The message was a plea: “If only the world could be freed from this erroneous and fatal racism which strictly distinguishes between superior, inferior and indigenous races … The present persecution of the Jews denies millions of people on the soil of their own homeland the elementary rights of citizenship, denies them the protection of the law against violence and theft.” It was a frank announcement of racist madness. At least on paper. That was the essence of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical.
While its draft was slowly making its way through various Vatican committees in the autumn of 1938, synagogues were burning in Germany. The Pope wanted to resist this way of dealing with those who pray differently. But his warning went unheeded. Before the encyclical was ready for publication, Pius XI died, and with him died his plan to resist Hitler. “The new Pope must be a saint or a hero,” the French cardinal announced. But the new Pope was neither a saint nor a hero, but a diplomat.
Six months before the outbreak of World War II, cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel. The door was closed behind them and Swiss Guards stood guard. The next day, on 2 March 1939, black smoke rose from the chimney, first twice, and then at 17.25, white smoke. On the balcony of the Apostolic Palace, the eldest Cardinal announced: “We have a Pope. The Venerable Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli has taken the name of Pius XII.”
The new 62-year-old Pope steps hesitantly onto the balcony. He was tall, very pale and with eyes like black charcoal. He raised his hand and the crowd in the square knelt. He blessed it. Then he turned sharply and disappeared inside the palace. When he returned to his apartment, he found a birthday cake. He did not stay long in his rooms, but with his long-time confidant Ludwig Kaas, he went to the niche of St Peter’s Basilica. There, a small door led down into a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a copper door, which Kaas opened with three keys.
They entered the Vatican crypt, where popes and kings lay in niches. The Pope knelt down in front of an empty niche, where the remains of St Peter were supposedly buried, and began to pray. He humbly asked the first Bishop of Rome to help him solve one of the Vatican’s biggest problems. The new Pope did not have the fighting temperament of his predecessor Pius XI. He was a man who loved to build bridges across which negotiating paths led. Soon after the beginning of his pontificate, he explained to his colleagues: “For me, the German question is the most important and I will deal with it first and foremost.”
In 1917, he became nuncio in Munich and very soon adopted the German way of thinking. He was so consistent in this that even in his later years he was called “papa tedesco” – the German Pope. In 1924, after long negotiations, a concordat with Bavaria was signed in Munich with his help, which was seen as a model for the concordats with the other German Länder. After this success, his move to Berlin was almost inevitable, and in 1929 he signed a concordat with Prussia, followed by one with Baden in 1932.
“My German mission is over,” he exclaimed on his triumphant departure from Berlin back to Rome. He was accompanied by bouquets of flowers and enthusiastic cheers from Catholics. He was truly a nuncio tailor-made for the Germans. Even in Rome, he dealt with German affairs on the principle of negotiating a deal and then insisting on strict compliance with what had been agreed.
But his troubles with Germany have only just begun. He called Hitler’s rise to power “more evil than the victory of the socialist left”. But he lost all illusions in June 1934, the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler got rid of his rivals in the Nazi Party, and some of the victims included lay Catholic leaders. Dr Klausener, the president of the Catholic Action, was shot, his deputy was dragged into the woods and shot in the nape of the neck, Dr Gerlich, a Catholic who published an anti-Nazi newspaper, was beaten to death, and Adalbert Probst, the director of the Catholic sports associations, was killed.
In March 1937, at Pacelli’s instigation, the Pope issued the encyclical With Fervent Concern in response to the increasing violations of the Concordat. It was read in 11,500 Catholic churches in Germany. The Nazi regime reacted very sensitively to it. All copies were confiscated, the printing houses that had printed it were expropriated without compensation, and many priests were prosecuted for allegedly breaking the law on foreign exchange or immorality.
Nazis put pressure on the Church
While the new Pope Pacelli prayed in the Vatican crypt, the lights in Building 8 on Prinz Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin burned long into the night. This was once a sculpture school, but the Nazis converted the studios into dungeons. On the top floor, SS chief Heinrich Himmler worked, and in the next room, his expert on Vatican affairs, the former priest Albert Hartl, was trying to write a biography of the new Pope. He collected public and secret information about Pacelli, then sat down at his desk and started typing:
“Pope Pius XII, born on 2 March 1876 in Rome, became nuncio in Munich in 1917, nuncio in Berlin from 1920 to 1929, cardinal in 1929, secretary of state at the Vatican in 1930. Pacelli has always been pro-German, his command of German is excellent, but his defence of the official policy of the Church is often at odds with the principles of National Socialism. Pius XII will never act quickly, but he is a careful observer. What he thinks is hidden inside him and he does not show what he feels.”
