Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (49 page)

*
Actes et Documents du Saint Siège Relatif à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale,
vol. II, page 318, “Lettres de Pie XII aux Evêques Allemands, 1939–1944”.

†
Ibid, vol. II, page 322.

*
Monsignor Lichtenberg had been sent to Dachau for publicly praying for the Jews.

†
Author’s italics.

‡
The Pope’s 1942 Christmas message is quoted on
this page
.

*
General Wolff was Himmler’s one-time secretary, who has served a prison sentence and is now free.

†
Faber and Faber, 1970.

‡
Luxemburg too was briefly considered for such a contingency.

*
Pages 373 and 381. German edition.

†
Colonel in the SS.

3

I
HEARD
more about Bishop Hudal from Bishop Jakob Weinbacher, now Auxiliary Bishop of Vienna, who took over as Rector of the Anima in 1952, on Hudal’s retirement. Bishop Weinbacher, now in his late sixties, was Cardinal Innitzer’s private secretary at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, and is deeply loyal to the late Cardinal whose attitude towards the Nazis has been a source of considerable controversy.

He spoke first about Innitzer’s appeals to Austrian Catholics; one immediately after the Anschluss in
Die Reichspost
*
asking for their loyalty to the new government; and another on March 28, 1938, made together with the Austrian bishops, this one addressed to the population in general, asking them to vote for the Anschluss in the coming elections. In this “solemn declaration” in the name of all Austrian bishops (except for the Bishop of Linz, who dissented), and signed by Cardinal Innitzer and Archbishop Waitz (of Salzburg), they said that “…  the thousand-year-old longing of our people is now fulfilled”. Stangl had mentioned the considerable effect these appeals had had on his thinking and that of his colleagues. (On polling day, April 10, Innitzer entered a voting booth saying “Heil Hitler”; on April 16 the Cardinal and some of his bishops were received in audience by the Pope, Pius
XI,
and his then Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli.)

“After that,” said Bishop Weinbacher, “the Cardinal was shunned by everybody. They all called him the ‘Nazi Cardinal’. In May 1938, there was a convocation in Budapest; bishops from all over the world attended, travelling through Vienna. Not a single one called on Innitzer. And no Austrian cleric was invited to attend.”
†
.

This ostracism, said Bishop Weinbacher, continued until October that year when, following the Cardinal’s sermon in St Stephen’s Cathedral in which he called on young Catholics to oppose the anti-Catholic laws imposed by the Nazi government, the Hitler Youth stormed the Archbishop’s Palace. “It was carefully organized,” said Bishop Weinbacher. “The Police President sat a few blocks away in a coffee house; he looked at his watch and said, ‘We’ll let them go to it for one hour’; and only when that hour was past did he start giving instructions to the police. By that time the mob had ruined the palace; all the windows were broken and it was only by the grace of God that the Cardinal wasn’t killed.”

(Cardinal Innitzer was not the only high Catholic dignitary whose personal experience of violence no doubt had some effect on his future thinking. Eugenio Pacelli described an experience
he
had as Papal Nuncio in Munich in 1919 as follows. “I am one of the few non-German eye-witnesses of the Bolshevik régime that ruled Munich in April 1919. At the head of this ‘Soviet’ government were native Russians; every idea of justice, freedom and democracy was suppressed; only the Soviet press was available. Even the Nuncio’s official residence was part of the battleground between the communists and the troops of the republican government; armed bandits forced their way in here and when I protested energetically against this violation of international law, one of them threatened me with his pistol. I am well aware of the objectionable circumstances under which the hostages were massacred.…”
*
)

“After that,” continued Bishop Weinbacher about Cardinal Innitzer, “his situation improved; he received letters from the Vatican and the bishops, sympathizing with him, and he was readmitted into the universal fraternity of the Church.”

