Monday, April 11, 2011

Heroic Vatican priest who ran rings round a Nazi colonel

Hitler's Pope: Pope Pius XIIThe Vatican had a very bad war. Pope Pious XII has gone down in history as ‘Hitler’s Pope’, a man of deafening silences who made no public protests whatsoever at Nazi atrocities, especially Auschwitz - or even at the rounding up of Italian Jews.

Add to that the assistance some parts of the Vatican gave in the post-war chaos to Nazis on the run and the record looks damning.

So it is a surprise for most of us to learn of a Scarlet Pimpernel-esque Vatican priest who did all in his power to help escaped prisoners of war from the Allied forces survive by hiding them in and around German-occupied Rome.

He was Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a tall (6ft 2ins) humourous-looking Irish man from Kerry. He had tousled hair that stood up like a brush’s bristles, eyes which twinkled through his thin-rimmed glasses and a fixed cherubic smile. Almost Father Ted material.

O’Flaherty made it his practice to stand on the steps of St Peter’s every evening, overlooking the great square in his black and red Monsignor’s robes, reading - or seeming to read - his breviary. 

People would come up to talk and keep him informed of escaped prisoners who needed hiding places.

Having served in the Vatican since the Twenties, he had contacts and friends in high places throughout Rome. 

Furthermore, the Vatican’s neutral territory included not only the rambling warren of St Peter’s but 150 other properties, monasteries, convents and religious houses scattered through the city. All possible hidey-holes.

O’Flaherty also had a valuable friend and neighbour in the British envoy to the Vatican, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, who gave the Rome Escape Line enormous help with funds channelled from the Foreign Office and a loan raised from the Vatican bank.

The Escape Line’s first customer was a British sailor called Albert Penny who put on workman’s overalls and rode a bike through St Peter’s Square, round the fountains and into the garden of the Vatican.

It seems to have been that easy. 

The Swiss guards were no obstacle. 

The Vatican policeman who stopped Penny was a sympathiser who directed him to the British Ambassador’s flat, where Sir D’Arcy’s butler, John May, was one of the organisers of the Escape Line.

He was the first not of hundreds but of thousands of escaped POWs of various nationalities who received the hospitality of Monsignor O’Flaherty and his circle. 

By the time Rome was liberated there were nearly 4,000 escapees secretly billeted through the city, many of them in private houses of sympathisers. 

They cost some £10,000 a month to feed. 

The most that can be said for Pius XII was that after Italy’s surrender in 1943 he preserved the Vatican’s neutral territory against Hitler’s wild threat to occupy it, seize its treasures and abduct the Pope to Germany or Liechtenstein. 

‘We will clear out that gang of swine!’ Hitler  ranted - but was persuaded by his own henchmen that doing so would cause more trouble than it was worth.

A white line was painted on the roads encircling the Vatican. 

Beyond that line the Gestapo ruled under the command of SS Lt Colonel Herbert Kappler. 

Kappler knew well of O’Flaherty’s Escape Line and regarded him as a major enemy.

The two of them fought a cat-and-mouse game around Rome. 

The priest was under constant observation on the steps of St Peter’s, as were his visitors, mail and telephone calls. 

There were even attempts to kidnap him.

Once, Kappler got a tip off that O’Flaherty was at the Palazzo with Prince Doria, one of his biggest financial contributors. 

As the Gestapo arrived, O’Flaherty disappeared down the stairs to the cellars. Luckily the winter coal delivery was in progress. 

The priest emerged from the building smeared with black dust and carrying a coal sack, which contained his Monsignor’s robes.

Two hours later the Prince rang him at the Vatican to say: ‘Colonel Kappler has been here for two hours. He is a very angry man.’

Sometimes O’Flaherty ventured boldly into the streets to keep a rendezvous with escapees. 

He often took spare priest’s robes to disguise them as he brought them back to the Vatican.

Kappler ordered raids to be made on Vatican properties - but somehow the Escape Line usually got advance notice and no one was found. 

An attempt to infiltrate the Georgian College of the Vatican with bogus priests was quickly rumbled.

Kappler managed to make things difficult for the escapees, but never seriously damaged the operation. 

Nor did he catch O’Flaherty, despite offering a 30,000 lire reward for information leading to his arrest.

Rome was liberated on June 4, 1944, by the Fifth Army. On the steps of St Peter’s, the Monsignor stood waiting for General Mark Clark, its commander. ‘Welcome to Rome!’ he said. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

The next months were busy as thousands of prisoners were repatriated. 

Whether O’Flaherty, as part of his humane principles, subsequently extended his help to German prisoners on the run is not reported in these pages.

But after the war ended in 1945 he was surprised to receive a letter from the ex-Gestapo chief Herbert Kappler, then in prison awaiting trial for his role in the massacre of 335 Italian jail-prisoners, who were shot as reprisals for a Partisan bombing in Rome - ten Italians for every German soldier killed (there were 33).

They corresponded and the priest went to visit Kappler several times. 

The prisoner had two requests - to be accepted into the Catholic Church and for O’Flaherty to be present at his execution. 

In due course the forgiving Monsignor received him into the church - ‘Now we are sort of pals,’ he told a friend. 

But the execution never took place.

Kappler got life imprisonment, the maximum sentence under Italian law. 

Long after O’Flaherty had returned to Ireland to die, Kappler, then fatally ill with cancer, was spirited from hospital one night by a much younger German pen friend, who had married him in jail. 

He was driven to Germany and died there a few months later.

The story of Hugh O’Flaherty has been told in other books (even filmed), but this is a new angle on it as a duel between the Irish Monsignor and the Gestapo Colonel.

Unusually, it ended in reconciliation - which makes this a heartening story.