The Nazis were particularly annoyed by Pacelli’s public advocacy of the equality of all races. The German spy in the Vatican, Father Joachim Birkner, who worked in the Vatican archives, reported that the Church wanted the German regime to collapse as quickly as possible. Hitler was therefore already thinking of renouncing the Concordat after the election of Pacelli as Pope. Joachim Birkner made special mention of the role of the Bavarian Jesuit in the Vatican and the Pope’s first confidant, Robert Leiber. He spoke to the Pope twice a day and read almost all his letters. Although he held no office in the Vatican, everyone knew that he was the Pope’s expert on German affairs. It was precisely because he had no official position and could hold his tongue that he was ideally suited to deal with secret matters.
Leiber warned the Pope that there were increasing signs that the Nazis were trying to destroy the Church in Germany, perhaps even tearing it away from Rome. Indeed, Nazi ideology has already become a true religion. They have renamed Ash Wednesday as Wotan Day, Ascension Day as the celebration of Thor’s hammer, they no longer decorate the Christmas tree with a star but with a swastika, and they claim that Hitler is just as important as Christ. Church organisations were banned, church schools and seminaries were closed and the church press was censored.
When Hitler invaded Austria the year before, Cardinal Initzer of Vienna announced that the Church was supporting the Nazis. Pacelli was still Secretary of State at the time, so he called the Cardinal in for an interview. He now decided, as Pope Pius XII, to write a letter to Hitler warning him of the violation of the Concordat. After consulting his colleagues on its content, he added: “The Church cannot renounce its principles. But we must certainly see whether we can peacefully agree and resolve this problem. If there is no agreement, we must resist.”
But he knew there was one more thing he had to solve. “It is very important to ensure a smooth courier service between the Vatican and the German dioceses, because that is the only way to get information in time. The courier, who does not officially belong to the Holy See, but who must be a trustworthy person, must leave Rome once a week, preferably on a Saturday, and arrive in Berlin on Monday and return to Rome the following Monday.”
Pius XII knew that the biggest problem was the internal courier service between the dioceses in Germany itself. The German security services and the spying of the SS had to be avoided.
The Vatican does not officially have its own intelligence service. It relied on reports from its priests, who acted as a kind of intelligence network. However hard the German Abwehr intelligence service tried, it had to admit that it was extremely difficult to establish links between its members. Only the Pope’s inner circle received reports from his confidants.
Hartl hoped that sex would open the door to this sacred circle. Archbishop Grober of Freiburg had a half-Jewish mistress. The President of the Caritas, Gartmeier, was caught embezzling 120,000 marks. Some monks were caught in a secret gay club. That was something, but it was far from enough. Vatican agents passed most of the information on to intermediaries, who in various ways passed it on to the Vatican, and it was here that most of the agents fell into the trap. But all this did not work for the Abwehr, so Hartl assumed that the Vatican had another undiscovered system of couriers.
All this at a time of Europe’s biggest political crisis. The Germans invaded Prague, Poland felt threatened, the Western Allies did nothing. Such a politically uncertain time put a political Pope on Peter’s throne. A long career in the foreign service of the Papal States had made him a skilful diplomat. He visited many countries and spoke many foreign languages. He was frank with strangers and serious with friends. He made friends with Prussian generals, dined with exiled monarchs, stood face to face with armed revolutionaries in Munich, was useful to every Pope but a lackey to none, and so commanded the respect of German diplomats. Pacelli had politics in his blood, so those who thought Pius XII was not of this world were wrong. He did not approve of retreating into the realm of pure spirituality, so he kept a very active eye on everything that was happening in the Vatican and around the world.
On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and Pius XII began to pray. The Vatican made its official announcement very late in the day, when it was already aware that the Germans were burning synagogues and killing both Jews and Poles. It recognised the Polish government in exile, not the Nazi protectorate. But it was not until 20 October that he took an official position on what was happening in Poland, with the encyclical Summi Pontificatus, which the world saw as an attack on Nazi Germany, since it condemned the persecution of the Jews. It was a brave attempt, but it failed. Pius XII did not use the word Jew in public until 1945.
Over time, his silence has brought Jewish-Catholic relations and his credibility into question. The meaning and cause of this silence remains an enigma in the biography of the Pope and the history of the modern Church. If we judge Pius XII only by what he did not say, we can only condemn him. He should have spoken up in the face of the scenes of piles of rotting corpses, of suffering children, of innocent people being shot and gassed. That was his duty, not only as Pope, but as a human being. But the Pope was left speechless in the face of humanity’s greatest moral crisis. But the Vatican has always avoided words that it believed would have no effect. Documents that have come to light in recent decades reveal the other side of the ascetic Pope’s coin.
