The Pope at War, page 40
The day after the trainload of Jews pulled out of the Roman train station, a member of the Vatican Secretariat of State office handed Ambassador Weizsäcker the latest Vatican list of those among the seized who should have been considered Catholics. “Among the various cases of ‘non Aryans’ not previously made known to the German embassy,” a note in the newly opened Vatican archives explains, “there are the two attached: they involve ‘non-Aryans’ who have been baptized, but not freed as others have been in their condition.”[19]
It was still dark when the train arrived at Auschwitz on the morning of October 23, exactly a week since the Roman roundup had begun. As the disoriented, exhausted, freezing, famished, filthy Jewish captives stepped out of the train, they were met by the camp’s medical director, the infamous Josef Mengele. As husbands and wives, fathers and their children rushed to find one another, they were immediately stopped, ordered not to move. Mengele directed the children and those men and women he deemed too old or too sick for physical labor to move to his right. The others were directed to his left. The elderly, the children, the sick, and the fragile were then loaded onto trucks and taken directly to the gas chamber. The youngest, born at Rome’s military college the previous Sunday, was not yet a week old. Slave laborers would later remove the victims’ gold teeth. The rest of the Jews, 149 men and 47 women, were sent to a labor camp where most would die from exhaustion or disease. Of the more than one thousand Jews who had been put on the train in Rome, only sixteen would emerge alive.[20]
On the day the Jews were being forced onto the train in Rome, Osborne, the British envoy, had a long audience with Pius XII. Appearing “well and in good spirits,” the pope shared two concerns. First, Rome’s food shortages might worsen should the Germans retreat from the city and the Allies not immediately arrive. This concern brought up the second one, that unrest might explode in the city during such an interval. Osborne asked the pope whether the Germans were treating the Vatican well. The pope replied that “he had no grounds for complaint against General von Stahel and the German police who had hitherto respected neutrality.”[21]
The next day the American envoy Harold Tittmann visited the pope and offered a similar account. The pope took the opportunity to tell Tittmann “that so far the Germans had respected the Vatican City and the Holy See’s property in Rome and that the German General Officer Commanding in Rome seemed well-disposed toward the Vatican.” Apparently, the pope made no mention of what had happened to Rome’s Jews in his meetings with the two envoys, or if he did, it was regarded as too inconsequential for them to put in their reports.[22]
Those Jews who had escaped the roundup were now on the run. The day after the train departed, in one of what would be many such scenes, a nun went to respond to a knock on her convent’s door. There she found a Jewish couple, the woman holding a baby in her arms. “Take him,” said the man, “and if you like, baptize him. If you don’t take him, I will kill him and kill myself.” Monsignor Costantini, who recorded the episode in his diary that day, added, “The child remained with the nuns. And the two forlorn Jews vanished, looking to escape from the Gestapo.”[23]
Pleas from Rome’s Jews kept coming to the pope. On the twenty-seventh, a Roman rabbi, David Panzieri, wrote directly to Pius XII, begging him to convince the Germans to return the victims of the October 16 roundup to their families, unaware that most had already been gassed and incinerated. But in the days following the roundup, the Vatican’s main focus was to alert the German authorities to the fact that, despite the earlier efforts to identify them and have them freed, some with bona-fide Catholic credentials had been among those forced onto the train.
On October 20, an accountant working in the administrative offices of the Vatican sent Monsignor Montini a plea on behalf of a family he knew: “Last Saturday, October 16, at 5 a.m., the following men, of Jewish origin, but converted to Catholicism and baptized, as seen from the attached certificates from the Most Excellent Vicariat of Rome, were taken by German armed forces from their home, together with their mother.” He listed the two men, Aldo Veneziani and his brother Dario, along with the dates of their baptism (1940 and 1941). The two men, wrote the accountant, were eager to bring the certificates proving their baptism to the attention of the German authorities in the hope that they would then set them free. He asked as well whether the Vatican secretariat would be “willing to interest itself in the pitiful case” of the men’s elderly mother, “although not Catholic, in consideration of her venerable age and her precarious state of health.”
