The Pope at War, page 27
Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto is taking place. Without any distinction all Jews, irrespective of age or sex, are being removed from the Ghetto in groups and shot. Their corpses are utilized for making fats and their bones for the manufacture of fertilizer…. Jews deported from Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, and Slovakia are sent to be butchered…. Inasmuch as butcherings of this kind would attract great attention in the west, they must first of all deport them to the East, where less opportunity is afforded to outsiders of knowing what is going on. During the last few weeks a large part of the Jewish population deported to Lithuania and Lublin has already been executed…. Arrangements are made for new deportations as soon as space is made by executions. Caravans of such deportees being transported in cattle cars are often seen.
Myron Taylor returning from European trip, New York, October 1942
Taylor’s memo concluded, “I should much appreciate it if Your Eminence could inform me whether the Vatican has any information that would tend to confirm the reports contained in this memorandum. If so, I should like to know whether the Holy Father has any suggestions as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized public opinion could be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities.”[29]
Although a note in the recently opened secretariat files shows that the pope read this memo immediately, he was slow to respond. A handwritten note on the memo, dated September 30, responded to the question of whether the Vatican had any reports confirming that the Nazis were engaged in slaughtering Jews. It read “There are those of Signor Malvezzi,” referring to the Italian business leader’s recent account of his trip to Poland. The pope had received many other such reports, including the recent one the Ukrainian archbishop had sent him, as well as the many detailed reports he had been getting from Don Scavizzi’s trips to the eastern front.
Taylor would leave Rome before receiving any response to his request.[30] A few days after his departure, Harold Tittmann, his assistant, now resident in Vatican City, went to the Apostolic Palace to follow up. A note in the secretariat files explains that the American envoy came “to pray that a response be given, even at any hour, to the memo left by His Excellency Myron Taylor on the killings of the Jews.”[31]
The following day, October 2, 1942, Monsignor Dell’Acqua, the member of the Secretariat of State staff whom the pope viewed as his expert on questions regarding Jews, offered his advice on how to respond.[32] Over the next years, Dell’Acqua’s antisemitic comments would mark many of the documents dealing with requests to the pope to speak out on behalf of persecuted Jews. His future in the church would be a bright one. In 1953 he would replace Monsignor Montini as substitute of the Secretariat of State office, and then in 1967 Montini himself, as pope, would appoint Dell’Acqua cardinal vicar of Rome.
It was best, Dell’Acqua suggested, to delay saying anything in response to the American request: “There is no doubt that the news contained in Ambassador Taylor’s letter is very serious…. It is necessary, however, to be certain that it corresponds to the truth, because exaggeration comes easily also for the Jews.” True, he noted, the pope had in the last months received very similar accounts of the mass murder of Jews from the Ukrainian archbishop and from Malvezzi. Here the pope’s adviser added parenthetically, apparently referring to the Ukrainian archbishop, “the Orientals too are not in fact an exemplar of sincerity.” “But,” advised the monsignor, “even given that the news is true, it will be wise to proceed with great caution in confirming it to Signor Tittmann because I seem to also perceive a political (if not purely political) aim in the American Government’s move, which would perhaps not fail to give publicity to the Holy See’s eventual confirmation.” In short, the Allies might cite the Vatican in support of their charge that the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Europe’s Jews. That, argued Dell’Acqua, “could have unpleasant consequences not only for the Holy See, but for the Jews themselves who find themselves in German hands…. One could ask the opinion of the nuncio in Berlin, but whatever will that poor man be able to say with certainty!”[33]
The following day the Polish ambassador would provide the pope with further news of the ongoing mass murder of Jews in his homeland: “The Germans’ massacres of the Jews in Poland are of public notoriety.” He went on to give details of the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths in concentration camps, concluding, “In the course of the next months, one expects that all of the Jewish population of the Warsaw ghetto, consisting of 300,000 Jews, will be sent there, and that the homes of that part of the city will be given to ‘Aryans.’ ”[34]
Coincidentally, while the pope was mulling over how to respond to the American president, Father Scavizzi, following his most recent return from visiting Italy’s troops on the eastern front, sent in yet another report of atrocities. “The elimination of the Jews, with mass killings, is almost total, without regard to children, not even those who are nursing…. It is said that over two million Jews have been killed.”[35]
On October 10 Cardinal Maglione finally handed the pope’s response to Tittmann. The statement, unsigned, acknowledged that reports of “severe measures taken against non-Aryans” had also reached the Holy See from other sources, “but that up to the present time it has not been possible to verify the accuracy thereof.” The pope had accepted Monsignor Dell’Acqua’s advice. Best to offer the Allies no confirmation of the reports of the Nazis’ mass murder of Europe’s Jews and risk having the Vatican invoked in confirming the Allies’ charge. In fact, best not even to use the word “Jews” at all.[36]
