The Pope at War, page 2
MUSSOLINI, EDDA (1910–95): Mussolini’s favorite child, and the one most like him, Edda was headstrong and independent. Initially enthusiastic about Hitler and having Italy join in the Axis war, she would turn against her father following the arrest of her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, and his subsequent execution.
MUSSOLINI, RACHELE (1890–1979): Semiliterate, the child of a poor peasant family, never comfortable around the opulence and pretensions of the Italian elite, her son-in-law included, Mussolini’s wife was, according to her daughter, “the true dictator in the family.” Although she despised her husband’s young lover, she remained his staunch defender.
PETACCI, CLARA (1912–45): Clara was just a schoolgirl, the daughter of a Vatican physician, when she began sending Mussolini letters pledging her devotion. Beginning their affair in earnest in 1936, two years after her marriage, Clara developed an obsession for “Ben,” as she called him. It was an obsession reciprocated by Mussolini, who often phoned her a dozen times a day and awaited her daily visits to the special room reserved for her at Palazzo Venezia. Over time, Clara began to offer her own political advice, reinforcing some of Mussolini’s worst instincts.
PIGNATTI, BONIFACIO (1877–1957): Formerly Italian ambassador to Argentina and France, Pignatti was appointed Italian ambassador to the Holy See in 1935. Typical of many career diplomats, he made the transition from serving a parliamentary democracy to serving a dictatorship without any sign of difficulty and, until his retirement in 1940, would do all he could to ensure the pope’s cooperation with the Fascist regime.
HITLER AND THE THIRD REICH
HITLER, ADOLF (1889–1945): Since Mussolini’s ascension to power in 1922, Hitler had held the Italian dictator up as a role model. That affection would last through the war as the Führer’s troops repeatedly saved the Italian army from catastrophe and then, following Mussolini’s overthrow, rescued the Duce from his mountaintop prison and set him up as puppet leader of a new Fascist regime in the north. While Hitler, a Catholic by birth, had no affection for either the church or the Catholic clergy, he saw an opportunity with the election of Pius XII to ease the tensions that had marked the Third Reich’s relations with Pius XI.
HESSEN, PHILIPP VON (1896–1980): Son of one of Germany’s most prominent aristocratic families, his grandfather a German emperor, his great-grandmother Queen Victoria of Great Britain, Prince von Hessen married Princess Mafalda, King Victor Emmanuel’s daughter, in 1925, and then five years later joined the Nazi Party’s storm troopers. Shortly after Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933, he was named head of his province. One of the people closest to Hitler, von Hessen became the Führer’s personal envoy to Mussolini. Shortly after Pius XII became pope, Hitler, seeking a possible opening, turned to von Hessen to conduct a series of secret meetings with the pontiff in the Vatican, meetings that have only now come to light.
RIBBENTROP, JOACHIM VON (1893–1946): Formerly a wine salesman, and a fanatic Nazi, Ribbentrop was named Germany’s foreign minister in 1938. He would serve in that post until the war’s end. “I have rarely seen a man I disliked more,” said the American undersecretary of state after meeting him in 1940. Constantly promoting the virtue of war, and ever boasting of the inevitability of German victory, he had no affection for the church but nonetheless paid a dramatic visit to the pope only a few months after German troops launched the war.
WEIZSÄCKER, ERNST VON (1882–1951): Judged “a typical example of the German official of the old school of the nineteenth century” by the American undersecretary of state, Weizsäcker, product of an aristocratic German family, was appointed state secretary for international affairs, number two to Ribbentrop in the Third Reich’s Foreign Ministry, in 1938. There he served Hitler efficiently through the first years of the war before being sent in the spring of 1943 to be Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See. Liked by the pope, who, especially during the nine months of German military occupation of Rome, counted on him to help protect the Vatican, he would be viewed at the Vatican as an exemplar of the good side of the Nazi regime. Tried for war crimes at Nuremburg following the end of the war, Weizsäcker would be found guilty despite the Vatican’s pleas on his behalf.
