The Pope Knew.

 A newly discovered letter shows Pope Pius XII DID know about the Nazi death camps during WWII.

(Reuters) The letter, dated Dec. 14, 1942, was written by Father Lother Koenig, a Jesuit who was in the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, and addressed to the pope's personal secretary at the Vatican, Father Robert Leiber, also a German.

Vatican archivist Giovanni Coco told the Corriere that the importance of the letter was "enormous, a unique case" because it showed the Vatican had information that labour camps were actually death factories.

In the letter, Koenig tells Leiber that sources had confirmed that about 6,000 Poles and Jews a day were being killed 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 newness and importance of this document derives from a fact: now we have the certainty that the Catholic Church in Germany sent Pius XII exact and detailed news about the crimes that were being perpetrated against the Jews," Coco told the newspaper, whose article was headlined: "Pius XII Knew".