The Pope at War, page 46
With the pope’s approval, Tardini summoned the German ambassador, informing him that the Vatican had sent new instructions to Rome’s parish priests. They were to urge their parishioners to remain calm should German troops be leaving the city and Allied forces entering. They wanted to ensure there was no violence. At the same time, Tardini told the ambassador, it was crucial that the Germans do nothing that might provoke the populace. It was especially important for the Germans to exert their moderating influence on the Italian Fascists, “because they are the hardest and most violent.”
Germany would continue to honor its commitment to protect Rome, replied Ambassador Weizsäcker, who met biweekly with General Kesselring, the German military commander in Italy. Tardini, relieved, replied that he personally was confident of the German government’s “good intentions” and “likewise persuaded that Marshal Kesselring’s tactics are aimed at saving Rome.”[31]
The Germans’ “good intentions” were less evident to the Romans as the first two days of June saw a frenetic effort by the German military to round up young men and women to send north for forced labor. A flood of anguished reports came to the Vatican reporting on German raids on Catholic shelters housing people whose homes had been destroyed. A June 1 note from a school attached to one such shelter reported that at one a.m. it had been surrounded by German soldiers, assisted by Italian police. Fortunately, “The boys all succeeded in fleeing thanks to the help of the Italian police. The girls, gathered in a large ground floor room, all escaped through a window.” A priest from another such school reported that at two a.m. that same night it too had been surrounded by armed forces and five young women and four men were seized and placed on a truck. “I omit,” wrote the priest, “describing the heart-rending scenes of the family members, especially of the mothers who saw their young daughters torn from them by force.” In an effort to respond to these pleas for help, the Vatican Secretariat of State contacted Father Pancrazio Pfeiffer. The result is described in a note dated June 4: “Father Pancrazio communicates that the boys and girls that were taken by the Germans in these recent days are being sent to Germany to work. They will be well treated and well paid.”[32]
After months of nervousness about the dangers Rome would face in the interval between the German retreat from the city and the Allies’ arrival, in the end there proved to be neither any interval nor anything for the pope to worry about. The last days of May had seen intense fighting south of the city, as dense olive groves gave cover to Wehrmacht snipers, while German machine guns fired from six-foot-deep trenches, and snarls of barbed wire blocked the way of Allied troops. But the Allies now pushed quickly through the last line of German defenses. Allied bazooka teams demolished German tanks as Allied soldiers raked the German-infested hillside forests with their automatic guns. Engineers widened the roads, which were soon clogged with Allied tanks, artillery pieces, trucks, and jeeps. On June 3, as the Allies approached the Eternal City, Hitler himself ordered Marshal Kesselring to prevent Rome from becoming a combat zone. The Germans would do nothing to damage it as they retreated.[33]
That evening at eleven p.m. the German military authorities directed Weizsäcker to have the Vatican Secretariat of State transmit Germany’s proposals for an evacuation of Rome to the Allies: They called on the Allies to recognize Rome as an open city, with no military forces permitted. In exchange they pledged to engage in no acts of destruction and do nothing to damage the city’s water supply or electricity. The next morning Cardinal Maglione summoned Osborne to transmit the German offer. The British envoy did not hesitate to respond on behalf of his government: the proposal to declare Rome an open city could not be taken seriously.[34]
Beginning the night of June 2, an endless procession of German tanks, trucks, and vehicles of all kinds, heading northward, streamed through the city’s streets. The Germans had requisitioned any conveyance that could be used for this purpose, from private cars to ox-driven carts. For many Romans, the sight they now witnessed was deeply gratifying. After nine months of living in fear of the Germans and their Italian Fascist allies, they looked on as the dispirited, weary German soldiers hustled northward in the face of the advancing Allied army. Monsignor Tardini observed, “The spectacle is depressing because one sees dejected, demoralized, exhausted soldiers…but it is also comforting because one sees the bullies humiliated, the violent ones crushed.” Romans watched in silence, afraid that any sign of celebration would lead the Germans to open fire.[35]
