Germany’s Catholic bishops have acknowledged that they were “complicit” in allowing the Nazis to rise to power and stood by while they launched World War II, according to new reports.

In a 23-page report made public this weekend, Germany’s Council of Catholic Bishops said it didn’t do enough to oppose the rise of Nazi power and even cooperated with Adolf Hitler’s regime during the Second World War, according to a report originally published in the UK’s Sunday Times.

“Inasmuch as the bishops did not oppose the war with a clear ‘no,’ and most of them bolstered (Germany’s) will to endure, they made themselves complicit in the war,” the report said, according to the Times.

“The bishops may not have shared the Nazis’ justification for the war on the grounds of racial ideology, but their words and their images gave succor both to soldiers and the regime prosecuting the war, as they lent the war an additional sense of purpose.”

Although the Vatican condemned Hitler’s race laws in 1937, the German church largely looked the other way during the war, which raged from 1939 to 1945, the Times said.