The Pope at War, page 23
While Pius XII carefully avoided any condemnation of Hitler or the Nazis, there was one evil he had no trouble denouncing. His late May 1941 speech to the members of the Girls’ Catholic Action organization warned of what he portrayed as the dangerous enemy they faced. As was his custom, he arrived at the event carried in his sedia gestatoria, the four thousand girls standing excitedly before him, all dressed in white. The event, the organization’s annual “crusade for purity,” was seen as sufficiently notable that it merited a special report from the local police commissioner, who described Pius XII’s “important speech” there.
Comparing the battle to be fought today with the “glorious” Crusades of old, the pope told the girls it was crucial for them to help government authorities “combat the dangers of immorality in the areas of women’s fashion, sport, hygiene, social relations, and entertainment.” Rome’s Catholic newspaper explained that the pope had in mind the scandal of women’s and girls’ immodest dress, their participation in sports wearing outfits that left parts of their bodies exposed, and their yielding to the temptation of inappropriate dancing, theater, books, and magazines. Pius XII would continue to warn of these dangers throughout the war years.[27]
The pope’s own knowledge of girls and women was limited, for aside from the nuns who ran his household, he lived in a world of men. There was only one woman in whom he felt free to confide, his longtime household manager, Sister Pascalina. “What is so amazing,” a police informant reported at the time, “is the full command assumed by the German nun who, since the time he was a cardinal, acts as the Pope’s private secretary…. The thing logically leads to much gossip for malicious tongues say all kinds of things about it, and apart from these calumnies, there remains the evident fact of the command exercised by the secretary, who does and undoes what she likes at her pleasure.” The informant went on to give as an example the current work being done on a Vatican City renovation project of interest to the pope, noting, “She herself oversees the work on the building making various visits in the evening, when there are no workers there…. Every order by the above-mentioned nun is as if given by the Pope and is obeyed to the letter.”[28]
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Thanks to the arrival of German troops in the Balkans and North Africa, the war was now going better for Mussolini. But he seemed oddly removed from its day-to-day oversight, spending an inordinate amount of time with Clara Petacci. Mussolini’s affair, Ambassador Phillips had told Roosevelt back in January, was prompting increasing criticism in Rome. In a reference to her distinctive hairstyle, Phillips had dubbed Clara “Madame Pompadour,” and he offered the president the salacious, if erroneous, detail that Mussolini had taken both Clara and her younger sister as his lovers. So consumed was the Duce with his mistress, claimed Phillips, that “for weeks, the army did not see him.”[29]
Troubling, too, were signs that competing groups were forming around Mussolini’s uneducated but highly opinionated and strong-willed wife, Rachele, whom their children regarded as the true boss of their household, and the scheming Petacci family members around Clara. “For some months now,” Ciano noted in his diary in mid-May, “Donna Rachele has been agitated, cold, and involving herself in policeman-like manner in things that don’t concern her.” As an example, he cited a report—albeit one that seems hard to believe—that she was going around in disguise, dressed as an impoverished Roman, to see what people on the streets were saying. Ciano was far from an impartial witness to his mother-in-law’s behavior, for the two had never gotten along. For Rachele, who came from the same modest anarcho-socialist background in Romagna as her husband, Ciano represented all that had gone wrong with Fascism, as it attracted the soft, well-heeled men of the economic elite who found it a useful way to defend their privilege.[30]
For Ciano, the problem with Clara was not that she was Mussolini’s lover but that their affair was becoming such a scandal. In 1939, with an extravagance hard to miss in the case of the family of a Vatican physician, Clara’s family moved into a sprawling, luxurious villa on Monte Mario, in the periphery of the city overlooking the Vatican. While full public attention to the Duce’s weakness for Clara and her parasitical family was still a couple of years away, police informant reports were already filled with accounts of popular anger at the Petacci family’s flaunting of the riches it was assumed Mussolini must have been showering on them. The needy dictator often visited his lover’s home, welcomed by Clara’s mother, herself the undisputed