Late on the night of October 22, 1942, wave after wave of British bombers swooped below the 2,500-foot cloud cover over Genoa and released hundreds of bombs and incendiary devices. Two searchlights pierced the skies as the city’s antiaircraft guns, positioned on the nearby hills, fired haplessly at their elusive targets. The attack would usher in a new phase in the Allied air war, a campaign of “area bombing” aimed at terrorizing and demoralizing the Italians. The port, the city center, residential areas, hospitals, and churches were all hit. Two days later it was Milan’s turn, the first time British bombers attacked in broad daylight, leaving 132 people dead. By war’s end, Genoa, Milan, and Turin would each have suffered over fifty Allied bombing raids.[1]
Along with this unwelcome new development came one even more consequential for the Axis cause. On the night of October 23, Allied forces under British general Bernard Montgomery began their offensive in Egypt at the central Egyptian Mediterranean town of El Alamein. Montgomery commanded 190,000 men, equipped with over a thousand tanks. He faced German war hero Erwin Rommel, who had 116,000 German and Italian troops under him, along with 540 tanks. Montgomery’s assault began with a massive artillery barrage on the Axis troops, followed by a harrowing tank attack through the minefields Rommel had planted. Within ten days the Allies had sent the Axis troops into flight, although not before half of Rommel’s men were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
To make matters worse for the Axis, on November 8, the first American GIs, under General Dwight Eisenhower, began flooding into the French colonies of Morocco and Algeria. Together with their allies, they defeated German and Italian forces there in short order. Until then France’s position had remained ambiguous, with the loyalty of the French military in the North African colonies not entirely clear. The fact that the French troops, who came under the authority of Marshal Pétain and his Vichy collaborationist government, failed to contest the Allied assault led the Germans to send their own troops into the southeastern portion of France. Until then, that large swath of France had been left under French military control.
For Germany and Italy, the new developments in North Africa were a disaster. The Allies were not only in the process of removing hundreds of thousands of Axis troops from battle and destroying a good deal of Axis war matériel; they were also creating a major staging ground for an assault on Axis-controlled Europe from the south. Italy lay tantalizingly close to the Allies’ new airfields and ports.[2]
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Ever since the German army had moved so rapidly through western Europe two years earlier, Axis victory had seemed inevitable to many in Italy and in the Vatican. Germany’s troops had seized much of Europe, penetrated deep into the Soviet Union, and routed British forces in North Africa, while Japan had conquered an enormous swath of territory in Asia and Oceania. Now a very different future was beginning to emerge.
Mussolini needed someone to blame for the country’s mounting disasters. “The bombings of Genoa and Turin are entirely the Vatican’s fault,” he told a surprised Raffaele Guariglia, his ambassador to the Holy See. Myron Taylor, said the Duce, had sensed a defeatist attitude during his recent visit to the Vatican and assumed it reflected a more widespread lack of Italian enthusiasm for the war. “So he went to London and suggested they intensify the terrorist bombings in Italy, certain that the Allies would bring about our country’s collapse that way.”
Guariglia tried to convince Mussolini he was mistaken. Vatican prelates would never do anything to undermine war morale, he said, for they lived in fear of doing anything that might provoke Fascist hotheads to strike out against the Holy See.
“It’s true,” replied Mussolini, “for it would be very easy to send a few hundred people to attack the Vatican.”[3]
At the same time, the Italian ambassador decided to speak with his German counterpart about what he saw as the greatest threat to the pope’s willingness to be cooperative. Pius XII was under great pressure to denounce German measures undermining the church, Guariglia told Ambassador Bergen. The pope had recently commissioned a report examining the situation of the church in German-occupied territories, and it painted an alarming picture. In Austria, all the seminaries were closed, and children were being sent to schools where any discussion of religion was forbidden. In Czechoslovakia, a number of priests had been sent to the Dachau concentration camp. At the camp at Mauthausen, according to the report received by the pope, “there are about 42,000 people, between Jews, priests, and those condemned for political reasons. It is a place of suffering and of the cruelest and most inhumane treatments, including the use of asphyxiating gas.”[4]
Despite all the alarming news of this sort coming in to the pope, Guariglia told Bergen, “the Pope has restrained himself as a courtesy to Germany, which is beneficial to Italy too.” But if the Germans continued to act against the church, the pope’s policy of silence could become untenable.
The German ambassador heartily agreed and now had a new note to strike in his pleas to Berlin. He wrote to Berlin on October 12, 1942:
Ambassador Guariglia recently expressed his grave concerns about the progressive deterioration of German-Vatican relations and cautiously asked if Germany could not be somewhat more accommodating towards the Curia, for instance with respect to the confiscation of monasteries and Church property…. As in every conversation, he raised the issue of the unbearable Anglo-Saxon propaganda, which portrays England and the United States as pillars of religious freedom against the Axis powers. He also fears that this propaganda could lead to pushing Argentina and Chile into the enemy camp.
