Discovered letter proves Vatican was aware of killings at Nazi concentration camps

A newly discovered letter inside the Vatican archives proves that then-Pope Pius XII was aware as early as 1942 of the scale of the genocidal campaign orchestrated by Nazi Germany against Jewish people and other minorities, which directly contradicts previous accounts by the Holy Sea.

As reported by Reuters, the Italian Corriere della Sera published the letter on September 17 after it was discovered by an in-house Vatican archivist and made public with the encouragement of Holy See officials.

The letter from 1942 was written by Father Lother König, who was a Jesuit active in the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Germany. In it he informed Pope Pius' secretary, Father Robert Leiber, who happened to also be a German citizen, of the killings that were taking place at the Auschwitz, Dachau and Belzec concentration camps, telling him that his sources had confirmed that around 6,000 Poles and Jews were being killed daily at the latter.

It was among documents that were kept in haphazard ways in the Vatican's Secretariat of State and only recently handed over to the central archives.

Giovanni Coco, the archivist who made the discovery told the Italian publication that its importance was "enormous, a unique case" because it showed the Vatican had information that labour camps were actually death factories. This is different from the previously taken position by the Holy Sea, which affirmed that the Vatican did not speak out at the time on the genocide because the information it had at the time was "vague and unverified".

The discovery was made thanks to Pope Francis ordering the Vatican's wartime archives to be unsealed and studied in 2019 following his statement during a speech in which he said "the Church is not afraid of history".