The Pope at War, page 38
Among the first to appear at the Vatican that morning was Ernst von Weizsäcker, the German ambassador. Eager to let the pope know that the German troops headed for Rome would respect Vatican neutrality, he met with Monsignor Montini. He coupled this news with a discordant note: Persistent rumors that the pope had played a part in deposing Mussolini were not helping matters. Indeed, a Roman newspaper article claimed that the pope had had a long phone conversation with Roosevelt shortly before the Duce was removed.
The story was pure invention, said Montini, who arranged to have the next day’s Osservatore Romano publish a front-page denial. Weizsäcker then cabled Berlin: “based on declarations by authorized Vatican bodies, the phone talks between Pope and Roosevelt are revealed to be pure fantasy.”[5]
The next evening Ambassador Weizsäcker phoned the Vatican to offer reassurances from the general in charge of German military forces in Rome: they would respect Vatican City and those institutions that depended on it. Goebbels’s diary entry of the next day confirms that the order came from Hitler himself: “The Vatican has inquired of our Ambassador whether its rights would be safeguarded in the event of our occupying Rome. The Führer sent an affirmative reply.”[6]
* * *
—
The British army crossed the Messina Strait from Sicily onto the Italian mainland on September 3, occupying Reggio Calabria at the toe of the peninsula. Six days later Allied troops landed at Taranto, at the base of Italy’s heel. From there, the Allies soon reached Brindisi. It was in this protective pocket of the extreme south of the peninsula that Victor Emmanuel and Prime Minister Badoglio would establish their makeshift royal government.
By the time the king reached safety in Brindisi, messages from Roosevelt, Churchill, and Eisenhower would be waiting for him: with Hitler’s army invading the peninsula, it was his job to rally the nation to fight back. Badoglio duly put out a weak call for Italy’s military to resist.[7]
“Our army,” the socialist leader Pietro Nenni recorded in his diary at the time, “melted like fog in the sunshine…. The spectacle of an army in ruin, without leaders, without arms, without discipline, with really only one wish: not to fight anymore against anyone, for any reason…. Everywhere the same story: arms abandoned, camps and barracks abandoned…in the face of an order from an exiguous number of Germans.” In the end, few Italian troops in Italy or abroad heeded the call to resist. The Germans disarmed over a million of them, killed about ten thousand officers and soldiers, and in most areas with few shots being fired, took six hundred thousand Italian soldiers for forced labor in Germany.[8]
On the night of September 10, the Germans issued an ultimatum to the scattered Italian forces offering resistance in Rome. They should surrender by midnight and allow the city to come under German control. The Vatican, promised the Germans, would be left alone. The following morning the radio announced that an accord had been reached between the Italian and German forces, and the fighting would end. An Italian general, Giorgio Calvi di Bèrgolo, married to the king’s oldest child, would assume responsibility for working with the Germans in overseeing the city.
Monsignor Costantini described the scene as he walked through Rome’s streets that day:
The city is peaceful; the stores are closed; all work has been suspended. Groups of people gather on the sidewalk with an air of astonishment and a kind of contained anxiety. There is not one smiling face. A kind of nightmare weighs on everybody’s soul….
[A]t Piazza Venezia, I saw a column of a great many German armored vehicles with machine guns levelled and with an arrogant attitude shown by the soldiers…. The vehicles were going in every direction. One got the impression that they were joyriding…an ostentatious show of force, a type of triumphal celebration in the streets of the Eternal City.
