A letter that has recently come to light shows that the World War II-era Pope Pius XII had detailed information of the Nazi Germany's crimes against Jews.
The new information raises questions whether Pius did enough to denounce the Nazi Holocaust at the time.
The Holocaust was the systemic killings of Jews and others like Poles by the Nazi Germany. The Nazi Germany under Hitler considered these communities as racially inferior and an estimate on the Jewish Virtual Library says around 6.6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust that primarily coincides with the World War II.
The newly-discovered letter from a priest in Germany to Pius says that 6,000 Jews and Poles were being killed by the Nazi Germany every day. The letter has been published by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The letter was found in the Vatican archives.
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The Associated Press (AP) notes that the new information undercuts the Vatican's argument that the Pope at the time could not verify diplomatic reports of Nazi atrocities to denounce them.
"Historians have long been divided about Pius’ record, with supporters insisting he used quiet diplomacy to save Jewish lives while critics say he remained silent as the Holocaust raged," notes AP further.
The letter is dated December 14, 1942, and is written by Rev. Lothar Koenig, a German Jesuit priest, according to AP. It is written in German and was sent to Pius’ secretary. It is part of an upcoming by Giovanni Coco, a researcher and archivist in the Vatican’s Apostolic Archives.
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"Coco told Corriere that the letter was significant because it represented detailed correspondence about the Nazi extermination of Jews from an informed church source in Germany who was part of the Catholic anti-Hitler resistance that was able to get otherwise secret information to the Vatican...Written in German, the letter addresses Leiber as 'Dear friend', and goes on to report that the Nazis were killing up to 6,000 Jews and Poles daily from Rava Ruska, a town in pre-war Poland that is today located in Ukraine, and transporting them to the Belzec death camp," reported AP.
The date of Koenig’s letter is significant because it suggests the correspondence from a trusted fellow Jesuit arrived in Pius’ office in the same three weeks before Christmas 1942 that Pius was receiving multiple diplomatic notes from the British and Polish envoys to the Vatican with reports that up to 1 million Jews had been killed so far in Poland, notes AP.
The book 'The Pope at War' by Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist David Kertzer notes that a top secretariat of state official, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, told the British envoy to the Vatican in mid-December, as per AP, that the Pope could not speak out about Nazi atrocities because the Vatican had not been able to verify the information. The new revelation, however, questions that line taken by the Vatican.
