Newly discovered correspondence suggests that World War II-era Pope Pius XII had detailed information from a trusted German Jesuit that as much as 6,000 Jews and Poles were being gassed every day in German-occupied Poland, undercutting the Holy See’s argument that it couldn’t confirm diplomatic reports of Nazi atrocities to denounce them.
The documentation from the Vatican archives, published this weekend in Italian each day Corriere della Sera, is prone to further fuel the talk about Pius’ legacy and his now-stalled beatification campaign.
Historians have long been divided about Pius’ record, with supporters insisting he used quiet diplomacy to avoid wasting Jewish lives while critics say he remained silent because the Holocaust raged.
Corriere is reproducing a letter dated Dec. 14, 1942 from the German Jesuit priest to Pius’ secretary which is contained in an upcoming book in regards to the newly opened files of Pius’ pontificate by Giovanni Coco, a researcher and archivist within the Vatican’s Apostolic Archives.
Coco told Corriere that the letter was significant since it represented detailed correspondence in regards to the Nazi extermination of Jews from an informed church source in Germany who was a part of the Catholic anti-Hitler resistance that was capable of get otherwise secret information to the Vatican.
The letter from the priest, the Rev. Lothar Koenig, to Pius’ secretary, a fellow German Jesuit named the Rev. Robert Leiber, is dated Dec. 14, 1942. Written in German, the letter addresses Leiber as “Dear friend,” and goes on to report that the Nazis were killing as much as 6,000 Jews and Poles each day from Rava Ruska, a town in pre-war Poland that’s today situated in Ukraine, and transporting them to the Belzec death camp.
According to the Belzec memorial which opened in 2004, a complete of 500,000 Jews perished on the camp. The memorial’s website reports that as many as 3,500 Jews from Rava Ruska had already been sent to Belzec earlier in 1942 and that from Dec. 7-11, the town’s Jewish ghetto was liquidated. “About 3,000-5,000 people were shot on the spot and a couple of,000- 5,000 people were taken to Bełżec,” the web site says.
The date of Koenig’s letter is critical since it suggests the correspondence from a trusted fellow Jesuit arrived in Pius’ office in the identical three weeks before Christmas 1942 that Pius was receiving multiple diplomatic notes from the British and Polish envoys to the Vatican with reports that as much as 1 million Jews had been killed to this point in Poland.
While it could possibly’t make sure that Pius saw the letter, Leiber was Pius’ top aide and had served the pope when he was the Vatican’s ambassador to Germany throughout the Nineteen Twenties, suggesting a detailed working relationship especially concerning matters related to Germany.
According to “The Pope at War,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist David Kertzer, a top secretariat of state official, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, told the British envoy to the Vatican in mid-December that the pope couldn’t speak out about Nazi atrocities since the Vatican hadn’t been capable of confirm the data.
“The novelty and importance of this document comes from this fact: that on the Holocaust, there’s now the understanding that Pius XII was receiving from the German Catholic Church exact and detailed news about crimes being perpetrated against Jews,” Coco was quoted by Corriere as saying.
However, Coco noted that Koenig also urged the Holy See to not make public what he was revealing because he feared for his own life and people of the resistance sources who had provided the intelligence.
Pius’ legacy, and the revelations from the newly opened Vatican archives, are to be discussed at a significant conference at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University next month that’s notable due to its across-the-spectrum participant list and sponsorship. The Vatican, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust research institute, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial in addition to the Israeli and U.S. embassies are all backing it, amongst others.
The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, is to open the Oct. Sept. 11 meeting that can feature scholars including Kertzer, Coco and Johan Ickx, the archivist on the Vatican secretariat of state whose own book on the archives, “Pius XII and the Jews” published in 2021, praised Pius and the Vatican’s efforts to take care of Jews and other people fleeing the war.
Coco said Koenig’s letter actually was present in the Vatican’s secretariat of state archives and was turned over to the Vatican’s predominant Apostolic Archives only in 2019, since the secretariat of state’s papers were disorganized and scattered, with a few of Pius’ documents kept in plastic containers in an attic cupboard space where heat and humidity were damaging them.
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Vanessa Gera contributed from Warsaw, Poland.
