Pope Pius XII, the leader of the Catholic Church during World War II, knew details of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews in the Holocaust as early as 1942, according to a letter found in Vatican archives, which conflicts with the position official of the Holy See at the time, according to which the information he had was vague and unverified, reports Reuters.
Pope Pius XII would have known about the Holocaust from the beginningPhoto: AP / AP / Profimedia
The yellowed, typewritten letter, reproduced in Italy’s Corriere della Sera on Sunday, is highly significant because it was discovered by a Vatican archivist and made public with the encouragement of Holy See officials.
The letter, dated December 14, 1942, was written by Father Lother Koenig, a Jesuit who was in the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, and addressed to the pope’s personal secretary at the Vatican, Father Robert Leiber, also German.
Vatican archivist Giovanni Coco told Corriere that the importance of the letter was “huge, a unique case” because it showed the Vatican had information that the labor camps were actually factories of death.
The Catholic Church in Germany gave Pope Pius XII accurate and detailed news about the Holocaust
In the letter, Koenig tells Leiber that sources had confirmed that approximately 6,000 Poles and Jews were being killed a day in the “SS ovens” at the Belzec camp near Rava-Ruska, then part of German-occupied Poland and now in western Ukraine.
“The novelty and importance of this document derives from one fact: we now have the certainty that the Catholic Church in Germany transmitted to Pius XII accurate and detailed news about the crimes that were being committed against the Jews,” Coco told the newspaper, whose article. it was captioned: “Pius XII knew.”
Asked by Corriere if the letter showed Pius knew, Coco said: “Yes, and not only since then.”
The letter referred to two other Nazi camps – Auschwitz and Dachau – and suggested that there were other letters between Koenig and Leiber that either disappeared or have yet to be found.
Pius’ supporters say he worked behind the scenes to help Jews and did not speak out to prevent the plight of Catholics in Nazi-occupied Europe from worsening.
His detractors say he lacked the courage to talk about the information he had, despite pleas from the Allied powers fighting Germany.
The letter is among documents that Coco said were haphazardly kept in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State and only recently handed over to the central archives where he works.
