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Knowledge of The Holocaust

Nazi efforts to clear the continent of Jews depended upon the cooperation of Germany's allies and satellites, asked to turn their Jews over and given a convenient pretext that Jews were being resettled and used for labor in the East. SS and police officials tried to deceive Jews themselves from the moment of assembly or roundup, through the train transports, and until they actually entered the gas chambers at the extermination camps. The more Jews went into hiding or engaged in resistance, the more difficult it was for the Nazi bureaucracy of death to complete the job efficiently. Finally, given exact knowledge of what fate lay ahead for the Jews, more non-Jews might have helped them hide or escape. Neutral countries might have allowed groups of Jewish refugees to enter, rather than turn them away.

On 04 April 4, 1933, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, instructed the Papal Nuncio in Germany to see what he could do to oppose the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies. On behalf of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli drafted an Encyclical, entitled Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety), that condemned Nazi doctrines and persecution of the Catholic Church. The Encyclical was smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits on March 21, 1937. Although some Vatican critics later dismissed the Encyclical as a slap on the wrist, the Nazis saw it as a security threat. For example, on March 26, 1937, Hans Dieckhoff, an official in the German Foreign Ministry, wrote that the "Encyclical contains attacks of the severest nature upon the German Government, calls upon Catholic citizens to rebel against the authority of the State, and therefore signifies an attempt to endanger internal peace". After the death of Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli was elected Pope, on March 2, 1939.

In September 1939 British intelligence began to 'read' the radio messages of the German Order Police, the large branch of the German police headed by Kurt Daluege. At least two battalions of Order Police carried out mass killings of Poles and Jews during the military campaign in Poland. British analysts learned of some of these murders through Order Police radio messages which they quickly deciphered, partly in a cooperative effort with French intelligence. The Order Police used obsolete World War I-era coding systems (hand ciphers, as opposed to the more sophisticated Enigma machine codes), which made their codes easier to break than those of Reinhard Heydrich's special mobile police units, the Einsatzgruppen.

Shortly after Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park deciphered some messages to and from the Higher SS and Police authorities in the Soviet territories sent through the Order Police communications network. The analysts recognized that Nazi mass murders of civilians had not only resumed, but were expanding. Between late July and mid-September 1941 the Higher SS and Police Leaders in the Soviet territories reported many details of the killing actions carried out by Order Police battalions and other Nazi forces under their command.

On September 12, 1941, the MI-6 staff declared in a note: "The fact that the Police are killing all Jews that fall into their hands should by now be sufficiently well appreciated. It is not therefore proposed to continue reporting these butcheries specially [to the Prime Minister], unless so requested." 31 This initial conclusion applied only to Nazi policy in the Soviet territories, not Nazi policy across the continent.

On January 22, 1942, the British Postal and Telegraph Censorship Office issued its third report in a special wartime series on Jewry. 29 Describing the situation of Jews on the continent, an unidentified official commented: "Policy of Extermination. The Germans clearly pursue a policy of extermination against the Jews. From an official German document the statement is quoted: 'The only things Jewish that will remain in Poland will be Jewish cemeteries.' "

In the summer of 1942 a Jewish labor organization (the Bund) got word to London that 700,000 Polish Jews had already died, and the BBC took the story seriously. The State Department, however, doubted the August 1942 report that Nazi Germany had a policy of resolving the Jewish question with the murder of up to four million Jews by means of poison gas. That information was sent by anti-Nazi German industrialist Eduard Schulte through intermediaries to Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, and from there to London and Washington. Even in the fall of 1942 there was considerable resistance in Washington to the conclusion that the Nazis were singling Jews out for "extermination."

