The Pope at War, page 45
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Weizsäcker continued to send Berlin reassuring accounts of the pope’s cooperation. He claimed that Pius XII, consumed with fear that a Communist tide might sweep through Europe, was sympathetic to their cause. As Weizsäcker put it in a message on March 29, 1944, “The pope is working six days a week for Germany, on the seventh he prays for the Allies.”[13]
The pope had been denouncing the Allies’ bombing of Rome, but he knew the Germans were using the city as a major transit point for military operations. Worse, they were now using train lines that ran alongside Vatican City. In early April this prompted Cardinal Maglione to send the German ambassador a note. In the last few days, he complained, thirty-nine train cars containing explosives had stopped along the tracks of St. Peter’s train station. In addition, four train cars containing antiaircraft artillery, guarded by German soldiers, had stopped on the track that linked that station to one inside Vatican City.
In an unusually frank note, Monsignor Tardini confided his discomfort at the position in which the Vatican now found itself. Allied bombs had recently destroyed Rome’s Ostiense train station and in doing so caused the explosion of a trainload of weapons, yet the pope complained only of the destruction of churches and homes and offered no acknowledgment that the Allies were targeting military facilities. “We give the ‘news’ on Vatican Radio,” Tardini wrote, “but only of the killing of civilians, without saying anything of the military objective hit. With this, is Vatican Radio truly remaining ‘impartial’?”[14]
Five hundred kilometers to the north, Mussolini found himself in a quandary of a more domestic kind. Clara, his ever-faithful lover, was now lodged with her family in an estate along Lake Garda, twenty kilometers down the waterfront from Mussolini’s lakeside villa. Rachele, with the help of her son Vittorio, was doing all she could to prevent her husband from seeing his young lover. In this she was helped by the hard-line Fascists who now populated the puppet government, for they viewed the affair as an embarrassing bourgeois scandal. Clara, frustrated but unbowed, kept up her stream of passionate letters, mixing protestations at her poor treatment with attempts to improve Mussolini’s spirits and regular dollops of unsolicited political advice. In mid-April she sent “Ben” an image of her holy protector, Saint Rita. “I kept it in jail,” she wrote him, “which is why it is so ragged because of the continual, insistent, devoted prayers to it, for the tears that fell on it during those long, anguished nights…. Don’t lose it, love…. Keep it always, keep it dear to you as I kept it dear to me, and trust in Her miraculous help, for She is truly the Saint of the impossible.” At the same time, she wrote of the birthday they might have been celebrating that month, reflecting on her one, ill-fated pregnancy: “Mine—ours—would now be a little over two years old, now three perhaps this month, being born in April! What bad and evil fortune! This joy too was denied to me, your child, made by you and me.”[15]
As Mussolini prepared for a meeting with Hitler, his first since the founding of the Italian Social Republic several months earlier, Clara sent him a packet of materials, coupling detailed political advice with a photo of herself. She urged him to assert his “absolute parity” with the Führer. Since the last meeting of the two dictators, the war had turned further against them, as the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht out of much of the Russian land it had earlier occupied and was now in the process of pushing the Germans out of Crimea to the south. The likelihood that the Allies would soon attempt a major landing in France was becoming ever greater.
The meeting took place on April 22, 1944, in the grand ballroom of the Baroque Klessheim Castle just outside Salzburg, near Hitler’s Berghof retreat. Mussolini knew it well, familiar with its eighteenth-century decor, its high mirrors and grand staircases, having had earlier meetings with his German comrade there. Speaking from a text he had prepared in German, Mussolini began by complaining about the poor conditions the six hundred thousand Italian troops faced in the prison camps the Germans had placed them in following the Italian armistice. He then protested the demand that the Italians provide yet more workers for Germany, saying it was unreasonable. It was important, too, he said, that Italians not think that his government was under German control.
