The stalled Italian invasion got back on track in February 1936, thanks in good part to the use of weapons banned by international treaties. The Ethiopians had no air force, and as the Italian planes dropped incendiary bombs on villages and poison gas on their fleeing inhabitants, they were helpless. “It’s very entertaining work, tragic but beautiful,” wrote Mussolini’s son Vittorio of the air attacks, in which he, along with his brother Bruno and Edda’s husband, Galeazzo Ciano, took part. When victims of the poison gas attacks were displayed to the world press, Italian newspapers claimed that the Ethiopians’ deformities had been caused by leprosy.39
“Mussolini has had a lot of luck, a lot of luck,” observed Pius XI. It was mid-March 1936, and a week earlier Hitler had sent German troops into the Rhineland, diverting international attention from the war in Ethiopia.40 Newly emboldened by a string of military victories, the Duce made clear the war would end on the battlefield. In the weeks leading up to the occupation of Addis Ababa in early May, the rout turned into something approaching genocide. The Fascist Party head Achille Starace, given command of a motorized unit, oversaw the torching of the villages they passed. The parched wounded staggered to the lakes to drink but found the water saturated with mustard gas, consigning them to agonizing deaths. Tens if not hundreds of thousands died.41
As the Italian army approached Addis Ababa, Haile Selassie realized that all was lost. On May 2, in a move that outraged some of his proud countrymen, he and his entourage fled the city aboard a train. In the capital he left behind, the leaderless warriors, searching for guns and money, ransacked homes, stores, and offices. Some tried to burn the city down rather than have the Italians take it over. Europeans huddled in their embassies, which came under attack. The chaos was terrifying but brief, as on May 5 General Badoglio led a column of two thousand Italian vehicles into the city, preceded by cars filled with Italian journalists there to record the triumph.42
The next day Tacchi Venturi sent Mussolini a congratulatory letter.43 “Excellency,” he wrote, “after having thanked God for the victory and the Roman peace, allow me to address a word of sincere, fervent joy to Your Excellency! The Lord has assisted You in a wonderful way in not giving up during the most difficult, uncertain hours. The hearts of all good Italian Catholics beg God to continue to give you his divine aid to ensure that the fruits of victory are truly those that one has the right to expect of a victorious apostolic Roman Catholic nation.”44
On May 9 a hundred thousand Romans crowded into Piazza Venezia. Raising their Fascist banners high and waving their handkerchiefs, they fixed their eyes on Mussolini’s balcony. Thousands more clogged the surrounding streets. Rhythmic, thundering chants of “Du-ce! Duce!” shook the ancient walls.
Throughout the country, in towns and villages, no matter how small or remote, church bells beckoned all to the central piazza. Loudspeakers sputtered to life, ready to broadcast Mussolini’s speech. In Rome three trumpet blasts sounded from the Duce’s palazzo, but few could hear; anticipation of his imminent appearance created excitement almost too great to bear. At last the great man strode onto the balcony, standing straight, immobile, his hands on the marble railing, his broad shoulders stretched wide, the expression on his square face set, as if he too were made of marble. The Duce knitted his brow in Fascist concentration, tilting his torso back as he raised his right hand in Roman salute. Roars from the crowd bathed the piazza. Only then did his face soften into a benevolent smile, as if offering some repayment to the multitudes for their adoration and their faith.
“Italy,” proclaimed the Duce, “finally has her empire.”
The crowd erupted. The piazza, wrote one witness, was like a temple under a heavenly cupola. Mussolini waved in acknowledgment but then hushed the crowd. He had more to say.
Ethiopians were to become subjects of the Kingdom of Italy, he explained. Italy’s king would now bear an additional title: Emperor of Ethiopia. “Raise on high your emblems, your arms and your hearts,” the Duce called out, “to salute, after fifteen centuries, the reappearance of the Empire on the fateful hills of Rome.
“Will you be worthy of it?” he asked the crowd.
“Yes!” they bellowed.
