A newly uncovered letter from Vatican archives suggests World War II-era Pope Pius XII was aware that thousands of Jews were being killed in Nazi gas chambers.
A newly unveiled document has added fuel to the debate. It’s a German letter sent by a German Jesuit member of the anti-Nazi resistance, Father Lother Koenig, and addressed to the pope’s trusted private secretary Rev. Robert Leiber. In the letter dated Dec. 14, 1942, Koenig wrote that up to 6,000 people, “above all Poles and Jews,” were dying every day in “SS-furnaces” at the Nazi-run Bełzec concentration camp in what was then occupied Poland.
From March to December 1942, about 450,000 Jews, mostly from Poland, were killed at the Belzec concentration camp,
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