The Pope and Mussolini (34 page)

Worried about anti-Catholic elements in the Nazi movement, the pope was especially upset about
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
, written by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis’ foremost theoretician. Rosenberg argued that God created humans as separate races; the superior Aryan race was destined to rule over the others. Jesus was an Aryan, he explained, but his Jewish apostles had polluted his teachings. Catholicism was the bastardized product of this Jewish influence. In early 1934 the Holy Office placed this German best seller on the Index of Prohibited Books.
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Hitler himself kept some distance from it, and so for a time some in the Vatican could attribute the Nazis’ anti-Catholic bent not to Hitler but to the party’s anticlerical wing. It was a familiar story in the Vatican, where anti-Church actions in Italy were commonly blamed not on Mussolini but on the anticlerics around him.

In his efforts to persuade Hitler to honor the concordat, Pius turned repeatedly to Mussolini for help.
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In the spring of 1934, when the Duce was preparing for his first encounter with Hitler, the pope sent him instructions.
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He wanted Mussolini to extract assurances from Hitler that he would observe the concordat. Although it had been in force for less than a year, the Nazis were already ignoring it. Mussolini was also to convey a warning: Hitler would be wise not to harass Germany’s bishops, for while “they can do him a great deal of good, they could also—albeit not wanting to have to—do him a great deal of harm as the Catholics will side with them.”

Pius also asked Mussolini to persuade Hitler “to free himself from certain acolytes who are making him look bad,” notably Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda. The pope thought both were encouraging attacks on the Catholic Church. The archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Faulhaber, had recently prepared a troubling report on Goebbels, whose writings, including a popular novel he wrote in the 1920s, combined a strong belief in God and Jesus Christ with disdain for the Church and the clergy. “I converse with
Christ,” wrote Goebbels in his book. “I believed I had overcome him, but I have only overcome his idolatrous priests and false servants. Christ is harsh and relentless.” To make matters worse, Goebbels, a Catholic, had recently married a Protestant divorcée and was, reported the archbishop, a “notorious homosexual.” Receiving the pope’s request, the Duce was more than happy to play the role of wise statesman and promised to do everything the pontiff asked.
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Mussolini was not looking forward to the meeting. The Nazis’ goal of creating a greater Germany, uniting all ethnic Germans, inevitably meant they would try to annex Austria. This went directly against Italy’s foreign policy, which regarded Austria as part of an Italian sphere of influence and a buffer against an overly aggressive Germany.
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Mussolini was a strong supporter of Engelbert Dollfuss, the Christian Social head of the Austrian government, who had suspended parliamentary government in March 1933 in response to Nazi-provoked unrest. That same summer Dollfuss, with his wife and children in tow, had visited Mussolini at his summer retreat at Riccione, on Romagna’s Adriatic coast, to seek his help.
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Shortly after Dollfuss returned to Vienna, an Austrian Nazi shot him, wounding him in the arm and ribs.
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The Führer landed at Venice’s airport on the morning of June 14, 1934, where the well-tanned Duce greeted him. Mussolini wore a magnificent uniform with rows of medals adorning his chest, a black Fascist fez, a dagger wedged in his belt, and knee-high black boots. Hitler wore a yellow trench coat, a floppy brown velvet hat, a dark suit, and simple black shoes. He looked, observed one witness, like “a laborer dressed in his Sunday best.” The pasty German would long suffer by comparison with the virile Mussolini, who delighted in baring his chest in an unending variety of poses. Hitler would never let himself be seen less than fully clothed, and even during his stint in prison in the 1920s he had insisted on wearing a tie every day. While Mussolini reveled in driving fast cars and piloting planes, Hitler preferred to sit in the back of his oversize Mercedes, surrounded by bodyguards, looking, in the words of biographer Ian Kershaw, like “an eccentric gangster.”
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As he emerged from the plane, the Führer was clearly embarrassed.
The confident Mussolini strode up to him and raised his arm in Fascist salute. Word would later spread that, as Hitler raised his arm in response, Mussolini murmured “
Ave imitatore!
” (“Hail, imitator!”). The impression Hitler made would feed Mussolini’s feeling that he was dealing with a poor copy of the original, a sense that would later prove dangerous.
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Proud of his fluent German, the Duce insisted on meeting with Hitler alone. He had even taken lessons to improve his German in the weeks leading up to the meeting. But Mussolini found it difficult to follow Hitler’s long rants, as much due to the boredom they induced as to any linguistic limitations.
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His belief that Hitler was a bit crazed only grew over the next two days. Their meeting was not helped by an infestation of mosquitoes, described as “big as quail,” nor by Hitler’s vaunting of the superiority of the Nordic race compared to the partially “negroid” origins of southern Europeans. The biggest source of tension continued to be Austria, for Hitler made no secret of his goal of uniting it with Germany.