Three days later, having received word of two other baptized members of the Veneziani family who had been taken on October 16, the Vatican secretariat sent a note to the German embassy. “Particular interest in the liberation of the below noted persons, arrested because of their descent, has been requested.” The Vatican note listed five Veneziani family members, identifying all but the elderly mother as “baptized.” It concluded, “The documents proving the Baptism of the above-mentioned persons are conserved at the Secretariat of State of His Holiness.”[24]
On October 29, Maglione’s office sent Weizsäcker another such appeal: “The most excellent German ambassador to the Holy See is asked for his benevolent interest in the release of Count Victor Cantoni and his mother, who were deported by the German troops from Rome, where they live, to an unknown destination. Count Cantoni, Catholic, was baptized thirty years ago as a child, and his mother was baptized in 1927.” A week later, writing on behalf of all those who had been arrested that day, although still avoiding the use of the word “Jews” in referring to them, Maglione sent a letter to the German ambassador. He asked if it was possible for him to satisfy the “many relatives or friends of the non-Aryans, recently arrested in Rome, who would like to have news of their loved one and eventually to have some material help.”[25]
At the same time, Weizsäcker sent Berlin the welcome news that the pope had decided to say nothing about the roundup of Rome’s Jews:
Although he has been beseeched by various parties to do so, the Pope has refrained from making any ostentatious remarks on the deportation of the Jews from Rome. Even though he must expect to be criticized for this for a long time by our enemies, and Protestant circles in Anglo-Saxon countries will exploit this for propaganda purposes, on this issue too he has done everything possible not to strain relations with the German government and the German authorities in Rome.
Weizsäcker noted that the Vatican’s newspaper had published only one oblique reference to the roundup. Written “in the paper’s characteristically long-winded and unclear style,” the ambassador reported, it stated that “the Pope grants his paternal care to all people, regardless of nationality, religion, and race. The diverse and ceaseless activities of Pius XII, it says, have even intensified as a result of the suffering of so many unfortunate people.” The German government, concluded Weizsäcker, should find nothing to object to in the Vatican statement, a German translation of which he enclosed, “especially since its wording will be understood by very few people as a specific reference to the Jewish question.”[26]
The pope’s silence as the Jews of Rome were being sent to their deaths was so striking that it even led to a complaint by the German priest who served as chaplain to the SS stationed in Rome. Speaking with the Italian priest who served as chaplain to the Roman police force, he said that some among the German military in Rome were unhappy about the deportation of Rome’s Jews. They were struck, he said, by the “indifference” shown by church authorities. Scrawled on the report to Montini containing the chaplain’s complaint is the comment, “H[oly] S[ee] had done what it could.”[27]
In the absence of any news of what had happened to the Jews once their train had left Rome, anguished relatives kept bombarding the pope with pleas. Perhaps none attracted his attention more than the one from a Roman Jewish family with personal ties to his own family. Four days after the roundup, Pius XII received word that among those seized was the niece of one of his former classmates from the Ginnasio Visconti, the Roman secondary school he had attended. In a letter his old classmate recounted what had happened: “One of my most beloved young nieces, Nella Pontecorvo, married name Mieli, guilty only of being born Jewish, was taken last Saturday from her own home in Via Padova 43 together with her tender young children, Marina age six and Claudia age four…. We know nothing more of them except, it seems, that after forty-eight hours they were forced to leave Rome for a destination unknown.” He added a note recalling that his niece’s grandfather “was tied by profound esteem and intimate friendship” with the pope’s own father.
