The Pope at War, page 41
Having quickly become a familiar figure to the German military command in Rome, Father Pfeiffer was invited to an October 30 dinner held in honor of General Stahel on his departure from his post as commander of German troops in Rome. Pfeiffer was given the seat between Germany’s ambassadors to Italy and to the Holy See. In his notes on the event, Pfeiffer wrote, “Weizsäcker congratulated me for making myself so useful in such difficult times. At this, Ambassador Rahn observed that he too would always make himself available, should he ever be able to be helpful. It would be sufficient to drop him a line.”
In his remarks that evening, General Stahel spoke of his pride in having been chosen to be commander of Rome during such difficult times. He expressed special satisfaction for all he had done to ensure the well-being of Vatican City.[14]
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Ever since the king and Badoglio abandoned Rome, Italy’s emissary to the Holy See had found himself in an awkward position. The new republican Fascist regime was calling on all members of the Italian government to swear their allegiance. Although Francesco Babuscio had for many years loyally served the Duce, he had always viewed this as in harmony with his attachment to the Italian monarchy. Also weighing against swearing allegiance to the reconstituted Fascist government was his awareness that the Allies were likely to win the war. Caught between the two competing calls for his allegiance, he was not particularly eager to draw attention to himself.[15]
In mid-October, cut off from any communication with the royal government in exile, Babuscio asked Cardinal Maglione to help him establish contact with it. Loath to risk upsetting the Germans or provoking Mussolini’s republican government, and unsure that a communication such as Babuscio proposed could be kept secret, Cardinal Maglione turned down the request.[16]
Nor was Pius XII eager to bring attention to the awkward situation he faced with his own nuncio to the Italian government, Francesco Borgongini. The pope made no attempt to have Borgongini contact the royal government in the south, and in these months of German occupation, the pope did not want to be seen having anything to do with that government. At the same time, he would not want to have his nuncio deal with Mussolini’s republic, for that would be tantamount to offering it official recognition. It was best to have the nuncio do nothing.[17]
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As part of the Allies’ armistice terms, they had demanded that Italy’s racial laws be scrapped. When, two months later, in November 1943, still no move had been made to nullify the laws, the Naples city administration, acting on its own, declared them no longer in effect. The Allies had entered Naples the previous month. Angered by the unilateral move, Prime Minister Badoglio complained to the Allied Control Commission in Brindisi.
Having learned that Naples had “decided to consider null and void all fascist antisemitic laws,” the secretary-general of Badoglio’s Foreign Ministry wrote, the ministry wanted the Anglo-American authorities to know that the royal government had the question of abolishing these laws “under consideration…. In the meantime, I would be grateful if, while informing the Anglo-American authorities in Italy of the foregoing, you could impress on them the value of not encouraging isolated actions in this field by provincial or city authorities.”[18]
Replying three days later, the Allied authorities stressed the urgency of putting an end to the racial laws and reminded Badoglio that his government was obligated to do so by the armistice agreement. The Allied officials also took the opportunity to ask a series of questions: Were the anti-Jewish measures still in effect? Had the large number of Jews interned in Italian concentration camps been freed? Were Jews receiving the government’s support in efforts to regain their property and the jobs that had been taken from them? Were Italian Jews now able to resume their normal lives and rebuild their communal institutions? What must have been clear to the Allied authorities was that none of the major figures in the royal government had shown the least interest in these questions.[19]
While the racial laws were still on the books in the Kingdom of the South, as the royal government came to be known, Jews living there, thanks to the presence of Allied troops, were at least safe. The same could not be said for the great majority of Italy’s Jews, who found themselves in regions under the control of the Germans and their Italian collaborators.[20] In Rome and elsewhere in German-occupied Italy, Jews sought refuge where they could, and many found shelter in convents and monasteries. Such was the case of Enzo Finzi who, fleeing the October 16 roundup in Rome with his wife and family, sought refuge at the city’s Monastery of the Carissimi, where there was someone they knew. Although it was already crowded with an assortment of political dissidents, Italian soldiers, carabinieri, and other men not wanting to serve the Nazi-Fascist cause, the monks took the Jewish family in.
