The local partisan chief, astonished by the prisoner he had taken, sent word to the resistance headquarters in Milan, requesting instructions. For his part, the diminished Duce asked only to be able to say good-bye to Clara. Until then the partisans had not realized she was among their captives. Clara insisted on staying by her lover’s side and sharing his fate, and the two spent a final sleepless night together in a nearby farmhouse. In the meantime, instructions had come from Milan. In the morning, the two prisoners were put in a car for the short drive to Mezzegra, along Lake Como. There, as they approached a modest villa, they were told to get out and stand in front of a wall. It was raining. Clara, still wearing her fur coat, was crying. “Are you happy that I have followed you to the end?” she asked. Mussolini, impassive and resigned to his fate, perhaps unaware she had even spoken, did not respond. As the partisan took aim, Clara struggled to put herself in front of Mussolini in a final, futile effort to protect him.
The next morning the partisans placed the two bodies in a truck and carted them off to Milan. In Piazza Loreto the Duce and his mistress were dumped alongside the cadavers of fifteen other Fascist leaders who had met similar fates. The previous August the Germans had shot fifteen imprisoned partisans, in reprisal for Allied bombings and resistance raids, and had exhibited their bodies in that same piazza. Such was popular justice. Twenty-three years of Fascist rule had suddenly ended—the city was freed from the German army and SS. In their delirium and anger, the growing crowd took their revenge on the bodies, spitting on them, cursing them, kicking them, striking the corpses with sticks and their bare hands. A woman fired five shots into Mussolini’s corpse, to avenge her five sons, she said, who were dead because of him.
To shield the bodies from the crazed crowd, some of the partisans hoisted them up, one after another, hanging them by their feet from scaffolding at a gas station on one side of the piazza. From the wounds in Mussolini’s head, brain matter seeped out and dripped onto the ground. Next to him swung Clara Petacci, who had always called him “Ben.” Someone with a sense of propriety had fastened her skirt to her legs with a piece of rope, so that as she hung upside down, it did not fall over her head.4
Achille Starace, longtime stage manager for the Mussolini cult, swung alongside the Duce. It was the closest he had gotten to him in years. Mussolini had stripped Starace of his position as party head in the fall of 1939, thinking the Fascists needed a different approach for the oncoming war. By the spring of 1945, the Duce’s once proud pit bull had been living penniless and abandoned in Milan, spending his days wandering the streets in a sweat suit and torn sneakers. When Milan was liberated, a group of partisans recognized him, although his unintended disguise was, in its own way, more complete than Mussolini’s had been. His trial that day lasted only twenty minutes before he was shot, his body hauled up at the gas station scaffolding in Piazza Loreto.5
Rachele, Mussolini’s long-suffering but ever-feisty wife, was taken by Allied forces and, along with her two youngest children, confined to the island of Ischia in the gulf of Naples. She would later return to the small village of Predappio, where she had first met Benito as a schoolgirl. In 1957, after years of effort, she finally succeeded in getting his body back so that it could be buried where he had been born. Unlike her husband, she lived to old age, dying in 1979.
Loyal Fascist to the last, Roberto Farinacci had fled Rome the day after Mussolini was deposed in July 1943, flying to Munich. He was taken directly to Hitler’s headquarters where, after first meeting with Ribbentrop, he saw the Führer. Once Mussolini was installed to lead the Republic of Salò in the north, Farinacci returned to his old fiefdom in Cremona, still predicting a Nazi victory. In late April 1945, with Allied troops poised to enter the city, he and a small group of followers hurried into their cars and drove off. Attempting to run a roadblock north of Milan, they came under fire. Their driver was killed, and Farinacci was seized. The partisans marched their captive to a nearby town, where a “people’s tribunal” was quickly assembled. Following a trial that lasted only an hour, he was condemned to die.
