To the Pope’s distress, as the Allies advanced from Sicily, they began regular bombing runs on northern Italian cities. Pius often stood at the east wing windows of the Apostolic Palace watching through his binoculars as the planes flew over Rome. On July 19, hundreds of Allied planes bombed Rome’s train yards. Stray bombs hit residential neighborhoods as well as damaging the Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura (Basilica of St. Lawrence outside the Walls). That news was the only time Vatican officials ever saw Pius cry. Cardinal Maglione had never seen him so “deeply saddened.”186 Pius and Monsignor Montini drove to San Lorenzo that afternoon and prayed with the enormous crowds, handed out money, and announced an extraordinary plenary indulgence for all sins for the victims of air raids.187 That evening, the Pope dashed off a furious letter to Roosevelt, expressing horror at “witness[ing] the harrowing scene of death leaping from the skies and stalking pitilessly through unsuspecting homes, striking down women and children.”188
Only a week after the San Lorenzo bombing, King Emmanuel III shocked Italy by arresting Mussolini.189 The previous day the Grand Council of Fascism voted no confidence in Il Duce’s government. Mussolini’s successor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a decorated military officer and tough ex-Viceroy of Italian East Africa, had little zeal for fascism. Badoglio disbanded the Fascist Party two days after assuming power. Within a week he had begun secret armistice talks with the Allies. Badoglio also considered annulling Mussolini’s race laws. He did not, in part, because of mixed signals from the Vatican. The Pope had dispatched Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi to inform the new government that the church did not want to abrogate the law.190 Tacchi Venturi lobbied only for a repeal of the ban on marriages between Jews and Aryans, so that the church could again regain control over the sanctity of all Italian nuptials.
Any debate between the new Italian government and the Vatican over who controlled mixed marriages seemed unimportant when on September 8 Badoglio announced Italy’s unconditional surrender to the Allies. The Nazis took advantage of the resulting civil strife to seize the northern half of the country. German troops marched into Rome September 10. The next day Hitler topped off the high drama with his first radio address in six months. He threatened Italians for the poor way the nation had treated Il Duce.191 The day after Hitler’s talk, a small squad of elite Nazi commandos freed Mussolini from his mountaintop jail in central Italy and brought him to Germany, from where he announced he would soon return to occupied Italy and form a fascist government in exile.192
During two decades the church had become comfortable and familiar with Il Duce and his ministers. Although at times there was considerable friction between the church and Mussolini’s state, the Pope and ranking clerics never felt threatened by the fascists. The Germans, however, were another matter. The Allies stoked the Pope’s anxiety by passing along a succession of rumors that Hitler planned to occupy the Vatican and take the Pope to Germany in shackles.193 On the day the Nazis occupied Rome, German troops were visible from the windows of Vatican City. Pius doubled his personal bodyguard and ordered the gates to Vatican City and the giant doors to St. Peter’s to be locked. The Swiss Guards replaced their ornamental pikes with firearms.194 The Pope’s personal papers were buried under a slab of marble flooring in the palace.195 The Allied diplomats residing inside the city-state also began burning their more sensitive documents. Cardinals packed their suitcases in case they had to flee.196
After several days, German ambassador Ernst von Weizsäcker pulled up to the Vatican accompanied by a military vehicle. Weizsäcker, a German aristocrat, was lukewarm in his dedication to National Socialism. He passed along the comforting news that the Germans would “protect Vatican City from the fighting.”197
While that assurance was earnest, Pius had no idea that the Vatican’s continued sovereignty in the middle of occupied Rome would bring the Nazi war against Europe’s Jews to his very doorstep. Two weeks after the German occupation, SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler—who the following year would earn the moniker “The Butcher of the Ardeatine Caves” for his massacre of 335 Roman civilians in retaliation for Italian resistance attacks—informed Rome’s Jewish community that unless it delivered 50 kilograms of gold, two hundred residents would be deported to concentration camps.198 These were the descendants of the oldest Jewish community in Western Europe, predating even the arrival of Christians. Their ancestors had seen Popes build, tear down, and then rebuild the walls of the ghetto in which they lived and worked.