ruler of her household. A devout churchgoer, she had long made peace with her daughter’s doubly adulterous affair and was now enjoying its fruits, as were Clara’s brother, Marcello—a man more devoted to questionable business schemes than to his own medical career—and her glamorous younger sister, whose dreams of a career as a film star Mussolini would help fulfill. Marcello, the inspector general of Italy’s police told the finance minister, “is doing more harm to the Duce than fifteen lost battalions.” Key to funneling government support to the family was Mussolini’s undersecretary, Buffarini, who somehow succeeded in casting himself simultaneously as an ally to both of the warring parties: Mussolini’s wife and his lover.[31]
Mussolini himself now seemed rarely in a good mood. In a typical choleric outburst, after reading a speech given by Roosevelt, he raged against the American president: “In all of history, there has never been a people led by a paralytic. There have been bald kings, fat kings, handsome yet stupid kings, but never a king who in order to go to the bathroom…had to be assisted by other men.”[32]
Roosevelt, in turn, had a dim view of the Duce but had little faith that the Italians would turn against him. The American ambassador in Rome had been reporting on the combination of low public morale and Italians’ growing conviction that the Germans would win the war. But, thought Phillips, Mussolini remained popular, and he advised the president against following Winston Churchill’s tack of denouncing the Duce to the Italians. A better approach, he thought, was to try to separate the Italians from the Germans by distinguishing between the two rather than casting them together in his denunciations of the Axis. It was a suggestion Roosevelt rejected out of hand. “At the present time there appears to be little possibility that the Italian people are willing to do more than passively accept the ignominious position which their alliance with Germany has forced upon them.” He added that “there would be little support in this country for a declaration of this sort.”[33]
Clara Petacci
On June 22, 1941, in an action dubbed Operation Barbarossa, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union with three-quarters of the German army, 160 army divisions, along with twenty-five hundred warplanes. Before long, 3.5 million German soldiers, joined by 700,000 German-allied troops, including the Italians, would face a Red Army numbering 5.5 million men. Within six months, as the Wehrmacht drove toward Moscow, the Red Army would suffer 4 million casualties, including 3 million starving in German POW camps. Although Hitler had been planning the attack for months, he informed Mussolini only a few hours before it began, with the German chargé d’affaires delivering the Führer’s letter to Ciano at his home at three a.m. Despite the hour, Ciano picked up the phone to tell Mussolini the news.[1]
Encouraged by the ease of his march through western Europe the previous spring, and by the difficulty the Red Army had had, in the winter of 1941, overcoming Finland’s tenacious resistance to its invasion, Hitler thought the eastern campaign would take no more than a few months. Nor were the Allies confident that the Russians could hold out long, believing their army was grievously weakened by Stalin’s purges of its officer ranks over the preceding years.
At the Vatican, news of the German attack on the Communist state was greeted with great relief, for the prelates had long worried about the prospect of a triumphant Russia sharing in an Axis victory. For the pope, the news cast the war in a very different light, as the Nazis took aim at what he viewed as Christianity’s greatest foe. Mussolini’s ambassador to the Vatican was pleased as well. He believed Hitler’s move would undermine the Allies’ efforts to present themselves as fighting on behalf of Christianity, battling both the Nazis and the Communists.[2]
First reports from the battlefield lent credence to the hopes and fears of a lightning German victory. No one was more euphoric than Mussolini and his son-in-law. Ciano noted in his diary that seventeen hundred Russian planes were reportedly destroyed in the first night of war. General Ugo Cavallero, the new head of the Italian military, advised the Duce that the poorly trained and equipped Soviet soldiers would quickly abandon the fight. The chargé d’affaires of the German embassy in Rome offered Ciano a similar view. The German military command, he reported, was predicting they would soon have five million Russian prisoners. Although Hitler had not asked for Italian help, Mussolini insisted on sending troops: “In a war of this nature,” the Duce wrote him, “Italy cannot remain on the sideline.” The campaign would culminate in “a dazzling victory…the prologue to the total victory over the Anglo-Saxon world.”[3]
