The Catholic Church in Germany broke its 55-year silence on Sunday, admitting that it used forced labourers "extensively" in its monasteries, hospitals and vineyards during the Nazi period.
Mr Rudolf Hammerschmidt, spokesman for the Catholic Bishops' Conference, said the church was currently searching its archives for evidence and would present a report containing an expected 30 to 40 cases to the Council of German Bishops at the end of the month.
The admission came a day after a new law came into effect in Germany, establishing the foundation "Memory, Responsibility and the Future" to act as overseer of the compensation fund for Nazi forced labourers.
The Catholic Church will decide after the conference of bishops on August 28th whether to pay compensation to survivors. They will also decide whether to pay into the new compensation fund, to make direct payments to survivors or to find what they call a "third way", namely for compensation payments to go towards funding the church's work in Eastern Europe.
The Catholic church in Austria also admitted last weekend to using forced labour during the second World War. Between 1941 and 1945, the church in the state of Carinthia took 79 forced labour convicts from Poland, Italy, Russia, Italy and the Balkans, a spokesman said.
The Catholic church in Germany had come under increasing pressure from politicians from all parties to own up to their responsibilities and to start discussing compensation.
"There is collective responsibility for forced labour in Germany, something the Catholic Church is part of, regardless of how many workers they used," said Mr Otto Graf Lambsdorff, the commissioner of the compensation foundation.
"In comparison to the Evangelical Church, the Catholic Church has always tried to talk its way out of this by saying that it never existed," he said in an article in a German newspaper.
The Evangelical Church in Germany has already admitted using forced labour and has made a compensation offer of DM10 million (£4 million). Combined with the compensation payments recently agreed with German companies who profited from forced labour, the total compensation fund is expected to top DM10 billion (£4 billion).
Although examinations of church archives are at an early stage, it appears forced labourers were often put to work in graveyards and church hospitals.
Father Maurus Krass, the prior of the Benedictine monastery in the Bavarian town of Ettal, was on a visit to the concentration camp at Dachau when he learned from a fellow priest of his monastery's history. The monastery requested and received around 40 Polish, Russian and French prisoners of war.
Older members of staff remember the prisoners and maintain that they were treated well. But the daughter one of the Polish labourers, Ms Teresa Majewska, says that she was forced to toil for 12 hours a day at the monastery, peeling potatoes, carrying rubbish and shovelling snow. Her story of mistreatment is backed up by witnesses in the region who have come forward to testify that the labourers were brought to the monastery under armed guard.
Fifty-five years after the end of the Nazi era it is estimated that there are between 800,000 and 1.5 million former forced labourers still alive in Germany.
The relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime has always been a sensitive one. Last year's book Hitler's Pope claimed that while still secretary of state in the Vatican, Pope Pius XII aided Hitler's rise to absolute power and that as pope he maintained a public silence on the Nazi programme of mass extermination in Europe.