ITALY’S ROYAL FAMILY
VICTOR EMMANUEL III (1869–1947): Named for his grandfather, founder of the Kingdom of Italy, the Savoyard king suffered from a lifelong inferiority complex due to his short stature. Sharing with Mussolini a deep-rooted misanthropy, he was intelligent and well informed but weak-willed and pedantic. Long a willing enabler of the Duce, he would be slow to act when, as the war began to go against the Axis, he fended off increasingly insistent pleas that he replace the Duce as government head and extract Italy from the war.
MAFALDA OF SAVOY (1902–44): Second daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III, Mafalda married the German prince Philipp von Hessen in 1925 and subsequently shuttled between Italy and Germany, where her husband was becoming a prominent Nazi and confidant of Hitler. It would not end well for her.
MARIA JOSÉ OF BELGIUM (1906–2001): Daughter and sister of kings of Belgium, she married the Italian king’s only son, Umberto, in 1930. A strong-minded woman not comfortable with the constraints imposed on her by her position and by her gender, she developed an independent circle of friends among prominent Italian intellectuals, including, increasingly, those displeased with the Fascist regime. She would be among the first influential Italians to seek the Vatican’s help in removing Mussolini from power and extricating Italy from the war, although in this she would have little success.
In March 1939, as the world hurtled toward a catastrophic war, the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church gathered to elect a new supreme pontiff. The man they chose would become one of the most controversial popes in church history. Pushed for sainthood by some, vilified by others, Pope Pius XII has been the focus of bitter debates about his dealings with the Nazi and Fascist regimes and his actions during the Second World War. Critics accuse him of a weakness for dictatorships and a distaste for Jews, highlighting his decision to remain silent as six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Mussolini and Hitler, they say, found him all too easy to intimidate and ever apt to embrace expediency over principle. Pius XII’s defenders paint a very different picture, a portrait of great virtue. He was, in their view, a man of rare courage, a man who, threatened with kidnapping if not assassination, heroically stood up to the Nazis and their Italian Fascist allies. Far from showing indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews, in this account, he worked tirelessly and effectively to save them.
Previous research on World War II has shed light on some of these questions and offered a more nuanced view than either extreme, but a crucial piece of the puzzle has long been missing. The Vatican archives detailing the activities of the pope and the prelates around him during the war were sealed upon Pius XII’s death in 1958. Since then, successive popes have faced intense pressure to open them. Finally, Pope Francis decided to order the archives for Pius XII’s papacy open, and they were made accessible to researchers beginning in March 2020. Now a more complete story can be told of the controversial pope’s actions during the war, and, perhaps as important, why and how, under great pressure, he made the fraught decisions he did.
The Pope at War offers readers the first full account of these events to take advantage of those recently opened archives. Its pages are full of previously unknown materials and new revelations. While researching this book, I read thousands of pages of these documents, those most closely bearing on the choices Pius XII made between 1939 and 1945. Many of these consist of internal memoranda prepared at the pope’s request as he weighed how to respond to the ongoing Nazi attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews and to Mussolini’s requests for greater Catholic support for the Axis war. Others consist of reports from the pope’s nuncios and other church leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe detailing the atrocities they were witnessing and advising the pope on what action he should take.
As important as the Vatican archives are to the picture painted in these pages, relying on them alone would produce a one-sided and incomplete account. Piecing the full, dramatic story together requires exploiting the huge mass of relevant reports and correspondence found in other historical archives: in Italy, Germany, France, the United States, and Britain. Many of these documents, too, have become accessible only in the last few years, as the slow process of government document declassification has run its course. These include the reports that Mussolini’s and Hitler’s ambassadors to Pius XII regularly sent their governments, as well as similar reports from the British, French, and American envoys to the Vatican. When put together, these accounts from inside the Vatican provide virtually a day-by-day chronicle of the drama lived there from the war’s beginning to its end. Offering an additional dimension, Benito Mussolini’s many spies inside the Vatican regularly dispatched reports of the intrigue, backstabbing, and conflict within its walls during these years. I made use of similar informant reports in writing The Pope and Mussolini, my earlier book about Pius XII’s predecessor, Pius XI, and the rise of Fascism in Europe in the years leading up to the war.
