A team of researchers found Pope Pius XII received reports of the annihilation of European Jewry, but preferred to ignore it • At the Pope's office they claimed: "Jews tend to exaggerate"

A team of German historians has uncovered in the Vatican Archives documents confirming for the first time that Pope Pius XII - who served during the Second World War - knew about the Holocaust, and that information about it had been hidden by the Vatican for decades. 

Photos: Moshe Ben Simhon, Samuel Buchris, Newsenders

The team, led by Church History historian Hubert Wolfe of the city of Minster, found in the document archive the term of Pius XII a documentary file containing a report to the U.S. Pope in the Vatican in September 1942. This report contained extensive details of Nazi crimes against The Jewish population in Poland - mainly a description of the elimination of parts of the Warsaw ghetto and the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Jews to concentration camps - US Ambassador Miron Charles Taylor was asked by US President Franklin Roosevelt to personally update the Pope on what is happening to Jews in the Nazi occupation, To publish a public protest against the extermination of the Jews, which would shock the civilian forces In the world, to "prevent these barbaric acts from happening." The Americans hoped to join the Pope in condemning the joint persecution of the Jews by the Germans, published by the United States, the United Kingdom and the United States on December 17, 1942. However, the Pope did not In addition, he avoided explicitly addressing the Jews and their fate in his Christmas speech that year.

The American Ambassador's report, called by the Pope on September 27, 1942, states, inter alia: Without any distinction and reference to age or gender, all Jews are sent from the ghetto in groups and shot. Their bodies are used to make fat and their bones - to make fertilizer. Executions are not carried out in Warsaw, but in camps prepared for this purpose, one of which is in Belzec. In the last month, only 50,000 Jews have been shot in Lemburg (now Lviv in Ukraine). According to another report, 100,000 were slaughtered. There is not a single Jew alive in all eastern Poland and the occupied Russian territories. " 

This information came to the US government about a month earlier through the Geneva Office of the Jewish Agency. According to information given to the Pope, Jews from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Slovakia were transferred to the East to be "slaughtered." An "efficient organization" of executions in Poland allows for the reception of Jews from the West. The document also states that the Germans had "further" success: they incited the Catholics in Poland against the Jews in their own country. 

The Pope then also had information from the Catholic Church sources in the German Occupied Territories about mass executions and extensive massacres in the Jewish population of eastern Poland and the USSR occupied by the Third Reich, and that no Jews remained in those areas. In August 1942, the Polish archbishop of the city of Lambberg sent, one month before the American ambassador's report, reported the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews by the Germans - including 130,000 Jews, including women and children in Kiev. The Archbishop called the German occupiers "diabolical". 

Vatican documents indicate that Roman Catholic officials in Rome tended not to believe the reports, mainly from Jewish sources. Cardinal Anglo Del'Aqua of the Pope's Office demanded that the information on mass murder of Jews be "compatible with the truth, since among the Jews there is a tendency to exaggerate."

Pope Pius XII's treatment of Jews during the Holocaust is controversial. Jewish organizations paid tribute to him after the war for working to save thousands of Jews through churches in Italy and throughout Europe. In early March, the Vatican first opened the archive concerning the period of reconciliation, between 1939 - the beginning of WWII, and 1958 to history scholars.