A recently discovered document suggests that Pope Pius XII had information about Nazi concentration camps and the mass extermination of Jews during World War II. The letter was published in the “La Lettura” section of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera this weekend.
Dated December 14, 1942, the document was discovered by Vatican archivist and researcher Giovanni Coco, who told the Italian newspaper that the letter was detailed correspondence about the Nazi extermination of the Jews, including in ovens. The correspondence was from a church source in Germany who was part of the Catholic resistance against Hitler and who managed to obtain secret information.
The documentation contradicts the Catholic Church’s argument that it could not verify diplomatic reports on Nazi crimes to expose them and sparks debate over the legacy of Pius XII, which will be discussed at a major conference at a university in Rome next month.
Historians are divided over the pope’s wartime actions, with supporters arguing that he used discreet diplomacy to save Jewish lives and that the pope could not speak out vehemently against the Nazis for fear of reprisals, while critics claim that he remained in silence while the Holocaust took place.
The letter from the priest, Reverend Lothar Koenig, to Pius’s secretary, another German Jesuit named Reverend Robert Leiber, was written in German and reports that the Nazis were killing up to 6,000 Jews and Poles daily in Rava Ruska, a then town Polish, which is now incorporated into Ukraine. Jews were also being transported to the Belzec extermination camp.
The date of Koenig’s letter suggests that the correspondence arrived at Pius’s office days after the massacre at Rava Ruska, being just another diplomatic document, in addition to visits by several foreign government envoys from August 1942 onwards, with reports that up to 1 million Jews had been killed in Poland by then.
Although it is not possible to say that Pius saw the letter, Leiber was the pope’s chief assistant and worked with the authority when he was Vatican ambassador to Germany during the 1920s, suggesting a close relationship, especially on matters relating to Germany.
According to the book “The Pope at War” by Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist David Kertzer, a high-ranking official in the secretariat of state, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, told the British envoy at the Vatican in mid-December 1942 that the pope did not I could talk about Nazi crimes because there was no certainty about the information.
In an interview, Kertzer said the document marks the first time that a reference to Jews being killed in ovens has been revealed in a letter that he said would certainly have come to Pius’ attention.
Kertzer said historians were eagerly awaiting revelations from the period because, as Vatican archivist, Giovanni Coco had access to Pius’s personal archives that had not yet been indexed and made available to scholars. The Vatican authorized the opening of the secret archives of Pius’ pontificate in March 2020.
“The novelty and importance of this document comes from this fact: regarding the Holocaust, there is now certainty that Pius XII was receiving accurate and detailed news from the German Catholic Church about crimes against Jews,” Coco said in an interview with Corriere della Sera.
However, the researcher noted that the author of the correspondence asked the Holy See not to make public what was being revealed because he feared for his own life and the lives of the sources.
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The post The Pope and Nazism: letter suggests that Pius XII knew about the extermination of Jews in World War II appeared first in Jornal de Brasília.
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