“What a clown!” quipped Mussolini as Hitler’s plane took off.
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The man boasted of the superiority of the German race. But as Mussolini delighted in telling Italian audiences, when the likes of Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and Augustus were gracing Rome’s magnificent palaces, the illiterate savages who were the Nazis’ ancestors lived in filthy hovels in the forest.
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Following the Venice meeting, Mussolini wrote to his ambassador to the Holy See, Cesare De Vecchi, to fill him in. “I will spare you all the idiotic things that Hitler said about Jesus Christ being of the Jewish race, etc.”
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When Hitler talked about the Catholic Church, Mussolini told De Vecchi a few days later, “it was as if he had prepared a phonograph record on the subject and proceeded to play it for ten minutes until the end.” Hitler had ranted that the Church was nothing but one of the Jews’ mystifications. “This Jew,” said Hitler, meaning Jesus Christ, had found a way to fool the entire Western world. “Thank goodness,” he told Mussolini, “that you [Italians] succeeded in injecting more than a little paganism [into the Catholic Church], making its
center in Rome and using it for your own ends.” While he was himself Catholic, Hitler added, he could see no good purpose that Catholicism served in Germany.
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Mussolini told the pope none of this, other than vaguely alluding to Hitler’s
sciocchezze
, nonsense, about Jesus being a Jew. Worried that if the pope learned what Hitler had said, it would only make matters worse, Mussolini offered De Vecchi an expurgated account of his conversation to use with the Vatican. He should let the pope know that he had done his best and that it might be possible in the future for him to get the Nazi leader to take a more conciliatory view.
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A month later armed Nazis, disguised in Austrian army uniforms, burst into Chancellor Dollfuss’s office and shot him dead. Earlier that day his wife and children had arrived at Mussolini’s summer home on the Adriatic, where Dollfuss was scheduled to join them. It fell to the Duce to tell them the news.
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Pius was despondent. Only the previous year, Dollfuss had come to Rome to sign a concordat between Austria and the Holy See. The pope knew him and regarded him as a loyal Catholic. “It’s horrible! It’s horrible!” he kept repeating. Sitting at his desk, he looked down, his head in his hands. When he finally looked up, he asked, “What can we do? What can we do?”
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Cardinal Pacelli had had a less enthusiastic view of the Austrian leader. In July 1933, when Dollfuss had learned that the Vatican was about to sign a concordat with Hitler, he became angry, convinced it would undermine Austrian resistance to a Nazi takeover. Knowing that Dollfuss had written a document expressing this view, Pacelli asked the Austrian ambassador to the Holy See for a favor. It would be good, said Pacelli, if Dollfuss’s account could be removed from the Austrian diplomatic archives.
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THROUGHOUT THESE MONTHS
, the pope received frequent reports detailing the Nazis’ campaign against the Jews. In early March 1933, just before the German elections, Hitler had assured a group of bishops
that he would protect the Church’s rights, its schools, and its organizations. In an apparent effort to win their support, he added that they were all allies in the same struggle, the battle against the Jews. “I have been attacked for my way of dealing with the Jewish question,” Hitler told them. “For 1500 years the Church has considered the Jews to be harmful, exiling them to the ghetto.… I am furnishing Christianity with the greatest service.”
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In April the pope received a letter from Edith Stein, a forty-one-year-old German philosopher in Munich who had converted from Judaism eleven years earlier. Stein begged him to speak out against the Nazis’ campaign against the Jews—a campaign waged by a government that called itself “Christian” and was using Christian images to support its efforts. “For weeks,” she wrote, “not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany and, I believe, in the whole world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this misuse of Christ’s name. What is this idolatry of race and state power which the radio hammers into the masses day by day if not in fact sheer heresy?” She concluded with a prescient plea: “All of us who are truthful children of the Church and who are observing conditions in Germany closely fear the worst for the reputation of the Church if the silence goes on any longer.”