Bergen concluded with this advice to the German Foreign Ministry: “I suggest you reflect on potential repercussions for our allies. Open conflict with the Pope would have a drastic negative effect on public opinion in Italy, which generally is not very good vis-à-vis Germany, and it would promote the machinations of those who seek to separate Italy from Germany.”[5]
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As the nightly bombings of the northern Italian cities continued, Giuseppe Bottai, Mussolini’s minister of education, went to warn him about the souring public mood. Don’t worry so much, replied the Duce. Following the invasion of Ethiopia seven years earlier, he reminded Bottai, the war at times had seemed to be going badly, and people’s enthusiasm had flagged, but once the war began to go well again, they were more enthusiastic than ever.[6]
Yet things were only getting worse. On the night of November 20, 250 Allied planes dropped bombs and incendiary devices on Turin, flattening entire neighborhoods and causing 117 deaths. A witness described the scene: “a cloud of fire, made all the brighter by the darkness, has descended on Turin.” Eight days later a new wave of RAF bombers appeared, dropping huge bombs and phosphorous incendiary devices on the city.[7] Turin’s archbishop sent the pope a barrage of telegrams and letters chronicling the damage. In early December, as the bombings continued, he wrote: “Churches hospitals ruined, Seminary and Cathedral intact. Household and myself safe.” D’Arcy Osborne, Churchill’s envoy at the Vatican, reported to London on the pope’s reaction:
There can…be no doubt that the recent heavy bombardments of North Italian cities have greatly upset the Pope and his entourage. Owing to the fact that His Holiness never made any specific condemnation of the deliberate slaughter of thousands of civilians in German bombardments, such as those of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, London, Coventry and other British cities, he is precluded by the most elementary logic from condemning our recent raids on Milan, Genoa and Turin.[8]
Nor were matters going better for Italian and German troops on the Russian front. On the snowy, foggy morning of November 19, 1942, over a million Soviet soldiers launched an attack on the German army besieging Stalingrad. Soon the three hundred thousand Axis soldiers found themselves encircled. Over the next three months, the Red Army would tighten its vise, as Axis rations ran out, a typhus epidemic raged, and the wounded and sick were left outside to freeze to death. The frozen bodies of German, Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian soldiers soon dotted the frosted wasteland amid the rubble of the city and its hinterland.[9]
In the privacy of her time alone with Mussolini, Clara witnessed her lover’s nervousness about the war’s new turn. “I’m disappointed and tired,” he told her on the last day of November. “Everything is very different from what I was expecting and what I had hoped…. Nothing interests me any longer, not even you.” Clara would always meet these episodes of self-pity and venom by doing her best to buck up his spirits, knowing that any passing cruel words he aimed at her would soon be replaced by renewed professions of his love. His mood could indeed change quickly. Only a few days later Mussolini was euphoric, back from a trip to Milan where he reveled in the enthusiastic reception he had received from the crowd that came to hear him speak there. “He is already in a divine mood,” Clara recalled happily.[10]
Despite the bombings of Italy’s cities and the recent stall of the Axis advance in Russia, Italy’s king, too, remained convinced the war would soon be won. “The Allies do not find themselves in a terribly comfortable position and I believe that they will not be able to win,” he told the papal nuncio, who met with him in late November. The king had advice for the pope as well: “In His exalted mission the Holy Father must maintain the strictest neutrality. However, I believe that in His heart he cannot wish for the victory of the Jews, the Bolsheviks, and the Lutherans.”[11]
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The intensifying Allied air assault on Italy’s cities prompted new fears that Rome might soon be targeted. In early December 1942 the pope learned of a Radio London broadcast threatening to extend the Allied bombing campaign to the Eternal City. He decided to contact not the British prime minister but the American president. He had good reason to believe Roosevelt would be more open to his plea, because Catholics were more politically important to the American president than they were to the British prime minister, and because it was London, not Washington, that had suffered from devastating Axis bombings.
The pope made use of both official and unofficial channels. Monsignor Amleto Cicognani, the papal delegate in Washington, alerted Archbishop Spellman, who immediately telephoned the president. Such was the New York archbishop’s clout that Roosevelt scheduled a meeting with him three days later. At the same time, Cicognani informed the American assistant secretary of state of the pope’s threat to protest publicly if Rome were bombed. That route proved less effective, as the American official responded by asking whether Pius XII had ever protested when London was bombed.[12]
At the Apostolic Palace, Cardinal Maglione summoned Mussolini’s ambassador. Whenever they asked the British to spare Rome from attack, he told him, they always received the same response: not only had the pope made no protest when Italians took part in bombing London, but Rome was the headquarters of both Italian and German military command centers. It was crucial, the cardinal told Guariglia, for the Duce to move all military activities out of the city.[13]
Mussolini soon sent back word signaling his agreement. The king, eager to avoid having British bombs fall on his palace, agreed as well.[14]
Frenetic negotiations followed, with the American envoy, Harold Tittmann, and his British colleague, D’Arcy Osborne, meeting almost daily with Maglione as the cardinal tried to broker a deal. Osborne, however, never had much confidence that Mussolini would abandon his capital. He also found the pope’s intense interest in protecting the Axis capital from harm unseemly. Instead of thinking only of protecting Rome from attack, Osborne noted in his diary, the pope would be better advised to consider his duty in the face of “the unprecedented crime against humanity of Hitler’s campaign of extermination of the Jews,” in which, he pointed out, “Italy was an accomplice as the partner and ally of Germany.”[15]
