The Pope at War, page 9
Travaglini was not only an avid Fascist but deeply enmeshed in a church social network that reached into the Vatican. On March 9, 1939, only a week after the pope’s election, he wrote to Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri, a member of the Curia in Rome and a former nuncio to Peru and Poland. Lauri’s closeness to the new pope was reflected in Pius XII’s appointment of him later in the year to be chamberlain, in charge of the Vatican in the event of the pope’s death. As he would in all his subsequent correspondence with the cardinal, Travaglini wrote on the stationery of the Order of Malta, the knightly Catholic religious organization. Beginning in June, the stationery identified him as the Order of Malta’s special representative to Germany.
In the first of his many letters, now found in the archive of the Vatican Secretariat of State, Travaglini informed the cardinal he had recently returned from a trip to Germany in a successful effort to protect the Order of Malta’s assets in the Reich. For this result, he said, much thanks was due to leading Nazi officials. While he was in Germany, he recalled, “Many notables of the Reich and the Party assailed me with questions about the new Holy Father.” He told them how fortunate the Third Reich was to have Pacelli as pope.[6]
Within weeks of Pacelli’s election to the papacy, Hitler summoned von Hessen to his office. Given the new pope’s evident eagerness to turn the page on the Vatican’s rocky relations with the National Socialist regime, Hitler, after discussing the matter with Hermann Göring, decided to explore the possibility of a deal. For this, he thought von Hessen, whom he had already been using as his unofficial go-between with Mussolini, best suited to act as his emissary. Von Hessen was told to see if he could arrange a secret meeting with the pope to begin the discussions.
On a Sunday in mid-April, barely a month after Pacelli had become pope, Prince von Hessen summoned Travaglini to the Italian royal residence in Rome. There he explained that Hitler had asked him to initiate negotiations with the new pontiff outside normal diplomatic channels. He was turning to Travaglini because he knew of his high-level contacts in the Vatican. Travaglini, excited, immediately wrote Cardinal Lauri, telling him what Hitler had requested and asking for the cardinal’s help in arranging a meeting between von Hessen and the pope.[7]
The pope agreed and met Hitler’s envoy for the first time on May 11. To help ensure secrecy, the pope took the highly unusual step of holding the meeting in Cardinal Maglione’s apartment. The two men spoke in German, although von Hessen, who had spent years living in Italy, could also speak Italian, and the Vatican archives contain a German-language account of their conversation.[8]
After welcoming von Hessen, the pope took out a copy of the letter he had sent Hitler shortly after his election as pope two months earlier. He read it aloud to the prince, then read Hitler’s reply.
“I have been very considerate, and the Reich Chancellor’s reply was very kind,” said the pope on finishing his reading. “But the situation has since deteriorated.” By way of example, he cited the closing of Catholic schools and seminaries, the publication of books attacking the church and the papacy, and the slashing of state funds benefiting the church in Austria. He told the prince he was eager to reach an agreement with the Reich and was ready to compromise insofar as his conscience allowed, “but for that to happen, there must before anything else be a truce…. I am certain that if peace between church and state is restored, everyone will be pleased. The German people are united in their love for the Fatherland. Once we have peace, the Catholics will be loyal, more than anyone else.”
Von Hessen explained that the National Socialists were divided into pro-church and anti-church factions that were “bitterly opposed to each other.” If the church would agree to confine itself to church matters and stay out of politics, the pro-church faction could prevail.
The church, replied the pope, had no interest in involving itself in partisan politics. “Look at Italy. Here too there is an authoritarian government. And yet the Church can take care of the religious education of the young…. No one here is anti-German. We love Germany. We are pleased if Germany is great and powerful. And we do not oppose any particular form of government, if only the Catholics can live in accordance with their religion.”
Von Hessen asked if the pope was willing to put the church’s commitment to stay out of politics in writing.
The problem, replied Pius XII, evading the question, was to be clear what was meant by “politics.” Religious education of the young, for example, should not be considered political.