Cardinal Pacelli, replying on the pope’s behalf, wrote not to Stein but to the arch-abbot who had forwarded her letter to the Vatican. Pacelli told him to let Stein know that he had shown her letter to the pope. He added a prayer that God might protect His Church in these difficult times. That was it.
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Perhaps surprisingly, Edith Stein’s faith remained strong. Before the year was out, she took vows to become a Carmelite nun. In the late 1930s, she would seek refuge in the Netherlands. On August 2, 1942, the Nazis seized her and her sister Rosa, both Jews in their eyes, and shipped them to Auschwitz. With their last breaths, they inhaled the gas chamber’s fumes.
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Around the time when Stein wrote her plea to the pope, Orsenigo sent Cardinal Pacelli a telegram. The Nazis had proclaimed anti-Semitism
to be official government policy. A boycott had been called of all Jewish-owned stores and businesses, as well as of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and professionals. On April 7 a law was passed dismissing Jews from the civil service. In reporting all this, Orsenigo cautioned the pope not to interfere. “Intervention by the Holy See’s representative,” the nuncio warned, “would be equivalent to a protest against the government.”

The pope followed his nuncio’s advice and remained silent.
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Strikingly, it was Mussolini, not Pius XI, who in these early months of Nazi rule was urging Hitler to stop persecuting the Jews. On March 30 Mussolini sent a confidential note to his ambassador in Berlin instructing him to meet with Hitler immediately and advise him that his anti-Semitic campaign was a mistake: it would “increase moral pressure and economic reprisals on the part of international Judaism.” He wanted to be sure that Hitler understood he was offering this advice in an effort to be helpful. “Every regime has not only the right but the duty to eliminate from positions of influence those elements that are not completely trustworthy,” he argued, “but doing this on the basis of Semitic vs. Aryan race can be damaging.” It was not only Jews who would turn against the Nazi regime, Mussolini warned, if he went ahead with his campaign: “The anti-Semitism question can serve as an anti-Hitler rallying point by enemies who are Christians as well.” The next day the Italian ambassador met with the Führer to pass on the Duce’s advice.
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The pope was aware of it. A note in the Vatican secretary of state files reports that Mussolini’s plea to Hitler “was taken and read to Hitler and Goebbels a half hour before the Ministers’ meeting that approved the law that dismisses the state employees of Semitic race.”
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Rejecting Mussolini’s advice, Hitler continued on his murderous path. In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws prohibited marriages between Jews and non-Jews and stripped Jews of their German citizenship. Reporting on the national congress of the Nazi Party that year, Orsenigo informed the Vatican that the Nazis were justifying their persecution by blaming the Jews for Communism. “I don’t know if all of Russian Bolshevism has been the exclusive work of the Jews,” the nuncio reported,
“but here they have found a way to make people believe it and to act accordingly against Judaism.” He concluded ominously, “If, as seems likely, the Nazi government is going to last a long time, the Jews are destined to disappear from this nation.”
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