Not Nice To Know: The Vatican Blames the Brits

But we really knew all along:-

Britain knew about extermination of Jews, Vatican claims

The Vatican's official newspaper has accused Britain and the United States of having detailed knowledge of Hitler's plans to exterminate the Jews but of failing to do anything to halt the Final Solution.

L'Osservatore Romano said the British and American governments ignored, downplayed or even suppressed intelligence reports about the Nazis' extermination plans.

They could have bombed Nazi concentration camps and the railways that supplied them but instead chose not to, the newspaper claimed. It quoted from the diary of Henry Morgenthau Jr., the wartime US secretary of the treasury, who described London's alleged indifference to the plight of the Jews as "a Satanic combination of British chill and diplomatic double talk, cold and correct and adding up to a sentence of death".

...It quoted Morgenthau as saying that as early as Aug 1942, the US government "knew that the Nazis were planning to exterminate all the Jews of Europe". In his diary, Morgenthau cited a telegram dated Aug 24, 1942, and passed on to the US State Department, that relayed a report of Hitler's plan to kill between 3.5 million and four million Jews, possibly using cyanide poison...American officials had "dodged their grim responsibility, procrastinated when concrete rescue schemes were placed before them, and even suppressed information about atrocities," Morgenthau wrote.

When the US government was finally convinced to try to rescue European Jews who had not already been sent to concentration camps, the British baulked, the editorial said.

It cited a British Foreign Office cable that warned of "the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy occupied territory" and advised against allocating money for the project.

While the British and Americans prevaricated, Pius was engaged in "the only plausible and practical form of defence of the Jews and other persecuted people" by arranging for them to be hidden in monasteries, convents and other Catholic Church institutions, the newspaper claimed.

L'Osservatore said that although the Nazis rounded up and deported from Rome more than 2,000 Jews, another 10,000 were saved.

Marking the 50th anniversary of Pius' death last year, Pope Benedict XVI described him as a great pontiff who worked "secretly and silently" during the war to "save the greatest number of Jews possible"...

Yeah, sure.

Read this:

L'Osservatore Romano and the Holocaust, 1939–1945
Susan Zuccotti

The frequent anti-Jewish articles in the official Vatican newspaper in the 1930s disappeared during the papacy of Pius XII (1939–1958). The research below shows that, even so, L'Osservatore Romano did not publicize the destruction of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust and remained reticent on other German atrocities. It did report Soviet cruelties and aggression. Even after the liberation of Rome in June 1944, the newspaper failed to denounce the ongoing genocide. It did, however, print the pope's three speeches that included expressions of compassion for those suffering because of "nationality and descent," his two encyclicals mentioning the unity of the human family, and several articles objecting to biological racism. After the roundup of 1,259 Roman Jews on October 16, 1943, it referred twice to the pope's universal charity without distinction of "nationality, religion, or descent," while in December it objected to arrests of Jews by Italians; the paper suffered no serious consequences. The author argues that L'Osservatore Romano could have done more.

and read here from this book.