Hitler had little patience for the Duce’s arguments. “But what was this Fascism if it just melted like the snow?” asked the Führer. He rejected Mussolini’s requests but did his best to project optimism, predicting that the alliance between the western Allies and the Soviet Union would soon come undone. At the meeting’s end, Hitler decided it wise to conclude with a more inspiring message. Fascist Italy was his closest ally, he told his Italian partner, the regime closest in ideology to his own. The two of them needed to stand together still, for he and the Duce were the two most reviled men in the world. Germany and Italy had to win the war. If they did not, both countries and both peoples would perish.
Following the meetings, the two men posed amiably for the cameras. “This is no time for recriminations,” Mussolini told his son Vittorio the next morning in explaining what had happened. “It appears that the secret weapons are now ready to be deployed. They are supposed to turn the situation around in our favor. I sensed much tension between the Nazi leaders and the generals. When things go wrong, the whole world is the same.”[16]
When the Duce returned to Italy from the meeting, having failed to accomplish the goals Clara had set out for him, she wrote again, bewailing the death she envisioned awaited them, “buried under the wreckage caused by drunken negroes, Jews, plutocrats.” Meanwhile, her mother, upset by signs that Mussolini’s wife was poisoning him against Clara, wrote the Duce a letter of her own, accusing Rachele of “having entered a state of insanity with murderous ideas based on a senile postmenstrual phobia.” Clara’s twenty-one-year-old sister added her own letters of a similarly denunciatory kind to the beleaguered dictator. Nor was the correspondence one-way. In the nineteen months of the Italian Social Republic, Mussolini would write over three hundred letters to Clara.[17]
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As the spring of 1944 wore on, life in Rome was becoming ever grimmer. The German and Fascist police continued to raid homes in search of partigiani, the armed underground resistance fighters engaged in sporadic attacks on German troops and Fascist forces. They looked as well for men to send off to forced labor, shooting at those who tried to flee. A booming black market charged exorbitant prices for basic goods, including potable water, which was in short supply. With electricity and gas intermittent and coal lacking, women and children trudged into the nearby countryside to gather bundles of wood. They could not use their bicycles, as they had been forbidden since an incident in December when a partisan tossed a bomb from one and pedaled away. In January the Germans imposed a five p.m. curfew as collective punishment for another partisan attack in the city.[18]
Waiting in endless lines to get their meager hundred-gram daily portion of bread, the women of Rome were desperate to find enough food to feed their starving children. The city’s walls were covered with the same message, painted in large letters: VOGLIAMO PANE! PANE! PANE! “We want bread!”[19] Worst off were the estimated two to three hundred thousand recent arrivals from outlying areas under bombardment who had flooded into Rome. Having no access to ration cards, they had little access to food.[20] But the situation of the native Romans was little better. In April a series of spontaneous assaults on bread stores, bakeries, and trucks taking food to German troops led to explosive skirmishes with the Fascist and German armed forces. The Roman police files for April were full of accounts of desperate women and their children raiding bakeries and food depositories, sometimes with the connivance of the proprietors. “At 6:30 a.m.,” read one April 25 report, “about fifty women and children in the Tiburtina Terzo neighborhood tried to attack the bakeries of the zone, and, although contained by the Police Forces, succeeded nonetheless in seizing…four hundred kilograms of bread.” A similar police file of a few days later, reporting on the situation in the Porta Pia neighborhood, recounted: “in via Nomentana 433, some hundreds of persons coming from the neighborhoods of the [city’s] periphery assaulted the bakery of Luigi Franzoni, making off with bread, flour, and pasta totaling in all about 800 kilograms. With the arrival of police agents three persons were arrested.”[21]
