Pope Pius XII knew of Nazi Holocaust atrocities, letter suggests

A newly unveiled doc has added gasoline to the controversy. It’s a German letter despatched by a German Jesuit member of the anti-Nazi resistance, Father Lother Koenig, and addressed to the pope’s trusted personal secretary Rev. Robert Leiber. Within the letter dated Dec. 14, 1942, Koenig wrote that as much as 6,000 folks, “above all Poles and Jews,” had been dying day-after-day in “SS-furnaces” on the Nazi-run Bełzec focus camp in what was then occupied Poland. Reported this week by Italian each day Corriere Della Sera, the letter was found by Vatican archivist Giovanni Coco, who described it as additional proof of a circulation of express and detailed information on Nazi crimes to the Holy See.

From March to December 1942, about 450,000 Jews, principally from Poland, had been killed on the Belzec focus camp, according to the web site of the museum and memorial in Belzec.

The pope who thought he could negotiate with Hitler

Within the years since Pius XII’s papacy ended, critics have scrutinized his motion, or supposed inaction, through the conflict. Holocaust survivors have lobbied to freeze his sainthood course of.

When the hundreds of thousands of pages within the Pius archives had been opened in 2020, Pope Francis said the Church was “not afraid of historical past” and that Pius’s papacy had “moments of grave difficulties, tormented choices of human and Christian prudence, that to some might seem as reticence,” based on PBS.

In his 2022 guide “The Pope at Struggle,” historian and anthropologist David Kertzer argued that Pius put the Catholic Church forward of ethical management, fearful that hostility towards Hitler may trigger the nations to interrupt with the church. Pius XII had additionally initially thought he might negotiate with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and mood Nazi hatred with diplomacy, the creator wrote. Whereas the pope acted rigorously amid preliminary considerations that Axis powers could ultimately management Europe, Pius XII by no means modified his strategy whilst proof, and pleas for the Vatican to take a stand, mounted.

“As an ethical chief, Pius XII should be judged a failure,” the historian wrote.