On September 17, 2023, Corriere della Sera published the news (on its “Culture” page), later relaunched on CNN’s front page: Pope Pius XII, during the war, knew details of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews during the Holocaust as early as 1942, according to a letter found in the Vatican archives that conflicts with the Holy See’s official position at the time, according to which the information in its possession was vague and unverified. The yellowed, typewritten letter is highly significant because it was discovered by an internal Vatican archivist and made public with the encouragement of Holy See officials. The letter, dated December 14, 1942, was written by Father Lother Koenig, a Jesuit who was part of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, and addressed to the Pope’s personal secretary in the Vatican, Father Robert Leiber, also a German. Vatican archivist Giovanni Coco told Corriere della Sera that the letter’s significance was “enormous, a unique case” because it showed the Vatican had information that the labor camps were actually death factories. In the letter, Koenig told Leiber that sources had confirmed that approximately 6,000 Poles and Jews were being killed daily in the “SS furnaces” at the Belzec camp near Rava-Ruska, then part of German-occupied Poland and now in western Ukraine. The letter was among documents haphazardly stored in the Vatican Secretariat of State and only recently handed over to the central archives where he works.
