The 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.