The Pope at War, page 8
“Most certainly,” replied the Duce.[19]
When the British government sent the then fifty-one-year-old Francis D’Arcy Osborne, a career diplomat, to be its envoy to the Vatican in 1937, it did not expect much of him. A Protestant, representing a country lacking formal diplomatic relations with the Vatican, Osborne’s situation did not seem particularly propitious. But the dapper diplomat would become something of a fixture in Rome and, following his ten years representing Britain at the Holy See, would never leave the Eternal City for more than a few weeks at a time. Indeed, he remains there still, his body buried in the city’s Protestant Cemetery.
Osborne came from an aristocratic family and would later inherit the title of Duke of Leeds. Unmarried, tall and slim, with a receding hairline, he tended to a formality typical of his class, a “grand gentilhomme,” as the French ambassador would put it, a bit stiff but charming and sociable. Although he had little money, he had extravagant tastes, was fond of elegant clothes, well-aged wine, and whiskey, as well as fine furniture and silver. When meeting with the pope or Cardinal Maglione, he spoke in French, in which all were fluent. With Maglione’s two deputies, he spoke Italian. A High Church Anglican, he was enamored of the Vatican’s architectural marvels and ornate rites and of the glories of Rome itself.
Osborne reflected the British aristocracy in another way as well, in his tolerance for Italian Fascism and disdain for Communism and Jews, as his early reports from Rome to London reveal. “The methods of the Comintern,[*]” he observed in 1937, “are devised to a large extent by the brilliant imaginativeness, mental agility and disintegrative predilections of the Jew, combined with the semi-asiatic fanaticism of the Russian. The first works on the intellectuals, the second on the mob of under-dogs.” The next year, in a report to the British foreign secretary, he remarked that Lenin had relied largely on “the mental agility, the cynical adaptability and the amoral ingenuity of the Jew.”[1]
On an early July day in 1939, as the crisis over Danzig was heating up, Osborne left his pleasant residence, with its view overlooking the vast Villa Borghese Park, and made his way to the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican. He came with a warning from his government: If the Italians thought the British would stand idly by while the Germans seized Danzig, they were deluding themselves. It would mean war. When Osborne left, Cardinal Maglione summoned the Italian ambassador, asking him to pass the British message on not only to Mussolini, but to the Germans as well.[2]
Neither potential victim of Axis aggression was happy about the pope’s efforts to get involved in negotiating a resolution of their disputes. In late June the American ambassador in Warsaw reported on the dismay felt in the upper echelons of the Polish Catholic Church at what they saw as the pope’s pro-German attitude and what they feared was his willingness to sacrifice Poland in order to protect the Catholic Church in Germany. At the same time, during a visit back to Paris, François Charles-Roux, the French ambassador to the Vatican, complained to the nuncio there about the contrast he saw between the new pope’s attitude toward the Axis powers and that of his predecessor. Since Pius XII’s election, observed the ambassador, the Vatican’s loud complaints about the treatment of the church in Germany had abruptly come to an end.
In addition to informing the pope what the French ambassador had said, the nuncio had further disturbing news. For some time now, he wrote, “one observes a certain change in attitude toward the Holy See in French public opinion, not, unfortunately, excluding some Catholic circles. One had already heard complaints that the Holy Father did not speak out on the occasion of the bombardment of Albania, which took place on Good Friday.” The unhappiness, he reported, had grown as French newspaper accounts of the pope’s abortive peace initiative portrayed it as designed to favor the totalitarian states.[3]
When the French ambassador returned to Rome, the pope summoned him. Charles-Roux had barely sat down when the pope surprised him by saying, “So I hear that you are not happy with me!”
The ambassador found himself at a loss for words.
“Yes, yes, I know it well,” insisted the pontiff.
Charles-Roux decided to be frank. People in France, he said, had the impression the pope was reacting against his predecessor’s approach.
