Seventy years ago this month, on July 25th, 1943, Hitler was informed that Benito Mussolini had been deposed in Rome. Italy had been teetering since U.S., British and Canadian troops had landed in Sicily several weeks earlier. Nevertheless, Hitler flew into a rage and demanded immediate action to occupy Rome and overthrow the new regime. He fumed that he would send his forces to Rome to arrest the “rabble” that and denounced Italian General Pietro Badoglio, who had been appointed prime minister, as “our grimmest enemy.”

Behind it all, he discerned the invisible hand of the Vatican, and launched into a tirade against the Pope. He would march straight into the Vatican and arrest the arch conspirators, Hitler swore. He then thundered: “Do you think the Vatican impresses me? I couldn’t care less. We’ll clear out that gang of swine. We will find all the evidence we need for this treachery right in the Vatican.” As an encore, he threatened to kidnap the Pope to teach duplicitous Italians a lesson they would never ever forget.

Senior Germany military and Nazi party officials were so alarmed by the prospect of seizing Pius XII that they went behind the Fuhrer’s back to warn the Italians

It took the combined persuasiveness of senior military and Nazi officials Rommel, Goering, Goebbels and Ribbentrop to prevent him from taking hasty steps that would have, in their opinion, “negative international repercussions.” But Hitler vowed to “settle accounts” with the Vatican in due course, which was not surprising. There was no love lost between Hitler and Pope Pius XII; they detested each other cordially. In the meantime, Hitler said he would focus on finding, liberating and restoring to power his partner in the “Brutal Friendship”: Il Duce.

But Germany officials remained worried. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, was so alarmed by Hitler’s threat against the Pope that he called for a secret emergency meeting on July 29, 1943, to inform his Italian counterpart, General Cesare Ame, in Venice. The Italians were stunned that Hitler would even consider such a step. The message was immediately passed to the Vatican. A few days after the Canaris-Ame meeting, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Vatican Secretary of State, summoned cardinals residing in Rome to discuss the impending Nazi invasion of the Holy See and told them to prepare for the eventuality by packing their suitcases and hiding sensitive documents under the marble floors of St. Peter’s Basilica.

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After the war, rumours circulated that the Curia had even devised a plan to take the Pope through underground vaults, catacombs and secret passages located under the Vatican to a convent on the outskirts of Rome. The Pontiff was then to be taken to a village north of Ostia for a voyage in a fishing vessel to Genoa from whence he would travel to Milan before crossing to Lugano in Switzerland. If true, this plan was more spectacular than anything written by Dan Brown. In any event, the Curia took Hitler’s threat to abduct the Pope seriously.

It is tempting to dismiss Hitler’s plot to kidnap and even potentially assassinate Pius XII as yet another example of the dictator going off to the deep end in times of crises. But there was method to his madness.

In July, 1943, “Operation Mincemeat” — the invasion of Sicily — had been successful. Hitler had been led to believe that Sardinia and Greece were the real targets. It was rapidly becoming clear to Hitler that a colossal military defeat on the scale of Stalingrad was in the making on the Southern Front as Italian forces proved unable and in many instances unwilling to fight for their country. The “Pact of Steel” between Germany and Italy was disintegrating.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia CommonsHitler and Mussolini in Venice.

The stakes could not have been higher for Hitler. A successful invasion of southern Italy would make key airfields available to the Allies, enabling them to launch bombing raids against Germany’s vital oil supplies in the Balkans. To make matters worse, the failure of Hitler’s last great offensive against the Soviets at Kursk meant that Germany had lost the initiative in the east and would never regain it. Those close to Mussolini, Hitler’s only major European ally, sensed that this was the beginning of the end for the Axis Powers.

In a desperate last minute gamble, Hitler tried to stem the tide by calling an emergency meeting with Mussolini in Venice on July 19th, 1943. The meeting was inconclusive, as it became clear to Hitler that the Italians wanted out of the war. Hitler was in no position to offer much military assistance, either — his forces were fully committed battling the Soviets in the east and waiting for an allied invasion in the West. The fact that the summit coincided with a major bombing raid on Rome did little to firm up Italy’s commitment to the war. A few days after the meeting, on July 25th, Mussolini was deposed, the Fascist Party officially disbanded and Badoglio took power with the blessing of King Vittorio Emanuelle III.