“Your cries,” Mussolini told them, “are like a sacred oath, which binds you before God and before men, for life and death. Salute the king!” Here he lifted his right arm in Fascist salute, and the multitudes in Piazza Venezia, and in the central squares of cities and towns throughout Italy, extended their arms and cried for joy.
The next day, in cathedrals and churches throughout the country, millions of Italians celebrated special masses of thanksgiving.45
THE END OF THE WAR came as a great relief for Pius XI. He had never wanted it, and it had put the Vatican under great stress. But the international situation continued to weigh heavily on him. He worried that the war had driven Mussolini further into Hitler’s arms. He worried, too, that with his head swollen by his African conquest, Mussolini would turn his attention to the Adriatic. Albania, the pope told the French chargé d’affaires in early June, was likely to be next on the Duce’s list.46 The pope was feeling ever feebler. In April he had failed to appear in St. Peter’s to celebrate Easter Sunday mass. He had given up his daily walks, limiting himself to an occasional ride around the Vatican gardens in his big American sedan. An elevator had been installed in the Apostolic Palace, so that he no longer had to walk up and down the stairs from his private rooms to his study.47
Mussolini was triumphant, bothered only by the fact that at war’s end the League of Nations sanctions still remained in effect. Again he turned to the Vatican for help.48 Cardinal Pacelli did what he could to oblige. Meeting with the British ambassador, he insisted that there would be no peace in Europe until the sanctions were lifted.49 Pacelli repeated the same message at his other weekly meetings with Europe’s ambassadors. The pope did his part as well, telling the French ambassador that the sanctions no longer served any useful purpose.50 On July 7 the League of Nations voted to lift them.51
Curiously, Italy’s ambassador to the Holy See, Bonifacio Pignatti, thought Mussolini was being overly appreciative of the pope’s support. The pontiff, he told the Duce, had acted only out of self-interest. A day did not go by without one Vatican emissary or another prowling the halls of government ministries, leaning on officials to do their bidding. The pope had too much to lose if anything happened to the Fascist regime.
Granted, Pignatti added, the virtually universal, enthusiastic support that the Italian clergy and the Vatican hierarchy had given the war effort had been valuable. But “don’t forget, in the Italian-Ethiopian conflict the papacy found itself facing a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik coalition,” one heavily supported by Protestantism. If the Vatican had backed Mussolini’s war, he said, it was because the Church was waging its own holy battle, aimed at the same enemies.52 Tacchi Venturi’s conspiracy theory, it seems, had made another convert.
Ethiopia was Mussolini’s great triumph, or so it seemed to him. Every day during the war, he had eagerly followed Italian troop movements by moving little Italian flags on the giant map he kept in his office.53 Before him, no one had paid any attention to Italy. Now the world’s leaders talked incessantly of what the Duce would do. Bishops and priests had showered their gold crosses and sacred valuables on him. Victor Emmanuel III had awarded him the state’s highest military honor, the Grand Cross of the Order of Savoy. The king had also offered to make him a prince, but he had refused. “Majesty, I have been and am only Mussolini,” he told the monarch. “The generations of Mussolinis were always generations of peasants and it is something I have been rather proud of.”54
Margherita Sarfatti’s prophecy a year earlier, from the window overlooking Piazza Venezia, would prove all too true. Her former lover’s feeling of self-importance now knew no bounds. His trust in his instincts had grown to the point where he seemed to believe the pope was not the only one in the Eternal City who was infallible. With the help of the sycophantic Starace, he w
ould soon take his cult of personality to a frightening new level, with statues, portraits, photographs of himself everywhere. Painted in huge letters, his slogans—“Believe, obey, fight,” “Mussolini is always right,” “Many enemies, much honor”—covered the sides of homes and barns.55 Secondary school students were already reciting a “prayer to the duce,” thanking God for Mussolini, “whom I love more than anything else in the world.” They ended with a pledge: “I humbly offer my life to you, o Duce!”56
Hundreds of thousands of Fascist youth and militiamen would start spending every Saturday afternoon—dubbed “Fascist Saturday”—practicing the new passo romano, the Roman step. While Mussolini insisted that it was based on the ancient Roman legions’ military march, its similarity to the Nazi goose step did not go unnoticed. In this respect, too, Sarfatti would not be wrong. Mussolini was leading Italy into the arms of Nazi Germany, a disaster foretold.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
DREAMS OF GLORY
WHEN GERMANY’S AMBASSADOR, DIEGO VON BERGEN, ENTERED the pope’s library in early 1936, he feared the encounter would be uncomfortable. It was Pius XI’s custom to meet with every ambassador at the new year. In the ten minutes allocated to each, he offered his blessing and briefly bestowed praise or blame for the government’s recent actions. As it happened, Bergen’s meeting would turn out to be even more unpleasant than he had expected.