At the town plaza where he was to be executed, Farinacci asked for a priest, who took his confession and offered absolution. Blindfolded and told to stand facing the wall so he could be shot in the back, Farinacci resisted. His captors did their best to beat him into submission. But just as the men of the firing squad began to squeeze their triggers, Farinacci turned around and raised his arm in Fascist salute. The bullets hit his chest as he shouted “Viva l’Italia!” His body remained where he fell for several hours, giving passersby ample time to add their kicks and spittle. Those with guns fired gratuitous bullets into the lifeless body of the most fascist of Fascists.6
Guido Buffarini, with whom the papal nuncio and Tacchi Venturi had met so frequently, had enjoyed the Duce’s confidence to the end. One of the minority who had voted in Mussolini’s favor at the fateful Grand Council meeting, he had been arrested by the new Badoglio government but then freed by the Germans. Making his way to Salò, he became minister of internal affairs in the puppet Italian government, doing Hitler’s bidding in rounding up the Jews. On April 25, 1945, he was with Mussolini in Milan, and he, too, tried to make it to the Swiss border. The partisans who seized him sent him to Milan for trial, where he outlived the Duce by three days, a firing squad putting an end to him on April 31.7
Eighty-three years old when Mussolini was shot, Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi returned to his books. In 1951, forty-one years after the first volume of his classic history of the Jesuits was published, the final tome appeared. When he died, in March 1956, The New York Times and The Washington Post published brief obituaries. Both credited him for brokering the Lateran Accords, the one significant negotiation between Pius XI and Mussolini in which he had played only a secondary role.8
On ascending St. Peter’s throne, Pius XII decided to keep the devout, unworldly Francesco Borgongini on as his nuncio. Through the war years and beyond, he remained in that post. In 1953, a year before his death, the pope named him a cardinal.
Father Agostino Gemelli, founder and rector of the Catholic University of Milan, who had won such applause from Farinacci with his anti-Semitic lecture in Bologna in 1939, continued to curry the favor of whoever was in power.9 At the war’s end, Italian authorities established a commission aimed at removing the most important Fascists from positions of public influence.10 Confronted with the fact that in 1933 he had denounced two of his own students to the police for engaging in anti-Fascist activities, and in the face of other accusations, Gemelli was suspended from his position as rector, pending further hearings.
The following year, a second commission continued the work of the first, presided over by Ezio Franceschini, professor of literature at Gemelli’s own Catholic University. The new commission absolved Gemelli and allowed him to return as rector. Gemelli then appointed Franceschini to be dean of the Faculty of Letters, eventually to become rector of the university himself.11 Today Gemelli enjoys a place of special honor in Rome, where the city’s most important Catholic hospital and a train station bear his name.
The king fared less well. In late August 1939 the American ambassador in Rome received urgent instructions from President Roosevelt: he was to carry the president’s personal appeal to the king, urging him to do all he could to prevent Italy from going to war. As Victor Emmanuel was then at his mountain retreat in Piedmont, Phillips boarded a train bound for Turin. When the ambassador’s car reached the remote camp, the king stood awaiting him, dressed in ordinary country clothes and a soft brown hat. He walked the ambassador to a small wooden cabin, where Phillips delivered Roosevelt’s last-minute appeal.
Victor Emmanuel remained silent as the ambassador read. When he finished, the king spoke. He was simply a constitutional monarch, he explained. “All I can do, in the circumstances, is to refer the message to my government.” Phillips was deflated. A thick silence fell between them. Not knowing what else to say, the American ambassador asked him how the fishin
g was going. The king’s face lit up. He had already caught seven hundred trout, he said proudly, but would remain at his camp until he had caught his customary thousand. Asked if he would then return to Rome, as the world was descending into a horrific war, he answered that no, he planned to go to his farm near Pisa, adding, “You know, I hate palaces.”12
Having added King of the Albanians to his proliferating titles, following Italy’s invasion of that defenseless country in April 1939, Victor Emmanuel did his best to avoid blame as Italian troops suffered one disaster after another. At the war’s end, disgraced by his close association with the Fascist regime, the king abdicated, in the vain hope that the monarchy could survive under his son, Umberto. In a 1946 plebiscite, Italians voted to send the royal family into exile. Postwar Italy would be a republic.
