The Pope at War, page 42
Dell’Acqua also argued that the Vatican should not, as the proposed statement did, deny there had long existed in Italy an “Aryan environment” that was hostile to the Jews. After all, he wrote, “in the history of Rome there is no lack of measures adopted by the Pontiffs to limit the Jews’ influence.” He also appealed to the pope’s eagerness to do nothing to antagonize the Germans. “In the Note the mistreatment that the Germans are alleged to subject the Jews to is highlighted. It may even be true, but is it the case that one should say it so openly in a Note?”
Dell’Acqua listed twelve objections in all to Tacchi Venturi’s draft before reaching his conclusion. It was inadvisable to send off such a note, even if it was only delivered orally to the German ambassador. It would be better simply to have a more informal word with Weizsäcker, “recommending to him that the already serious situation of the Jews not be worsened.” One might also ask someone to have “a little word with Marshal Graziani so that the Republican Government proceeds prudently.” The monsignor ended his recommendations with a final suggestion, reflecting his irritation at the Jews’ constant appeals for the pope’s help. “It is also necessary to let the Jewish Signori know that they should speak a little less and act with great prudence.”[34]
General Graziani with Hitler and Mussolini, E. Prussia, July 20, 1944
Weighing the memos for and against making such an appeal to the German ambassador, the pope, siding with Dell’Acqua, decided to stay the course. He might have been influenced in this decision by news he had recently received.[35] Mussolini had ordered that “mixed families” be exempted from the order to deport all Jews, and it seemed that other “modifications” of a similar kind were under study. There the matter rested. Over the next several months hundreds more Jews from Rome would be captured and sent north to their deaths, and thousands more from northern Italy. The pope judged it best to say nothing.[36]
Skip Notes
* General Rodolfo Graziani, minister of defense in Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic.
As 1944 dawned, Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, longtime foreign minister and, until recently, ambassador to the pope, sat in a cold prison cell in Verona, charged with treason.
When the king removed the dictator from power on July 25, 1943, Ciano had found himself in an impossible position. Fearing arrest by the new Italian government, several Fascist leaders had fled to Germany, Farinacci among them. But for those like Ciano whom the Germans were blaming for the Duce’s fall, Germany seemed a risky destination. By the end of July, Ciano was under house arrest, the entrance to his home guarded by carabinieri. His wife, Edda, contacted the Vatican requesting refuge for the family, but given the delicate moment, the pope did not want to be seen shielding the person who was among the most reviled men in Italy.
Dino Alfieri, one of the Fascist leaders still free in Rome, had come to visit Ciano at his home confinement. Ciano embraced his old comrade and, speaking of his imprisoned father-in-law, burst into sobs: “He was a great man, a real genius.” Then Edda came into the room. She looked, recalled Alfieri, “pallid, emaciated, her lips pale, her large, luminous eyes sunken and veiled with sadness…. For the first time she appeared to me a simple and poor woman.” Although for years the couple had lived largely separate lives, in the months that followed Edda would become her husband’s tenacious defender.[1]
Spain had been a more appealing destination for Mussolini’s son-in-law, given the role he played in supporting Franco’s successful revolt. The problem was how to get there. In August, desperate for a way out, he made what would prove to be a fatal mistake, using German contacts to arrange an escape for him and his family. Hitler, whose approval was necessary for the plan, had great affection for Edda but none for her husband. Initially he gave approval only for Edda and her children to come to Germany, apparently thinking she would be happy to free herself of the man who had betrayed her father. When told she insisted on having her husband with her, the Führer reluctantly agreed.
Their escape was dramatic. Early on the morning of August 27, Edda dressed her children in a double set of clothes. Leading them out of their home in the fashionable Parioli residential neighborhood in the north of the city, she told them, “Pretend we’re going for a walk.” At a nearby piazza, a black American car with two Germans inside pulled up. Edda and the children climbed in, and they sped off. At the same time, Ciano, wearing large, tinted glasses, stepped out of the door to his building and, before the carabinieri had a chance to react, jumped into a slowly moving car that came by with its back door open. There is some question as to whether the police on duty were bribed by the Germans to allow Ciano to get away. Ciano’s biographer, Eugenio Di Rienzo, recently advanced an alternative theory, speculating that Italian authorities were complicit in Ciano’s escape. He theorized that Italy’s new leaders feared that if the Allies got their hands on him, he would provide detailed evidence of the connivance of the Vatican and the monarchy in the Fascist regime.[2]
The two cars carrying the Ciano family pulled into a Roman courtyard, where a closed Wehrmacht truck waited to take them to Rome’s airport. There a Junkers 52 military plane with engines running awaited them, bound for Munich. Shortly after arriving in Germany, Ciano acquired a fake moustache and glasses along with a passport identifying him as an Argentinian of Italian origin. Edda’s name, according to her new passport, was Margaret Smith, an Englishwoman born in Shanghai.