The pope had much to complain about. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, two-thirds of all schoolchildren in Munich, capital of Germany’s largest Catholic region, Bavaria, had been attending Catholic parochial schools. By 1935, this number had been cut in half. In another two years, it would shrink to three percent.1
These “so-called conversations,” Bergen recalled, “are monologues by the Pope, who takes it for granted that his words will be heard without demur and received with deference.”
Shouting and waving his arms and becoming ever more agitated, Pius bemoaned all the ways the Third Reich was persecuting the Church. When Bergen attempted to get a word in, the indignant pope simply raised his voice further. The allotted ten minutes had long since gone by, yet the pope railed on. “There have always been those who have said that the Church is destined to disappear,” he warned the ambassador. “But it is they who have always disappeared, not the Church.” Then the pope pressed the electric buzzer he had had installed on his desk, beckoning the attendant outside to open the door for his departing visitor.2
Upset, Bergen went directly to Cardinal Pacelli’s office to complain. He regarded the former German nuncio as an old friend. How much of what Pius said, he asked, should he pass on to his superiors? The pope’s harsh words, he pointed out, would anger them. Pacelli recommended that he report only the gist of the pope’s comments, leaving out his more inflammatory remarks.
“This episode has shown yet again,” Bergen would tell the German foreign minister, “how Cardinal Pacelli constantly strives to pacify, and to exert a moderating influence on the Pope, who is difficult to manage and to influence.” It was best, he added, not to take the pope’s outbursts too seriously. Mussolini, on the basis of his experience with the pope’s tirades, was said to have advised, “Don’t get excited about it. The best thing to do is just to let the old gentleman have his say.”3
The Duce’s increasing embrace of the Führer angered the pope. Nor was he happy that Britain and France were doing so little to stop Germany’s military buildup. On March 7, 1936, Hitler sent German military forces into the Rhineland, the strip of land at the border of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands that, according to the 1919 Versailles Treaty, was to remain demilitarized. The German troops had orders to retreat at the first sign of counterattack by the French, but the French did nothing. “If you had sent in 200,000 men,” the pope told the French ambassador the following week, “you would have rendered an immense service to the whole world.”4 Europe moved one step closer to war.
