an intentional creation of the British Political Warfare Executive. However, in 2007, subsequent to those accounts, Dan Kurzman published a work which he maintains establishes that the plot was a fact. In 1944, Pius XII issued a Christmas message in which he warned against rule by the masses and against secular conceptions of liberty and equality. Final stages As the war was approaching its end in 1945, Pius advocated a lenient policy by the Allied leaders in an effort to prevent what he perceived to be the mistakes made at the end of World War I. On 23 August 1944, he met British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was visiting Rome. At their meeting, the Pope acknowledged the justice of punishing war criminals, but expressed a hope that the people of Italy would not be punished, preferring that they be made "full allies" in the remaining war effort. Holocaust During the Second World War, after Nazi Germany commenced its mass-murder of Jews in occupied Soviet territory, Pius XII employed diplomacy to aid victims of the Holocaust and directed the church to provide discreet aid to Jews. Upon his death in 1958, among many Jewish tributes, the Chief Rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff, said: "Jews will always remember what the Catholic Church did for them by order of the Pope during the Second World War. When the war was raging, Pius spoke out very often to condemn the false race theory." This is disputed by commentator John Cornwell, who in his book, Hitler's Pope, argues that the pope was weak and vacillating in his approach to Nazism. Cornwell asserts that the pope did little to challenge the progressing holocaust of the Jews out of fear of provoking the Nazis into invading Vatican City. In his 1939 Summi Pontificatus first papal encyclical, Pius reiterated Catholic teaching against racial persecution and antisemitism and affirmed the ethical principles of the "Revelation on Sinai". At Christmas 1942, once evidence of the mass-murder of Jews had emerged, Pius XII voiced concern at the murder of "hundreds of thousands" of "faultless" people because of their "nationality or race" and intervened to attempt to block Nazi deportations of Jews in various countries. Upon his death in 1958, Pius was praised emphatically by the Israeli Foreign Minister, and other world leaders. But his insistence on Vatican neutrality and avoidance of naming the Nazis as the evildoers of the conflict