On August 22nd 1939, Hitler met his closest collaborators in Berchtensgaden. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr military intelligence, was present and later took notes of the meeting. The details of the attack on Poland were discussed, and then Hitler raised another problem. “The Poles must be dealt with ruthlessly harshly after the campaign is over. I do not want to burden the army with liquidations necessary for political reasons, but the SS will have to take over the destruction of the Polish upper class, especially the Polish clergy.”
Canaris, on his return to Berlin, entrusted Hitler’s request to his deputy Hans Oster, who informed the American diplomat in Berlin, who said he did not want to interfere. The British embassy also just shrugged its shoulders. Canaris knew Pius XII from their Berlin days, when they used to ride around the city together. But how to inform him of the fate awaiting the Polish priests. He needed a reliable intermediary to take his message to Rome.
Vatican Spy
Josef Müller was a lawyer, a Bavarian beer fan, so ruggedly rustic that he was called Joey Ox, and a recipient of the Iron Cross of the First World War. He was regarded as an adventurer by some and as a good man by those who knew him better. He served on the boards of a number of companies in his lifetime, so that he became familiar with banking, brewing, book printing, publishing and the tobacco industry, and also had a law firm. When Hitler took power, he saw some of his best friends disappear and end up in Dachau.
He quickly attracted the attention of the secret police and the SS, and his name was put on the list of Catholics who opposed the regime. He was arrested but soon released. But Müller also had friends among his enemies. He and Hans Rattenhuber, the head of Hitler’s personal guard, spent many an hour over many a mug of beer. The result was one of the most unusual friendships of the Second World War, with Rattenhuber regularly informing Müller of SS secrets.
Munich’s Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber did not himself ask Muller to spy on the Vatican. Monsignor Johannes Neuhausler did it instead. He asked him if he could help to ensure that the insolvent Leo Haus would remain in the hands of the Church. This made Müller a “trusted colleague”. In his law firm, lists of violations of the Concordat were drawn up and his task was to check their veracity. This required an extensive network of agents, made up of acquaintances from his student days and his army days, and colleagues who had access to Nazi officials and anyone knowledgeable, whether they worked in journalism, the banks or even in the SS itself.
One of the best informants was the “Nazi” nun Pia Bauer, who ran a charity for Nazi first-prisoners in 1923, and another was the film critic and children’s story writer Franziska Schneidhuber, about whom the SS had a dossier which read “Jewish, divorced, probably a lesbian, but devoted to her faith”. For many years she successfully conveyed important news to the Vatican, until she was arrested in 1941 as a Jew and executed in Theresienstadt.
But the best courier was Müller. He often flew from Germany to Italy in a small sports plane, landed in Merano and handed over a bag full of documents to a reliable person who then took them to Pacelli. The SS was suspicious, but did not know that he was spying for the Vatican. He was targeted because many of his clients were Jews, as he had arranged for them to emigrate from Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938.
One morning, the phone rang at Müller’s home and an unknown voice told him that Admiral Canaris wanted to speak to him. Could you come to Berlin right away? Müller was frightened. Just what did they want from him? He kissed his wife and child and went to Berlin. Hans Oster, Canaris’s deputy, met him at the Abwehr headquarters and said to him, “Mr Müller, we know much more about you than you know about us.” And he began to give him details of his work.
After a long introduction, he continued: ‘I will be completely honest with you. There are some who are not happy with the present government and would like to reach out to the other side through the Pope. You are the right person to convince the Pope of our good intentions.”
Müller couldn’t believe his ears. Dissatisfied with the government? The government was Hitler’s and the other side could be none other than the Allies. The conversation lasted for three whole hours and in the end Müller agreed to go to Rome with this mission. In the vicinity he met Ludwig Kaas, the Pope’s confidant, in a villa and told him what Canaris thought. Kaas remained silent for a long time and promised to inform the Pope. At the very next meeting, he told Müller: “His Holiness thinks that something must be done, but it must in no way jeopardise the position of Catholics in Germany.” This was a rather ambiguous answer, but at least not a refusal, and Müller went back to Germany.
The Abwehr knew it had to provide him with maximum cover for all his trips to Rome. The Germans considered Italy an unreliable ally, so Müller was to be in Italy as an Abwehr spy to formally determine whether Italian generals had secret contacts with the Allies. This information, however, was always the easiest to obtain through the Vatican. In Rome, the Pope and his closest associates were spied on by four different organisations, and letters going in and out of Rome were read by the German censors. The Catholic institutions in Rome were also full of spies working for various countries. Müller was supposed to work independently of all of them. Canaris suggested that they should only make contact with the English through the Vatican. He knew that what he agreed with them would be true. It would be a matter of agreement whether the final result of the talks would be peace or a mere truce.