The Vatican organized a relief service in Rome amid the crisis, trucking in desperately needed food supplies. “Sixteen small Vatican vans carrying provisions are circulating through Rome,” one police report recounted. Each bore the emblem of Vatican City on its sides. The author of the report, an officer of the Fascist government’s police force in Rome, added a suggestion: “Why, in agreement with the German authorities, don’t we see that at least two hundred such vans provide food to the city, with ‘Italian Social Republic’ written on its sides, to contrast with those of ‘Vatican City’?”[22]
These Vatican efforts to bring food to Rome by ship and truck quickly became a source of conflict with the Allies, who made little effort in their air attacks to spare the Vatican’s convoys. Responding to a Vatican request that Allied bombers steer clear of them, a British Air Ministry memo on April 21 explained: “The British and US Governments consider that the responsibility for supplying the population of Rome with food rests with the so-called Fascist Republican Authorities or their German masters…. His Majesty’s Government and the US Government…regret that they are unable to accept the general proposal.”[23]
Informed of the decision, Osborne sent a heated message to London: “It is going to cause an extremely painful impression if I have to tell the Pope that His Majesty’s Government appreciates his desire to save Roman population from starvation but unfortunately ‘for military reasons’ they cannot give their assent to methods proposed.” Rome’s population, Osborne reported, was on the verge of starvation and already dependent on the food the Vatican had succeeded in bringing in. “Unless supplies of flour can reach the city by sea, in Vatican ships or otherwise, famine seems inevitable…. [U]nless we can within immediate future either ourselves provide for essential supply of flour to Rome or enable Vatican to do so we shall be inviting a catastrophe by which the sole beneficiaries will be the Germans.”[24]
Further pleas to the Allies to permit the Vatican food convoys led to a top secret military memo from the head of the Allied air command. Issuing orders to avoid bombing convoys of trucks with Vatican markings, he wrote, “would result inevitably in hampering the efficiency of our action against enemy communications and probably in unnecessary loss of life to aircrews endeavoring to identify Papal vehicles.” The Allies were in the process of besieging Rome by land from the south, by sea from the west, and by air from the north and east. In running regular food convoys to Rome, he wrote, “the Vatican…is surely performing an unneutral act since, in effect, it is working to defeat one of the recognized instruments of siege warfare, the starvation of the populace.” It was an accepted principle of war, he argued, that the occupying military power is responsible for feeding the local population. If the Germans proved unable to do so, “it is surely not for us to help them by action which has for us the doubly deleterious effect of solving their difficulties in Rome and hampering our military actions designed to wrest Rome from their hold.”[25]
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The Germans were meanwhile continuing their roundup of Rome’s Jews. Since the initial SS seizure of more than a thousand of them the previous October 16, many hundreds more were wrested from their hiding places over the next months of German occupation. Roman Jews who survived tell of living in constant fear of having their hiding places revealed by their neighbors. Indeed, most were discovered only as a result of Roman informants who received hefty payments for turning in each Jew.[26]
In other parts of German-occupied Italy, thousands more Jews were seized in these months and deported to Nazi death camps. None were more visible or more vulnerable than the spiritual leaders of Italy’s Jewish communities. Of twenty-one chief rabbis in the country, nine were sent off to their deaths at Auschwitz. In these months, the primary concentration camp to which captured Jews were first shipped was Fossoli, in the town of Carpi, near Modena. In theory under an Italian camp commander, it was in practice run by an SS officer. From Fossoli, the Jews would be periodically placed on trains bound for the death camps in Poland.
Some of the captives never made it that far. Pacifico Di Castro had not been at home in Rome the previous October 16 when the SS seized his wife and seven children and sent them to their deaths at Auschwitz. Discovered later at his hiding place, he was sent to Fossoli. There, falling ill, he failed to perform a work assignment. A prison guard murdered him on the spot. A similar fate met a deaf elderly Jewish man at Fossoli, shot in the back of the head for his failure to respond “present” when his name was read at roll call.
