The Pope at War, page 39
As the fateful date of October 16, 1943, approached, Pius XII had another meeting with Ambassador Weizsäcker. Both were eager to ensure smooth relations between the Vatican and the German military forces occupying Rome. The pope began the audience by thanking the ambassador for all he had done thus far. When Weizsäcker brought up “the aspersion against our troops in Rome spread by our enemies,” the pope commiserated with him, and the two men discussed how the pope might best help combat the stories.
Hitler’s ambassador would next appear in the Apostolic Palace a week later, but that meeting would take place under dramatically different circumstances.[25]
On September 24, 1943, barely two weeks after German troops seized Rome, Heinrich Himmler’s Reich Security office in Berlin cabled orders to Herbert Kappler, head of the SS in the city: “All Jews, without regard to nationality, age, sex, or condition must be transferred to Germany and liquidated there.”[1]
In January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, top Nazi officials had met to coordinate plans for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Six months later the SS began gassing operations at its Treblinka killing center in Poland. Over the following sixteen months, nearly a million Jews along with an unknown number of non-Jewish Poles, Roma, and others were put to death there and at other such sites. In December 1942 the Allies issued a declaration stating that the Germans were engaged in the mass murder of Europe’s Jews and warned that those responsible for this “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” would “not escape retribution.”[2]
Now that they controlled much of Italy, the Germans could add the murder of all of Italy’s Jews to their plans. Approximately forty thousand Jews were then living on the peninsula. The Germans began almost immediately, improvising a bit at first. Within a week of the announcement of the armistice, members of the “Adolf Hitler” Panzer Division seized fifty-four Jews in towns around Lake Maggiore in the north, shooting some and drowning others. They had apparently taken the initiative on their own. A few days later as many as four hundred Jews, in good part refugees escaping the Nazis in southern France, were rounded up in the Cuneo area in the northwest. Most were put to death at Auschwitz.[3]
Within a day of the German troops’ entrance into Rome, the city’s chief rabbi went into hiding with his family. Israel Zolli had until a few years earlier lived in Trieste and had close ties with his rabbinical colleagues in central Europe. He urged the lay leaders of Rome’s Jewish community to close the synagogue, destroy the list of members, distribute all its accumulated emergency financial aid to the poor, and encourage all of Rome’s Jews to hide as well. But Zolli was not on good terms with the community leadership, and with his German accent and a personality judged cold, he was not popular among the city’s Jews. The community’s lay leaders rejected his advice, worried that it would trigger panic.[4]
Jews had been living in Rome for over two thousand years. Four centuries earlier, when Pope Paul IV first mandated that they be confined to a walled ghetto, locked in at night, twenty-five hundred Jews had lived in Rome. In good part impoverished, they were subject to draconian laws mandated by the popes to keep them in their humble state and to limit all contact with their Christian neighbors. They were further humiliated by the requirement that they regularly attend conversionary sermons at a nearby Catholic church. They lived in fear as well that church authorities would seize their children. Church practice demanded that Jewish children who were baptized, even without the knowledge or consent of their parents, could not be raised by Jews and so were to be taken from their families. Under the thumb of the popes, and at their mercy, the Jews in Rome came to be known as the Pope’s Jews. The situation came to an end only with the conquest of Rome by Italian military forces in 1870, and with it the end of the Papal States.[5]
Many of the twelve thousand Jews who now lived in the province of Rome were poor, especially those living in the city’s old ghetto, on the banks of the Tiber, not far from Palazzo Venezia and the Pantheon. In the wake of the German occupation, those with more means, scattered through the city, hurriedly packed up their Jewish books, magazines, and newspapers, stored away their Chanukah menorahs, and pried the mezuzahs from their doorposts. On September 29, 1943, German troops sacked the archives of the Jewish community and smashed down the door of Rabbi Zolli’s home, having brought an expert to go through his collection of rare Jewish books to determine which were worth carting off to Germany.