Von Hessen then brought up what had been another sore point in the Vatican’s relations with the Reich, the much-publicized “morality” trials of German priests. Hundreds of priests had been charged with sexual crimes, including the abuse of children. “Such errors happen everywhere,” observed the pope. “Some remain secret, others are exploited. Whenever we are told of such cases, we intervene immediately. And severely. If there is mutual goodwill, we can set such matters straight…. As I said, especially within the Church they should not occur and are deplorable, and when they happen the Church acts immediately.”
That the Secretariat of State a year earlier, then under Cardinal Pacelli’s direction, had taken immediate action in dealing with such cases is now clear from the Vatican archives. A folder there, labeled “Vienna: Order to burn all archival material concerning cases of immorality of monks and priests,” describes the decision, in the face of an ongoing police investigation, to order the destruction of all church files documenting cases of Catholic clergy sexual abuse in Austria.[9] To date, historians have largely dismissed the police investigations of clerical sexual abuse of minors during the National Socialist regime as evidence of the regime’s anti-Catholicism. It is indeed likely that the prosecution of the clergy was motivated by attempts to place pressure on the church. However, there were reasons that the church was so vulnerable to this variety of blackmail. The fact that the Vatican has never made its own records dealing with cases of clerical sexual abuse available to scholars has contributed to the failure by historians to pursue how such cases were handled. It was only many years later that, under pressure, the German church hierarchy authorized an investigation of clerical sexual abuse, and it focused exclusively on the decades following the war. That investigation found thousands of such cases, most involving the abuse of boys under age thirteen. The story of the earlier decades remains unknown and largely unexamined.[10]
Throughout their meeting, von Hessen expressed his nervousness that word of it might leak out. “No one knows we’re having this conversation,” the pope assured him. “Even my closest associates don’t know about it.”[11]
Following their encounter, von Hessen returned to Berlin to tell Hitler what the pope had said. Three weeks later, having returned to Rome, employing what would become their standard practice, von Hessen called Travaglini to the royal palace and recounted what Hitler had told him. Travaglini in turn relayed this in a letter to Cardinal Lauri, which the cardinal then sent on to the pope.
“The Fuehrer,” the message began, “was very satisfied with the secret discussion that the Prince had with His Holiness on the evening of May 11, 1939…. Following that meeting various conversations took place in Berlin with the Führer and with Goering and Ribbentrop.” As a result:
The pope’s meeting with von Hessen had changed Ribbentrop’s attitude toward reaching an agreement between the Reich and the Vatican, which he had previously opposed but now supported.
As of May 25, the German press was ordered to end its attacks on the Catholic religion and Catholic priests in Germany and on the contrary, to speak well of them if good occasions should arise to do so.
Hitler called on various regional officials to send reports on the religious situation in their regions, in order to be in a position to negotiate with the Vatican regarding its concerns.
The decision was made to send Prince Philipp to Rome with a message of homage and good wishes for the Holy Father, accompanied by some concrete proposals, to initiate official contacts via the respective diplomatic channels for the hoped-for accord.