All this was happening in the late autumn of 1939, when the war was not even in full swing and Canaris had at least roughly seen the end of Germany.
Hitler had to be removed. But how? Kill him, just imprison him, put him on trial or send him to an insane asylum? Physical liquidation was the surest way, and Dr Erich Kordt of the Foreign Office volunteered to do it. As assistant to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, he had access to Hitler’s reception room and knew of Hitler’s habit of always entering it to greet guests. That is when he would drop the bomb. But an event, which the conspirators called “the luck of the devil”, thwarted Kordt’s plan.
On 8 November 1939, Hitler travelled by train to Munich to give a speech in a beer hall on the anniversary of the failed putsch of 1923. When he arrived in the city, the German border police arrested 36-year-old Georg Elser, who was trying to cross the border illegally into Switzerland. He was found with a pair of pliers, part of a lighter, a postcard of the interior of the pub where Hitler was supposed to have spoken, and a badge of the Red Front, a former communist organisation. He was questioned by the police only a few days later about why he wanted to flee to Switzerland.
Elser knew that Hitler spoke in the beer hall every 8 November, so he hid a bomb in a hollow pillar behind the lectern. However, Elser was not a member of the Canaris conspiratorial circle and acted alone. So Hitler entered the beer hall, spoke for only one hour instead of the scheduled three, and left eight minutes before the bomb exploded. The assassination attempt confused the conspirators and Dr Kordt was now no longer able to obtain the necessary explosives for the bomb, as the SS had begun to keep a strict watch on all explosives depots. In Berlin, the Papal Nuncio handed over a letter to the Foreign Office from the Vatican congratulating Hitler that nothing had happened to him. Hitler doubted his sincerity.
The day before the failed assassination, Müller received a message from London via the Vatican: “The Germans must do something as proof of their willingness to change.” This proof was now provided by the hapless Elser, who had no connection with the conspirators at all, and London decided to send two of its informers to the frontier town of Venlo on the German-Dutch border to meet a German officer who would give them the plan to remove Hitler.
The two informants drove to the border with a Dutch driver. The border ramp rose and the car drove through no-man’s land towards the German border. Again, the border ramp rose and the car was immediately surrounded by a squad of SS men. It was a trap. The Dutch driver drew his revolver and opened fire, then tried to run back, but fell dead under a hail of bullets. The two informers raised their hands and became prisoners. Someone obviously knew too much and talked too much. The Vatican and London were disappointed. London in particular began to doubt Germany’s willingness to change.
The Vatican and the Holocaust
Meanwhile, German-Vatican relations deteriorated and were not improved by the visit of the German Foreign Minister to the Vatican on 11 March 1940. The Poles were, after all, the most Catholic nation in Europe, and the Germans were mass incarcerating priests in concentration camps and refusing any intervention by the Vatican. And even these attempts at intervention drew the ire of the Axis representatives. Mussolini went mad and his envoy to the Vatican, Alfieri, experienced something unusual. There was a real quarrel with the Pope, which went so far over the line that the envoy’s wife carefully withdrew from the room.
Pius XII lost his usual restraint and announced in an excited, raised voice that his message was not a political statement, but an expression of sympathy in his misfortune and contained no unfortunate words against Germany. He finished by saying:
“So be it, even if one day I am imprisoned in a concentration camp. One day we will all have to answer to God for our actions. You know very well how terrible things are happening in Poland. The only thing stopping us from protesting against this is the knowledge that we are only adding to the suffering of these unfortunate people.”
Among those affected, this apparent indecision on the part of the Pope has provoked frustration and bitterness, and a feeling that they have been let down by Mother Church.
Meanwhile, the Abwehr (Canaris)-Müller, Vatican-London and vice versa canal continued to operate. Müller’s liaison with the Vatican was Father Leiber. They met on the roof of the Jesuit college or in the darkness of the Roman churches. The Vatican then sent the Pope’s messages to London via the British Ambassador Osborne. Leiber gave Müller the messages only orally, and only in extreme cases did he leave written messages at his hotel, but they were written in such a way that their content was neutral. Nevertheless, Müller burned them after reading them.
But in London, some were still sceptical. “I’ve heard this story about German opposition to Hitler a thousand times,” said an undersecretary in the British Foreign Office. But London sent its proposal to the German generals via the Vatican, and the first condition for even starting talks with the new German government was a ban on the Nazi party and a cessation of hostilities. Austria could remain German, Poland independent, and a plebiscite for the other occupied territories.