Not at all, said the pope. True, his methods were a bit different, but the French needed to understand that, following Germany’s annexation of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia, forty million Catholics now lived within the Reich. He had to be careful not to do anything that could make their situation worse. “If there was a chance to ease their difficulties,” asked Pius XII, “does the Pope not have the duty of seizing it?”
Admittedly, the pope acknowledged, the results of his efforts had thus far been disappointing. The religious situation in Germany hadn’t changed, although there were some bright spots, as the treatment of the church in the German press had improved. None of this was to say he had any faith in Hitler. That faith had long been undermined by the Führer’s failure to observe the terms of the concordat that the pope himself, then the Vatican secretary of state, had negotiated shortly after Hitler came to power.[4]
It would be folly, replied the French ambassador, for the pope to offer Hitler any further concessions.
To this, the pope offered no objection but instead shifted the subject. Should war erupt, he observed, Germany had a great deal of military might.
So do the French and British, the ambassador replied.
As for Italy, said the pope in concluding the audience, it was his impression that the Italian people did not approve of the government’s pro-German policies, although they had little influence.[5]
If the French ambassador was frustrated by what he saw as the pope’s apparent tilting to the totalitarian states, he, along with his government, would only become more worried when, in mid-July, the pope decided to revoke his predecessor’s condemnation of France’s Action Française. Thirteen years earlier the Vatican had placed the newspaper of the antisemitic, monarchist Catholic movement on the Index of Prohibited Books, the publications that no good Catholic should read. In reporting Pius XII’s decision to Ciano, the Italian ambassador linked it to what he referred to as the new pope’s “strong sympathy, I would say almost a weakness, for the nobility.” The new papacy, he concluded, “is progressively taking on its own distinctive complexion, one that has nothing to do with that of the preceding one.”[6]
* * *
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With the election of Pope Pacelli, one matter Mussolini would no longer have to worry about was the likelihood of papal protest against the Duce’s campaign against Italy’s Jews, who had been driven out of the nation’s schools and universities, and out of their jobs. No such criticism of the racial laws would ever escape the pope’s lips or pen, not in 1939, nor over the following years in which they were in force.
While the pope offered no public sign of displeasure with the anti-Jewish campaign, he continued to lobby on behalf of Catholics who had formerly been Jews or were the children of Jews. “These unfortunates, as Catholics,” the pope’s Jesuit envoy argued, “are children of the Church, with the same rights and duties as any other Catholic.” Should the church not come to their aid, it could “spark the doubt in their souls of being abandoned by the Church: which might make them come to curse the day of their conversion, or worse, to commit apostacy in the hope, albeit illusory, of being effectively helped by the Israelites.”[7]
Mussolini’s top official overseeing the campaign against the Jews was forty-four-year-old Guido Buffarini Guidi, undersecretary of internal affairs. Mussolini kept for himself the position of minister. With the country’s prefects and police reporting to Buffarini, he had enormous power. Portly, ruddy-cheeked, crafty, and ruthless, he was regarded by the German embassy to the Vatican as Italy’s most talented Fascist. Mussolini is reported to have said, “Buffarini is such a liar that one does not dare believe even the least percent of what he says,” yet he relied on him for handling the everyday machinery of government.[8]
Buffarini made the most of his position, running a side business offering fake certificates of Catholic identity to selected Jews for a handsome price, complete with a cottage industry in producing forged parish baptismal records. For a price, too, officials would discover that the children born to Catholic women married to Jewish men were actually the product of their mother’s adulterous affair with a Catholic lover. Such children could enjoy their new status as pure Aryans, that is, pure Catholics.[9]
Guido Buffarini with Heinrich Himmler, Palazzo Venezia, Rome, May 4, 1938
In late August, the papal nuncio to Italy, Monsignor Borgongini, was dispatched to bring Buffarini the pope’s latest complaint about the government’s treatment of baptized Jews. As the nuncio entered the undersecretary’s office, he was momentarily taken aback by the sign he saw on the wall: “Please do not talk to me about Jews.” Indeed, when the nuncio began to raise the subject, Buffarini interrupted him: “But this isn’t the moment because, as you know, as part of its recent effort to promote war, the international Synagogue has stood against Italy.”