In late September as well, Kappler, for reasons that remain unclear still today, summoned the two lay leaders of Rome’s Jewish community and demanded that the city’s Jews provide him with fifty kilograms of gold within forty-eight hours. He warned that if they did not, he would select two hundred Roman Jews by lot and have them deported. Worried they might not come up with sufficient gold in time, a delegation of Jews went to the Vatican to ask the pope’s help. Although the pope, it was reported, agreed to offer whatever might be lacking, in the end his help was not needed. Two days later the two Jewish leaders, accompanied by the head of the Office of Racial Affairs of Rome’s police department and by two Italian policemen, delivered a pile of the requisite weight of gold jewelry to Rome’s SS headquarters.[6]
On October 11 Kappler received another telegram from Berlin, this one ordering “the immediate and complete elimination of Jewry in Italy.” Other members of the German command in Italy were told of the order at the same time, including General Stahel and Germany’s new ambassador to Italy, Rudolf Rahn, who had replaced Mackensen. Additional members of the SS were sent to Rome to help put the plan into action.
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Saturday, October 16, was both the Sabbath and the third day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. It was still dark on that cold, wet morning when a hundred SS officers marched double file into Rome’s old ghetto to get the Judenoperation under way. Another 265 fanned out to other parts of the city carrying clipboards with lists of the Jews who lived there. When the Jews of the ghetto first peered out their windows that morning, drawn by the commotion, many assumed the Germans had come to search for the men who had been evading the recently declared conscription for forced labor. Indeed, having feared such an event, most of the younger Jewish men had already gone into hiding. It still did not occur to those who saw the Germans approach that they had come to seize all Jews, women as well as men, babies as well as the elderly. Checking the address of each building against their lists, the SS men methodically banged on each door, smashing down those where no one answered. Shocked by the order for them all to come out, the Jews tried to draw some hope from the Germans’ written instructions—the SS men themselves spoke no Italian—to lock the door behind them and keep their keys. Surely, many thought, or at least hoped, they would soon be coming home.
As the morning progressed, the dramatic roundup was attracting the attention of passersby, who stood mutely watching the horrific scene as uniformed SS marched hastily dressed families in ragged single file through the wet streets amid pleas, sighs, tears, and shouts. Anguished mothers carried infants in their arms while gripping the small hands of those old enough to walk. A sick, deaf eighty-five-year-old woman was marched by, along with a paralyzed man who had to be carried aloft in his wheelchair. A woman holding her baby opened her blouse to nurse in the hopes of convincing the German officer to let them go, but he merely responded by poking her with the muzzle of his rifle, telling her to move along with the others. The men of the SS led the Jews in the old ghetto to an excavated area below street level near the ancient Roman Theater of Marcellus, where three or four tarpaulin-covered trucks shuttled back and forth, taking batches of distraught Jews to their destination, a military college complex across the Tiber, near the Vatican.
Some succeeded in escaping, warned by the shouts from neighboring apartments, while others simply froze in fear. Rosa Anticoli fled her home with her four little children before the SS arrived, desperate to reach a nearby tram stop. Slowed down by her young daughter, sick with diphtheria, she had not gotten quite far enough when a suspicious SS officer, spotting her, shouted, Jude! Jude! Rosa fell to her knees and pleaded for mercy. Prodding her with the butt of his rifle, he marched her and her four children to an awaiting truck.