While many Jews succeeded in finding safety in this way, others were less fortunate. Some, on presenting themselves at the door of a Catholic religious institution, were told that they would be admitted only if they agreed to convert. Others were simply turned away. Emma Fiorentino, a Roman Jew, to cite but one case, received a telephone warning on October 16 that the roundup had begun. Desperately searching for somewhere that would let her and her children in, she thought of a nearby convent which housed two nuns she knew. The nuns refused to admit them. Emma and her family then walked from convent to convent pleading for shelter, but they were turned away everywhere.[21] To cite another example, in the days that followed the October 16 raid, a parish priest wrote to the Vatican to plead for help for two Roman Jewish children, a girl aged nine and a boy fourteen. Their parents, he explained, wanted “to entrust them, respectively to male and female religious institutions,” but as they desperately went from one to another of them, “some of them refused to accept them because they are Jews, claiming a prohibition by the order of higher authorities.” The priest reported that they had yet to locate a Roman convent or monastery that would take them in.[22] Although as these and other examples suggest, there is no evidence the pope ever directed church institutions to take in Jews, and many did not, he was aware that among the large number of refugees concealed in Rome’s religious buildings were many Jews.[23]
Guido Buffarini, the new republican Fascist government’s minister of internal affairs, played a central role in the murderous new phase of Italy’s anti-Jewish campaign. Following Mussolini’s overthrow a few months earlier, Badoglio’s government had jailed him. Within days of his imprisonment, the mother superior of Rome’s Institute of the Most Holy Crucifix wrote directly to the pope to plead his cause: “Holiness, remembering the infinite number of benefits and favors received for so many years that His Excellency Buffarini lavished on the works of our Congregation,” she wrote, she prayed that the pope would intervene to have him freed from prison and allowed to remain at home. Following the mother superior’s plea, the papal nuncio spoke with the chief of police on Buffarini’s behalf. The police chief assured him that while the prominent Fascist would need to remain in prison, he would be treated “with all possible consideration.” He remained imprisoned until the Germans freed him in early September.[24]
On November 30, 1943, in his new role for the Italian Social Republic, Buffarini sent a telegram to the prefects of all the provinces under his control: “The following police order is being communicated for immediate execution…. All Jews…of whatever nationality residing in the national territory must be sent to special concentration camps. All their possessions, including their real estate and other properties, must be subject to immediate seizure.” In deference perhaps to the repeated requests the pope’s emissaries had made to him in his former role in overseeing Italy’s racial laws, he added a note: “Jews born of mixed marriages should be considered Aryans.”[25]
Indeed, the Vatican’s efforts to shield baptized Jews from such measures were still very much alive. Four days before Buffarini’s order, Cardinal Maglione wrote the German ambassador with his latest request. The bishop of Trieste had implored the Vatican to see that the dire situation of the “non-Aryans” in his diocese was not aggravated by the ever more stringent measures being adopted against them. “It seems,” Maglione informed Weizsäcker, “that the local German authorities have proceeded to the arrest and requisition of the property of a number of Jews, without even making a distinction between the baptized and those not baptized, or those married to Catholics.” Maglione asked the ambassador to intervene.[26]
The patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Adeodato Piazza, was likewise moved to write to Rome to express his unhappiness that baptized Jews were being treated as Jews and called on the Holy See to do all it could to save them. He voiced another concern as well, which he registered in meeting with the German consul in Venice. It was disturbing, he said, to see Italian Fascist zealots invading the houses of poor, old, and sick Jews and arresting them while leaving the wealthier Jews to move freely around the city. “This injustice was disturbing him so much,” wrote the consul, “that the only solution he could see would be for the measures against the Jews to be carried out by German authorities, because then justice would at least be guaranteed for all. It is well known that the Patriarch’s chief wish is to have all Jews and half-Jews shut up in a ghetto.”[27]
