The Pope at War, page 10
The Duce ran his tongue over his lips and thought the matter over a moment before saying matter-of-factly, “In that case…Italy’s road is clearly marked: we must honor the alliance.”
Attolico, shocked, stood mute. Mussolini broke the silence: “There is nothing else to do! I told the rally in Maifeld[*1] that Fascist Italy spoke with a single voice and a single will. I told Germany in front of a million Germans gathered there that with friends one goes all the way.”[5]
* * *
—
On August 22 the world’s press carried the surprising news that Germany was entering a nonaggression pact with its archenemy, the Soviet Union. A German attack on Poland now appeared imminent. The day after Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Russian counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed the agreement, both the French and the Polish ambassadors rushed to the Vatican with the same request: Should Germany invade Poland, a Catholic country, it was crucial that the pope publicly condemn it.[6]
The next day Italy’s ambassador arrived at the Apostolic Palace, where, with Cardinal Maglione awkwardly still away on his summer vacation, he met with his deputy, Monsignor Domenico Tardini.
While the ambassador would rather have met with the cardinal himself, he realized that as far as access to the pope was concerned, he lost little by seeing either Monsignor Tardini or the cardinal’s other deputy, Monsignor Giovanni Montini. Indeed, it was clear to all in the Vatican that the pope felt closer to the two deputies than to the secretary of state himself.
The pope never would develop a warm, personal bond with Maglione and never felt entirely comfortable with him. Practically the same age as Pius XII, nuncio to France while Pacelli had been nuncio to Germany, and Pacelli’s rival at the recent conclave, Cardinal Maglione had a hard time playing the subservient role that the pope found most congenial in those who worked for him. But it was just such devoted service that the pope found in Maglione’s two principal deputies, who had loyally served in their present positions under him when he himself had been secretary of state.[7]
The two deputies were very different. Forty-one-year-old Giovanni Battista Montini, the pope’s favorite, came from a prominent Catholic family from the northern city of Brescia. The product of elite Catholic seminaries and colleges, Montini was appointed substitute[*2] of the Vatican Secretariat of State in 1937.
Almost a decade older than Montini, Domenico Tardini was at the same time named secretary of the Curia’s Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, responsible for relations with the governments of the world. The son of a Roman family of limited means, he was as rough around the edges as Montini was genteel. “Monsignor Tardini is a short, stocky man, rather common, and of modest origins,” observed the French ambassador, “with a very lively spirit, of mediocre culture, impulsive.” Although Tardini said only what he wanted to say, he was inclined to be more frank than others in the Secretariat of State. For this refreshing trait, as well as for his wry wit, he was popular among the foreign envoys at the Vatican.[8]
The French ambassador captured Giovanni Montini well, with a play on words: “He is a little bit the Pope’s enfant de choeur—ou de coeur [altar boy—or child of his heart].” He was, in some ways, much like the pope: from an elite Catholic family, intellectual, innately rather shy and soft-spoken, cautious in his speech: “emotional, indecisive, unsure of his judgments, he is at the same time very likeable, very sincere, very frank and yet elusive.” The ambassador concluded the sketch by noting that people in the know thought Montini was likely to become a pope himself one day. Indeed, over two decades later Montini would be elected to the papacy, taking the name of Paul VI.[9]
Meeting now with Mussolini’s ambassador, Tardini said the pope would welcome any suggestion the Italian government had for preventing the outbreak of war. The ambassador replied, as he had in the past, that the only thing the pope could do to be helpful was to urge Poland to cede Danzig to the Germans.
Tardini immediately informed the pope of the Italian request. The following day, at their early morning meeting in Castel Gandolfo, the pontiff handed him the text of a telegram to send in code to the nuncio in Warsaw. Its message was clear: “If Poland were to give some satisfaction on the question of Danzig, it might open a path to détente.” This was not the pope’s first effort to convince the Polish leaders to be more flexible. Earlier in the month he had instructed his nuncio in Warsaw to urge compromise on the Polish government. Now, on receiving this latest telegram, the nuncio met again with Poland’s foreign minister, this time specifically urging Poland to cede Danzig to the Germans. The Polish minister refused the request out of hand.[10]
Monsignor Domenico Tardini, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Monsignor Giovanni Montini, and (seated) Kazimierz Papée, Polish ambassador to the Holy See, March 16, 1939
* * *
—
Despite all his bluster, the Duce did not share the Führer’s rosy prognosis for how quickly Poland could be conquered, and he was even less convinced of an easy victory over Britain and France should those two powers follow through on their threats to come to Poland’s aid. Nor, despite his repeated proclamations of Fascist Italy’s might, was he without doubts about the country’s ability to wage a European war. At his twice-weekly meetings with the king, the constitutionally mandated commander of Italy’s military, Victor Emmanuel made no secret of his belief in the poor state of the country’s forces, the woeful quality of its generals, his worry that Italy could be exposed to a French attack across the Alps, and, not least, his belief that Italians were not psychologically prepared for a war. Nor did the monarch have any love for the Germans, much less Hitler, whom he detested.[11]
On the afternoon of August 25, Hans Georg von Mackensen, the German ambassador to Italy, hand-delivered a letter from Hitler to Mussolini belatedly informing him of the signing of Germany’s nonaggression pact with Moscow. Sitting at his desk in Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini, who prided himself on his knowledge of German, read the Führer’s text carefully. His reaction was rather muted. He was reconciled to the idea that a European-wide conflict was about to erupt, but, he said, he would have preferred Hitler to delay the war another year or two so Italy could be better prepared.[12]
While he assured Mackensen that Italy would honor its pledge and stand by Germany in war, the Duce was already looking for a way out. The next day he sent Hitler a message. The chiefs of staff of the Italian military, he told the Führer, had identified all the materials they would need Germany to supply to enable them to take part in a war that might last as long as a year. An extensive list followed, beginning with six million tons of coal, two million tons of steel, and seven million tons of petroleum. It was a request Mussolini knew the Germans could not satisfy. He ended his message on a rather discordant note: “If you think that there is still any possibility whatsoever of a solution in the political field, I am ready—as on other occasions—to give you my full support and to take such initiative as you may consider useful for the aim in view.”