“It is just because we are on the brink of war,” replied the nuncio, “that I can assure you that many baptized Jews, who have been excluded from the army, would like to fight for Italy. So I suggest you change the date of October 1, 1938 [after which baptism would not exempt Jews from the racial laws], for example, to December 31, 1939.” The new date would give “the Jew the possibility of redeeming himself by receiving baptism, and then be a soldier in defense of his country. In that way, seeing as he would be risking his life, you will no longer be able to suspect that these people are simply getting baptized for selfish reasons.”
The deputy minister gave no ground but promised that if war were to break out, he might reconsider the proposal.[10]
* * *
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Ciano was relaxing on the beach at Ostia, near Rome, on a warm August afternoon, when an aide arrived with a message. The German foreign minister wanted to meet him the next day in Austria. Ciano rushed back to Rome to alert his father-in-law and prepare for the trip.
On arriving in Salzburg, Ciano was driven the twenty-six kilometers to Ribbentrop’s lavish lakeside summer residence, Schloss Fuschl, a fifteenth-century castle built originally by the prince-archbishop of Salzburg. Dressed in his smart military uniform, Ciano was discomfited to find Germany’s foreign minister wearing casual civilian clothes. His discomfort only grew when Ribbentrop, who greeted him rather icily, told him that he had asked him to come so that he could inform him that Hitler had decided on the “merciless destruction of Poland.” The German foreign minister brushed off Ciano’s protests that this would trigger a larger conflagration. Neither Britain nor France, he said, would in the end risk war.
If Ribbentrop had a new home in the Salzburg area, he was following the example of many of Hitler’s ministers, for during the warmer months if they wanted to see the Führer, this was where they needed to be. Hitler had earlier acquired his mountain retreat nearby, in Obersalzberg, on the German side of the old border with Austria. Over the previous years the original building had been dramatically expanded, the massive complex amid the mountains dubbed the Berghof, a palace fitted for the demanding dictator. The day following his uncomfortable meeting with the German foreign minister, Ciano went there to see Hitler.
The Führer spoke with Ciano while standing in front of a large wall map of Europe. As a great nation, he said, Germany could not continue to abide Poland’s provocations without losing prestige. But, he insisted, the fighting would be limited. While one day it would be necessary to fight the western democracies, that day remained in the future.
Ciano said he hoped the Führer was right but felt less sure the war could be contained and worried that Italy was not ready to throw itself into a Europe-wide conflagration. In the wake of the recent Ethiopian war and then Italy’s support of Franco’s revolt in Spain, his country’s stores of raw materials were completely exhausted. He then listed Italy’s other vulnerabilities should war erupt: its industries were clustered in the north, making them easy targets for air strikes; its African colonies were only lightly defended; and a million Italians were working in France. Ciano even pleaded that Mussolini had put great stock in hosting a world’s fair in Rome in 1942 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his regime, and ambitious construction for the event was already under way.
None of this impressed Hitler. If he turned out to be wrong, said the Führer, and the Polish invasion triggered a larger war, so be it. It was just as well that it be fought while the Duce and he were still young.[11]
Skip Notes
* The Third Communist International.