Many of Italy’s Jews sent to Fossoli seemed unaware of the fate that would meet them at the end of their train trips farther north. Such was the case of Tranquillo Sabatelli, his wife Enrica, and two of their four children. In order to avoid detection after escaping from the October 16 roundup in Rome, the family split up. Tranquillo, in hiding with one of his sons, was discovered, and the two were sent to Fossoli. There they discovered that his wife and their other son had previously been found out and sent to the concentration camp. Only their two daughters still remained hidden. On May 16, 1944, Tranquillo succeeded in sending a letter from Fossoli to the elder of the two, shortly before he, his wife, and his two sons were sent off to Auschwitz:
Dear daughter,
It’s papa who writes you from Modena, because I was transferred here from Verona with Carlo and they brought us to the camp at Carpi where with surprise and sorrow I found Mamma and Mimmo…. Now we are all leaving in a convoy for unknown destination, who knows where, but I think far from Italy. We are going to find Uncle Angelino. [His brother, Angelo Sabatelo, was among those seized in Rome on October 16 and sent to Auschwitz, never to return.] I beg you, dear daughter, not to cry and to be strong, take good care of Mara [her young sister]…. We will return, I swear it to you, and I will always be close to mamma, as I am now. Be strong…. After the misfortune, the Lord God has at least wished to have the four of us united together.[27]
In April, the plight of one of the country’s more prominent Jews reached the pope. Mario Segrè was a world-renowned professor of Latin epigraphy. His mother and sister had been deported to Auschwitz and to their deaths in the October 16 roundup, but he, his wife, and one-year-old child had found refuge in Rome’s Swedish Institute of Classical Studies. Informed on by an Italian, they were arrested by two Italian policemen on April 5 and sent to Rome’s Regina Coeli prison to await deportation.
The Brazilian embassy to the Holy See sent the Vatican Secretariat of State a letter informing them of the arrest. Monsignor Montini scribbled his own anguished note in its margin: “Professor Mario Segrè has already been transferred into the hands of the Germans! With his wife and boy!” Their only hope, thought the future pope, was to convince Weizsäcker to intervene, and he soon raised the matter with the German ambassador. We have no record of his reply, but it is easy to imagine that Weizsäcker took no responsibility for what his fellow Germans were doing as they sent thousands of Italy’s Jews to their deaths. Professor Segrè, his wife, Noemi, and Marco, their toddler, were all sent to the Italian concentration camp at Fossoli, then on to Auschwitz where, on May 24, the day of their arrival, they were led in a line of their fellow Jews into the gas chamber.[28]
At the time, Vatican City itself was sheltering 160 refugees, many in the lodgings of the canons of St. Peter’s, others elsewhere in that same building of the Canonica. Since the attempt made in February to have all the refugees evicted, which the pope was finally convinced to retract, the numbers had not grown dramatically. It seems that virtually all had found a way into Vatican City despite Vatican attempts to keep them out. Among them were various aristocrats, high-ranking Italian military officers, judges, and wealthy businessmen, all either wanted for their dissident activities or for escaping service in the Fascist military or government.
A June 2, 1944, Secretariat of State enumeration of the refugees in Vatican City counted among them “around forty…of the Jewish race, about fifteen of whom had been baptized.” Indeed, some of the Jews had been baptized since their arrival. In theory, none of the refugees were supposed to be there. Some had entered in cars bearing diplomatic or Vatican City license plates, some had made their way from St. Peter’s Basilica into the Canonica through the sacristy, the room that stores priestly vestments, and others, as a Secretariat of State report explained, employed “some little stratagem to elude the vigilance of the guards at the Vatican’s entry gates.” The only way any of them could be induced to leave, the report concluded, was by force, as all knew the fate that awaited them outside.[29]
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The Allied conquest of Rome was finally at hand. After having been pinned down for many months by German forces in the mountains south of Rome, and suffering tens of thousands of casualties, the Allied armies finally broke through in late May. On May 25 General Mark Clark, commander of the Fifth U.S. Army, riding in an open jeep, followed by two dozen war correspondents, rode up to the point in the Anzio-Terracina road where his troops had met up with the Allied troops that had been trapped at the Anzio beachhead. For the benefit of the cameras, the gum-chewing soldiers took off their helmets, grinned, and engaged in much backslapping. The time for the final assault on Rome was now at hand.[30]