A few days later the monsignor added, “We are at war. I have confidence, however, that the Holy See and Rome will be respected.”[9]
On the fourteenth of September 1943, half a dozen German troops stationed themselves at St. Peter’s Square. The Vatican offered to put up a small wooden shed just outside Vatican territory to shelter them from the weather, and the offer was accepted. As the French ambassador to the Holy See put it in his report the next month, “Worried above all about surviving the storm, the Vatican is seeking to avoid any possible cause of friction with the Germans. It is being aided in this by the German ambassador [Weizsäcker], who seems to be showing goodwill.”[10]
* * *
—
Hitler acted quickly to free Mussolini from his latest place of imprisonment, atop the Gran Sasso mountain, in the Apennines northeast of Rome. On September 12 German soldiers in gliders landed at the remote site, while German troops seized the funicular that gave access to the base. The two hundred well-armed carabinieri guarding Mussolini surrendered without a shot being fired by either side. Italy’s fallen Duce was then flown to Germany, where he joined the other Fascist leaders who had found refuge there.
After some disagreement with his military brass, Hitler decided it would be in the Reich’s interest to install a new Italian government under Mussolini. As a result, on the evening of the eighteenth, German radio broadcast a speech by the Duce. He was once again, he proclaimed, assuming the direction of Fascism in Italy.
The Germans had released Clara, her sister, and her parents from their jail cells in Novara, in northwestern Italy, the previous day. From there she had traveled northeast to her brother’s house in Merano, near the Austrian border. On arrival, she first kissed the image of the Madonna of Pompeii to whom she had prayed for this moment, then pressed her lips to a photo of Mussolini. In her diary, she recalled her thrill at hearing his voice on the radio: “You speak, you speak to the people still…but to me it seems you speak also to me. Your soul passes into mine in drops and I feel you within me as before. I am transfused as always! Your unique words, your touching phrases, your way of speech, so human, simple, precise, poetic.” A week later Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic was officially announced at the first meeting of the new puppet government. The optics were less than optimal, as the gathering was held at the German embassy in Rome, and Mussolini himself was absent.[11]
Eager to cooperate with the Germans in order to protect Vatican City, Pius XII found a willing partner in Hitler’s ambassador. On September 16 Weizsäcker, carrying an envelope stuffed with cash, met with Monsignor Montini at the Vatican. He said the money was to compensate the Vatican for damage done to one of the basilicas a week earlier during the brief combat in the city. When Monsignor Montini balked at taking it, Weizsäcker told him to consider the cash “for the poor” and insisted on leaving it.
Weizsäcker said that General Reiner Stahel, the German military commander now in charge of Rome, was eager to show his goodwill to the Vatican and so had asked to come to the Apostolic Palace to meet Cardinal Maglione. The ambassador explained he had thought it best to dissuade him. Weizsäcker worried it could lead to unwanted rumors.[12]
Word that General Stahel was not being received at the Vatican triggered suspicion among some in Berlin that the pope had refused to see him. Asked by Ribbentrop if this was true, Weizsäcker responded he too had heard the rumor, along with the opposite rumor that Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Germany’s commander of the entire Mediterranean theater, had already met with the pope. “Both stories are false,” wrote the ambassador. “In truth, the Field Marshal has made no attempt to be received by the Pope, neither he himself nor his envoy.”[13]
There was one irritating matter the ambassador did raise with Cardinal Maglione. After German troops seized Rome, the British had been spreading “a series of false news reports: the Germans had disregarded the neutrality of the Vatican; had entered the Vatican City; the Pope had surrendered and was a hostage in German hands; the Vatican [radio] broadcast was surveilled by Germans; and so on.” The ambassador informed Berlin that he had asked for official Vatican denial of the reports, and he was pleased to report that both L’Osservatore Romano and Vatican Radio had issued a “public correction.”[14]
When “enemy propaganda,” as Weizsäcker characterized it, continued to push the claim that German troops were mistreating the Vatican and looting Rome’s churches, he asked the Vatican to reaffirm its denials. The Vatican newspaper soon published a new, more extensive refutation, and the ambassador proposed that the German government issue the following statement:
Since German troops have entered Rome, enemy propaganda, with fabrications of all kinds, has sought to portray the city of Rome and its people, but especially the Vatican, as a victim of German tyranny. The German military and German policy are to be disparaged to the Catholics of the world.
