This Europe: Letters reveal Auschwitz victim's plea to Pope Pius XI

After the decision of Pope John Paul II to begin opening the Vatican's secret archives to researchers, details are emerging of how heroic, lonely figures within the Catholic Church fought vainly in the 1930s to alert the hierarchy to the dangers of Nazism.

The most notable document to surface so far is a letter written by Edith Stein, the atheist Jew who converted to Catholicism, became a Carmelite nun and died in Auschwitz in 1942. She was canonised by the Pope in 1998.

Stein wrote an impassioned and extraordinarily prescient appeal to Pope Pius XI in 1933, urging him to galvanise the church against the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

The letter was long believed lost; Stein mentioned it in her autobiography of 1938, saying she didn't know what had become of it. In the letter she wrote, "Holy father ... for weeks we in Germany are spectators of evils which entail total contempt for justice and humanity ...

"For years the Nazi leaders have shown their hatred for the Jews. Now they have attained power and have armed their followers – including noted criminal elements – to harvest the fruit of the hatred they have sown."

Mentioning the Nazi boycott of Jewish traders, and the numerous suicides that followed, she wrote: "Is not this idolatry of the race and of state power stark heresy? Is not this war of extermination against Jewish blood an outrage against the sacred humanity of our Saviour, of the Holy Virgin and of the apostles?"

Clearly in great distress at the Church's apparent unconcern about Nazi atrocities, she went on, "We ... who see the actual situation in Germany believe it is harmful to the image of the Church worldwide if this silence is prolonged further."

Stein's letter received no answer, and it is not known for sure whether Pius XI even read it. What is known is that Sant'Uffizzio, the Vatican office that deals with heresy, planned a "sillabo" – a condemnation – "of the errors of Hitler and Lenin", in 1933 and 1934, but it never saw the light of day. And Pope Pius XI, who whether or not he saw Stein's letter, was alive to Nazism's evils, planned an encyclical against anti-Semitism, but after his death in 1939 his successor, Pius XII, it is alleged, shelved it.

Even one tiny but vital reform, the removal from the liturgy of the phrase "perfidious Jews", which according to newly surfaced documents was requested by a church organisation called the Society of Friends of Israel in the early 1920s, was not in fact realised until long after the Holocaust, by Pope John XXIII.

The picture emerging as researchers transcribe documents and pass them on to the media is murky, dense with contemporary detail. Atheistical Bolshevism, not Nazism, was the obsession of the Church. It took penetrating insight, back then, to grasp that Nazism was the worse evil. One man who did grasp it, a forgotten German Jesuit priest called Friedrich Muckermann, wrote a letter as prescient in its way as Stein's. It was directed to Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, in 1934, and in it he described Nazism as "a real religion ... a religion that works with revolutionary dynamism and which works above all on subhuman instincts. What confronts us is a phenomenon of diabolical violence ... National Socialism and Neopaganism are identical.

"What is the problem with the Church?" Muckermann went on to ask. "Often it lacks courage ... Why does the Church not go into battle against Nazism with the same energy that it finds in confronting Bolshevism and socialism?" It is a question that continues to resonate down the decades. That lack of courage might help to explain the fierceness with which Pope John Paul II today excoriates the immorality of war mongers, and never ceases trying to build bridges to other religions.

The documents released so far, and only accessible to accredited researchers on conditions "resembling a university examination" according to one of them, relate to the years 1922 to 1939. For much of that time, the man who became Pius XII, figure on whom all controversy centres, was a cardinal in Germany. But the papers that relate to the war year, when Pius XII's silence and alleged connivance with the Nazis caused most outrage, will not be opened until 2009.