On June 4, as the last of the retreating German soldiers were leaving, Allied troops began entering a city rejoicing at its liberation. There had been no battle in Rome, and what shots were heard were fired in the air in celebration. The next day at seven a.m. the pope appeared at the window of his fourth-floor apartment in the Apostolic Palace to bless the crowd. As he looked out, he was annoyed to see an American tank parked in St. Peter’s Square below. Over the course of the morning, he would phone Tardini three times to get it removed.[36]
Cardinal Maglione summoned the chargé d’affaires of Italy’s Vatican embassy. The cardinal had not been in good health for many months and in recent weeks had frequently been confined to bed. When Babuscio entered the cardinal’s office, he could see he was suffering, a condition he blamed in part on having spent the past winter in Vatican palaces completely lacking in heat. Although unwell, the cardinal thought that now that the Germans had left Rome, the matter he wanted to raise could not be delayed. The pope was worried that, after what had transpired over the past months, the victors might not show the “sentiments of clemency” that they should in dealing with the Germans’ Italian collaborators. He asked Babuscio to convey this request to the royal government.[37]
At six p.m. on June 6, a large crowd again gathered in St. Peter’s Square in what L’Osservatore Romano, hailing the pope as the Defensor Civitatis, would describe as an expression of the Romans’ gratitude to the pope for saving their city. It was a big day for the Allies as well, D-Day, for that morning the massive amphibious landing of Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy had taken place. Over the next days, they would begin their slow and costly battle to escape from their exposed positions and drive the Germans from France.
Cheered on by the crowd that day, the pontiff stepped out onto the loggia perched over the basilica’s massive door and offered thanks to God for having inspired “both of the belligerent parties” to spare the Eternal City. “People credit Pope for saving Rome,” explained Osborne in reporting the event to London, “though he had nothing to do with it.” Had Hitler ordered the Germans to stand and fight, the Romans would not then be in the streets celebrating. But Osborne, in apparent contradiction, added that perhaps Hitler had spared the city in order to stay on Pius XII’s good side, “in the hope of retaining the Pope’s services as an advocate to mitigate the harshness of eventual armistice or peace terms.” A more plausible case for the pope’s role in sparing Rome is that both the Germans and the Allies were eager to cast themselves as defenders of Christianity. In this sense, perhaps the pope, or more precisely, the papacy, had indeed saved Rome.[38]
Early on the bright, sunlit June morning the day before Rome’s liberation, General Mark Clark had set out from Anzio in a convoy composed of two armored cars and six jeeps packed with journalists. It had been almost eleven months since the first Allied troops had landed in Sicily and begun their bloodsoaked march north, months in which early hopes of the liberation of Rome had periodically flared up, only to be extinguished. Along its way through the hills that morning, the convoy stopped to allow the general to pose for photos next to a large blue and white street sign indicating the direction to “Roma.” The festive atmosphere was brusquely interrupted, though, as amid the clicking of the cameras came the sound of sniper bullets. The general and his entourage dropped to the ground and crawled down the hill, taking shelter in a thick-walled house. Only the next day would the last of the snipers be cleared and the road to Rome opened.[1]
In the days that followed, as smiling Allied troops pressed candies into the hands of the throngs of Rome’s children who greeted them and the city rejoiced in its liberation, Allied dignitaries vied for the honor of a private audience with the pope. General Clark was the first of these to make his way to the Apostolic Palace, arriving in his jeep on June 8, 1944, in St. Peter’s Square still wearing his battle dress. In preparation for his meeting with Clark, the pope had notes drafted to guide their discussion. While Tardini likely wrote down the first three of the four points the pope wanted to make, thanking the Allies for sparing Rome from further damage, the pope added his own fourth point by hand: “We have been informed that the Communists are entering into many of the offices of government. That is cause of considerable worry. We feel that very little good can come of it. We hope that some restraint can be exercised over them.”[2]
The next day brought the prime minister of New Zealand, whose troops had taken part in the drive toward Rome. Osborne, who accompanied him, had never seen the pope in such a good mood. The fact that the transition from German to Allied control had come without damage to the city and without any attacks on the church had been a great relief. Indeed, the Vatican had survived the German occupation of Rome relatively unscathed. While the Allies had mounted a propaganda barrage in the previous months claiming German persecution of the Vatican, it was largely just that, propaganda. In mid-June Robert Murphy, America’s chief diplomat with the Allied army in Italy, reported back to Washington that “so far no evidence has been obtained in Rome of oppression and persecution of Roman Catholic Church there.” What damage had been done was the result of Allied bombardment of the city.[3]
Among the Allied luminaries seeking an audience with Pius XII was Charles de Gaulle, head of the Free French forces, who met with the pope in late June. “It is the actions of the Soviets,” recalled the French resistance leader following their conversation, “that fills the Holy Father with anxiety.” The pope “believes that Christianity is destined to suffer very cruel ordeals and that only a close union of the European states inspired by Catholicism—Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Portugal—will be able to curb the danger. I see that this is Pope Pius XII’s big objective.” A few days later, when De Gaulle returned to Allied headquarters in Algiers, he shared his impressions of the pope with Duff Cooper, the British emissary to De Gaulle’s Free French Committee. “General de Gaulle told me last night,” Duff Cooper reported to London, “that he had not been very favourably impressed by his interview with the Pope. It appears that his Holiness is mainly concerned at the present time with the sufferings which he fears may befall the unfortunate people of Germany.”[4]
Although the pope had been relieved by the smooth transition to Allied control of Rome, he remained unhappy that the Allies had rejected his pleas that Rome be declared an open city. As the Allies had rebuffed the German proposal that the city be demilitarized, might it not now be Germany’s turn to subject the city to bombardment? The American secretary of state referred to this fear in an early July letter: “The papal authorities appear unduly apprehensive of danger to Rome in view of the present over-all military situation, especially as to the Allied air supremacy over Italy and other military means at hand. The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that there is little likelihood of serious German air or other attacks upon the city of Rome now or in the foreseeable future.”[5]
Soon after the Allied occupation of Rome, President Roosevelt asked Myron Taylor, his emissary to the pontiff, to return there. Taylor’s first reports back to Roosevelt from the Italian capital, in the form of handwritten letters, told how exhilarated he found the pope, who was now receiving thousands of Allied officers and men at his daily audiences. The pontiff had even held a special audience in the papal throne room for members of the press, shaking hands and speaking personally with each of them.
In the lengthy conversations that Taylor had with Pius XII, the pontiff made clear he thought Germany would ultimately be defeated, but he expressed concern at the loss of life that would be necessary to bring it about. He worried, too, that defeat would lead Germany to turn Communist. The pope asked Taylor if he thought he should make a new plea for peace, to which Roosevelt’s envoy responded with a firm no. The pope’s most recent statement on the subject, in his remarks a few days before the liberation of Rome, Taylor told him, “was interpreted in America…as pro German…. Nothing should be done that would raise false hopes in Germany or elsewhere as it would prolong the conflict” and, he warned, “it would be misunderstood and resented.”[6]
In early July 1944 the pope received William “Wild Bill” Donovan, legendary director of the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence service, for a private audience.[7] Curiously, when meeting with the American spymaster, with whom he shared his worries about Communism and the future of Germany, the pope was under the misimpression that the U.S. president himself was on his way to Rome.[8] He instructed the lone American prelate in the Secretariat of State, Monsignor Walter Carroll, to draft an English-language memo in preparation for the encounter. Although Roosevelt was not in fact coming, the memo offers insight into what the pope and those in the Secretariat of State were thinking in the aftermath of the Allies’ conquest of Rome.