Following the pope’s direction, the Vatican Secretariat of State contacted the cardinal vicar of Rome to verify that Nella and her two children had been baptized and so should have been exempted from the SS roundup. On December 13, Monsignor Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, wrote on the family’s behalf to Ambassador Weizsäcker to ask if he could arrange “to have news of the children and their mother, and obtain, possibly, their liberation.” Montini explained: “They are non-Aryan Catholics and the documents of their Baptism are available at the Secretariat of State of His Holiness.” Unfortunately for Nella and little Marina and Claudia, evidence of their baptism arrived much too late. The children had been sent directly to the gas chamber on their arrival at Auschwitz. Their mother, after having her little children taken from her, was perhaps sent to the slave labor camp. She had recently celebrated her forty-first birthday. It would be her last.[28]
On the cloudless evening of November 5, 1943, four bombs fell on Vatican City. One exploded in the gardens near the Vatican radio station, two others near administrative buildings. The fourth crashed through the roof of the Vatican’s mosaic factory. Remarkably, no one was badly hurt, although Monsignor Tardini, responsible for international relations at the Vatican Secretariat of State, narrowly escaped injury. He had been heading for his study in the governor’s palace when one of the bombs blew in its windows and collapsed the ceiling. Finally, quipped the sharp-tongued prelate, they had succeeded in creating an “open city.”
Although the damage could have been much worse, it was considerable. Blast marks could be seen up to the fourth floor on the exterior of many buildings. The mosaics laboratory was strewn with wreckage, a water main broke, and one of the buildings housing foreign diplomats had narrowly missed a direct hit. Although St. Peter’s Basilica largely escaped damage, some of its windows shattered.[1]
The search for the guilty party began quickly, as did the Axis use of the episode for propaganda purposes. The Vatican sent evenhanded notes to the American and British envoys and to the German ambassador detailing the damage and asking for an investigation to determine who was responsible. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden sent a telegram to Allied headquarters in Algiers: “Enemy propaganda is making great play with the alleged bombing of Vatican City by Allied aircraft at 2100 hours on November 5th. If as we assume there is no truth in this story we suggest that A.F.H.Q. should issue an immediate denial that any Allied aircraft were over the Rome area on this date.” At the same time, the American War Department cabled Eisenhower in Algiers recommending he issue a prompt denial as well.[2]
The day after the bombing, the Fascist media was filled with expressions of outrage. “A criminal air raid attack was made yesterday at about 9 p.m. against Vatican City,” announced a Rome radio broadcast. “The holy city…which is being protected by Reich troops from any possibility of violation, was hit by four heavy bombs which caused considerable damage. It is very probable that the attack was directed against St. Peter’s Basilica.” A banner headline in Rome’s major newspaper screamed “Criminal Anglo-Saxon Attack on Vatican City.” The headline in Farinacci’s Il Regime Fascista, back in business after having been briefly shuttered following the Duce’s overthrow, proclaimed, “Another Evil Act of the ‘Gangster’ of the Air: Vatican City Bombed: The Premeditated Barbarous Incursion.”[3]
Eisenhower quickly issued a denial: “Crews adhered to their definite instructions and did not bomb the Vatican City.”[4] The following day, November 8, a statement prepared at a meeting of the British War Cabinet read “Enquiries showed that the bombing of the Vatican City during the previous week could not have been done by Allied aircraft.”[5]
The following day the British prime minister would receive an unwelcome message in the form of a cable from the chief British diplomat in Algiers, Harold Macmillan. “We think that we probably did bomb the Vatican,” he wrote. “It was a very small affair anyway of possibly one machine that had lost its way.” The British government quickly buried Macmillan’s report. The next day the U.S. State Department put out its own press release responding to the Vatican request for an investigation: “A reply has now been received from General Eisenhower which establishes beyond any doubt that the attacking plane was not an Allied aircraft.”[6]
