Vatican opens archive on pope's silence during Holocaust

Historians will begin combing the archives of the world's most contentious pope on Monday, hoping to glean why Pius XII stayed silent during the Nazi extermination of Jews in the Holocaust. More than 200 researchers have applied for permission to settle in one of the small studies of the Vatican Apostolic Archives to begin poring over millions of letters and documents the Vatican had kept under lock and key. The historic moment was preceded by decades of controversy and debate about why the pontiff, who headed the Catholic Church from 1939 until his death in 1958, never spoke out about the slaughter of six millions Jews in Nazi concentration camps across Europe.

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