Hitler replied the same day. Presiding over a military high command that had a poor opinion of the abilities of its Italian partners, Hitler had always been the main booster of the Italian alliance. He still retained a strong affection for the Duce, recalling the early days in Munich when Mussolini served as his role model and inspiration. He would now do what he could to help him save face. Regretfully, Hitler informed his Italian partner, Germany could not furnish all the materials requested. “In these circumstances, Duce, I understand your position, and would ask you to try to achieve the pinning down of Anglo-French forces by active propaganda and suitable military demonstrations such as you have already proposed to me.”[13]
Hitler’s message served its purpose, for it allowed Mussolini to claim that if he was not sending Italian troops to fight alongside his German allies, it was only because Hitler had not asked for them. But there was no getting around the fact that this came as a great humiliation for the Duce—the first of what would be many for him in the war—after all the years he had boasted of turning soft, mandolin-playing Italians into hardened Fascist warriors.
* * *
—
The next day, a Sunday, a large crowd gathered in Piazza Venezia, clamoring for the Duce to appear outside his window. They had come to express not their enthusiasm for war, but their faith that their leader would somehow help avert it. After stepping onto the tiny balcony outside his office window and raising his arm in salute, Mussolini went directly to Clara in the Zodiac Room.
“Sweetheart, did you see? They needed to see me and then I warmed their hearts with my smile, as I made a sign as if to say that things are getting better. These people don’t want war…. People are writing me from all over the world calling on me to act as mediator.” Then, as was often the case, Clara turned the subject from the political to the personal, her jealousy over Mussolini’s other lovers. Especially weighing on Clara was Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s most serious affair, although it had ended over a decade earlier. For the Duce, Clara’s mention of Sarfatti brought to mind the last time his wife had lectured him about his relations with other women. It had been ten years earlier, he told Clara, when Rachele caught him on the phone with Margherita. Now, though, his wife showed no interest in his affairs or, for that matter, in him. “No,” he assured Clara, “I don’t love her. She is the mother of my children…. We are always very distant, very: we are too different.” Clara felt reassured for the moment, but her doubts, her insecurity would soon return.[14]
The pope was meanwhile growing increasingly uneasy. As German troops massed on the Polish border, the French ambassador returned to the Vatican to plead for a papal declaration in support of Poland. “His Holiness,” wrote Monsignor Tardini, in recalling Pius XII’s response to the request, “says that this would be too much. One cannot forget that there are forty million Catholics in the Reich. Just think what they would be exposed to if the Holy See were to do something like this!” The pope, however, deciding some action was needed, sent Father Tacchi Venturi, his Jesuit envoy, to meet with Mussolini and urge him to do all he could to preserve Europe’s peace and, in any event, keep Italy out of the war.[15]
That Mussolini was eager to see the pope’s messenger was evident from the speed with which he agreed to the meeting. Tacchi Venturi sent his request to meet at twelve-thirty p.m. and an hour later was told to come to Palazzo Venezia that same afternoon at five. There the Jesuit found Mussolini in a rather good mood and eager to get his own message to the pope. Germany today, the Duce observed, was much stronger than it had been in 1914, and even back then it had taken all the world’s forces several years to defeat it. But, said the Duce, there was still hope. Here he took out a piece of paper on which he had written a message. It was advice he wanted the pope to send to Poland’s president.
The text was brief: “Poland does not oppose the return of Danzig to the Reich and calls for direct talks with Germany on concessions allowing Polish traffic through the Danzig port; on the corridor; on reciprocal matters concerning minorities.”[16]
Although Mussolini could often be abrupt, and meetings with him short, he seemed in no rush to see his old Jesuit partner leave. It would be criminal, said the Duce, for a world war to erupt simply over the question of Danzig. But should it happen, he added, anticipating the Jesuit’s next plea on the pope’s behalf, he would not rush to throw Italy into it.