By October 1942 the West had received partial information about the Holocaust from a multitude of sources. Existing historical accounts of the private meeting between Himmler and Mussolini, which took place on October 11, 1942, are usually drawn from Himmler's own detailed summary of the meeting. After covering various topics, Himmler gave Mussolini a version of Germany's policy toward the Jews that was more invented than sanitized. According to Himmler, because Jews were the source of sabotage, espionage, and resistance - even women and children -- they were being removed from Germany, the General Government of Poland, and other occupied territories. Mussolini supposedly agreed with Himmler that this was the only possible solution. Himmler then spoke of sending some Jews into concentration camps and using others for construction of roads in the East. The mortality was high, because these Jews had never worked before, Himmler said. The oldest Jews were quartered in old age homes as well as in a special ghetto at Theresienstadt, where they could live according to their taste. Another portion of the Jews had been pushed through the lines to the East, where the Russians had shot them.

Pope Pius XII knew details about the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews by the end of 1942, according to a letter found in the Vatican archives that conflicts with the Holy See's official position at the time that the information it had was vague and unverified. The letter was published 17 September 2023 in Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. The letter dated 14 December 1942 was from German Jesuit priest Rev. Lothar Koenig, to Pius’ secretary fellow German Jesuit, Rev. Robert Leiber. Koenig was a member of the Catholic anti-Hitler resistance that was able to get otherwise secret information to the Vatican.

The letter reported that the Nazis were murdering up to 6,000 Jews and Poles daily in "SS-furnaces" at the Belzec camp near Rava-Ruska, which was then part of German-occupied Poland and is now in western Ukraine. The letter made reference to two other Nazi camps - Auschwitz and Dachau - and suggested that there were other missives between Koenig and Leiber that either have gone missing or have not yet been found. Over a 4 day period in December 1942, Rava Ruska’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 Belzec.

Also in December 1942, Pope Pius XII had received multiple diplomatic notes from British and Polish envoys with reports that up to 1 million Jews had been murdered to date in Poland. According to ‘The Pope at War’, a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist David Kertzer, a top secretariat of state official, had 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.

The controversy over Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II was reignited when Pope Benedict XVI signed a Decree affirming that his Predecessor displayed "heroic virtues" during his lifetime. When the Pope visited the Great Synagogue of Rome, Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community, told him: "The silence of Pius before the Shoah still hurts because something should have been done".

“The Rights of Man, the Feast of Christmas, and Suffering Humanity” was the radio address by Pope Pius XII on Christmas Day in 1942. "A social doctrine or structure which denies or neglects the internal and essential link connecting God with all human concerns is an aberration; those who follow such a doctrine build up with one hand but with the other they are providing the means which sooner or later will undermine and destroy the structure.... today a conception rules which is no less detrimental to society, regarding as it does everything and everybody from the standpoint of utility to the State, to the exclusion of all ethical and religious considerations.....

"Legislators will accomplish this task successfully if they avoid dangerous theories and practices which are detrimental to the community and to its cohesion, and which owe their origin and wide diffusion to false postulates. Among these is to be counted a juridical positivism which invests purely human laws with a majesty to which they have no title, opening the way to a fatal dissociation of law from morality. Likewise to be banned is the theory which claims for a particular nation, or race, or class, a juridical instinct against whose law and command there is no appeal. Finally, all those theories are to be shunned which, though in themselves divergent and deriving from opposed ideologies, have this in common that they regard the State, or a group representing it. as an absolute and supreme entity exempt from all control and criticism, even when its theoretical and practical postulates result in open and clashing contradiction with essential data of the human and Christian conscience.... "... all men of courage and honor... ought ... to devote themselves to the service of the human person and of a Divinely ennobled human society.... Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction....

But the Bishop of Rome said not a word about Jews, only mentioning race in passing, and seemed much more concerned about Godless Communism: "Guided always by religious motives, the Church has condemned the various systems of Marxist socialism, and she condemns them still today, for it is her permanent duty and right to save men from currents of thought and from influences which jeopardize their eternal salvation....under the oppression of a State which controls everything and regulates the whole of public and private life, which encroaches even upon the sphere of thought, conviction, and conscience, this lack of freedom nay have consequences even more disastrous, as experience shows." After studying Pius XII's 1942 Christmas message, the Reich Central Security Office concluded: "In a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order.... Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals."