The Pope at War, page 49
Meanwhile another desperate effort to enlist the pope’s help to avoid the fate that now threatened the Fascist and Nazi leaders was under way within Vatican City itself. Several weeks earlier, while the pope was confined to bed with the flu, the German ambassador had gone to see Monsignor Tardini. Weizsäcker arrived with a stack of encrypted messages from Berlin. They were proposals, he explained, for the pope to use his influence with the Americans and British to broker a truce. The Germans had only one card left to play: Weizsäcker argued that Russia’s goal was to turn all of continental Europe Communist. The only way to prevent such a calamity was for the three great powers—the United States, Britain, and Germany—to join together to defeat it. Nazism, added the ambassador, had been misunderstood. It was basically only another form of capitalism. Aware that the Nazis’ ongoing extermination of Europe’s Jews was not a great selling point for his argument, he suggested that some kind of arrangement could be made to relocate Jews outside of Europe. He made no mention of the fact that his government had already put over half of all of Europe’s Jews to death. When Tardini greeted the ambassador’s proposal with unconcealed skepticism, Weizsäcker asked whether he thought the Allies might take a different attitude if Hitler were no longer in the picture.
Despite Tardini’s lack of enthusiasm for the proposal and his incredulity at the ambassador’s characterization of Nazism, the German ambassador returned five days later to renew his plea. The democracies alone could not stop the Communist tidal wave from washing across Europe, and should Germany lose the war, there was no doubt that all of Europe would soon turn red. Without specifying to whom he was referring, Weizsäcker said that the “people in Berlin” were calling on the Allies to halt their land and air campaign against Germany. This would allow the Germans to concentrate their forces on the eastern front and defeat the Russians. They would then negotiate a peace of “conciliation” with the Allies.
Tardini was unmoved. Were the Vatican to do what Weizsäcker was asking and serve as the conduit for such a proposal to the western Allies, he replied, it would immediately expose the Holy See to the charge it was trying to save Nazism just as it was being defeated on the battlefield. The pope would be criticized for promoting a compromise peace in the face of the Allies’ repeated exclusion of that possibility. Such a proposal might also lead the Allies to suspect that the Vatican was enabling the Germans to focus their military efforts on defeating the Russians before then turning their full force against their western enemies. To these objections, Weizsäcker replied weakly that the British and Americans might reach their agreement with “other German leaders and not with Nazism.” But, thought Tardini, the ambassador was exceedingly vague about what exactly this might mean.
Tardini brought the pope his notes of the encounter. A few days later, having recovered from his illness, the pontiff decided to meet with Weizsäcker to discuss his proposal. Proceeding cautiously, as he always did, he thought it best to first have a word with Myron Taylor. In an effort to end the war without further bloodshed, he asked the president’s envoy, might the Allies be willing to enter discussions with the Germans either directly or through a third party, perhaps—although he did not say this—through the Vatican itself? Taylor could not have been more emphatic: there could be no such talks. Only Germany’s unconditional surrender would end the war.[22]
Adolf Hitler, Berlin, March 20, 1945
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In Berlin, the end was nearing for Hitler and the men around him. But his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, still clung to the slender hope that the Vatican might play a role to save them. “The Catholic press in England, led by the Catholic Herald,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on March 30, “continues to attack bolshevism sharply. Its language could not be bettered by the German press. I assume that this violent attack is being made on instructions from the Vatican.” His hopes, such as they were, would soon be extinguished. On April 13 Soviet troops entered Vienna as they closed in on the heart of the Third Reich. A month after voicing his hopes in the Vatican, Goebbels and his wife, holed up in Hitler’s Berlin bunker, prepared for the end. After directing a medical staff member to give morphine injections to their six children, aged four to twelve, they had Hitler’s doctor crush a vial of poison and put it into each of their children’s mouths. Goebbels and his wife, Magda, then swallowed the poison themselves.[23]
It was while Hitler and his associates were hunkering down in their Berlin bunker that the pope learned of the fate that had befallen King Victor Emmanuel’s daughter, Princess Mafalda. She had returned to Rome from the funeral of her brother-in-law, King Boris of Bulgaria, in September 1943. Her parents were gone, having abandoned the city two weeks earlier, in the hours after the armistice was announced. After visiting her three youngest children, whom Monsignor Montini was sheltering in his Vatican apartment, she had received word that her husband was planning to reach her by telephone at the German embassy. It was a cruel ruse, as, on Hitler’s orders, Mafalda was seized on her arrival at the embassy and forced onto a plane bound for Berlin.
Shortly after Rome was liberated, several months after her disappearance, the Vatican made its first attempt to learn of her fate, perhaps prompted by a request from the newly returned royal family. A cyphered telegram in mid-August 1944, bearing the signature of Cardinal Maglione, went to the Vatican nuncio in Berlin: “I will be grateful if Your Most Reverend Excellency can inform me where and how Her Royal Highness Princess Mafalda is. According to the latest information she is at Kassel.” In fact, Mafalda had never been allowed to return to her husband’s home in Kassel but had been sent shortly after her arrival in Berlin in September 1943 to the Buchenwald concentration camp three hundred kilometers to the southwest. Monsignor Orsenigo, the nuncio in Berlin, could provide the Vatican no news of her.[24]
In March 1945 Monsignor Montini, who had briefly sheltered Mafalda’s children in his Vatican apartment two years earlier, sent a new ciphered telegram to Orsenigo in Berlin: “Fervent prayers have been directed to the Holy Father that he interest himself in the fate of Princess Mafalda of Savoy, married to Prince Philipp von Hessen.” Montini asked that the nuncio see what steps could be taken to ensure her safety. The telegram, however, came much too late. Nor, perhaps unsurprisingly given the situation in Berlin in these last weeks of the war, did it ever reach the nuncio.[25]
A month later Mafalda’s brother, Umberto, urgently contacted Monsignor Montini. Umberto had been made regent of the realm following Rome’s liberation when his father reluctantly transferred most of his powers as king to him. What prompted Umberto’s new appeal to the Vatican was a newspaper story out of Paris reporting that Mafalda was dead, having died the previous year at Buchenwald. Monsignor Montini quickly cabled the nuncio in Paris, Angelo Roncalli, to see if he could verify the report. Roncalli was able to locate two priests who had recently arrived in Paris from Buchenwald. The future pope John XXIII then cabled news of what he had learned: the princess had been injured during an Allied bombing of the Buchenwald concentration camp the previous summer and had died a few days later. Roncalli added: “corpse preserved and recognizable.” The gruesome details of her death, following a botched operation to amputate her badly burned left arm, would only come later.[26]
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The war in Italy ended in late April, an event that President Roosevelt did not live to see. Within days of the president’s death on April 12, 1945, Allied troops broke through the Germans’ last line of defense in Italy in the mountains between Florence and Bologna and rushed northward. With the Allied army advancing rapidly and the Germans retreating, popular revolts broke out in cities throughout the north. At eight a.m. on April 25, an underground radio station broadcast a call from the leadership of the Committee for National Liberation in Northern Italy for armed insurrection in all lands still occupied by the “Nazi-Fascists.” In Milan, amid a general strike, partisans began taking over strategic points as German troops began their retreat. Desperate carloads of Fascists sped through the streets shooting wildly at their enemies. That same day, in an attempt to avoid a final bloodbath, Cardinal Schuster hosted a meeting bringing Mussolini and his war minister Rodolfo Graziani together with the Resistance leaders. A pallid, physically shrunken Duce asked for guarantees for the safety of himself and his Fascist compatriots, but it was too late, much too late for that.[27]
Benito Mussolini, 1945
Fleeing northward, the Duce made his way to Como, on the southern edge of the lake of the same name. There Clara insisted on joining him. While in Milan, Mussolini had arranged for a plane to take her parents and sister to safety in Spain, but Franco, fearful of the Allies’ reaction, was not willing to take in Mussolini himself. The man who had long basked in the cheers and adulation of millions now felt abandoned. The last humiliation was at the archbishop’s, where he had been told that the German military command had already entered into negotiations with the Resistance leadership to arrange for their evacuation from Milan, something they had not bothered to tell him.
Along Lake Como, a retreating German convoy agreed to take the Duce and Clara as it headed north to the border, but before it got far, a small group of lightly armed partisans blocked its way.[28] Eager to move on, the German officer in charge agreed to let the partisans search for any Italians hidden among them in exchange for a promise to allow the convoy to proceed. Despite the German uniform he wore and the sunglasses partially covering his well-known face, the Duce was recognized and seized. Clara insisted on being taken with him.
Shocked to find himself with such an illustrious prisoner, the local partisan chief sent word to Milan, asking the Resistance leaders what he should do. After debating whether the fallen dictator should be brought back to Milan alive or simply executed where he was, they made their decision and dispatched a low-level partisan chief, “Colonel Valerio”—in his pre-partisan life Walter Audisio, an accountant—to carry it out. On arriving at the farmhouse on Lake Como where Mussolini and Clara were being held on April 28, Audisio apparently told them he had come with orders to let them go. The details of what transpired over the next hour have inspired a booming editorial business, including a number of contradictory descriptions later given by Audisio himself. Put into a car with “Colonel Valerio” and a number of his fellow partisans, Mussolini and Clara were driven to a short stone wall circling a small villa. There at four p.m., the car pulled over, and the couple were told to get out. It was raining, and Clara, weeping, was wearing her fur coat. Mussolini, sensing his end was near, had a vacant expression. “Are you happy that I followed you to the last?” Clara whispered to him. Mussolini, his mind far away, seems not to have heard.
“By order of the general command of the Committee of National Liberation,” the partisan colonel then announced—or at least this is how he subsequently described the events—“I have the task of rendering justice in the name of the Italian people.” As he pointed his weapon at them, Clara rushed at him in an effort to turn it away, but in the end he succeeded in his task. Mussolini and Clara fell, mortally wounded, to the wet ground.
The partisans then piled the two bodies into a truck and headed for Milan. There, in Piazzale Loreto, the cadavers of Mussolini and his lover joined those of other Fascist notables who had been executed in much the same way. The choice of Piazzale Loreto was not casual, for the previous summer, in reprisal for a partisan attack on a German military convoy, the head of the Gestapo in Milan had selected fifteen civilians and had them shot there, leaving their putrefying bodies on display for several days. Now in their delirium following years of war and deprivation, the crowd took its revenge on the bodies of the Fascist leaders, spitting on them, cursing them, kicking them, and shooting bullets into them, before Mussolini and Clara, along with their comrades, were hung by their feet from the scaffolding of a gas station bordering the piazza. A priest had tied a rope around Clara’s skirt, binding her legs at her thighs, before she was hoisted up, protecting her modesty as she hung from the scaffolding. Drops of the Duce’s brain oozed from his damaged head and dripped down on the ground below. Readers of the Vatican newspaper the next day would learn of the dictator’s death only from the article in the lower part of the fourth column of page two. It was titled simply: “Shooting of Fascist Chiefs.”[29]
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The days that followed were a time for celebration but also for revenge. A few days after the Duce was hung by the feet at Piazzale Loreto, Archbishop Schuster wrote the pope to describe the orgy of popular violence enveloping Lombardy. He described it as “a wave of communism, inspiring terror.” People’s tribunals, he told the pope, were ordering many people shot without any real trials: “it is enough to establish the identity of the accused: ‘Are you so-and-so? You are dead.’ ” Among those executed was Father Tullio Calcagno, director of the pro-Fascist Catholic journal Crociata Italica. “He was surprised in a German military barracks,” the cardinal informed the pope. “He had neither priest, nor sacraments [that is, the administration of last rites]. However, he twice made the sign of the Cross and was then shot. God’s justice!” The crowd then attacked the fallen priest, kicking and spitting on his lifeless body. Fortunately, observed the archbishop, a group of young Catholics intervened, removing the priest’s black cassock so that it would not be sullied.[30]
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Mussolini’s former acolyte, partner, and protector outlived him by only two days. The Führer, having taken refuge in a bunker deep below Berlin’s Chancellery as the Red Army closed in, was oddly busy with marriage plans at the time Mussolini was taken out and shot. Shortly after midnight the next day, bowing to his secret lover’s greatest wish, Hitler and Eva Braun were married in the bunker by a local Nazi city councilor. Following the small ceremony, champagne and sandwiches were served. The Führer then dictated his final testament, blaming the war on “international Jewry.” The following day, having learned of Mussolini’s fate, and amid reports that Soviet troops were nearing, Hitler made his final arrangements. Closing the door to his study, he sat on a small sofa alongside his wife. Eva swallowed a prussic acid pill and slumped down. Hitler held a Walther pistol in his right hand, brought it up to his temple, and pulled the trigger.
On discovering the bodies minutes later, Hitler’s valet went to fetch blankets and with the help of three SS guards rolled the two bodies onto them. The four men then carried the newlyweds up the stairs from the bunker and out into the Chancellery’s garden. There, amid punishing Red Army artillery fire, the two corpses were laid side by side. Large quantities of gasoline were poured over them, and then they were set ablaze. When the first Soviet soldiers arrived two days later, all that remained of Hitler and Eva were ashes and teeth.[31]
Pope Pius XII
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The pope’s name day, June 2, came less than a month after Germany’s surrender. Eager to take advantage of the gathering of the cardinals traditionally held that day to honor him, Pius XII did something he had never previously done. He addressed himself directly to the question of National Socialism. He began, defensively, by justifying his signing of the concordat with Germany a few months after Hitler had come to power, an agreement he had helped craft as secretary of state. It was done, he stressed, with the agreement of the German episcopate, and without intending in any way to signal Vatican approval of Nazi doctrine. “In any case,” he said, “one must recognize that the Concordat over the following years procured some advantages, or at least prevented greater harm.” He then devoted much of his speech to chronicling what he described as the Nazi regime’s campaign against the Catholic Church. He highlighted the many Catholic priests, especially in Poland, who were consigned to concentration camps by the Nazis. He did not fail to get in, as well, mention of his 1942 Christmas address, casting himself as following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Pius XI, and his 1937 encyclical denouncing Nazi doctrine.
The speech highlighted the suffering of Catholics and the Catholic Church during the war and represented the Catholics in Germany as the Nazis’ victims. He made not even the briefest mention, indeed no mention at all, of the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews. If any Jews had been in those concentration camps alongside the valorous Catholic priests and lay Catholics, one would not know it from the pope’s speech. Nor did he make any mention of Italy’s part in the Axis cause, much less suggest any Italian responsibility for the disasters that had befallen Europe.[32]
Two days after the pope’s name day speech came the first anniversary of the liberation of Rome. To mark the day, the youth wing of Italian Catholic Action organized celebrations to offer thanks to Pius XII, heralding him as the savior of Rome and the great Defender of Christianity. The campaign to proclaim him a saint would have to await his death, still years away.[33]
The postwar years were a time for forgetting. A new history had to be written for Italy, one in which Italians had not been Fascists, Mussolini had not been a popular hero, Italy was not the partner of Nazi Germany, and the pope had not pursued a modus vivendi with Europe’s murderous dictators. Throughout the country, cities large and small sprouted centers for the study of the Resistance as temples to worship a past that was as heroic as it was misleading. Centers aimed at shedding light on the two decades of the Fascist regime were notable only for their absence.[1]
