are such things as true villains.   My top candidates for truly evil people would be those who cause the deaths of the largest number of humans.

That would be: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.   Atheists all.   Not to forget Lenin--another atheist.

To return to the book by Cornwell, Hitler's Pope:

And going back to the time before the Concordat:

p 110 (Cornwell):

In the spring of 1931 a Catholic Reichstag representative, Karl Trossmann, published a best-selling book entitled Hitler and Rome, in which he described the National Socialists as a 'brutal party that would do away with all the rights of the people'    Hitler, he declared, was dragging Germany into a new war, a war that "would only end more disastrously than the last.'   Not long after, the Catholic author Alfons
Wild published a widely distributed essay entitled 'Hitler and Catholicism' in which he proclaimed that 'Hitler's view of the world is not Christianity but the message of race, a message that does not proclaim peace and justice but rather violence and hate.'

(to be continued)