There were also a lot of reservations on the German side. “This is treason,” General von Brauchitch bellowed, “you must be arrested.” With a heavy heart, Müller reported to the Vatican that the generals were indecisive. Hitler was not indecisive, however, and on 10 May 1940 he invaded Belgium and the Netherlands, and then invaded and quickly defeated France. This unexpected success further weakened the will of the German generals. To rise up against a leader who had achieved such successes on the battlefield and who was celebrated by the people was, of course, madness, doomed to failure. Then, in June, Italy entered the war on the side of the Axis and the Vatican found itself an island in a hostile sea.
When Pius XII went outside the Vatican, he was greeted in the street by Italian fascists shouting “Death to the Pope!” The Swiss Guards therefore exchanged their medieval helebarde for machine guns and equipped themselves with gas masks, while the Pope’s confidants burned all papers that might indicate Vatican contacts with the Abwehr.
But successes were followed by defeats for the German army. First in front of Moscow, then in Stalingrad and North Africa, and German generals were ready to accept that it was time to get rid of Hitler. The German branches of Catholic orders, such as the Jesuits, Dominicans and Benedictines, were also moved. They did not answer to the local bishops, but to the heads of the orders in Rome, who of course answered to the Pope.
Representatives of these orders met and set up a committee of seven members, headed by Jesuit Rösch. He travelled around Germany, organising a courier service and collecting all the information that the couriers brought to the Jesuit Provincialate in Munich. The Pope did not trust his nuncio in Berlin because he thought him too soft and even suspected him of collaborating with the SS.
He could not rely on the German bishops either, as the dioceses were full of German spies. So the only option was to rely on the Catholic orders. The members of the Committee were given a special dispensation so that they did not have to wear the habit of a religious order or live “otherwise than in accordance with the rules of the Order”. The Committee often used Müller to send information to Rome, although other options were also available.
At this time, the conspiratorial circle of the generals began to take on clearer and clearer shapes. Generals Treschow, Beck, von Moltke, former Ambassador to Rome von Hassell, Colonel Gerstdorff, Hans Oster and former Mayor of Leipzig Goerdeler, who resigned in 1937 because the Nazis had destroyed a monument to the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn, played a prominent role. But it was he, who, in the event of a successful coup, was expected to take one of the highest posts in the new government, who was not entirely trusted by the conspirators, who considered him to be indecisive.
After the successful seizure of power, Müller was to fly immediately to Rome as an empowerer of the new government, present his credentials to the Pope and propose that he recognise the new authority and contact the Allies. But it was with the Allies that things began to get complicated. They expected and demanded the complete surrender of Germany and were not interested in talks that would offer only part of that.
Meanwhile, the rebel generals’ plans to assassinate Hitler failed one by one. On 13 March, Hitler flew to Smolensk and, after consulting with his generals, climbed back into his Focke-Wulf Condor, ill at ease and exhausted. At that time, Fabian Schlabrendorff asked someone in his entourage if he could take two bottles of cognac with him as a present for a general. There was explosives in it, but because of the humidity and the altitude at which the plane was flying, the detonator did not work. Hitler again miraculously escaped.
A few days later, the generals missed another opportunity. Hitler was due to inspect a confiscated collection of Russian weapons in Berlin. Colonel Gersdorff was to present it to him with a bomb in his pocket. But Hitler almost ran over the exhibition and did not stay more than three minutes, and Gersdorff hesitated too long.
Meanwhile, Pius XII had something else to think about. The Vatican did not conceal its relentless persecution of all those who disagreed with the Nazi regime, and not even that the dimensions of this persecution had already reached unprecedented proportions. In mid-March 1942, barely two months after German officials had laid the tracks for the “final solution of the Jewish question” in a villa in the Wannsee district of Berlin, the first news reached the Vatican from reports by the Bishop of Breslau and Budapest that the deportations of the Jews would mean their certain death.
They were also confirmed by the military priest Pirro Scavizzi. In 1942, he accompanied the sick train of the Order of Malta to Poland, and it was then that Archbishop Sapieha of Krakow told him about the fate of the Galician Jews, who were being massacred. Similar reports came from the nunciatures in Budapest and Istanbul. Archbishop Septycky of Ukraine also reported that the Nazi regime was even worse than the Bolshevik regime. On 26 September 1942, the American ambassador to the Vatican told the Nazis that the Warsaw ghetto was being liquidated and that the bodies of the murdered were to be made into fat and the bones into fertiliser.
The Vatican’s only response to all this was a delaying message: ‘There are also reports from other sources of harsh action against non-Aryans, but we cannot verify at this time whether they are true or not.’ Pius XII, of course, could not doubt their truth. Then Pirro Scavizzi personally reported to the Pope: “The Jews are being exterminated by mass killings, and this regardless of whether they have adults, infants or children in front of them.”
