On this day—October 27, 1941 The Vatican received its first detailed internal report on the systematic massacre of Jews in Europe in the “Holocaust by Bullets.” Monsignor Giuseppe Burzio, the Holy See’s chargé d’affaires in Nazi-allied Slovakia, wrote Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione based on accounts from Slovak military chaplains returning from the Eastern Front. Jewish prisoners of war were shot on the spot. Jewish civilians, including men, women, and children of every age, were being rounded up and systematically “suppressed” (massacred). The Vatican’s immediate reaction was not public alarm or urgent intervention. Diplomats asked Burzio to clarify whether the killers were Slovaks or Germans. His confirmation that SS units were carrying out the shootings on German orders arrived months later. By March 1942, Burzio was warning that the planned deportation of 80,000 Slovak Jews to German-controlled territory amounted to “condemning the greater part of them to their deaths.” The information was there, but it was kept quiet.