Unlike the king, Pius XII escaped any blame for the disaster that had befallen Italy. Indeed, many have portrayed him as a heroic opponent of the Fascist regime. The “Pius war,”13 as they have been called—the heated debates over Pius XII—have focused not on his relations with Mussolini but on those with Hitler. Did he bear responsibility for not condemning the Holocaust when Nazis and their collaborators—many of whom considered themselves Catholics—were murdering Europe’s Jews? Was he “Hitler’s pope,” as the provocative, if misleading, title of John Cornwell’s controversial book suggested?14 His critics accuse him of cowardice and betrayal of the pope’s prophetic mission. His defenders argue that he was the best friend that the Jews had.
To date, rather little attention has been paid to Eugenio Pacelli’s role in Italy in the years leading up to the war. His relations with the Fascist regime, and his role in preventing the elderly and irascible Pius XI from doing anything to upset the Vatican’s collaboration with it, have remained curiously out of the limelight.
Pius XII, Pope Pacelli, died in 1958. His successor, John XXIII, convened a Second Vatican Council and dramatically changed the Church’s direction. No longer would Jews be demonized. Interreligious understanding would be prized, not scorned. Freedom of religion and speech were to be applauded, not attacked.
Since those heady years of the Second Vatican Council, both Pope John XXIII and the Council itself have become controversial among those in the Church who yearn for the old days. Pius XII has become their hero, defender of the Church’s eternal verities. Meanwhile, his predecessor, Pius XI, remains all but forgotten.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, OR SO THE COMMON NARRATIVE GOES, fought heroically against Italian Fascism. The popes opposed the dictatorship, angry that it had deprived people of their civil rights. Italian Catholic Action, the Church’s organization of the laity, stood as one of the most potent forces opposing the regime. The Fascist “racial laws” in 1938, in this comforting narrative, sparked indignant protests from the Vatican, which denounced their harsh treatment of the Jews.
Unfortunately, as readers have seen in these pages, this story bears little relation to what actually happened. The Vatican played a central role both in making the Fascist regime possible and in keeping it in power. Italian Catholic Action worked closely with the Fascist authorities to increase the repressive reach of the police. Far from opposing the treatment of Jews as second-class citizens, the Church provided Mussolini with his most potent arguments for adopting just such harsh measures against them. As shown here, the Vatican made a secret deal with Mussolini to refrain from any criticism of Italy’s infamous anti-Semitic “racial laws” in exchange for better treatment of Catholic organizations. This fact is largely unknown in Italy, and despite all the evidence presented in this book, I have no doubt many will deny it. That the Duce and his minions counted on the men around the pope to keep Pius XI’s increasing doubts about Mussolini and Hitler under control is a story embarrassing for a multitude of reasons, not least the fact that the central player in these efforts was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the man who would succeed Pius XI. There is no cause dearer to Church traditionalists today than seeing Pacelli—Pope Pius XII—proclaimed a saint.
With the opening in 2006 of the Vatican archives covering this dramatic period, the full story of these years, in all its richness, emotional highs and lows, and surprises can finally be told. Cardinal Pacelli’s daily logs of his meetings with the pope, along with tens of thousands of other documents that shed light on this history, are now available in the Vatican Secret Archive. Precious documents are also found in other newly opened Church archives for the period, including those at Rome’s Jesuit headquarters. There we find the copious papers of the pope’s shadowy private emissary to Mussolini, Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi.
