This is the best summary I could come up with:
A letter found among the private papers of Pope Pius XII suggests that the Holy See was told in 1942 that up to 6,000 people, “above all Poles and Jews,” were being killed in furnaces every day at Belzec, a Nazi death camp in Poland.
Though news of the atrocities being perpetrated by Hitler was already reaching Pope Pius XII’s ears, this information was especially important because it came from a trusted church source based in Germany, said Giovanni Coco, a Vatican archivist who discovered the letter.
The document, which was made public this weekend by the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, adds to the evidence that some scholars say shows Pius knew about the Holocaust as it happened.
“There was concern about what could happen to Catholics in Poland, in Eastern Europe, in the Third Reich, all those territories under Nazi control where it was difficult for the church to intervene,” he said.
The letter entreats the Vatican to be cautious in making the information it provides known “because if it emerged that it came from the German church, the persecution would become fiercer in Germany than it already was,” Mr. Coco said.
Mr. Sarfatti, whose most recent research focuses on documentation from 1942, identified by some scholars as “the bloodiest year of the Holocaust,” said the Holy See received reports that year about the atrocities from innumerable sources: priests returning to the Vatican from trips, local clergy, papal nuncios, politicians from occupied countries, citizens, Jewish groups and rabbis.
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