Von Hessen’s message went on to stress the importance Hitler placed on having the negotiations remain secret and on ensuring that no sign of them appear in any of the official diplomatic channels linking the Holy See and Germany. Should the negotiations become public, they would raise expectations of a deal that might in the end prove impossible. For Hitler, reaching out to the pope in this private way could be seen as a sign of weakness, and unless an agreement could be had with the pope, there was no benefit to letting word of his initiative get out.[12]
Through the summer of 1939, as Hitler prepared his invasion of Poland, he continued to use the same channel to hold out hope to Pius XII of reaching an agreement that might usher in an era of harmonious relations between the Vatican and the Third Reich. In early July, the pope received a new report via Cardinal Lauri. Prince Philipp, briefly in Italy for a royal wedding, had summoned Travaglini to the royal palace to pass on the Führer’s latest message. At a meeting with Hitler a few days earlier, von Hessen had asked him whether the proposals for the pope were ready. The prince reported that while the Führer was “now predisposed to conciliation,” he “asked to be excused if, given the current extremely delicate international situation, he hadn’t been able up to now to adequately study the current complex problems of the Catholic Church in the Reich in order to be able to bring the Holy Father, with devout and respectful sentiments of great esteem and sympathy, concrete proposals.” But, von Hessen hastened to add, he was convinced that the much-desired religious peace could be achieved, and he hoped soon to return again to Rome to meet with the pope.[13]
Von Hessen’s next secret meeting with Pius XII took place the following month, less than a week before the Führer’s invasion of Poland. It was preceded on August 21 by a long, encouraging report that Travaglini sent the pope, again via Cardinal Lauri. Typical in including a large dollop of self-promotion, Travaglini informed the pontiff that he had himself returned recently from Germany, where he had lobbied the Nazi higher-ups on behalf of the Vatican, telling them that “Pope Pacelli is their Pope.” Von Hessen, he reported, wanted Pius XII to know that not only had Hitler ordered the press to stop its criticisms of the church but also that, in order to create the necessary atmosphere for reaching an accord with the Vatican, he was subtly distancing the Reich from Alfred Rosenberg, Nazism’s foremost anti-church theoretician. “Now the problem,” wrote Travaglini, “is in the exclusive hands of the Führer and von Ribbentrop.”[14]
“A half hour ago,” reported Travaglini three days later, in a letter to Cardinal Lauri, “His Royal Highness Philipp von Hessen arrived from Germany with some extremely urgent messages from the Führer for the Holy Father. I believe we have now arrived at the official start of the Negotiations. The Prince has to leave again by air tomorrow evening or at the latest on Saturday after having seen the Holy Father.” Travaglini then asked for instructions on how to arrange for this new meeting. He noted that the prince would be using the same alias he had employed in his earlier visit: Marquis Turri. In forwarding Travaglini’s letter to the pope, the cardinal emphasized in a cover note that von Hessen had come to Rome “by order of the Führer to once again negotiate the noted affairs secretly and personally with Your Holiness.”[15]
A detailed account of von Hessen’s next encounter with the pope, which took place at Castel Gandolfo, comes in the form of a German-language record found in the newly opened Vatican Secretariat of State archives. Labeled “Secret Audience of His Royal Highness Prince Philipp von Hessen, Saturday, 26 August 1939, Evening, 6 pm,” it describes the dramatic meeting that took place less than a week before Hitler sent German troops into Poland, setting off the Second World War.
The German prince began, as was by now becoming familiar, by telling the pope that Hitler wanted to assure him of his “most fervent desire” to restore peace with the church. The Führer, said von Hessen, did not believe that any “big issues” divided them. Seemingly oblivious to the apparent contradiction, the prince then said that Hitler thought the “biggest issues” needing to be resolved, if an agreement was to be reached, were two: the “racial question,” and what the Führer saw as the clergy’s meddling in Germany’s domestic politics. Hitler thought that the first of these obstacles to an agreement, the “racial question,” could be “avoided,” presumably by continuing the new pope’s policy of remaining silent about the issue. What was needed if an agreement was to be concluded, then, was reaching an understanding on the proper role of Germany’s Catholic clergy.
In responding, the pope first expressed his gratitude to the Führer for his warm greeting. He, too, he said, would like to see the church reach an honorable agreement that would ensure religious peace in the Reich. As for Hitler’s concerns about political activity by the German clergy, there should be no grounds for worry, as the church had no reason to engage in partisan politics.
The Führer, replied the prince, was convinced that their talks could well lead to a new, revised concordat with Germany, one that included Austria, now part of the Reich, as well.
“We will promote the achievement of an honorable religious peace with utmost vigor,” said the pope.
