The Pope at War, page 32
Reluctant to alienate the pope, Roosevelt had not abandoned his hope of finding a way to declare Rome an “open city”—that is, one free of military activity and so not subject to attack.[32] His efforts met strong opposition not only from the American military command but from his own secretary of state, Cordell Hull. In late June, Hull explained his reasons in a long letter to the president: Given Rome’s strategic position in the peninsula, the city remained a major rail hub linking north and south. Indeed, despite the Vatican’s earlier assurances that the Italian and German military headquarters were being removed from Rome, they had good evidence that they had not, “and in fact there is every evidence that Mussolini continues to use Rome as the capital of Fascist Italy.”[33]
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While it must by then have been clear to the pope that Mussolini’s days were numbered, he remained careful not to antagonize the Duce or the Fascist government. But the disastrous turn in the war was leading an increasing number of the country’s priests to express their unhappiness with the continued fighting. The result was a stream of prefect and police informant reports flowing into Rome complaining that parish priests were depressing public morale.
In mid-June, Ciano’s second-in-command at the Vatican embassy argued that these cases of “defeatist” priests should not be given much importance. What was significant, he advised the Italian Foreign Ministry, were the strong words of support for the war that continued to come from some of the country’s most influential bishops and cardinals. He cited the recent blessing the patriarch of Venice had given Italy’s troops, praising them for battling “the enemy’s oppressive power” and for “spreading Roman and Christian civilization in the world.” He also quoted the recent remarks of Cardinal Carlo Salotti, a member of the Curia, hailing Italian soldiers’ willingness to sacrifice their lives on behalf of their country, “proud in their Christian faith.”[34]
As the Red Army was marching westward, and underground Communist Party organizers were helping foment strikes in factories of the north of Italy, the pope was becoming increasingly worried that a Communist wave might soon wash over the country. In mid-June, he addressed twenty-five thousand Italian workers gathered in Vatican City’s Belvedere Courtyard. Cautioning them against the “lying promises” of the advocates of revolution, he warned that the Communists would reduce them all to slavery.
In reporting the speech to London, the British envoy wrote, “I am inclined to attribute the vehemence of the Pope’s warnings against social revolution to the fear lest reaction from Fascism in Italy may take a Communist form.” Osborne’s chargé d’affaires followed up with a further critique. The pope “denounced ‘social revolution’ so severely and painted its consequences in such dark colours that the Fascist and Nazi press were able, by dint of judicious omissions, to represent the speech as having been little more than an attack on Communism.” The Nazis made ample propaganda use of the speech. Italy’s chargé d’affaires in Berlin reported that it was distributed “practically in its full text,” presented “as the most explicit denunciation of communism that the Pope has ever uttered.”[35]
Despite the turn the war had taken, the ongoing exchange of favors between Vatican prelates and the leading Fascist government officials continued. It would be an exchange for which many of the leading figures of the Fascist regime would later receive ample repayment from the Vatican. Throughout the war, Cardinal Maglione and those around him had used their government ties to protect their own relatives from the dangers posed by the war, especially to prevent their young kin from being sent off to the killing fields. The latest example, in May 1943, was emblematic. Maglione penned a letter to Francesco Babuscio, then chief of staff of the Foreign Ministry, addressing him as “dear friend.” He asked that the orders to have the nephew of the papal nuncio in Belgium sent off to the front be countermanded and that he instead be assigned to the Rome office of the Foreign Ministry.
Babuscio replied two days later: “Permit me to tell you right away that it gave me immense pleasure to once again see your handwriting.” He also wrote to the general under whose command the nuncio’s nephew served. “It is in our great interest,” Babuscio explained, “to maintain relations of confident sympathy with Cardinal Maglione.” As expected, the general complied with the request.[36]
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From its base in Algiers, Eisenhower’s Operation Husky now neared its final planning stages. Despite all the people involved in the effort, the secret of where and when the Allies would strike remained well kept. A massive invasion was coming soon.[37]
On July 5, 1943, three black Vatican limousines displaying both white papal banners and red-and-black swastika flags pulled up at the German embassy to the Holy See, located in the majestic, columned, eighteenth-century Villa Bonaparte. The estate had been the Roman residence of Napoleon’s sister Paolina over a century earlier. The Vatican attendants had come to accompany the new German ambassador, Ernst von Weizsäcker, and his entourage as they traveled the short distance to the Apostolic Palace for his presentation of credentials to the pope. Weizsäcker would later have the distinction of being the only wartime diplomat at the Vatican to be convicted at Nuremburg for crimes against humanity.[1]
As a young man, Weizsäcker had served in the German military during the Great War before entering the diplomatic service. Following stints as ambassador to Norway and then, in the early years of Hitler’s reign, to Switzerland, he returned to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. In 1938, when Hitler chose Ribbentrop to be his new foreign minister, Ribbentrop selected Weizsäcker to be state secretary, the top job under him.