Church enthusiasm was immediately clear to Italy’s faithful from Catholic press coverage. L’Avvenire d’Italia published an editorial alongside the front-page news of Italy’s declaration of war against the USSR. “The Cross,” predicted the paper’s director, “will once again appear atop the Kremlin’s cupola.” The editor of Rome’s Catholic newspaper added his own blessings a few days later, on the departure of the first Italian military units for the Soviet front. They were on their way to do battle, he wrote, “against the murderers of Catholic Spain, the ‘Godless,’ the irreducible enemies of Christian civilization…. In these days, our prayers rise up all the more fervently to God, that the Axis affirm this God-given historical task.”[4]
The declaration of war against the Soviet Union likewise triggered an outpouring of renewed support for the Italian war effort by Italy’s church hierarchy, encouraged by the Vatican.[5] Cardinal Adeodato Piazza, patriarch of Venice, offered stirring patriotic remarks at San Marco Basilica to the troops leaving for the Russian front, concluding with the wish that they soon return to San Marco “to sing the Te Deum of Victory.” The archbishop of Catania, at the other end of Italy, pronounced much the same hope. The reports on the clergy that prefects from each province sent monthly to Rome similarly painted a gratifying picture for the Duce. “The clergy and Catholics in general,” wrote the prefect of Salerno, “learned with enthusiasm of Germany’s actions against Russia” and were now describing the struggle as a “holy war…the crusade against the Godless…. All these manifestations of a national character by the high Italian clergy draw their inspiration directly from the Pontiff who has, personally as well, not failed in recent times to eloquently express his sympathy and his faith in Italy and in Rome’s mission.”[6]
The imagery of the Axis cause as a Christian crusade was becoming common not only in the Catholic press but in the Fascist press as well. In July Mussolini’s newspaper featured a pastoral letter of the archbishop of Gorizia, in northeastern Italy. All good Catholics, he said, should be willing to shed the last drop of their blood for the victory of Christianity against the darkest barbarism. “It is like the time when the venerable hierarchs of the Church saluted and blessed the voluntary militias leaving for the Orient to liberate the Sepulcher of Christ.”[7]
While Mussolini was no doubt pleased by the clergy’s support, he wanted the Vatican to do more. A week into the Russian campaign, Ciano sent a message to his ambassador at the Vatican: “There is no doubt that for the purposes of propaganda in American Catholic circles, and especially for the isolationist Irish [Americans], nothing would make a greater impression at this moment than a clear and unequivocal condemnation of bolshevism by the Holy See.” Mussolini’s greatest fear was that the United States would enter the war. Anything the pope could do to prevent or even delay it would be exceedingly valuable.[8]
By midsummer, Ambassador Attolico and his chargé d’affaires, the veteran diplomat and fellow conservative Catholic Francesco Babuscio Rizzo, were regularly meeting with Cardinal Maglione and his deputies, pleading with them to get Pius XII to issue a strong denunciation of Communism. But the pope was far from eager to take an action that, given the timing, would be widely viewed as publicly throwing his support to the Axis powers. It was one thing for the Italian church, albeit under the pope’s authority, to cast its lot with the Axis cause, but quite another for the pope to do so personally. Cardinal Maglione told Babuscio that since Vatican opposition to Communism was well known, there was no need to repeat it now. He invoked another argument, one the Vatican would repeat many times. If the Italian government really wanted the pope to speak out against the Soviets for their persecution of religion, the pontiff could hardly fail to mention the Nazis’ ill treatment of the Catholic Church as well. According to the reports they were getting, said the cardinal with a bit of exaggeration, the first thing the German troops did when they occupied new territory was to throw all the nuns, monks, and priests onto the street.[9]
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There was good reason to believe the Soviet army would soon collapse and in doing so bring the war to an end. The Germans were rapidly marching along a vast front, stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north, where they had occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, through Minsk in Belarus, and down past Odessa on the Black Sea. Meanwhile Britain, suffering from unremitting bombing and increasing isolation, seemed to have little choice but to sue for peace.