News of Buffarini’s order to arrest all of Italy’s Jews, confiscate their property, and send them to concentration camps prompted an unusual comment on the front page of the Vatican newspaper. In its December 3 issue, L’Osservatore Romano asked what could have prompted the authorities to feel the need to drastically modify the existing racial laws. If Jews were thought to be responsible for some new danger, surely merely adding additional police surveillance would have sufficed. The Vatican paper expressed special concern for “the painful recognition that the new measures strike some who are Catholics from birth, children of Catholic parents, along with individuals who have sincerely converted and been practicing from the time of their youth or for many years, in any case entered into the bosom of the Church and Christian life, participating in the divine grace and in the communion of the Saints, like all those who are baptized.”[28]
The U.S. intelligence report for southern Europe that week commented on the Vatican’s response to the newly announced roundup of Italy’s Jews: “After several unofficial and fruitless appeals, the Vatican openly, but with characteristic mildness, takes issue with the neo-Fascist government over the latter’s drastic antisemitic campaign being planned and executed with Nazi-like ferocity.” The pastoral letters of the bishops of northern Italy “merely exhort their flocks to docility and patience ‘during these most trying times.’ ” If Hitler had any concerns that the pope might speak out against the new anti-Jewish campaign in Italy, Weizsäcker would assure him he need not worry. “As for a protest by the pope for the arrest of the Jews,” Weizsäcker reported to Berlin in mid-December, “it is not even being considered.”[29]
Italy’s Jews were now regularly being rooted out of their hiding places. Among the traces they would leave behind, as they were sent off to their deaths, were hastily penned letters that came fluttering out of the trains taking them north. One such note, written by twenty-three-year-old Abramo Segre to Lucia, his fiancée, emerged from a train passing through Brescia on December 7, 1943. In the train with Abramo were his mother and sister.
Dear Lucia,
I entrust my letter to the goodness of someone who will want to mail it. This is the second day that I find myself closed in a cattle car with my family and with two hundred other people on our way to the concentration camp. I face the terrible prospect of eight days of travel to reach Cracow in Poland.
I have the feeling unfortunately that, for me and my family, this voyage is one without return, because if we don’t succumb to the hunger and the exhaustion to which we will be exposed we will not be able to resist the terrible cold, being scarcely dressed and shoed as we are. Our last hope is in God who, unfortunately, up to now has not helped us, but to whom nonetheless we continue to pray.
The sufferings of prison were a paradise compared to what we are facing…. Here we don’t even have a name, but only a number, like animals.
The train goes not very fast but inexorably toward the border. I must now end this brief letter that has little chance of reaching you.
The letter never did reach Lucia. Abramo, his mother, and his sister Rosa would all die at Auschwitz.[30]
As the roundup of Italy’s Jews intensified, it was impossible for the pope to ignore. In mid-December, the archbishop of Ferrara became the latest to implore the Vatican’s intervention in favor of the victims, “especially those members of mixed families.” A note in the Secretariat of State files reveals the reply sent to the archbishop: “one can respond saying that the Holy See, as it had done in the past, tries in the current circumstances as well to aid the non-Aryans to the extent it can, particularly those in mixed families.” It was unlikely that they would achieve any result, “but, if nothing else, one will always be able to say that the Holy See has done everything possible to help these unfortunates.” The note added, “One might also ask Mons. Nuncio to say a word or arrange to have a word said, confidentially, with Marshal Graziani[*] or with Buffarini asking that mercy be used especially toward the mixed families.”[31]
The dramatic new order to arrest all of Italy’s Jews, confiscate their property, and send them to concentration camps made the pope’s continuing silence ever more embarrassing. Believing some kind of Vatican action was called for, Father Tacchi Venturi decided to take the initiative and sent the pope a lengthy appeal. He did not go so far as to call for a public papal protest, but he urged that a Vatican brief be presented to the German ambassador calling on his government to end its homicidal campaign against Italy’s Jews. In mid-December 1943 the Jesuit prepared a draft of the brief.