Bishop Weinbacher, who is an established anti-Nazi and who was consecrated by Pope John in 1962, feels that history has now vindicated Cardinal Innitzer who, he says, no doubt made political errors when the Nazis first took over but retrieved these mistakes later. “They recently did a comprehensive television show about him here,” he said (in Vienna), “and it showed very clearly where he stood and that he was fundamentally not at all pro-Nazi.”

“Bishop Hudal”, he said, “was very close to Pope Pius
XII
– there is no doubt of that; they were friends. I talked a lot with him and this certainly emerged very clearly. But he never spoke about the things he did after the war. He was … well, perhaps ‘secretive’ is too strong a word, but certainly he was very discreet about it; he didn’t like to talk about it at all. One knew his political position, of course, so one was careful; he was, after all, an older man. In Vienna, a long time before, I remember he came to my office one day, just after he had written two pro-German articles for the
Reichspost
– he wrote them under a pseudonym but everybody knew it was he. He said, ‘Well, what did you think of them?’ I said, ’eminence, I think priests don’t belong in politics.’ And he said, ‘Ah, yes, yes, you are right; you are probably right.’ He was always like that; always wavering in his opinions, always adapting them to whoever he spoke to last, except that he stuck firmly to his pro-German, his ‘nationalistic’, attitudes.

“As Rector of the Anima, as you know, he was also Father Confessor to the German community in Rome, and amongst them were certainly Catholics of Jewish descent towards whom he behaved with the utmost correctness. But everybody knew that he later became very involved with getting jobs, passports, visas, etc, for refugees. I
think
he also helped other people, but there is no doubt that among those he eventually assisted were a great many of the Nazi high-ups. He is supposed to have got Bormann out too, I heard. He had his connections with the International Red Cross, I don’t know how, and, of course, he disposed of large sums of money. Yes, it is possible that this money came from the Pope – certainly the Pope had such sums at his disposal.” I mentioned that Frau Stangl had told me that her husband said Kesselring had transferred army funds to the Pope, thus enabling him “occasionally” to help someone. Bishop Weinbacher had never heard of such funds.

“The Pope was surrounded by German priests,” he said. “They were his private group, his friends. Father Leiber, Father Wüstenberg [now Nuncio in Tokyo, and – like Father Leiber – always well known as being anti-Nazi], and Bishop Hudal. He spoke German fluently and in private all the time, with a charming Italian accent. But of course, you know, even if he liked Germans, it didn’t necessarily mean that he was pro-Nazi. He had, I believe, spent a very happy time in Germany – this is where the reasons may lie, far more than in any sinister political motivations.

“About Hudal,” he said, “there are of course two possibilities – either he helped many people and amongst them some Nazi bigwigs, without knowing who they were. Or, alternatively, he helped
some
other people, which we know he did, but mainly concentrated on the Nazis and in full knowledge of who and what they had been. Of course, if the latter was the case” (he smiled gently) “then one would have to admit that it would seem to have been a bit more than mere neighbourly love.

“He has written his memoirs you know. They are in the hands of the Stocker Verlag in Graz, who haven’t published them yet, I don’t really know why. I read them, briefly, but he doesn’t mention his activities of the postwar years with a single word; it’s just as if none of that had ever happened.…”

*
Church newspaper, equivalent to the British
Catholic Herald.

†
This interpretation was not quite correct: it is true that Pope Pius XI disapproved strongly of Innitzer’s attitude, and in fact compelled him to issue a public retraction of his appeal. But according to the official British Catholic magazine,
The Tablet,
of May 21, 1938, the reason why no Austrian – or German – clerics attended the Eucharistic Congress was because the
Nazis
had forbidden them to do so, not the Pope.

*
In an interview in the French newspaper,
Le Matin
.

4

M
Y NEXT
talk was with Monsignor Karl Bayer, Jesuit Director of the International Caritas in Vienna, who only recently left the same position in Rome, where he had been since the war.