In August 1939, as he was finalizing plans for invading Poland, Hitler was also engaged in negotiations with Pius XII so secret that not even the German ambassador to the Holy See knew about them. The existence of these talks, initiated shortly after Pacelli became pope, have only now come to light with the opening of the Pius XII archives at the Vatican. Both Hitler and the pope thought it in their interest that no one be aware of them, and it was a secret the Vatican was eager to maintain long after Pius XII’s death. In publishing from 1965 to 1981 their massive twelve-volume compilation of the Holy See’s documents on the Second World War, which to date has constituted the official record of Vatican activity during the war, the four Jesuit editors systematically expunged all reference to those secret meetings.[1]
The key player in the negotiations was thirty-six-year-old Prince Philipp von Hessen. Von Hessen proved of special value to the Führer because he was the son-in-law of Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel, having married the king’s daughter, Princess Mafalda, in 1925. It was all part of a pattern of aristocratic marriage, Philipp’s younger brother having married Princess Sophia of Greece, whose own brother Philip was the future Duke of Edinburgh. Indeed, there were few German aristocrats with a more illustrious pedigree than Philipp, whose grandfather was the German emperor Frederick III and whose great-grandmother was Britain’s Queen Victoria. Philipp was a man of medium height, with blond, rapidly balding hair. He kept what hair remained short and combed straight back. His full-page photo in the 1941 almanac of German aristocrats shows him in profile, wearing his dark Nazi uniform, the large swastika patch on his left arm impossible to miss.
The Nazi prince had experience keeping secrets. While courting Mafalda in the early 1920s, he had made sure his clandestine amorous relationship with the English poet Siegfried Sassoon never came to light; nor would his other homosexual liaisons ever become public.[2]
Within five years of their marriage, Mafalda’s husband had joined the SA, the Nazi Party’s storm troopers, and wore its brown-shirted uniform. What Mafalda thought of her husband’s embrace of Hitler remains unclear. Some historians argue she was repulsed by the Nazis, but whether she was or not, she remained loyal to her husband while raising their four children. In the end, she would pay the price as the Führer lashed out at her and her husband following the Italian king’s turn against the Duce in 1943. Princess Mafalda would die a gruesome death a year later in the Buchenwald concentration camp, buried beneath a plain marker reading simply Eine unbekannte Frau, an unknown woman. She was forty-one years old.[3]
But this was still years in the future. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he rewarded von Hessen by appointing him governor of his home province of Hesse-Nassau in Prussia. Although in the first years of his marriage he had lived largely in Italy, von Hessen would now spend most of his time in Germany. Along with other highly visible and deeply conservative aristocrats, he proved valuable to the dictator in lending legitimacy to the Nazi regime, enveloping the Third Reich in the cloak of German tradition. As one of Hitler’s most prominent German biographers put it, between 1938 and 1942, next to Albert Speer, Philipp was “Hitler’s closest friend in terms of a foremost unpolitical relationship.” Few had as easy access to the Führer as the prince, who served not only as Hitler’s private conduit to the Italian government and to Italy’s royal family but as his adviser on the acquisition of Italian art.[4]
To maintain their secrecy, the talks between von Hessen and the pope had to be arranged through unofficial channels. The roundabout route, which would be used repeatedly over the next two years, involved a rather shadowy friend of Mafalda’s brother, Prince Umberto, Italy’s future king. Raffaele Travaglini, a man with valuable Vatican connections, had a secret police file dating back to 1931 that painted him as a schemer and self-promoter. Born in 1900, Travaglini had fought in the First World War and joined the Fascist Party in 1922. After some experience as a journalist, he was appointed in 1927 as Italy’s vice consul in Jerusalem thanks, as he later put it, to his ability “to utilize my modest relations in the Vatican and my modest competence in ecclesiastical matters.” By 1931, back in Italy, he had acquired a position in the bureaucracy of the Fascist afterwork program and began attracting the attention of Mussolini’s police chief as a suspected spy for the Vatican. “Travaglini,” reported a police informant in 1933, “is someone who has traveled a lot and has easy access to and is very well known in Vatican circles…. It is likely that Travaglini is engaged in a double game (if he is indeed one of our agents) with us and with the Vatican.”[5]
Prince Philipp von Hessen and Princess Mafalda, June 8, 1933, Hesse-Nassau, Germany