Mussolini arrived in Germany two weeks after his daughter. Hitler, meeting the Duce for the first time after his rescue, told him, “I don’t doubt that you will agree with me in believing that one of the first acts of the new [Italian] government will have to be death sentences for the traitors of the Grand Council. I judge Count Ciano four times a traitor: traitor to his country, traitor to fascism, traitor to the alliance with Germany, traitor to his family.”[3] It would be best, added the Führer, for the death sentence to be carried out in Italy. The prospect of executing his grandchildren’s father sickened the Duce, but Hitler was unbending.
In Munich on October 19, 1943, ten men of the SS escorted Ciano onto a plane bound for Verona. Members of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic militia met him on his arrival. Informing Ciano he was under arrest, they drove him to a sixteenth-century monastery that had been converted into a prison. There cells had been prepared for each of the men who had voted against Mussolini at the July 24 Grand Council meeting. Subject to a humiliating body search, he was allowed to keep only the small icon of the Madonna he always carried with him and photographs of Edda and his children. He would spend the next weeks awaiting a trial that, he knew, could have only one result.[4]
Edda returned to Italy with her children to plead with her father. She threatened him as well, saying that if the sentence were carried out she would release Ciano’s diary, filled with embarrassing revelations. Despairing at his own powerlessness and perhaps sensing that his own end could not be far off, Mussolini told her the matter was no longer in his control. The die-hard Fascists who now dominated the republican government viewed Ciano as a traitor and wanted his head. Were he to try to intervene on his son-in-law’s behalf, he would appear unforgivably weak both in the eyes of his own Fascist entourage and in those of the Germans on whom he depended. Edda remained nearby, continuing her fight while friends arranged to smuggle her three children across the Swiss border. On the night of December 12, her middle child Raimonda’s tenth birthday, the children made their escape, spending their first night in Switzerland in the residence of the bishop of Lugano.
After being allowed to visit her husband in his jail cell only once and fruitlessly repeating her threats to release his diary, Edda made plans to join her children in Switzerland. The Germans were alarmed. On January 9, 1944, the SS in Verona received a telegram with new instructions: “Watch closely the daughter of Mr. Mayer [the German code name for Mussolini]. She can move and go where she wants, but she is not to put a foot in Switzerland. An eventual attempt by her to leave must be impeded even by force. The diaries of the son-in-law of Mr. Mayer are still to be found. Search for them.” On that same night, despite the efforts of the SS to find her, Edda slipped across the Swiss border.[5]
Edda Mussolini with her children, 1938
On January 10, following a three-day trial conducted by a special court of the Italian Social Republic in a riverside fortress in Verona, Ciano was found guilty of treason. He had conspired, the court ruled, to remove Mussolini from power. Along with four other members of the Grand Council who had voted against Mussolini at that fateful Grand Council session, he was sentenced to death by firing squad. Mussolini learned of the verdict at his residence on Lake Garda. He took the news calmly, at least on the surface, but showed signs of not having slept well over the previous nights. His stomach pains, which had earlier subsided, had now returned.
That evening the prison chaplain came to visit the condemned men, who asked to make Confession and take Communion. He remained there through the night as the men reminisced about their lives and their families. At six a.m., the eldest of the condemned men, Marshal Emilio De Bono, one of the four leaders of the Fascist March on Rome that had brought Mussolini to power in 1922, hearing the chiming of the bell from the nearby convent, stood up. They should all, he proposed, offer a final earthly salute to the Madonna, whom they would next see in Paradise. Led responsively by the priest, they recited the Angelus:
The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,
And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.
Hail Mary, full of grace….[6]
Soon the men were placed in a police van and driven to a nearby fort. The seventy-seven-year-old Marshal De Bono, who had led the initial invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, stepped out of the police van first. Easily identifiable by his trademark white goatee, he wore a dark suit and black hat. He was followed by Ciano, who wore a gray overcoat against the cold. The men were marched into a nearby field where, blindfolded, they were made to sit backward on rickety wooden chairs, their hands tied behind their backs. The makeshift firing squad lined up in two rows. Five bullets struck Ciano in his back, but he did not die right away. Others also writhed on the ground, their chairs tipped over, and so the firing squad was ordered to aim another round into their bleeding bodies. Ciano still somehow managed to murmur, “Oh, help, help!” The squad’s commander walked up to him, revolver in hand, and fired a bullet into his head. “It was like the slaughtering of pigs,” recalled a German diplomat present at the execution.[7]
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On the first day of 1944 the pope learned that Mussolini’s government wanted to replace Francesco Babuscio, responsible for Italy’s embassy to the Holy See. For months, Babuscio had remained in his uncomfortably ambiguous position, for it was unclear which of Italy’s two competing governments he represented. In December, when he succeeded in making his first secret contact with the royal government in the south, he had left the embassy building in Rome and taken up residence in Vatican City. The move did not go over well with the Fascist government, which informed him he was being recalled. To avoid a direct confrontation with the Vatican, he was told to go on “medical” leave.[8]
Execution of Galeazzo Ciano, Verona, January 11, 1944
The pope, not wanting to force the issue of which Italian government Rome’s embassy to the Vatican represented, had a Vatican Secretariat of State staff member, Monsignor Testa, speak with a foreign service officer still at his post in Rome. “I just met again with our friend the Monsignor [Testa],” the ministry official reported. “He informed me that the Holy Father wanted us to be told ‘I pray that they not insist on taking a formal position.’ ”[9]
A few days later, the Fascist government sent the pope its response: “In conformity with the specific instructions given by the Head of the Government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has always taken care after September 8 to avoid any attitude that might bring attention to the question of the relations between the Republican Government and the Vatican.” It was Babuscio who had compromised this delicate balance by abandoning the embassy and moving into Vatican City.