While Church documents offer precious new insight, they do not tell the full story. Much is to be learned from the records of the Fascist regime itself. Thanks to its files, no other period of history offers such vivid descriptions of Vatican intrigue or such graphic accounts of its scandals. Among those whose exploits are mercilessly chronicled in one such thick Fascist police file is the papal protégé who became a cardinal in these years despite a long trail of pederasty accusations. It is in such police files, as well, that we learn of the strange assassination attempt against Father Tacchi Venturi, and the secret he so desperately sought to conceal. We have all this thanks to the regime’s extensive spy network in the Vatican, whose reports fill scores of boxes in the state archives. They tell tales of prelates’ jostling for power that no Vatican document would record. They describe papal investigations whose embarrassing revelations remain today safely ensconced in Vatican “personnel” files hidden from view.
Over the course of the seven years of archival research that went into this book, I compiled digitized copies of twenty-five thousand pages of documents from these different archives. I also pored through thousands of pages of published Italian, French, British, American, and German diplomatic correspondence, diaries, and memoirs. The work was rarely tedious, for the surprises kept coming. The challenge of piecing together documents from different archives to solve long-standing puzzles was intoxicating.
The relationship of the two larger-than-life figures at the center of this book turned out to be even more intriguing than I suspected. This was not because Mussolini and the pope were so different—although of course in many ways they could scarcely have been more different—but rather because of all they had in common. Both had explosive tempers. Each bristled at the charge of being the patsy of the other. Both demanded unquestioned obedience from their subordinates, whose knees literally quaked in fear of provoking their wrath. Each came to be disillusioned by the other, yet dreaded what would happen if their alliance were to end.
These pages, then, recount the story of two men who came to power in Rome in the same year and together changed the course of twentieth-century history. Scholarly, proper, and devout, Pius XI had spent much of his adult life poring over old manuscripts. He longed for the medieval times when the Church’s verities went unquestioned. Mussolini, apostle of the new, was a rabble-rouser, a violent bully, and a visceral anticleric. As readers of this book have seen, their relationship did not end well. Pius XI, who had earlier hailed Mussolini as the Man sent by Providence, ended his life feeling ill-used. Mussolini was no happier. As he told the members of the Fascist General Council, the pope was a disaster.
For the three Bears
Sam, Jack, and Charlie
nipotini straordinari
From their Zaide
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IT WAS IN 2002, WHEN POPE JOHN PAUL II AUTHORIZED THE OPENING of the archives of the papacy of Pius XI, that I decided to write this book. In 2003 materials related to the Vatican’s relations with Germany were made available to scholars, followed three years later by the general opening of the archives for the Pius XI years. The period was such a dramatic one, and the controversies over the role of the Vatican in the major events of the time so heated, that I found the challenge irresistible.
My work began in earnest during a sabbatical year I spent in Italy in 2004
–5. Although the main Church archives dealing with the pope’s relations with the Fascist regime were not yet open, the archives on the other side—the Italian Fascist government—were, and I spent many months working in Italian archives, primarily the Central State Archive and the archives of the Italian Foreign Ministry. Three years later, with the opening of the Church archives at the Vatican and elsewhere, a bounty of new sources, and new insights, became available.
Having worked on this book now for nearly a decade, I have accumulated many debts. None is greater than to Alessandro Visani, who worked alongside me from practically the start of the project, as we pored over correspondence and memos shoulder to shoulder in the Italian archives and then in the various Church archives. Visani, who has a doctorate in the history of this period, brought not only his outstanding archival research skills but an infectious enthusiasm and prodigious energy to the project, in work done on both sides of the Atlantic.
I have also been fortunate that a number of talented research assistants at Brown—both doctoral students and undergraduates—have helped with the work for this book. Among them I would like to thank Stephen Marth, Simone Poliandri, Harry Kasdan, Andy Newton, and Monica Facchini. I would also like to thank Anne-Claire Ignace, who helped me with the work in the French Foreign Ministry archives in Paris. Thanks as well to various staff members at Brown who helped support my labors: Matilde Andrade, Catherine Hanni, Katherine Grimaldi, and Marjorie Sugrue. I also acknowledge with gratitude research funding provided by the Paul Dupee University Professorship at Brown University.
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