Tacchi Venturi hurried to get the dictator’s note to the pope. On learning what Mussolini had asked of him, Pius XII had telegrams prepared for his nuncios in Warsaw and Berlin. The telegram to Berlin, signed by Cardinal Maglione, went out quickly:
Some diplomat has suggested the following solution for the Danzig question: “The Polish corridor and the adjacent territory could become an independent state like Monaco, Liechtenstein, etc., guaranteed or administered by neutral Powers, which would assure complete freedom for all nationalities and for commerce.” As the situation now seems extremely serious, I communicate the above to Your Excellency on the august order of the Holy Father, so that you make such use of it as you believe possible and opportune.[17]
Maglione’s deputies found the task of drafting the message to Poland more difficult. Indeed, the ever-cautious Monsignor Tardini questioned whether it was wise for the pope to send any such message at all. Aside from the likelihood that the pope’s secret efforts would come to light, he saw three other reasons why it would be best to abandon the idea. First, “it would seem as if the Holy See was playing into Hitler’s hands. He would bite off another big mouthful with Danzig and then next spring would begin all over again.” Second, “the Holy See would have seemed to accomplish another Munich,” which Tardini described as consisting of “Hitler screamed, threatened and obtained what he wanted.” Third, advised the monsignor, “the Holy See would seem a bit too tied to Mussolini. It would seem easy enough, in fact, to know that the person who made the suggestion…was him. That all worries me because these are exactly the accusations that are now being made against the Holy See.” Spurning Tardini’s advice, the pope decided to send the telegram anyway, directing his nuncio in Warsaw to meet with the Polish president.[18]
Although the pope threw himself into this last-minute effort to broker a peaceful settlement of the German-Polish dispute, he had little confidence he would succeed. “Poland is going to be crushed within a few days,” he told a visiting French prelate. “And France isn’t able to do anything for Poland, absolutely nothing. Do you know what strength Germany has? It is overwhelming.”[19]
But the pope made one last effort. On August 31, only hours before the war would erupt, he had Maglione summon the ambassadors of all five countries at the center of the crisis—Britain, France, Poland, Germany, and Italy—to the Vatican. Each, separately, was handed a copy of the pope’s plea to avoid war.[20]
* * *
—
Mussolini was himself in a state of great nervous tension, but it was a nervousness mixed with excitement. The previous day he had taken time, as he often did, to call Clara several times before her arrival at their room in Palazzo Venezia. When she appeared late that afternoon, he gave her a humor magazine to read, telling her he had to wait for an important phone call before he could be free for their lovemaking. But his impatience got the better of him. He roughly pulled her dress over her head, and as Clara recorded that day in her diary, they made “savage love.” She added, “I cry for joy.”
Mussolini soon got the call he was waiting for, as Ciano briefed him on the latest German-Polish developments. When Mussolini returned to Clara, he told her the news: war was about to break out. “The poor Poles, poor Poles, what a disaster they’re making!” said the Duce. “How can they fool themselves into believing in help from the French or the English?”[21]
Skip Notes
*1 The May field was created for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Mussolini appeared with Hitler there in the fall of 1937.
*2 Substitute is the title given to the head of one of the two major departments into which the Vatican Secretariat of State was divided.
The guns of the German battleship began firing on the Polish military garrison at Danzig’s port before dawn on September 1, 1939. At the same time, sixty-two German army divisions supported by thirteen hundred warplanes crossed the border into Poland, one major group attacking from Prussia in the north and one from Slovakia in the south. By six a.m. the first bombs began falling on Warsaw. German Stuka dive-bombers swooped down to wipe out scattered concentrations of Polish troops, while the Luftwaffe tried to destroy as much of the Polish air force as possible before it could leave the ground. The air attack targeted towns and villages as well, causing the terror-stricken residents to clog the roads and so block the flow of Polish reinforcements to the front. Monsignor Rarkowski, the field bishop of the German army, sent an urgent message to the Catholic soldiers of the Wehrmacht that day: “In this grave hour, when our German people face a test of their resolve under fire and have come forward to fight for their natural and God-given rights, I address myself to you soldiers…. Each of you knows what is at stake for our people…and each man sees before him, as he goes into action, the shining example of a true fighter, our Führer and Supreme Commander, the first and bravest soldier of the Greater German Reich.”[1]
Over the first three days of the war, the German forces would carry out seventy-two mass executions, both of captured Polish soldiers and of men, women, and children shot in anger at popular resistance to the German occupation. In one incident on September 8, a shot fired from a high school hit a German army officer; the Germans responded by executing fifty students in reprisal, despite the fact that the boy who fired the shot had given himself up. That same day, after a German company commander was killed in fighting south of Warsaw, enraged Germans led three hundred Polish prisoners of war to a ditch and machine-gunned them, leaving their bodies strewn aside the road.[2]
In their desperation, Poland’s leaders sent urgent appeals to the French and British governments to come to their aid, but the Germans continued their brutal march unbothered by any significant foreign interference. Over the next few weeks, they carried out more than six hundred massacres, some in retaliation for the death of a German officer, in one case in response to the death of two German horses caught in a crossfire. Within those first few weeks, too, the roundup of Poland’s Jews began, a roundup that ultimately led to the death of three million of them.[3]
* * *
—