Monsignor Testa suggested that Babuscio be asked to give up his position “for that well-being of the Holy See that he always says he wants to serve. He could…find a pretext to suspend his functions.” If Babuscio presented the decision as his own, suggested the monsignor, “the Holy See would avoid the danger of a clamorous break with the Republican Government, as it would also avoid that of a [formal] recognition of that same Government.” Babuscio, however, refused to step down. In the end, it was Mussolini’s government that backed off, judging it best to leave the current ambiguous situation as it was. Babuscio would spend the next months in his new lodgings in Vatican City.[10]
* * *
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In the wake of Ciano’s execution, Mussolini was feeling ever more miserable. Trying to save the father of his grandchildren would have made him look weak to his Fascist supporters and his German allies, but allowing his daughter’s husband to be executed as a traitor was humiliating as well. Now Edda, his favorite child, the one most like him in so many ways, was refusing to speak to him and had, embarrassingly, fled to Switzerland.
Clara, for whom Edda had long been an enemy, did what she could to revive her lover’s spirits. He needed, she told him, to act like a “real dictator” again.[11] She showered “Ben” with detailed political advice as well, regularly mixing in reproaches for his failure to fully appreciate her. Among the targets of her tirades, both Jews and “plutocrats” featured prominently. As two historians who studied her closely observed, “If she were not a woman, Clara would be the ‘new man’ imagined by fascism to regenerate Italians.” Indeed, Clara kept urging Mussolini to act tougher, to whip Italians into proper Fascist shape, and to assert himself more forcefully with Hitler, who, she assured him, was his great supporter and friend.[12]
An indication of Mussolini’s state of mind at the time, or at least his daughter’s view of it, is found in a U.S. intelligence service memo from Switzerland written after Edda’s arrival there. She is reported to have said that her father “is convinced that everything is over and that nothing more is to be done. He is a prisoner of the Germans and of the neo-Fascists, and the latter have no love for him. His authority is dead. He is without strength, sad, sick, and eaten by bitterness at finding himself abandoned even by his closest friends.”[13]
Some confirmation of this view comes from a letter Mussolini wrote Clara on February 4: “I am a kind of podestà of a large town with highly limited powers. A State without arms is merely a parody. The Pope is infinitely better armed that I am. The Palatine Guard, according to the newspapers, while being the refuge of all the draft-dodging nobility, has its own arms and light artillery. I still have nothing…. Yes, I am the ‘living corpse.’…I am a living, ridiculous corpse. Ridiculous above all.”[14]
Later that month Mussolini again gave vent to the self-pity that would come through in many of his letters to Clara in these months of his puppet government. Ever since that fateful Grand Council meeting the previous July, he wrote, “I am dead…. My authority lies more in tatters by the day. My prestige too. I used to be someone. Even if they had hung me from the Tower of London, I would have been someone. Now I am nothing…. The only sector over which I rule is the mortuary police.” In showering Clara with laments of this kind, the fallen dictator knew he would trigger new attempts to bolster his spirits, as she did that day in a typical effort to waken him from his stupor: “Lift off this gloom that envelops you, get back your energy and your vibrancy, your will. It is not events that ought to dominate you, but you the events.”[15]
Such was the Duce’s desperation that he enlisted a priest, Father Giusto Pancino, to send his daughter a message. Pancino had gotten to know Edda in the weeks she had spent as a nurse with the Italian troops in Albania, where he was then serving as a chaplain. Mussolini sought to win back her affection, worried that in the wake of her husband’s execution she now despised him. To locate Edda and accomplish his mission, the priest would need to get help from the Vatican, and so the priest headed not north but south to Rome.[16]
Succeeding in arranging a meeting with Monsignor Tardini, Father Pancino had a dramatic story to tell. Mussolini wanted to convince Edda he was not responsible for her husband’s death, that it was the Germans’ fault. He said he had tried to have his son-in-law pardoned, but the Germans had delayed word of his decision until too late. While the Duce recalled these events, said Father Pancino, he had begun to cry. The priest also had something he wanted to bring Edda, the little Christian devotional volume, The Imitation of Christ, that her husband, the priest said, had always carried with him. Indeed, Ciano had had it with him at the time of his death. The priest asked Tardini for a letter of introduction to the nuncio in Bern, whose contacts would enable him to find Edda.