While Pius XII is at the center of the drama I examine here, The Pope at War offers a new account not only of the pope and the Vatican during the war but of how Italy experienced the war as well. Pius XII was Roman, the cardinals of the Curia were almost all Italian, and as bishop of Rome, the pope had special authority over Italy’s church. How the pope balanced his public stance of neutrality while presiding over an Italian church hierarchy that offered enthusiastic support for the Axis war will become clear in these pages. How Italy’s Catholic clergy urged all good Catholics to fight on Hitler’s side, despite their uneasiness with the Nazi regime, is a story I tell here as well. Integral to all this is making sense of the strange relationship between the two men who, from Italians’ perspective, stood out above all the rest: Mussolini and the pope. While the Italian dictator depended on the pope to ensure church support for the war, Pius XII would have his own reasons for wanting to remain in Mussolini’s good graces.
For those fascinated by the drama and the tragedy of the Second World War, a handful of world leaders have stood out: Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. The case can be made though that someone else should be considered. The pope had a status in war-torn Europe like no other man. Throughout the continent and beyond, many saw him as the only person whose position gave him unquestioned moral authority. To many he appeared as the last hope to stave off war and, once it had begun, to help bring it to an end. For Italians, he was the country’s only authority independent of the Fascist regime, the lone man whose own charisma rivaled Mussolini’s.
What follows is the story—sometimes shocking and often surprising—of a pope facing a world torn by war, fearing for the future of the church he led and under unrelenting pressure to denounce the evildoers. If the events recounted here offer a dramatic chapter in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, they are much more than that. They form an important and until now only partially understood chapter in the history of the Second World War itself. Perhaps, too, it is a story that offers lessons for our own world today.
THE TWISTED CROSS
On May 2, 1938, three special trains, carrying hundreds of German diplomats, government officials, Nazi Party leaders, security agents, and journalists, left Berlin accompanying the Führer on his first—and what would turn out to be his last—visit to Rome. Luminaries of the Third Reich, including Joachim von Ribbentrop, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, and Hans Frank, made the trip, leaving only Hermann Göring behind to keep the government going. Benito Mussolini, Italy’s dictator, the man who invented Fascism two decades earlier, had insisted on the visit, eager to reciprocate for the huge, adulatory crowds that Hitler had turned out in Germany the previous fall in his honor.
The visit began awkwardly for the Führer. He assumed he would be accompanied through cheering crowds by the man he had long regarded as his role model, but on arrival in Rome, he found himself instead in an ornate, horse-pulled carriage sitting alongside Italy’s small, introverted king. “Have they not heard of the invention of the motor car?” Hitler remarked later. The Führer’s distaste for the weak-willed, white-mustachioed monarch was fully returned by King Victor Emmanuel III, who viewed the German leader as a drug-addled mental degenerate. But because it was the king and not Mussolini who was head of state, protocol demanded that the German chancellor be hosted at the Quirinal, the enormous royal palace constructed atop Rome’s highest hill by Pope Gregory XIII in the sixteenth century. Hitler found it a melancholy place, resembling nothing so much as an oversize antique shop. His hostess there, Italy’s Queen Elena, towered over her husband by several inches. She bore a remarkable resemblance, observed the misogynist Führer, to one of the “horse guards.”