Sumner Welles, the American undersecretary of state, had met Weizsäcker in Berlin during the same 1940 European trip that had brought him to the Vatican. He found him “a typical example of the German official of the old school of the nineteenth century.” Like many who served in Hitler’s government, Weizsäcker would later claim never to have really been a Nazi and to have been appalled by its excesses. But it was men like him who ensured the smooth functioning of the Third Reich. For the first four years of the war, he had run the Foreign Ministry and, as one historian put it, “supplied Nazi diplomacy with a civilized façade.” He had been pleased by the early conquests that had expanded the Reich, and his office had played an instrumental role in deporting Jews from the occupied countries of Europe to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps. He would later claim he had no idea what awaited them there.[2]
Although the pope had had an ally in Diego von Bergen, Germany’s long-serving ambassador to the Vatican, he would see some advantages in the new appointment. Bergen had little influence with Hitler and, ailing in recent months, had rarely been seen by anyone at the Vatican. By contrast, there was no better connected or more professional German diplomat than Weizsäcker, who, self-confident, well spoken, and projecting sincerity, immediately began to inspire trust and sympathy in the pope and in the men of the Secretariat of State.[3]
Indeed, from the Vatican’s perspective, Weizsäcker epitomized the good Nazi. He was, as the pope’s nuncio in Berlin put it, among those “men of Government who are not fanatics for National Socialism.” The new ambassador, a Protestant, would ingratiate himself to the men of the Vatican by asking their help to enroll in a course on Catholic religious culture.[4]
After presenting his credentials, Weizsäcker accompanied the pope to his study. There the pope sat at his desk, while the ambassador dragged a chair from a corner of the room to be closer to him. As he always did on such occasions, the pope began by fondly recalling the many years he had spent in Germany. When the conversation turned to the war, the ambassador stressed Germany’s central role in combating Communism. Pius XII then spoke of his own unpleasant experiences as nuncio in Munich in 1919, when Communists briefly took over the city. Weizsäcker reported to Berlin that in commenting on the war, the pontiff “condemned the mindless slogan of our enemies about an ‘unconditional surrender.’ ”
Hitler’s new ambassador felt he could build a good relationship with the pope. He found him easy to talk to, was delighted at the pope’s excellent German, and could even occasionally get the pope to laugh. He later wrote, “I should enjoy my job more if the pope was a bit less ascetic and of a less frail disposition…. He is first a very faithful Catholic priest, and second a practical man.” Doing his best to meet all the cardinals of the Curia in his first weeks in Rome, Weizsäcker was pleased by what he found. “What they were hoping for above all,” he reported to Berlin, “was an agreement between England and Germany to unite against the Russians. Great is their disappointment that the British show no willingness to pursue this goal.”[5]
The day before Weizsäcker made his ceremonial entrance to the Apostolic Palace, a different kind of ceremony was held in the cathedral of Frascati, on the outskirts of Rome. The local priest had summoned the faithful to take part in a procession “to implore the Madonna for ‘peace with justice’ and victory over the forces opposed to Christianity and to our country.” He praised the efforts of the archbishop of Milan, who had recently convinced hundreds of thousands of the faithful to sign a pledge that they deposited at the feet of the Madonna at the city’s famed Duomo. If the Madonna agreed to bring Italy victory in the war, they would all say the rosary daily, stop going to see movies that promoted immodest fashions, and devote their families to the Sacred Heart of Mary. Frascati’s priest circulated his own version of the petition and urged his parishioners to sign.[6]
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The Allied landing in Sicily was now only days away, but the king still dithered. The latest of the military command to urge him to act was General Vittorio Ambrosio, the nation’s military head, who called on the monarch to replace the Duce with a military dictatorship that could negotiate a separate peace with the Allies. But the king insisted that such dramatic action was premature, indeed dangerous, arguing that after two decades of Fascist rule, one could not simply bring the regime to an end overnight.[7]
As Operation Husky—the landing in Sicily—was about to launch, Roosevelt and Churchill decided to jointly address a message to the Italian people. There was one note, though, that the American president insisted on writing himself. “I am sending the following message to the Pope,” the president wrote Churchill on July 9, “and feel that this should come from me instead of from both of us because of the large percentage of Catholics here, and because the Pope and I have a rather personal relationship, especially during the last few months.”
Roosevelt’s note to Pius XII began: “By the time this message reaches Your Holiness a landing in force by American and British troops will have taken place on Italian soil. Our soldiers have come to rid Italy of Fascism and all its unhappy symbols, and to drive out the Nazi oppressors who are infesting her soil.” He assured the pontiff that the Allies would do everything possible to avoid damaging churches and religious institutions.