Myron Taylor and Cardinal Maglione with visiting Henry Lewis Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War, Vatican City, July 6, 1944
The pope thought it important that the Americans, and not the British, play the major role in Italy in the months to come. “The Americans,” wrote Carroll, “seem disposed to return to America and leave Europe to the English. It is a return to American isolationism which is extremely dangerous and might well be disastrous for Europe.” Behind the American view that they would soon be able to wash their hands of the Italian situation, he advised, was the idea that Italy should be left to the Italians. This was “based on the fundamental error that Italy is ready for a democratic form of government and that American democracy can be transplanted to Italy.” Such a view, thought the monsignor, showed an ignorance of both Italian history and the Italian character. It was crucial that the American government exert “a quiet but very effective control over the destiny of the country for some time to come.”
The final point that the pope was advised to raise with the American president was the danger that Germany’s defeat would lead to Russian domination of Europe. Preparations had to be made to ensure that this did not happen. Now was the time to press Roosevelt, who would “undoubtedly be a candidate for a fourth term” and was “extremely sensitive to reactions and to the popular opinion in Catholic circles in America…. He will be most anxious therefore, to know the desires of the Holy See and will most certainly make every effort to satisfy those desires. Hence, this is a logical moment to strike hard.”[9]
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For many Allied soldiers, the chance to take part in a papal audience in the frescoed halls of the Vatican was too exciting a prospect to resist, and the pontiff delighted in mingling with them. He was now holding large public audiences every day, for the most part in the Sala Regia outside the Sistine Chapel, where a special platform had been built from which he would offer remarks in English before giving his blessing. As he left these audiences, he often stopped to speak with the men within reach and offer them his ring to kiss. “His gracious manner and smile, and the close individual attention which he bestows on each person to whom he speaks,” reported Osborne, “never fail to make a most favourable impression.”
Yet curiously, the pope was a bit worried by the reception he encountered in his audiences with American soldiers. He told General Clark, at one of his subsequent audiences with the American military leader, “You know, I think your American soldiers do not like me.” Given the large number of GIs who had been clamoring to attend a papal audience, Clark at first thought he was joking, but he was not. When Italians or Germans had attended his audiences, Pius XII explained, they broke out in cheers when he entered the hall, “but when I appear before your American soldiers, they do not utter a sound.” Much to the pope’s relief, Clark explained that in the United States, a more reverential attitude was thought appropriate on such occasions. Applause and shouts would have seemed disrespectful.[10]
While the pope was exhilarated by the crowds drawn to his daily audiences, he remained preoccupied by fears of a Communist takeover in Italy. At his weekly meetings with Taylor, that worry and his related desire to have the Allied armies remain in Italy for a long time were the two primary topics of discussion. When Osborne met with the pope in late July, he found the same concern: “In discussing the Italian situation to-day the Pope said that he hoped that we should maintain unobtrusive control, if not actual occupation of the country for some time. Otherwise he feared chaos would supervene.” Osborne, no friend of the left himself, agreed, but he told Pius XII that the “uncompromising but uninformed champions of democracy in London and Washington would never agree to anything of the sort.” Both the American and the British leaders thought the Italians should decide their own future by holding free elections. “The Pope,” Osborne reported, “observed that this was admirable in theory, but in practice and in present conditions in the country a doubtful benefit to the Italian people.”[11]
Osborne would soon have the unusual opportunity of briefing the British prime minister directly, as Churchill had decided to pay Rome a visit. Hearing of the plans, Francesco Babuscio, once again secure in his status as the official Italian envoy to the Vatican, met with Pius XII on August 17. Italy’s royal government had long pressed the Allies to treat Italy as a co-belligerent rather than as a defeated enemy. Now that Italy’s capital had been freed of the Germans, the distinction was becoming a more pressing issue for the Italians. Offering Italy recognition as an ally rather than as a vanquished Axis power would mean reestablishing the country’s own government’s powers rather than having the Allies continue to exercise that authority. Babuscio asked the pope to impress on Churchill the importance of making this move. He also urged the pope to impress the British prime minister with the urgency of supplying Italy with sufficient food that its people could avoid starvation in the coming winter. Italy, said Babuscio, lacked everything: coal, fuel, medicines. With the collapse of the transportation system, even the crops that were harvested often had no way to get where they were so desperately needed.