While the appeal was to be made on behalf of Italy’s Jews, it did not stray from the church’s longtime teachings: Jews should be kept separate from Christians and prevented from acquiring positions of social influence. However, it was not permissible to physically harm them. In pleading to have the deportations and murders stopped, Tacchi Venturi argued that Mussolini’s racial laws, instituted five years earlier, had successfully kept the Jews in their proper place, and as a result there was no need for these new measures. Jews did not present the grounds for serious government concern in Italy that they did elsewhere. Nor had they engendered the same hostility from the “Aryan” population that they did in other countries. This was partly, he argued, because there were so few Jews in Italy and partly because so many of them had married Christians. The new laws confining Italy’s Jews to concentration camps offended the “good sense of the Italian people,” who believed that “the racial laws enacted by the Fascist Government against the Jews five years ago are sufficient to contain the tiny Jewish minority within the proper boundaries.”
“For these reasons,” wrote the pope’s Jesuit envoy, “one trusts that the German Government will want to desist from the deportation of the Jews, whether those done en masse, as happened last October, or those done individually.” He returned again to his earlier argument: “The above-mentioned racial laws of 1938, rigorously observed, already took care of the indisputable difficulties caused by Judaism when it comes to dominate or to enjoy much reputation in a nation. But as this is not the case in Italy at the moment, one does not understand why…there was a need to return to a question that Mussolini’s government considered already taken care of.”
Tacchi Venturi suggested the pope might conclude the message to the German government with a threat to speak out, proposing the following wording: “If the harsh measures are renewed against the small Jewish minority, which includes a notable number of members of the Catholic religion”—that is, Jews who had converted to Catholicism—“how will the Church remain silent and not express great sorrow for the fate of men and women not guilty of any crime…without failing in its divine mission, its compassion, and all of its maternal care?”[32]
On December 19, Cardinal Maglione sent Tacchi Venturi’s text to Monsignor Angelo Dell’Acqua to get his opinion. Whether the Jesuit’s plea to the pope had first been read by the pontiff and it was the pope himself who asked to have it sent to Dell’Acqua, or whether Maglione thought it best to have the opinion of the office’s resident expert on Jewish questions before showing it to the pope remains unknown. Dell’Acqua would later become cardinal vicar of Rome, but at the time he was a forty-year-old staff member of the Secretariat of State. He had earned the pope’s confidence in questions regarding Jews.
A month earlier, Dell’Acqua had been called upon to advise the pope on how to respond to a plea from the bishop of Trieste in the wake of the German occupation of that city and the beginning of its roundup of the city’s sizable Jewish population, one of Italy’s largest, numbering six thousand at the start of the war. “I do not share the thought of Monsignor bishop of Trieste that the current situation in Venezia Giulia [the region in which Trieste is located] favors such an official intervention by the Holy See in favor of the Jews…. An official intervention by the Holy See might confirm the Nazi leaders in the false idea, that is, that the Holy See is in agreement with international Jewry, which preaches the necessity of the destruction, or virtual distruction of the German people.”[33]
Dell’Acqua sent back a lengthy critique of Father Tacchi Venturi’s proposed plea on behalf of Italy’s Jews two days after receiving it. He advised against the protest, not least because, in his view, the Jesuit’s text was overly sympathetic to Jews: “The persecution of the Jews that the Holy See deplores is one thing, especially when it is conducted with certain methods, but quite another thing is to distrust the Jews’ influence, because this can certainly be opportune.” Indeed, the Vatican-overseen Jesuit journal, La Civiltà Cattolica, had been repeatedly warning of the need for governments to introduce laws to restrict the rights of the Jews in order to protect Christian society from their depredations. How could the Vatican justify taking such a great interest in the Jews, asked Dell’Acqua, when it had not complained about the violence Germany had directed against “Aryan people who have professed the Catholic religion from birth”?