In late July, D’Arcy Osborne, Britain’s Vatican envoy, warned London that Hitler might try to enlist the pope in a peace offensive in the fall. The British envoy believed the pope’s “natural caution” would incline him against involving himself in an initiative that was likely to fail, but there was some reason for worry: “Great pressure and even blackmail from the Axis may be expected and the Pope is obsessed with the ambition to play a part in the restoration of peace.”[10]
As primate of the Italian church, the pope was trying to keep the Duce happy by doing nothing to discourage Italy’s most prominent churchmen from giving their vocal support to the Axis war. To Mussolini’s dismay, however, the pope remained unwilling to compromise himself with the British or, especially, with the Americans. In the days following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the closest he came to praising the Axis cause was in his late June speech marking the celebration of Rome’s two patron saints, Peter and Paul. The German press trumpeted his words on that occasion—his reference to the “great courage shown in defending the bases of Christian civilization and confident hope in their triumph”—as a clear endorsement of their war.[11]
With reports of the Germans’ ill treatment of the church continuing to come in, the pope decided at the same time to find a safe way to make church displeasure at the German government known. In mid-August Cardinal Maglione sent the papal delegate in Washington new instructions: while no American bishop should publicly express support for either side of the war, “it is, however, desirable that some of them…find a way to let their faithful know the painful conditions in which religious life operates in Germany and in the occupied countries. In doing so, they must act as if on their own initiative and not in the name of the Holy See.” Papal deniability was crucial. Any bishop calling attention to the issue must “not suppose, much less bring attention to the fact, that the news given comes from the Holy See.”[12]
In fact, tensions over the war were mounting within an American church hierarchy that was riven by factions and personal rivalries. Not long after Maglione sent his instructions to Washington, the American prelate closest to Pius XII, Archbishop Spellman of New York, wrote to tell the pope how uncomfortable the situation had become. Bishop Joseph Hurley had triggered the latest embarrassing public display in a speech that branded Nazism as worse than Communism and called on Catholics to support the president’s plan to send aid to Russia. “Catholic papers openly attacked Bishop Hurley and in an unprecedented incident in American history,” wrote Spellman. “Archbishop [of Dubuque, Francis] Beckman attacked Bishop Hurley in a radio address. In short, things are in a turmoil here.”[13]
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In late August 1941, after a three-day journey aboard his special train, Mussolini reached Görlitz, at what is today the border between Germany and Poland. In addition to his own generals, his large retinue included Hans von Mackensen, the German ambassador to Italy, whose cigars stank up much of the train, and Lieutenant Colonel Eugen Dollman, head of the German SS in Italy.[14] Hitler came to the station to meet the Duce and then accompanied him to his newly constructed “Wolf’s Lair,” a few kilometers to the east, the huge palatial complex Hitler had built to be his headquarters for Operation Barbarossa. Thousands of workers had cleared the forest nearby to construct the Führer’s vast underground complex, surrounding it with minefields and barbed wire. Nothing remotely like it existed in Italy.
Ever eager to impress Hitler and convinced that victory was near, Mussolini told him it was his great wish to have the Italian armed forces play a larger role in the war against the USSR. The Führer, confident of victory himself and with his generals seeing little value in the Italian army, tried unsuccessfully to dissuade him, citing Italy’s great distance from the Russian front and the logistical difficulties they would face.[15]
Back at the Vatican, the first news was coming in of resistance the German troops were encountering in their eastern drive and even instances of counterattack from the much-disparaged Red Army. While the pope and the men of the Curia feared an all-powerful, triumphant Nazi Germany, the alternative, unlikely as it then seemed, of Russian success against the Wehrmacht raised the possibility of a victory conference at which Europe’s future could lie in Stalin’s hands, a prospect they dreaded. But there was a third possible outcome, one that offered a glimmer of hope. What God, in his mysterious ways, might intend was a brutal war between Russia and Germany that would bring about the end of Communism but leave Nazism grievously weakened. In such a scenario, the pope might well come to play a crucial role in negotiating a peace settlement. Indeed, he might one day be hailed as Europe’s savior.[16]