The Pope cried like a child during the story and even contemplated excommunicating the Nazis. But the diplomat in him won. “A solemn protest might have brought me the praise of the civilised world, but for the poor Jews it would have meant even worse persecution.”
Germans in Rome
In the Netherlands, on this issue, all the churches have managed to overcome their confessional differences and do what many advised the Pope to do. As the day of the mass deportation of the Jews approached in July, and with their final destination still unknown, they took an unequivocal stand.
The reaction of the occupying authorities was surprising. Reich Commissioner Seyss-Inquart offered to exempt Jews baptised before 1 January 1941 from deportation. Even Catholics and Protestants who had once been of the Jewish faith, or whose ancestors had been, were still seen as Jews by the Nazi race doctrine adherents and were therefore persecuted. The price for this exception was supposedly the silence of the Church. But this tactic did not work. On 26 July, a protest against the deportation of the Jews was read out publicly in all the Catholic and some Protestant churches. The German authorities reacted immediately and deported all the Jews.
When Pius XII heard of this protest, according to the testimony of those present, he turned pale and rushed to the kitchen. He held four pieces of paper in his hand and threw them into the fire. He later explained that they were a protest against the Nazi regime, which he had intended to publish in the Osservatore Romano, but had changed his mind when he heard what fate had befallen the Dutch Jews. Pius XII here confused cause and effect. The deportation of the Dutch Jews was not the result of a protest read out in the churches, but a thing that had been determined long before.
In July 1943, the war knocked on the door of the small Papal States. The Allies landed in Sicily and on 19 July the first bombs, the harbingers of war, fell on Rome. Then something strange happened. Before the signal was given to end the danger, the Vatican gates were opened and the Pope was taken by car to the ruins of the Basilica of San Lorenzo. There he prayed for and comforted the victims of the air strike. His companion Giovanni Montini, later Pope Paul V, handed him a box full of banknotes hastily collected at the Vatican and the Pope began to distribute them among those present.
He was not afraid to protest this way. In numerous letters to the Allies, he protested strongly against the air raids on the Eternal City, which also threatened the Vatican. But the deceptive peace was soon over. On 23 July 1943, Mussolini was deposed by the Grand Fascist Council and the new government immediately began secretly negotiating an armistice with the Allies. Too many people knew about the talks, however, and on 10 September, two days after the Italian capitulation, German troops invaded northern Italy and Rome.
Pius XII was – unforgivably – again surrounded by Germans. German soldiers were virtually standing at the gates of the Vatican. He felt threatened and was therefore even more cautious in his attitude towards the Nazis. As a last resort, he had already prepared a letter of resignation in case he was arrested.
Now the Italian Jews, whose deportation the fascist authorities had managed to delay until then, also had to fear for their lives. The Germans were already preparing in cold blood the arrest of 1,259 Roman Jews. On the night of 16 October 1943, in a swift action, they were driven from their homes and 1007 of them, including 800 women and children, were immediately sent on the journey of death in full view of the Holy Father.
Again, Pius XII did not publicly condemn this act of violence. Nevertheless, behind the walls of the Vatican, there was a flurry of diplomatic activity. The Pope’s envoy threatened the German commander of the city with a public announcement of the Pope’s protest if the arrests were not stopped immediately. The Pope’s protest was also handed over to the German Ambassador von Weizsäcker. “The Curia is particularly saddened that this matter has taken place virtually under the Pope’s windows. The Holy Father’s reaction would have been milder if the Jews had been used for works in Italy.” But these protests were too late, as the trains were already taking the Jews to Auschwitz.
Most Roman Jews escaped the raids and were spared afterwards, and the Church played an important role. Thousands found refuge in monasteries, churches, seminaries and Vatican buildings, even the papal residence of Castel Gandolfo. The Papal Guard increased from 300 men to 4,000 in that year, including 400 Jews who were given much-needed Vatican identity papers. Similar things were happening in other areas of Italy occupied by the Germans.
Almost the same as in Italy was happening in Hungary, where 750,000 Jews were still living at the beginning of 1944. But they too were facing death. With the German troops, the enforcers of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, led by Adolf Eichmann, arrived in Hungary. The Pope’s representative in Budapest, Monsignor Angelo Rotta, bombarded the Hungarian Quisling government with appeals and protests to no avail.
But the Vatican was very well informed about what was happening in the camps. Two Slovak camp inmates miraculously escaped from Auschwitz and reported on the mass murder. Nevertheless, several trains left Hungary for Auschwitz every day, with between 6 000 and 12 000 Jews on board. The Pope appealed directly to the Hungarian government and the deportations of Jews were stopped, at least in some places. This was the first and only direct intervention by the Pope in favour of the Jews.
