Letter suggests Pope Pius XII knew of mass gassings of Jews and Poles in 1942

Newly discovered correspondence suggests that the second world war-era Pope Pius XII had detailed information from a trusted German Jesuit that up to 6,000 Jews and Poles were being gassed each day in German-occupied Poland. The documentation undercuts the Vatican’s argument that it couldn’t verify diplomatic reports of Nazi atrocities to denounce them.

The documentation from the Vatican archives, published this weekend in Italian daily Corriere della Sera, is likely to further fuel the debate about Pius’s legacy and his now-stalled beatification campaign.

Historians have long been divided about Pius’s record, with supporters insisting he used quiet diplomacy to save Jewish lives while critics say he remained silent as the Holocaust raged.

Corriere is reproducing a letter dated 14 December 1942 from the German Jesuit priest to Pius’s secretary, which is contained in a forthcoming book about the newly opened files of Pius’s pontificate by Giovanni Coco, a researcher and archivist in the Vatican’s apostolic archives.

Coco told Corriere that the letter was significant because it represented detailed correspondence about the Nazi extermination of Jews, including in ovens, 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.

The letter from the priest, the Rev Lothar Koenig, to Pius’s secretary, a fellow German Jesuit named the Rev Robert Leiber, is dated 14 December 1942. 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 prewar Poland that is today located in Ukraine, and transporting them to the Belzec death camp.

According to the Belzec memorial which opened in 2004, a total of 500,000 Jews perished at 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 7-11 December, the city’s Jewish ghetto was liquidated. “About 3,000-5,000 people were shot on the spot and 2,000-5,000 people were taken to Bełżec,” the website says.

The date of Koenig’s letter is significant because it suggests the correspondence from a trusted fellow Jesuit arrived in Pius’s office in the days after the ghetto was emptied, and after Pius had received multiple diplomatic notes and visits from a variety of envoys of foreign governments from August 1942 onwards with reports that up to 1 million Jews had been killed so far in Poland.

While it can’t be certain that Pius saw the letter, Leiber was his top aide and had served the pope when he was the Vatican’s ambassador to Germany during the 1920s, suggesting a close 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 because the Vatican hadn’t been able to verify the information.

Coco was quoted by Corriere as saying: “The novelty and importance of this document comes from this fact: that on the Holocaust, there is now the certainty that Pius XII was receiving from the German Catholic church exact and detailed news about crimes being perpetrated against Jews.”

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 the lives of the resistance sources who had provided the intelligence. Pius’s supporters have long insisted that he couldn’t speak out strongly against the Nazis because of fears of reprisals.