These attempts are futile. It is a matter of course that Germany fully respects the sovereignty and integrity of the Vatican state and that the German troops present in Rome act accordingly.
Weizsäcker followed this up with a detailed report to Berlin on all the ways the German authorities were cooperating with the Vatican to ensure its continued smooth operation. “For these reasons I have recently had constant contact with the Cardinal Secretary of State. Of course, Maglione fervently insisted on the rights of the Curia. But our talks have proceeded in mutual agreement. The Curia has repeatedly expressed its respect for the German actions.” Germany’s ambassador concluded by trumpeting how beneficial the statement he had put out had been in countering enemy propaganda, noting that it was published in L’Avvenire, which, “as is well known, is a Catholic paper close to the Vatican.”[15]
Weizsäcker was also eager to impress Ribbentrop and Hitler with the pope’s helpful attitude. “By chance,” he wrote Ribbentrop the following day, “I was able to have a glimpse at three documents that are indicative of the Pope’s political position. All three documents were written after July 25.” He went on to describe them:
The first document includes an intervention by the Curia with the Badoglio government on behalf of old Fascists.
In the second, the Curia, on the Pope’s orders, pleads for the Duce and his family, listing about twenty members of the family by name. The names of Count Ciano and Edda Ciano are not among them, though.
The third document is of particular interest. It included Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione’s analysis of imminent global threats…. Maglione says that Europe’s fate depends on Germany’s successful resistance on the Russian front. The German army is the only possible bulwark against Bolshevism. If it crumbles, that would be the end of European culture.[16]
In Berlin, the papal nuncio to Hitler’s government, Monsignor Orsenigo, went to see the German state secretary and had a congenial conversation at his Foreign Ministry office. The German told the nuncio that it was only through their speedy military intervention that the Germans had prevented a Communist uprising in Milan and Turin. He recorded Orsenigo’s reaction: “The Nuncio then said that, in his view, only Germany and the Vatican could face the Bolshevik threat, Germany on a material and the Vatican on a spiritual level.” The nuncio, he added, “would be pleased if we gave the Vatican the opportunity for common action against Bolshevism.”[17]
* * *
—
Italy now had two governments, the royal government headed by Badoglio, isolated in its Allied-protected enclave in the extreme south of the peninsula, and Mussolini’s republican government, the Italian Social Republic, based around Salò, a small town on the banks of Lake Garda in northeastern Italy, not far from the Austrian border. Their competing claims of legitimacy posed an immediate problem for the Holy See and an even more pressing problem for the men of the previous Italian administration, who were being called upon to support Mussolini’s new Fascist regime.[18]
Neither of the competing governments offered a very appealing sight. Harold Macmillan, the British diplomat, and Robert Murphy, his American counterpart, who had negotiated the armistice for the Allies, offered Roosevelt their view of the king’s rule in late September: “The Government, from the military and civil point of view, is little more than a name. Its importance is that it has unchallenged claim to legality.” The aged king was “physically infirm, nervous, shaky, but courteous, with a certain modesty and simplicity of character which is attractive. He takes an objective, even humorously disinterested view of mankind and their follies.” He was not, however, “capable of initiating any policy, except under extreme pressure.” His interests were “his family, his dynasty, and his country, in that order.” As for the men of his government, the Allied diplomats wrote, they “inspire sympathy rather than confidence. They are old and unimaginative…. The Marshal [Badoglio] has courage and a high sense of duty. The rest are men of ordinary parts…. They hate the Germans, but they fear them equally. All their divisions, in Italy and the Balkans, are ‘surrounded’ by a smaller number of German troops…. There is an atmosphere of well-bred defeatism.”[19]
* * *
—