Such a peace, the prince assured the pontiff, “really is the Führer’s deep wish. He hopes to see your Holiness when he comes back to Rome for official purposes.” The Führer had hoped by now to have provided the pope with a series of points to move the negotiations along. Unfortunately, “the Russian affair came up,” distracting Hitler from the matter. Von Hessen did not need to explain his reference, for the German-Russian nonaggression pact, signed three days earlier in Moscow, had already been reported in the press. But the negotiations with the pope, insisted the German prince, remained of the utmost interest to the Führer. That was why Hitler had ordered him to make this trip to Rome, wanting to move the discussions ahead. At the same time, they all realized that everything had to be done in secret if they were to prevent “hostile interference” by those eager to prevent any agreement between Pius XII and the Führer.
It was certainly true, said the pope, that there were those who would not like to see the conclusion of such a peace, but Hitler needed have no concerns about maintaining secrecy on the Vatican’s side. “The secretum,”[*] said the pontiff, “is sacred to us.”
As the meeting neared its end, von Hessen, although himself a Protestant, asked for the pope’s approval of his plan to dedicate a small Madonna in the pope’s honor “in remembrance of this day.” It was an appropriate offering, as Pius XII had a long-held devotion to the Virgin Mary. Expressing his appreciation for the German prince’s gesture, the pope agreed.[16]
Pius XII would next meet with Hitler’s emissary two months later. By then, the world would be much changed, a terrible new war begun.
Skip Notes
* Secret. The pope apparently used the Latin term here.
“We are passing through a very mysterious moment here,” Ambassador William Phillips wrote President Roosevelt on August 18, 1939, “and underlying the deadness of mid-August in Rome there is a feeling of general alarm.” Ever since Ciano’s return from Salzburg, Phillips had been trying unsuccessfully to see him to discover why Hitler had summoned him there so urgently. “The Pope,” added Phillips, “is said to be seriously alarmed.”[1]
Mussolini continued to affect a boastful, if not megalomaniacal, swagger. But doubts from his generals about the military’s preparedness, and reports of Italians’ lack of enthusiasm for a war, were giving him some pause. His mood swings were becoming ever more frequent. Irritated by a London newspaper’s claim that Italy’s military wasn’t ready to fight a war, he vented his fury with his son-in-law. He had been considering remaining neutral, he told Ciano, but now he was inclined to go to war at Germany’s side. “Otherwise,” remarked the Duce, “we would be dishonored for a century.”[2]
The next day Mussolini was relaxing—that is, insofar as he was capable of relaxing—in his Palazzo Venezia hideaway with his lover, Clara Petacci. Adjacent to the room was a small bathroom where, after sex, Mussolini liked to freshen up, splashing his face with his favorite cologne. Still in the early years of their affair, Clara, then twenty-seven years old, was thrilled by her proximity to the man she and many other Italian schoolgirls had grown up idolizing as the heroic incarnation of virility. As she waited for him each afternoon in the Zodiac Room, she whiled away her time stitching new gowns, scribbling in her burgeoning diary, or simply lying on the sofa, daydreaming.[3]
This day, like many, offered Clara something of a political education, as Mussolini pontificated on the world situation, an endless stream combining acute analysis with the rankest vitriol. England, Mussolini told Clara that day, should never have given its guarantees to Poland without first reaching an agreement with Russia. “Now Russia is going to screw them!” Without Russia’s support, explained the Duce, the English would soon realize they had put themselves in an impossible situation. “They’ll begin to say: ‘It’s not worth dying for Danzig…for something that has nothing to do with us.’…Ah! The Germans are lucky. They always find themselves facing morons or cowards.”[4]
The following day Mussolini’s ambassador to Germany, Bernardo Attolico, appeared at Palazzo Venezia, having arrived by train from Berlin bearing urgent news. A career foreign service officer and former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Attolico looked as soft as the Duce was hard. Tall, overweight, and balding, with protruding ears, his sparse gray hair combed back, the ambassador wore round, thick-lensed glasses.
“Duce!” said the breathless Attolico, “in Berlin they’ve decided to wage war, now, within a few days!”