Events in Spain were also leading to greater collaboration between the Duce and Hitler. An electoral victory by Spain’s leftist Popular Front in the spring of 1936 triggered a military rebellion. The Church, long identified with the old elites and now with the rebellious officers, quickly became a target of popular anger at the revolt.5
Spain had worried the pope ever since the king’s abdication five years earlier. In 1933 the pope issued an encyclical criticizing the Spanish government’s efforts to curb Church influence.6 Yet Pius was inclined to work with the more moderate government elements to find a solution. His efforts were thwarted both by anticlerical extremists in the government and by the hostility of many in the Spanish Church hierarchy who were opposed to any compromise with the leftists.7
The outbreak of the civil war in July 1936 brought unspeakable horrors. Seven hundred priests, monks, and nuns were killed. Priests’ ears were cut off and passed around as if they were trophies from a bullring. Nuns’ rotting remains were dug up from their graves and left exposed—French newspapers published photographs. Monasteries were transformed into socialist headquarters, religious services were banned, and almost all of Barcelona’s churches were set ablaze. On August 12 Cardinal Pacelli went to the Spanish embassy to protest.8
Although Francisco Franco, leader of the Spanish military revolt, has sometimes been compared with Mussolini, the Duce had no particular affection for him. Franco wasn’t much of a general, he thought, cowardly keeping far from the front. And the sadism of the Spanish forces was appalling. “For them,” Mussolini remarked, “executing a thousand men is like eating a plate of macaroni.”9
Motivated less by ideological camaraderie with Franco than by a desire to limit the international influence of the leftist government in France, Mussolini soon found himself conferring with the Nazis on how best to help the insurrection. In October the first Russian airplanes, tanks, and other supplies began arriving to shore up the Spanish government. The Italian Catholic press urged Mussolini to send Italian troops to aid the rebels.10 By year’s end, he had dispatched thousands of blackshirted militia and soldiers to help Franco.11
The pope did not share in the enthusiasm for the war. He was horrified by the bloodcurdling accounts of anti-Catholic atrocities but balked at endorsing an armed revolt against an elected government. Nor was he eager to see Mussolini embroiled in a war that would push him further into Hitler’s arms.12
JUST AS HE WAS GETTING the first reports of civil war in Spain, the pope received more disturbing news from Germany: the Nazis were planning to put hundreds of German monks and nuns on trial on charges of sexual perversion. Over the next year, the highly publicized trials would receive front-page coverage in the German press. “Corrupters of Youth Clad in Cassocks” screamed one headline. “Bottomless Depravity in the Monastery” declared another. The priests were accused of luring children in their charge into sexual acts and seducing vulnerable young women as well. To make matters worse, German authorities had renewed their case against the Jesuits, accused of illegally exporting funds.13
Then came the upsetting news that Mussolini was sending his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, to Berlin for talks on strengthening the links between the two countries. Ciano had risen through government ranks at dizzying speed. By age thirty-two, in 1935, he had become minister of press and propaganda. The following year Mussolini shocked the diplomatic world by appointing him to the government’s most prestigious post after his own: minister of foreign affairs. Increasingly, if unconsciously, Ciano tried to imitate his father-in-law’s mannerisms. But his high-pitched, nasal voice could not reproduce the Duce’s booming, staccato speech. Romans took to calling him derisively il Ducellino, “the little Duce,” or generissimo, a playful combination of genero, “son-in-law,” and generalissimo, the military’s highest rank. “The son-in-law also rises,” quipped an American diplomat. Easily impressed with power, in over his head, and a sucker for flattery, Ciano was putty in Hitler’s hands.14 That October, three months after the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, Ciano signed a secret coope
ration agreement with the Third Reich. Thus the Rome-Berlin “axis” was born.15
A new American ambassador to Italy, William Phillips, arrived in Rome around the same time. At their first meeting, Ciano made a good impression on him—he was affable, laughed a good deal, and spoke excellent English. But Phillips soon began to have doubts about Italy’s youthful foreign minister. “In appearance,” he wrote, “he looked astonishingly boyish, although inclined to be plump.”16 Of medium height, Ciano had a round face and “well-oiled black hair,” slicked back “in typical Italian fashion.” He was clearly ambitious but had “no standards morally or politically.” Ciano reveled in his position as Fascist potentate and the Duce’s son-in-law. But the other Fascist leaders detested him, resenting his unmerited rise to power and his love of la dolce vita. Most of all, they were angry that Mussolini had apparently chosen him—without bothering to consult them—as his political heir.17
Ambassador Phillips had a very different impression of Mussolini. Upon entering the “vast, empty hall with polished floor” for their first meeting, he spied a figure at the far end, sitting at a desk. “A short, thick-set and powerfully built man came forward to meet me,” he recalled. “Complete baldness seemed to exaggerate the size of his head.” What most struck the ambassador were the Duce’s eyes, which, when he wanted to make a point, “suddenly seemed to expand and the whites to protrude.” They spoke in English, Mussolini’s recent private lessons having served him well. Phillips would later observe that when wearing his Fascist uniform, the Duce seemed a commanding figure, but on those rare occasions when he saw him in civilian dress, he looked like a “sturdy peasant” and “a very rough customer.”18
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