Outside the ghetto, when a group of SS came to seize a Jewish family from a middle-class apartment building on Via Flaminia, a neighboring woman, looking on, berated the SS officer. He had a ready defense: Germany’s ambassador, he told her, had recently met with the pope and told him of the plans to round up the city’s Jews. “If you have to deport the Jews,” the SS officer quoted the pope as saying, “it is well to do it quickly.” Needless to say, no such conversation with the pope had taken place, but the fact that the pope had never spoken out either against Italy’s own racial laws or against the Nazis’ systematic murder of the Jews allowed such stories to be spread among the SS and the German troops.[7]
In all, the Germans wrested 1,259 people from their homes, many from the old ghetto, but many too from apartments scattered throughout the city. All were trucked to the military college compound just outside the old walls of the Vatican. On their arrival there, the 363 men were separated from their families and sent to a different part of the compound. Two hundred seven children and 689 women were imprisoned there, the oldest ninety years old. The trauma caused one woman to go into labor, resulting in an additional imprisoned Jew the next day.[8]
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Pius XII learned of the roundup early that morning. Among those to inform him was the young Princess Enza Pignatelli, who, alerted by a friend to the unfolding tragedy, rushed to speak with the only man the Romans thought to be in a position to stop it. Somehow she succeeded in reaching the pope’s private chapel, “pushing aside with her elbows those who wanted to stop her.”[9]
The pope could have no doubt about the fate that awaited the Jews. Making matters worse, the seizure of Rome’s Jews and their detention a stone’s throw from the Vatican, where they awaited deportation to their deaths, put his policy of not criticizing the Nazis’ ongoing extermination of Europe’s Jews to an excruciating test. For centuries, the popes had, as bishops of Rome, cast themselves as protectors of the city’s Jews, even as they had forced them into a ghetto. Only two months earlier the pontiff had for the second time raced to the site of an Allied bombing to publicly express his solidarity with the victims. How could he remain silent now?[10]
The pontiff phoned Cardinal Maglione and asked him to summon the German ambassador immediately. Meeting Weizsäcker that afternoon, the cardinal, invoking the ambassador’s sense of Christian charity and humanity, asked if he might intervene: “Excellency, you who have a tender, good heart, see if you can’t save so many innocents. It is painful for the Holy Father, painful beyond all measure that in Rome itself, under the eyes of the Common Father so many people are made to suffer simply because they belong to a particular race.”
Weizsäcker reflected for a moment, then asked, “What would the Holy See do if things were to continue?”
“The Holy See,” said Maglione, “would not want to be constrained to say a word of disapproval.”
“It has been more than four years,” responded the ambassador, “that I have been following and admiring the Holy See’s attitude. It has succeeded in steering the ship amidst rocks of every kind and every size without any collisions, and even if it had more faith in the Allies, it has known how to maintain a perfect balance. I ask myself whether, right at the time that the boat is about to reach port: is it a good idea to put everything in danger? I think of the consequences that a step by the Holy See would provoke…. The instructions received come from the highest source.”
After a pause to let the cardinal reflect on his unmistakable reference to Hitler as responsible for the order to round up Rome’s Jews, Weizsäcker asked, “Does Your Eminence leave me free not to report this official conversation?”
“I observed,” Maglione recalled in his notes of the encounter, “that I had asked him to intervene by appealing to his sense of humanity. I left it to his judgment whether or not to mention our conversation, which had been so friendly.”
Maglione went on to assure the German ambassador that, as Weizsäcker himself had noted, the Holy See had always been careful not to give the Germans the impression of having done “even the least thing against Germany during a terrible war.”
“Meanwhile,” concluded the cardinal, “I repeat: Your Excellency told me that he would do something for the poor Jews. I thank you for it. As for the rest, I leave it to your judgement. If you think it more opportune not to mention our conversation, so be it.”[11]
In fact, Weizsäcker never promised to do anything on behalf of Rome’s Jews and never did. What he did do was inform Berlin the next day that the Curia was “particularly shocked that the action took place, so to speak, under the pope’s windows,” and that groups hostile to the Germans were trying to exploit the roundup “to force the Vatican out of its reserve.” He added that people were beginning to contrast the silence of the current pope to “his much more fiery predecessor Pius XI.”[12]
At the military college, the Jews were forced to sleep on the floor. The incessant weeping of women and children, along with the pangs of hunger and the stench from the lack of lavatories, made sleep impossible in any case. All wondered what would become of them, although most imagined some kind of work camp would be their destination. Few could imagine the fate that awaited them.