Cardinal Maglione came to know of the Allies’ suppressed account of what had happened thanks to a letter sent eight days after the incident by Monsignor Carroll, the only American working in the Vatican Secretariat of State. Carroll happened to be in Algiers. “In a conversation with the American Chief of Staff during the past week, I was informed very confidentially that they feel that the bombing of the Vatican is probably attributable to an American pilot who lost his way.” In fact, explained the American prelate, “another American pilot reported seeing an Allied plane dropping its load on the Vatican.” The American general had expressed his regret and pledged that strict measures would be taken to ensure it would never happen again.[7]
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At the end of October, Clara Petacci finally got to see her lover again. Having been freed by the Germans from her brief imprisonment, she had been sending Mussolini a stream of long handwritten letters, a curious stew mixing attempts to buck up his spirits, protestations of her undying love, complaints about his failure to sufficiently appreciate her, unsolicited political advice, and warnings about his enemies. Over the next year and a half, she would write him over three hundred of these, and although he repeatedly urged her to destroy their correspondence, she not only kept all his letters but made copies of her own. Clara’s visit that day to Mussolini’s residence at Gargnano, on Lake Garda about ten miles up the lake from Salò, was made possible because the Duce’s wife, Rachele, had yet to return from Germany. In the car on the way to see him, Clara clutched her rosary in her hands and prayed to her favorite saint, Rita. Entering a side entrance to Mussolini’s villa, she described her first sight of him: “I see him advance slowly in the shadow. I feel dizzy…. I see him, I see him again. He takes hold of my hand, he holds me, we look at each other, we tremble violently.” They spent the night together, a privilege they would not often get to repeat, for Rachele, Clara’s archenemy, would soon be returning and would use all the arms at her disposal to keep Clara away.[8]
For his part, Mussolini felt as much prisoner as dictator, resenting the Germans’ control and no longer confident of his ability to dictate to his own Fascist underlings. The ministries of his government were scattered across the Veneto region, while his villa served as both his office and his home. He had long reveled in the popular adulation that met him wherever he went and the oceanic crowds roused by his combative speeches. Now he felt alone, rarely venturing from his villa and not fully trusting the men who guarded him. He had not been back in Rome since he had been so abruptly removed by the king; nor would he ever return there. At the balcony of Palazzo Venezia where he had given so many memorable harangues, the only sign of his presence now was a picture of him, his arm raised in Roman salute, hung from the balustrade. Guarding the entrance of that building were no longer his own troops but a German tank and four armored German cars. Most humiliating of all, perhaps, were the widespread rumors in Rome that he was dead.[9]
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Throughout these first weeks of German occupation, relations between the Vatican and the Germans continued to go smoothly, much to the pope’s relief.[10] On October 8, Weizsäcker had asked the pope to issue a statement denying the Allied tales of German mistreatment of the Vatican. The pope hesitated. If he were to issue his own statement, he said, all he could do would be to confirm that the Germans had thus far acted properly. He suggested that a statement by the German authorities would be more valuable, for it could not only speak to the past but offer guarantees for the future as well.[11]
In the end, the pope agreed to a joint declaration, signed by the German ambassador and Cardinal Maglione, published prominently in the October 30 issue of L’Osservatore Romano and then reprinted in La Civiltà Cattolica:
In order to put an end to baseless rumors now in circulation, particularly abroad, concerning the attitude of the German troops towards Vatican City, His Excellency the German Ambassador to the Holy See, on the instructions of his government, has informed the Holy See that just as Germany has hitherto respected the institutions and activity of the Roman Curia as well as the sovereign rights and integrity of the Vatican City State, it is determined to respect them in the future as well. The Holy See, recognizing that the German troops have respected the Roman Curia and Vatican City, have gladly taken note of the assurance given by the German Ambassador as regards the future.[12]
In helping nurture good relations between the Vatican and the German military authorities in Rome, no one was more active than Father Pancratius Pfeiffer, the German superior general of the Salvatorian religious order. Sympathetic to the Axis and a native speaker of German, he eagerly offered to serve as the intermediary in Vatican dealings with the occupying forces. The pope would have at least a half-dozen meetings with him during the nine months German troops remained in Rome.[13]