Monsignor Bayer’s connection with Rome dates from his youth. A Silesian by birth, he studied for the priesthood in Rome, staying at the Germanikum. During the war he served as an interpreter, not as a priest, in the Luftwaffe (which had no chaplains, he said), and was based in Italy and imprisoned there when the Allies took over. He was on the general staff in charge of billeting and so on, and was also one of Kesselring’s interpreters during the meetings which were to decide whether Florence would be declared an Open City. It was he who translated the announcement to the Italian population that the Florentine bridges were to be destroyed. “I had made friends,” he says, “with a family who owned a shop on the Ponte Vecchio – they sold silk fabrics. The night the announcements were posted – it was quite late and I knew that as most people stayed home at night in those days, they wouldn’t see the announcements in time – I took a truck and helped that family move their stock out of their shop and into a safe place, in an area which would be under the Open City agreement. They were the only people in the street”, he said with obvious pleasure, “who didn’t lose their shirts when it was blown up next morning.”

Many months later, this family helped him when he was on his way to Rome after an adventurous escape from the
US
internment camp at Ghedi, where the forty-five priests interned with him had elected him to intercede with the Vatican on their behalf. The Vatican then appointed him liaison chaplain responsible for the 250,000 German prisoners of war in the north of Italy.

Monsignor Bayer, now about sixty, is tall, slim and fair, and smells agreeably of after-shave lotion. He drives a sporty car with an Italian number-plate, and seems very comfortable in the renovated building not far from Vienna’s centre which houses Caritas International. I gathered that he is now mainly concerned with financial administration: he referred often to requests for financial aid from various Catholic communities in the Eastern bloc. Obviously active for refugees from Eastern Europe, he is very knowledgeable about the whole spectrum of refugee aid.

He told me that the help given in Rome to refugees could be divided into four “waves”.

“The first wave”, he said, “was the Jews [from Germany] in 1933–6. The Raphael Society – Father Weber [about whom more later] and Bishop Hudal were already helping people even then. The second wave came in 1939 when anti-Semitism first raised its head in Italy. It was at the beginning of the war in Europe that the Vatican bank began to handle foreign currency for the benefit of refugees. The third wave came after September 8, 1943, when Italy ‘left’ the war and Italian fascists began to seek escape. And the fourth wave – no doubt the largest by far – came after April–May 1945. This one included nationals of many countries who were in Italy, in
POW
camps and elsewhere, at the time, and didn’t want to return to their communist-controlled homelands; German
POWS,
some of whom would eventually go home, but many of whom didn’t wish to at the time; the Polish Anders army;
*
the Russian Vlasov army
†
(including 10,000 to 15,000 Ukrainians); large numbers of the people fleeing from Yugoslavia, Rumania, Hungary, Austria; and then, of course, the comparatively small group of
SS
personnel who are the people you are particularly referring to.

“All along”, he continued, “there were two ‘channels’ of help given by the Church or organs of the Church – one financial, the other more indirect. The money most certainly came from the Vatican. But on the other hand, many individual priests and officials helped many people in different ways, and not necessarily with money. I recall hearing about a case – a Frau Muschadek, whose husband had been a theologian in Germany lecturing on canon law. Being only half-Aryan, he had left Germany in 1936 and had come to Rome for help. Well, they didn’t really know what to do for him, but nice Cardinal Mercati,
*
he discovered that the Muschadeks were quite keen on the idea of emigrating to Brazil. So he gave them a Vatican
laisser-passer
and a letter asking the Brazilian bishops to assist them. I don’t know what the bishops did or didn’t do for him over there, but anyway, it didn’t work out very well, because he died. I gather that after his death Frau Muschadek made a great nuisance of herself and finally the Brazilians, no doubt fed up with her, repatriated her to the only place from which she had an identity paper – the Vatican. She arrived in my office one day with a letter signed by no less than President Vargas of Brazil; it made a great to-do, I remember. Well, she was full of how she was stranded there because of the horrid Nazis and all that. Oh, I can’t remember what we did for her. I think we got her some office work or something – anyway, she was looked after.…”