As the thousand terrified Jews huddled a few hundred meters from the Vatican, pleas kept coming to the pope to do something. On the day after the roundup, Pius XII received an urgent letter from a group of Roman Jews who had eluded capture, begging him to intervene. That day, too, he received a letter that an elderly Jewish woman “in precarious condition of health” had somehow smuggled out of the military college where she was among the imprisoned. She pleaded for his “authoritative intervention.” At the same time, a number of other Roman Jews reached the Vatican Secretariat of State office to plead for papal help on behalf of their family members who had been seized.[13]
That morning Monsignor Montini had obtained German permission to send a member of his staff to the place of the Jews’ imprisonment. The Jews, the emissary learned, had been given nothing to eat or drink since their capture. Doctors who treated those who had been beaten were on their way out the door as he arrived. He learned something else of interest from speaking to those milling around outside the military college entrance. “It seems, according to some who were outside and knew people interned there, that they also included people who had already been baptized, confirmed, and celebrated a Church wedding.”[14]
In fact, among those rounded up were quite a few Christians, that is, baptized Jews, as well as Jews married to Christians. Within hours of the arrests, pleas were coming into the Vatican to take action to have them freed. At seven a.m. on October 16, an employee of the Vatican Library learned of the plight of his relatives who were among the first taken in the raid. He rushed to the Vatican, where he found a cardinal he knew who advised him to speak with Monsignor Dell’Acqua in the Secretariat of State. This he did, but at the same time, taking advantage of his acquaintance with Monsignor Montini, he sent him an urgent letter: “I turn to Your Excellency with the most fervent prayer to use Your authority with the German Embassy so that Catholic people, and fervent Catholics like my aunt and my cousins are saved…. It is an intervention that cannot come quickly enough, if (God forbid!) it is not already too late.”[15]
At the same time Monsignor Montini learned of another such case and hastily wrote to Cardinal Maglione: “This morning the lawyer Foligno was ‘taken’…Catholic by birth with his Aryan wife and children.” A note three days later reported the good news: “Mr. Foligno…comes to the Secretariat…to give thanks for what has been done for him: he was liberated after only a few hours.” The day after the roundup, the Roman office of the Order of Malta advised the Vatican Secretariat of State of another such case. Although the man in question had a Jewish father, the letter explained, he had been baptized at birth. He had been seized in the German raid. Three days later the office of the Order of Malta followed up with a letter reporting that the Germans’ error had been rectified: “fortunately for him, before embarking for an unknown destination…he was let go.” In fact, the Vatican Secretariat had hastily drawn up a list of those among the imprisoned whom the church deemed Catholic and had given it to the German ambassador.[16]
Early on Sunday, the Germans began carefully reviewing their captives’ identity documents to determine which Christians had erroneously fallen into their net. Over the next hours they would release not only former Jews who had been baptized but also those Jews married to Christians. This was Rome, not Poland or Russia, and the Germans did not want to unduly provoke the Vatican.[17]
Beginning at dawn on Monday, October 18, the 1,007 remaining Jews were loaded into trucks, which then rumbled through Rome’s streets to the Tiburtina train station. Among them were 105 children under age five. At the station, the trucks pulled up alongside a long train that waited on a dead-end track. Ordered to get out, the Jews were forced into eighteen windowless cattle cars. Hours later the train pulled out of the station. As it made its way north, witnesses reported hearing plaintive cries emanating from its forlorn human freight.
Monsignor Montini met with Pius XII to ask how he should reply to a letter that relatives of the captured Jews had sent the previous day, pleading for the pope to intervene. “Let them know,” instructed the pope, “that one is doing everything that one can.” Lutz Klinkhammer, the foremost historian of Germany’s military occupation of Italy, summed up the pope’s reaction to the roundup of Rome’s Jews: “It is more than clear that all their efforts were aimed above all at saving the baptized or the ‘half-Jews’ born from mixed marriages.”[18]