Informed of Roosevelt’s planned message, the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden and Britain’s ambassador to the United States Lord Halifax wrote both the president and General Eisenhower in Algiers to voice their disapproval. “We doubt whether message would help towards reconciling the Pope to an Allied invasion. The Pope must know anyway we intend to respect the neutral status of the Vatican, freedom of religion, and as far as possible ecclesiastical buildings and institutions; and to assure him that we intend to do so will not influence his attitude towards invasion.” Undaunted, Roosevelt sent his message anyway.[8]
On the night of July 9, the Allied armada, consisting of 2,590 ships, left the shores of North Africa, headed for Sicily’s southeastern coast. Defending the island were a quarter million ill-equipped and dispirited Italian soldiers and thirty thousand German troops. A forty-mile-an-hour gale produced boatloads of seasick GIs and wreaked havoc on the Allies’ plan to land gliders behind the Axis lines. Thousands of paratroopers were blown off course but still succeeded in cutting Axis communications. In the early morning of July 10, the first shipborne troops landed on the still dark beaches, the British Eighth Army under General Bernard Montgomery and the Seventh U.S. Army under General George Patton. Over the next three days, 3,000 ships would deliver over 150,000 ground troops, supported by more than 4,000 aircraft. By evening of that first day, the British had walked into the southeastern Sicilian city of Syracuse virtually unopposed.[9]
The pope received Roosevelt’s letter that same evening. His mood was not helped by the fact that Allied radio had broadcast its content before he read it. Monsignor Tardini dismissed the letter as nothing but a public relations effort by the American president, its intended audience not the pope but the 24 million Catholics in the United States.
Once again, the pope had Monsignor Tardini prepare a memo to help him decide how to respond to the president. As Tardini noted, Roosevelt’s letter cast the Allied battle as a crusade, and he seemed to want to portray the pope as his partner. But while he had offered assurances that he would respect Vatican City, the president had said nothing about Rome. “He proclaims that he will as far as possible spare the churches,” but only “after having destroyed so many extremely precious churches in Sicily and elsewhere!” Tardini suggested that the pope reply by reaffirming the Holy See’s neutrality, repeating his entreaties for the Allies to protect civilians and church buildings and reminding the president of Rome’s sacred character. The pontiff should “proclaim one more time that the pope’s teachings and activities are inspired by and aim at true peace, at a pax Christi.” Here the monsignor added, “Very different I believe from the one that in reality if not in his words Roosevelt is pursuing!”
The tart-tongued Tardini added an additional complaint: “This so-called Liberator of Italy (unfortunately the Liberators sow nothing but ruins!) pretends almost to be the pope’s friend.”[10]
When Mussolini learned of Roosevelt’s letter to the pope, he had his son-in-law register his unhappiness with Cardinal Maglione and insisted that the government had a right to know how the pope would respond. Ciano reported that the cardinal looked “visibly upset” by the president’s letter and had “excluded most emphatically that the Church had done anything to even indirectly encourage such a message.” Saying the Holy See itself could not take sides in international conflicts, the cardinal reminded Ciano of all the statements Italy’s cardinals and bishops had issued in support of the country at war and all the support provided by Italy’s Catholic press. “From the conversation,” concluded Ciano, “I got the clear impression that Roosevelt’s message was the first bomb to fall on the Vatican. The Holy See is in fact aware of the embarrassing position in which Roosevelt has tried to put the pope.” Despite the urging of Tittmann, the American envoy, to have the president’s letter published in the Vatican newspaper, the pope judged it best not to further anger the Duce.[11]
Two days later Pius XII sent his response to Roosevelt via a short telegram to his delegate in Washington. While he was thankful for the assurances the president had given regarding religious life and the safety of Vatican City, he said he was disappointed that the president had given no such assurances for Rome. He reiterated his plea that the city be spared.[12]
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As the Allied armies closed in, among those in the Fascist government eager to avoid disaster was the undersecretary of foreign affairs, Giuseppe Bastianini. With Mussolini retaining for himself the position of foreign minister following his cabinet purge of a few months earlier, Bastianini functioned in effect in that role. The day after the Allies landed in Sicily, he sought help from Cardinal Maglione, whom he had known for almost two decades. The previous twenty-four hours had been among the most dramatic in Italy’s history. When Bastianini sat down in the secretary of state’s large, richly furnished red-damask-upholstered study, its windows offering a spectacular view of Rome, the cardinal reached out and placed a hand on his.
Bastianini had come to ask for the cardinal’s help in opening negotiations with the British. He wanted to send an envoy to make contact with the British government, but someone who could be dismissed as having no official government role if the matter came to light. Toward this end, he thought it best if the envoy were to carry a Vatican City passport and pose en route as a member of the Vatican’s administrative staff. Exactly what kind of deal with the Allies Bastianini had in mind remains unclear. In meeting earlier with Alberto Pirelli to discuss the matter, he had said there needed to be a government of national unity, in which the industrialist himself might serve as foreign minister, but he left vague whether Mussolini would remain head of it. The plan was to sound out the British on the possibility that Italy could lead a group of Axis countries—Romania and Hungary among them—in withdrawing from the war.[13]
Who might this unofficial envoy be? asked the cardinal, nervous about handing out Vatican identity documents for such a purpose. Bastianini suggested Giovanni Fummi, a Roman banker who had once represented American financial groups in Europe.