Word of the Nazi extortion spread fast. Rome’s Jews started gathering the gold. The Chief Rabbi, Israel Zolli, was acquainted with the Vatican’s moneyman, Bernardino Nogara. Disguised as a Catholic engineer, Zolli made his way into Vatican City, where he met with Nogara.199 The Rabbi had wisely selected the ideal person to lobby. Nogara, more than anyone else at the Vatican, was someone to whom everything was filtered as a business transaction. After checking with Secretary of State Maglione, Nogara agreed to help raise the gold. Rome’s Jews would have four years to repay it.200
It is unlikely that Maglione and Nogara would commit to something so sensitive without Pius’s approval.VII Pius’s inaction throughout the war was mostly in instances in which he thought speaking out might worsen conditions for the church, Catholics, or the victims. There were no such risks when it came to the gold demanded by the Nazis. At most, the church risked the nonpayment of the loan. The Nazis simply wanted their tribute; they did not care how Rome’s Jews got it. It was even possible that Hitler and his top officials might like that they were able to wrest away even a small amount of the church’s wealth.
On September 28, Zolli again visited Nogara. This time it was to inform him that the Vatican gold was no longer needed since the Roman Jews had raised it themselves.202
On October 16, the stakes changed dramatically. Despite receiving the gold, the Nazis still decided to move against the Rome ghetto. The Pope became an eyewitness to the Holocaust: the Nazis rounded up 1,200 Jews.203 The operation was directed by Obersturmbannführer Kappler. Although the ghetto was about a mile from the Vatican, the Nazis transported the Jews along the outer perimeter of a piazza a mere 250 yards from Pius’s windows.204 The Nazis locked the Jews into the Italian Military College in Via della Lungara, only a few hundred yards from the Vatican.205 Two days later, trucks transferred one thousand of them—896 women and children—to Rome’s main rail station. There they were jammed into freight cars with little food and water and no toilets.
Pius said not a public word in support of Rome’s Jews. No one then knew that Ambassador Weizsäcker had told the Pope a week earlier of an impending “resettlement.”206 The Vatican never warned Jewish leaders, evidently fearing that it might put both Rome’s Jews and the church at risk of Nazi reprisal.207
On the day of the roundup, Weizsäcker asked Secretary of State Maglione whether the Vatican intended to issue any statement. Third Reich officials privately worried that the deportations could spark strong opposition from war-weary Italians who did not share the German fervor for eliminating Jews. If the Pope weighed in against the deportations, Nazi leaders in Berlin had discussed scrapping their plans.208 According to Maglione’s notes, he told Weizsäcker, “It is sad for the Holy See, sad beyond telling that right in Rome, under the eyes of the Common Father, so many people have been made to suffer only because they belong to a particular race.”
Weizsäcker again asked if the Pope intended to say anything.
“The Holy See would not want to be put into the necessity of uttering a word of disapproval,” Maglione said.209
Pius feared that any squabble with the Nazis over the plight of Rome’s Jews might only benefit the communists. If he castigated the Germans in public, Hitler might use that as a pretext to turn Rome into a military garrison and convert it into a barrier against the advancing Allied armies. That, of course, would destroy much of the city, something Pius feared.210
The same day as the roundup, the Vatican appointed Alois Hudal, an Austrian bishop base
d in Rome, to continue any further talks with Weizsäcker.211 Hudal was the leading bishop urging the Aryanization of Catholicism, in which Christ was an “intellectual Führer.”212 He was friendly with dozens of high-ranking Nazis and in 1936 had written The Foundations of National Socialism, a virulently pro-Nazi treatise.213 Pius and his advisors evidently thought Hudal might carry more gravitas with Nazi officials than the Pope’s Italian Secretary of State.214 It had been Pius who appointed Hudal as the rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, Rome’s theological school for German seminarians.215 The two were friendly (a friendship from which the church tried hard after the war to distance itself).
At near midnight on that same day, Weizsäcker sent two telegrams to the Foreign Office in Berlin. He summarized what he had learned from Hudal, whom the ambassador referred to as “an authoritative Vatican dignitary, who is close to the Holy Father.”