Adolf Eichmann, the organiser of the “Final Solution”, ignored his intervention and talked about the “old donkey”, sent another 1500 Jews to Auschwitz, and then all deportations were stopped. But for the 437,000 Hungarian Jews, the intervention came too late. The Pope has also always supported the representatives of the Ustasha regime in Croatia. He even received one hundred members of the Ustasha police and its Zagreb chief. In 1943, he also thanked the Pope for the personal letter he had received from Ante Pavelić. Later in the conversation, he said that he was “disappointed that in spite of everything, nobody wants to see the real and real danger to Europe, because nobody has yet launched a crusade against Bolshevism”.
Pius XII was no longer dealing with rebellious German generals during this period, and they were not pushing too hard against Rome either, as they had enough problems of their own. Already at the beginning of the summer of 1943, the SS appeared in the office of Canaris’s deputy, Hans Oster, with a search warrant. He had to open a safe and on his desk were some coded documents on secret operations abroad. Among them was a file entitled Z Grau, which dealt with Müller’s trips to Rome.
Although he escaped arrest, Canaris thought his days were numbered and a voice on the phone told Müller that his time had come and that the warrant for his arrest had already been written. He wondered what they could actually accuse him of. He was accused of helping Jews to escape, taking their money with them. But worse, he was accused of working against the security of the country and of being a crony of the Western allies.
He quickly started clearing his desk and burning any papers that might incriminate him. Then he put the laundry he would need in prison in his suitcase. Meanwhile, the crime commissioner was waiting outside and handcuffed him. He said a quick goodbye to his wife and eight-year-old daughter, told her not to forget to feed the bird, then drove the car away and disappeared around the corner. Fortunately, he was imprisoned in a military prison and not in an SS dungeon. The Vatican, through the Munich Jesuit Rösch, who was now replacing the arrested Müller, asked Canaris to destroy all documents proving the Pope’s involvement with the Allies.
As Müller was being taken in a car to the military prison, a criminal official took pleasure in telling him how the guillotine worked, laughing meaningfully, and upon his admission to the prison said to him, “From now on, you no longer have the right to salute with Heil Hitler.”
During the interrogations, they wanted to know why he travelled so often to the Vatican and which people he had contact with there. Among the documents seized from his apartment was a copy of the plan for Hitler’s bunker at Pullach. The interrogators wanted to know how he had got hold of them.
Müller remained silent. On 3 March 1944, he appeared as a defendant before the Berlin Higher Court, where the battle between the SS and the army was actually taking place. The military judge presumed him innocent, and the SS threatened to arrest him immediately on other charges. Colonel Claus Stauffenberg, wearing a black shield over his eye, was in the courtroom as a representative of the military authorities.
Arrest and convictions
In May 1944, black clouds of smoke could be seen over the hills near Rome. From the heights of the Vatican Gardens, Pius XII could see Allied patrols approaching the city. No one in the Vatican knew whether the Germans would defend Rome or not. Several bombers appeared in the sky and showered bombs on German positions near the city. Again and again, the drumming of cannons and the racket of machine guns could be heard. Late at night on 4 June, the first Allied troops entered the city and the streets filled with citizens. On Sunday, 300,000 Romans filled St Peter’s Square. A large window opened and Pius XII, dressed in white, stepped out onto the balcony of the palace. The crowd shouted, waved their arms and shouted, “Long live the Pope!”
His speech was the shortest of his pontificate. He thanked Saints Peter and Paul for protecting the city, urged the Romans not to think of revenge, and ended with the exclamation, “Sursum corda!” Over the next few days, he received the Allied soldiers in large numbers, hosted a group of soldiers of Jewish origin and blessed them in Hebrew. During the short-lived German occupation of Rome, the SS arrested 1007 Romans and sent them to Auschwitz. Only 17 survived. Pius XII never spoke publicly about these deportations.
But now he no longer had inner peace. He had lost 58 kilograms because he had drastically reduced his meals out of solidarity with others. The Pope, who began his pontificate under the palm branches of peace, watched the devastation of war with sadness in his eyes. “Do we have peace on earth, real peace?” he wondered. And he answered to himself: “No, only the time after the war.”
On 20 July 1944, Müller heard military vehicles driving along the roads and the tramping of soldiers’ boots. The commander of the military prison entered his cell and told him, “Hitler is dead. He has been assassinated.” He was relieved, but in the next few hours he began to worry again, because he had no other conscience. He was waiting to be freed and to fly to Rome as a representative of the new government.