Only at the end of the six-day visit was Hitler fully able to enjoy the sights, when he went to his favorite Italian city, Florence, having left the king and queen behind in Rome. Shortly after Mussolini’s train arrived there, Hitler and his retinue pulled into track sixteen of Florence’s train station, festooned with flowers, German and Italian flags, and large golden banners of the Fascist fasces. Amidst the stirring sound of the city band’s rendition of “Deutschland über alles” and the Fascist hymn, “Giovinezza,” came the roar of an Italian fighter squadron flying low overhead. The two smiling dictators sat side by side in the back seat of an open car as, surrounded by motorcycle police, they set off on their triumphal tour through the streets on their way to the Pitti Palace. A small army of architects, engineers, and artists had worked for months to decorate the city for the event. Tens of thousands of red and black swastika flags, interspersed with red-white-and-green Italian flags, hung from windows along the way. It was a beautiful spring day, and with a holiday declared throughout the Tuscan region, 350,000 people came to get a glimpse of the two great men, albeit with a clear preference for their own Duce. Thousands of Fascist militiamen and soldiers, lining the streets, held the crowds back. Hundreds of police, including a company brought in from Rome, along with fifteen hundred carabinieri from other districts, made their presence known as well. After a tour of the unparalleled art collection of the vast Renaissance palace—Mussolini, who had no patience for museums, had not joined Hitler for the viewing—the motorized procession resumed. The two men stopped at a shrine to a Tuscan martyr of the Fascist cause before going to a nearby hilltop so that Hitler could admire the city view.
Unknown to the guest of honor, a small contretemps preceded the gala dinner held that evening at Palazzo Medici Riccardi, the fifteenth-century rusticated graystone palace built by Cosimo de’ Medici to house his family. According to a report prepared by the American consul in Florence, four female invitees were told at the last minute not to attend. The women’s Jewish ancestry having belatedly been discovered, the local Fascist authorities deemed it best to avoid doing anything that might offend their German guests. In the end, as the consul’s report explained, one final adjustment was made: “One lady made such a strong protest, proving she was not a Jew, that the request not to attend the dinner was withdrawn in her case.”
Following the meal, the two dictators set out again, bound for the Teatro Comunale for a performance of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. Afterward, late at night, they viewed a military display in their honor, with a light show featuring two huge sparkling inscriptions of “Führer” and “Duce.” They then returned to the station where Hitler’s train was waiting. As the two men stood on the platform saying their farewell, they struggled to contain their emotions. “Now,” Mussolini told Hitler, “no force will ever be able to separate us.” The Führer’s eyes were wet with tears.[1]
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While the Duce and the Führer were preening for the Italian crowds, the pope was fuming. Eighty years old, frail, and with less than a year to live, Pius XI, who in the early years of his papacy helped Mussolini solidify his dictatorship, had become alarmed with the Duce’s ever-tightening embrace of the Nazi regime. In recent months the pope had become increasingly vocal in decrying the Nazis’ attacks on the Catholic Church in Germany and their attempts to create a pagan religion of blood and soil with Hitler its new deity. When visiting Rome, heads of state typically came to see the pope, but Pius XI made clear he would grant the Führer an audience only if he promised to change course in dealing with the church. This the German dictator refused to do.
To signal his displeasure at Hitler’s visit, Pius XI had left Rome, retreating to the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo in the nearby Alban Hills. He ordered the Vatican museums closed and directed that the lights illuminating the Vatican at night be extinguished. In addressing a group of newlyweds who came for a papal blessing while Hitler was in Rome, the pope strayed far from his usual bromides to lament the glorification of the swastika in Catholicism’s capital. It was “the sign,” he said, “of another cross that is not the Cross of Christ.”[2]
For Mussolini, whose regime had long enjoyed a productive relationship with the Vatican, Pope Pius XI was becoming a problem. It was going to be difficult enough to win the support of Italians—no lovers of Germans with their talk of a superior Aryan race—for his alliance with Hitler without having the pope undermining him. But as long as Pius XI lived, Mussolini had little hope of relief. Indeed, many of the pontiff’s subordinates in the Vatican were themselves unnerved by the pope’s criticism of the Nazis, fearing it could jeopardize the church’s privileged position in Fascist Italy. Among these prelates, none was more powerful than the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, second in authority only to the pope and a man widely viewed as Pius XI’s likely successor whenever death came.