The claim that Hitler was planning to kidnap the pope, later often cited by defenders of Pius XII in explaining his actions, was an invention of Allied propaganda. It had gained sufficient traction by early October 1943 that the Nazi press office thought it necessary to issue a long denial, broadcast on Mussolini’s newly installed radio station. “For a few weeks now,” it began, “the Vatican and the Pope have been the hobbyhorse of English-Jewish-American propaganda, which is capable of the most shameless and absurd fantasies as we know from long and daily experience.” Radio stations from America to Great Britain and the Soviet Union, the Nazi press release complained, were claiming that “Hitler’s SS had taken over the personal custody of the Pope, who thereby became a prisoner of Germany…. Notwithstanding the denials published by ‘L’Osservatore Romano’ and broadcast by Vatican Radio, these propagandists in the service of Jewry continue their work and fantasize about the imprisonment of the Pope and pretend to be deeply aggrieved and indignant because of this egregious injustice towards the representative of God on Earth.”[20]
Undaunted by the German denials, Allied propaganda put out ever more elaborate tales of a Nazi plot to kidnap the pope. On October 9 the British Political Warfare Executive arranged for a bogus “German” radio broadcast reporting that all preparations were now complete for the removal of the pope to the German Reich. Two days later it added a further embellishment: the Lichtenstein castle in Württemberg was now ready to receive not only the pope but the cardinals of the Curia as well.[21]
* * *
—
Having received the latest Vatican plea to recognize Rome as an open city, Weizsäcker went to discuss the matter with Cardinal Maglione. Perhaps, said Weizsäcker with a smile, the Vatican could take care of the problem simply by persuading the Allied troops to turn back, “just like Pope Leo the Great did with Attila.” The cardinal laughed but quickly turned serious. He was hoping all three governments might reach an agreement to prevent a destructive “battle for Rome.” Not being a military man, he said, he could not say exactly how this would work in practice. Perhaps one “party” might leave Rome before the other “party” reached the city.[22]
The pope and the cardinal feared not only the physical consequences that a pitched battle over Rome might cause, but the possibility of a Communist insurgency amid the destruction. In mid-October, Maglione told Weizsäcker that the lack of a robust Italian police force in the city worried him. A week earlier the Germans had seized the carabinieri barracks in Rome, forced over two thousand carabinieri housed there onto a train, and sent them off to the Third Reich. The limited number of police remaining in the city, said the cardinal, would be unable to quell a Communist insurrection.
Maglione sent a parallel plea on the pope’s behalf to the American president via Monsignor Cicognani, the apostolic delegate in Washington: “Should the Germans be forced to evacuate Rome, there are serious worries for the period in which the city, before the arrival of the Allied troops, would remain practically on its own.” The cardinal argued that “the few remaining police forces would not be in a position to stop many riotous elements, especially the communists.” In his cover letter, passing on Maglione’s plea to Roosevelt, Cicognani added further explanation: “From reliable sources it has been learned that the Communists are plentifully supplied with arms and might embark upon a program which would result in wholesale robbery and the complete sacking of the city. Such an eventuality…would hardly exclude the possibility of an attack upon Vatican City itself.”[23]
While the pope was sharing his fears of Communist insurrection with the American, British, and German envoys, the Nazi SS was exploring how it might be able to exploit the Communist threat even after the Allies captured Rome, as now seemed inevitable. British intelligence intercepted an October 12 telegram that the German Foreign Ministry Intelligence Service sent to Rome. It offers a tantalizing glimpse into the contacts the Nazis had—or at least thought they had—with the Italian Communist Party leadership:
Please investigate most carefully the possibility of organizing Communist coup after the Anglo-American occupation of Rome. The object, among other things, would be to exert pressure on the Vatican. Please examine the possibility and, if favourable, make preparations. Prinzing, who has contacts with the Communist Party leadership, is to be incorporated. The affair is to be handled as a special assignment and a state secret matter.
Albert Prinzing, professor of Italian studies at the University of Berlin, member of the National Socialist Party since 1934 and of the SS since 1935, was responsible for intelligence on Italy at the German Foreign Ministry. What contact he might have subsequently made with the Italian Communist Party leadership, if any, remains unknown.[24]