On 21 July, Hitler’s voice came over the radio to the German people: ‘I speak to you today so that you may hear my voice and know that I am not wounded and that I am well, but also to inform you of a crime unparalleled in German history. A small clique of ambitious, irresponsible and at the same time insensitive and stupid officers have hatched a plan to remove me from my post and with it the Wehrmacht General Staff …” The assassination attempt on Hitler by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg failed, Hitler was only slightly wounded and was already plotting revenge.
Soon afterwards, the dungeon where Müller was held began to fill up with imprisoned generals and colonels. Müller also saw Canaris and Oster. The Jesuit Rösch was also arrested. He was transported to Buchenwald shortly afterwards, and then on 4 April 1945, together with 14 other prisoners, he was taken by truck to the Flossenbürg camp in Bavaria, near the Czech border. This was a death camp, and Müller was delighted when the SS escort there was told that the camp was so full that there was no room for any more new arrivals.
The lorry with the prisoners drove on. Two SS officers on motorbikes soon caught up with it. A raw voice called his name. A telegram arrived from Berlin, demanding that Müller stay in Flossenbürg. Müller’s heart stopped for a moment. In the camp, he was locked in a cell and chained to a wall. The cell smelled of urine and sweat. In Flossenbürg, the number of executions had increased so much in recent months that the crematorium was no longer able to cope. Bodies were piled up, poured on petrol and set on fire, so the smell of charred corpses spread everywhere.
In April, the camp laundry was turned into a court to try Canaris and Hans Oster. On 9 April, Canaris, Oster and three other conspirators were taken to the prison yard, where gallows were set up. They were made to undress, then hanged and left to rot slowly. It was not known when Müller was to be executed. His wife had stopped receiving his letters, and when asked what had happened to her husband, she was told that he was dead.
Müller waited under the gallows for two hours before a guard came and took him back to his cell. The next day, around 150 prisoners were loaded onto seven buses and taken, under heavy SS escort, through Austria and over the Brenner Pass into Italy. Nobody knew what they were going to do with them, and Müller was convinced that they would end up being shot. They reached the village of Villabassa, where the SS, seeing that the end of the war was near, quickly dispersed. On 4 May 1945, the advance party of the American army arrived in the village. The American General Gerow told all the liberated prisoners that he could not take them home, but only as far as Naples.
In Casserta, US General Lemnitzer summoned his intelligence officer and pushed into his hands a list of about 150 Germans whom the American predecessor had met in the Italian Alps and brought to Naples. They were supposedly political prisoners and anti-Nazis. “Give them a little shake, especially one Müller, who tells strange stories about the Vatican.”
Müller was interrogated for ten days and finally agreed to work for the US occupation authorities in post-war Germany. In the following years, he worked as a prosecutor in Bavaria, dealing mainly with those Nazi criminals who had not been convicted at the Nuremberg Trials. He could also have had a successful political career if he had not been considered too left-wing by Catholic circles. He was one of the post-war founders of the Bavarian conservative CSU party and its president until 1949.
The Pope, worried during the war about what the Nazis would do to the Church, has now found a new opponent. Although Stalin had once sneeringly said that the Pope had no divisions, Pius XII now used the only means he had. He publicly attacked the godless superpower and in 1949 issued a decree excommunicating the Communists and depriving Italian party members of the right to receive the sacraments. His doctrine of strict anti-communism led him to look with mercy on former Nazi perpetrators.
So the Vatican helped former war criminals evade justice, hiding them and helping them flee to other countries. “It is my Christian duty to help anyone fleeing communism.” Thus, with the help of the Vatican, Eichmann, Mengele and Brunner and many others fled. Otherwise, he did not deviate one millimetre from his theological positions. He prevented theologians from discussing reforms in the Church, however mildly. But this did not make him any less popular, and this popularity has almost taken on cult-like proportions.
Until his old age, he welcomed the faithful from all over the world with iron discipline, despite his poor health. But when he was about to bless the members of the Congress one sunny October day in 1958, his hand was stuck in the air. No one suspected that these were the signs of the eighty-two-year-old’s illness and utter exhaustion. On 9 October, the death knell of the Lateran Chapel rang out, and then all the bells of Rome’s churches began to ring, heralding the death of a Pope and the end of an era.
His testament speaks of his affliction: ‘Have mercy on me Lord, for your mercy is great. I accepted my election as the highest pastor of the Church knowing that I was unworthy and undeserving… During a long pontificate, in difficult and responsible times, I made mistakes and abandoned duties which led me to realise even more clearly that I was unfit and unworthy for the role.”
This was not the account of God’s almighty vicegerent, but evidence of the mindset of someone who doubts his own actions.