“I can confirm that this represents the Vatican’s reaction to the deportation of the Jews of Rome,” wrote Weizsäcker. “The Curia is especially upset considering the action took place, in a manner of speaking, under the Pope’s own windows. The reaction could be dampened somewhat if the Jews were to be employed in labor service here in Italy.”216
That was a great relief to the Nazis in Berlin. It confirmed the Pope would not stir up Catholic Rome against the deportation of the Jews. The contingency plans prepared in case any Papal condemnation ignited civilian unrest were shelved.217
The day after the roundup, Secretary of State Maglione privately requested that the Germans release any baptized Jews, what the Vatican called “Aryanized Jews.” The Nazis initially refused. Later that day they set free nearly 250 prisoners, but those were non-Jews, foreigners, one Vatican official, and some “Aryan servants” who had been visiting the ghetto and swept up in the raid.218
The Nazis did not want to keep the Jews in Rome long. Just two days after they were detained, a train left packed with a thousand Jews. The next day, in a remarkable showing of the degree to which Vatican officials failed to understand the moral and historical significance of the events unfolding around them, the church formally thanked Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, for the German military’s respectful wartime behavior to the city-state.219 And the Vatican asked for more Nazi forces to keep Rome’s communists under control.
Five days after the boxcars left Rome, the log at Auschwitz marked their arrival at the Third Reich’s largest extermination center: “Transport, Jews from Rome. After the selection 149 men registered with numbers 158451–158639 and 47 women with numbers 66172–66218 have been admitted to the detention camp. The rest have been gassed.”220 Only fifteen survived the war.221,VIII
After the war, Pius wrote in his personal journal about which single day he believed would “be known in history as the most sorrowful for the Eternal City during the Second World War.”223 For Pius it was the Allied bombing raid that accidentally damaged the Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. He did not mention anything about the roundup and deportation of Rome’s Jews.
Sir D’Arcy Osborne had an hour-long private audience with Pius the day after the Nazis transported the Roman Jews to Auschwitz.224 Osborne asked under what conditions the Pope might consider abandoning Rome. Never, said Pius, unless he was forcibly removed. He had no complaints, he told a surprised Osborne, about the Nazi occupation of the city.225 When Osborne raised the matter of the deported Jews, the Pope did not answer. He had decided that silence would be his response to any direct questions about them.226
Osborne watched in dismay only a few weeks later when a stray “British” bomb hit a mosaic workshop in Vatican City. Pius was furious. Two members of the Pope’s kitchen cabinet, his nephew, Prince Carlo Pacelli, and Count Enrico Galeazzi, asked the German ambassador to deploy antiaircraft artillery inside the Vatican. That never happened. The Allies convinced Pius and his aides that the so-called bombing raid was a Nazi-sponsored propaganda mission.227
Within two months of the Rome deportations, the Nazis seized another 7,345 Jews in northern Italy. Most went to Auschwitz, where 6,746 were gassed. At a detention camp near Trieste, SS and Ukrainian guards murdered 620 Jews, many by vicious beatings, others by execution.228
The massacres in neighboring European countries dwarfed the number of victims in Italy. Only a couple of months after the roundup in Rome, Maglione noted that Poland’s Jewish population had been decimated from 4.5 million before the war to 100,000. The Cardinal Secretary got some details wrong, but his notes serve as a contemporaneous marker about how much was known inside the Vatican about the Holocaust. Maglione wrote about the “horrendous situation” and how Jews were “finished off under the action of gas” at “special death camps at Lublin [Treblinka] and near Brest Litovsk [Sobibor].”229 That coincided with a letter to Pius from a Warsaw parish priest, Monsignor Antoni Czarnecki, providing jaw-dropping details of gassings at Treblinka.
Some ranking prelates ignored Pius’s policy of silence and bravely tried to slow the Nazi murder machinery. The Hungarian Papal Nuncio, Angelo Rotta, repeatedly risked his life to counter Nazi directives and help Jews by providing baptismal certificates and passports. Now, from April through May 1944, he told Pius that the Nazis—who had occupied Hungary and shoved aside the puppet government only that March—had begun deporting the country’s Jews to Auschwitz.230 With the enthusiastic help of the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross, Germans began a feverish conclusion to years of genocide, as nearly half a million Jews were sent to Auschwitz over several months.