There was a great deal of speculation that Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, was secretly negotiating under Vatican’s auspices

Hitler suspected that the Vatican was involved. He was aware that Mussolini’s Undersecretary of State Giuseppe Bastianini had approached the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Maglione to use the good offices of the Pope to find out if Italy might reach an accommodation with the Allies as early as April 1943. For months rumours of peace initiated by the Vatican, and supported by the Portuguese, the Spaniards and the Swiss, had circulated in European capitals. There was also a great deal of speculation that Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, was secretly negotiating under Vatican’s auspices.

The evidence for these behind-the-scenes manoeuvres to get rid of Mussolini and withdraw Italy from the war is to be found in a memorandum prepared by the Italian Foreign Office and presented to Cardinal Maglione. The document essentially stated that in view of Allied advances in Italy, Rome’s position in the war had to be re-evaluated. The formal purpose of the note was to seek Vatican involvement in discretely asking Western powers about their intentions concerning the future of Italy. Although it was known that the Pope would initiate such contacts provided the Vatican had “prior assurances of Italian and German concurrence” in approaching the Allies, Hitler increasingly grew alarmed that the Holy See would be used to detach Italy from the Reich, sanctify the Badoglio government and bless Italy’s decision to sign an armistice with the Allies. Hitler feared that the Vatican would then freely use its immense moral authority against the Third Reich.

Hitler’s worst nightmare came to pass when, on Sept. 3, 1943, in the aftermath of British landings on the Italian mainland, Badoglio signed an armistice with Allies. The Nazis retaliated by taking control of central and northern Italy and installing Mussolini, who had been liberated from captivity in a daring raid by special Nazi forces, in a puppet regime based in the northern Italian city of Salo. An emaciated Il Duce immediately had assassinated all those he could catch for complicity in his deposition, including his son-in-law Count Ciano.

For Hitler, the time to settle accounts with the Vatican had finally arrived.

A few days after the occupation of Rome on Sept. 9, 1943, Hitler invited Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff, SS Commander in charge of security in Italy, to discuss the “occupation of the Vatican and transfer of the Pope Pius XII to Liechtenstein.” According Wolff, the following conversation with Hitler took place.

Hitler: Now, Wolff, I have a special mission for you, with significance for the whole world, and it is a personal matter between you and me. You are never to speak of it with anyone without my permission, with the exception of the Supreme Commandant of the SS, Himmler, who is aware of everything. Do you understand.

Wolff: Understood, Fuhrer!

Hitler: I want you and your troops, while there is still a strong reaction in Germany to the Badoglio treachery, to occupy as soon as possible the Vatican and Vatican City, secure the archives and the art treasures, which have a unique value, and transfer the Pope, together with the Curia, for their protection so that they cannot fall into the hands of the Allies and exert political pressure. How quickly can you prepare this operation?

After intense discussions, Wolff managed to convince the Fuhrer that the deportation of the Pope would have adverse consequences and deeply offend German Catholics. Moreover, Wolff claims to have told Hitler that the international repercussions would be severe, and thus outweigh any temporary gain resulting from the neutralization of the Vatican. Hitler, apparently, with great reluctance, shelved the plan to deport the Pope.

But, Wolff, like Canaris before him, informed the Pope of Hitler’s intentions. This, unfortunately, had a disastrous effect on the Pontiff, making him even more timid and reticent in his dealings with the Nazis, who were about to embroil Jews in German-controlled Italian territories in the Final Solution.

Meir Michaelis, in his book Mussolini and the Jewish Question, reconstructs and discusses the thinking and behaviour of the Holy See to the deportation of Roman Jews from the Ghetto in considerable detail. His conclusion is that the Vatican took the following position: in the name human solidarity and Catholic piety, the Jews could be and had to be helped as an oppressed people; it was, however, not for them alone that the person of the Pope himself could be placed at risk. The threat of abduction loomed large in the minds of the Pope and the Curia. And consequently, the concerns for the safety of the Pope cast a shadow over the lamentable responses of the Vatican to the greatest moral crisis confronting the Holy See in 1943.

In 1303, Phillip IV had to kidnap Pope Boniface VIII in order to dethrone him. Sadly, 640 years later, Hitler’s threats alone proved sufficiently intimidating to keep the Vatican in check. The threat to the Pope’s safety was not significantly reduced until June 5 of the next year, when Allied forces liberated Rome from Nazi occupation. For thousands of Italy’s Jews, that was much too late to matter.