Rotta asked once again for Pius to issue a directive to stand against the Nazi deportations. The second-highest-ranking Hungarian prelate, Archbishop Gyula Czapik, had earlier advised his colleagues “not [to] make public what is happening to the Jews; what is happening to the Jews at the present time is nothing but appropriate punishment for their misdeeds in the past.”231 In a religion where Pius’s predecessor had established Papal infallibility, administrators of the Hungarian church—as did the leading clerics in most European countries—looked to the Pope for direction. Priests, likes those in Croatia who ran the death camps, were free to do as they wished since the Pope never issued a decree prohibiting their role in murdering Jews.232
Most frustrating about Pius’s silence is that there was less reason than at any time during the war for the Pope to have feared German retaliation for speaking out against the mass murder. By the time of Rotta’s warnings, it was evident the Germans were losing the war. The successful Allied invasion at Normandy on June 6 added to the growing battlefield momentum of Allied and Soviet troops. Diplomatic rumors had reached the Vatican that some high-ranking Nazis were angling for a negotiated truce.
By now the Allies knew precisely what was happening at Auschwitz, from a bone-chilling account told by two escapees (the so-called Auschwitz Protocols).233 Slovakian Nuncio Monsignor Burzio summarized the information from the two escapees into a grim, single-spaced, twenty-nine-page report that he sent to the Pope that May. The Papal Nuncio to Turkey—Bishop Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII—received the Auschwitz Protocols from a friend, a delegate to the Jewish Agency, a humanitarian aid organization. The future Pope cried as he read it. Roncalli expressed his frustration and anger about the inaction of his Vatican superiors.234
With their worst fears realized in the closing phase of the war, the Western governments, Protestant leaders, and neutral countries such as Switzerland bombarded Pius with urgent pleas for him to invoke his moral authority to try to save Hungary’s Jews. The Pope’s trusted apostolic delegate to the United States, Archbishop Amleto Cicognani, sent a direct appeal from four prominent rabbis who warned that the lives of possibly a million Jews were at stake. A strong appeal by Pius might shame the Nazis into sparing them. Palestine’s chief rabbi made a similar plea.235
But during the spring of 1944 Pius again appeared to be more fixated on averting any Allied bombing of the Vatican than he was about the frenzied end of the Holocaust. When Allied bo
mbers mistakenly flattened the sixth-century St. Benedict Abbey at Monte Cassino, eighty miles south of Rome, pictures of German troops risking their lives to save precious objects from the smoldering ruins scored the Nazis a major propaganda coup.236 Pius told the Americans and British that they would “stand guilty of matricide before the civilized world and in the eternal judgment of God” if they bombed Rome.237 Unknown to Pius, Roosevelt was determined to take the capital before the presidential elections that November, even if it meant bombing sorties.238 The Germans played off of Pius’s obsessive fears by moving their command operations in the shadow of the Vatican, assuming that the city-state afforded them protection from Allied airpower.
Pius knew it was only a matter of time before the Americans liberated the city. The Pontiff directed his Secretary of State to formally request of Osborne that “no Allied colored [nonwhite] troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned at Rome after the occupation.” The Pope thought black troops were more prone to raping civilians than white soldiers.239 When he was Nuncio to Germany, he accepted as fact the often repeated tales that French African troops had committed terrible assaults on women and children in the post–World War I occupation of the Rhineland.240 Pius also repeated his opposition to the Allies’ insistence on an unconditional Nazi surrender. He feared it would devastate Germany and advance communism.241 The Pope’s comments about “colored troops” and his desire that the Allies not force the Nazis to fully surrender added to the Western perception that Pius was out of touch.242
On June 5, 1944, Allied troops liberated Rome. The Vatican had fretted that Hitler might order his army to mount a destructive door-to-door battle to hold the city, but German troops simply retreated north. Although relieved the Germans were gone, Pius spent his first day calling his Secretary of State to insist the Americans move a tank that he could see from his window. He thought its proximity to the Vatican showed a lack of respect for the church’s sovereignty.243
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