The Pope and Mussolini (62 page)

Invading Albania, then Greece, then joining forces with the Germans in North Africa and on the eastern front in Russia, the Italians depended time and again on the Germans to come to their rescue. In the fall of 1942, Italian troops and their German allies retreated before advancing allied forces in North Africa. That winter two hundred thousand Italian troops fought alongside the Germans on the eastern front in the disastrous Battle of Stalingrad. Nearly half were killed or captured. The tide had turned, and it was becoming clear that the Axis powers were headed for defeat. Initial Italian enthusiasm for the war evaporated. In early July 1943 Allied troops landed in Sicily, meeting little Italian resistance. On July 19 hundreds of Allied planes dropped bombs on Rome, aiming at military targets but causing thousands of civilian casualties.

On Saturday, July 24, the Grand Council of Fascism met for the last time. As usual, Mussolini sat at his desk at one end of the vast Hall of the Map of the World. Seated at two long tables that stretched at either side of him were the bigwigs of Italian Fascism. The meeting began in
mid-afternoon, when a cocky Mussolini unleashed a tirade, blaming the recent military disasters on incompetent generals. He heaped special scorn on Sicilians, who had greeted the Allied troops as liberators.

Dino Grandi, dapper and goateed, one of the regime’s luminaries, sitting near the Duce, rose and delivered a speech such as the dictator had never heard. Mussolini alone, Grandi proclaimed, was to blame for the disastrous situation the country now faced. “The Italian people were betrayed by Mussolini,” said Grandi, who had served as Mussolini’s foreign minister and then ambassador to Great Britain, “the day that Italy began to be Germanized.” Mussolini, he charged, “engulfed us in a war that is against honor, and against the interests and the sentiments of the Italian people.”

Dumbfounded, his confidence shaken, Mussolini’s attempts to interrupt became progressively weaker, as Grandi called for deposing him and bringing back parliamentary democracy. Then Grandi turned left to face Mussolini: “You believe you still have the devotion of the Italian people? You lost it the day that you consigned Italy to Germany. You think you are a soldier: Italy was ruined the day you put on your commander’s stripes. There are hundreds of thousands of mothers who cry out: Mussolini killed my son!”

Seated at the long tables, some Grand Council members, astonished and furious, swore at Grandi. “You will pay with your head for this treachery!” shouted one. Those who agreed with Grandi considered whether to support his motion, which called for deposing the dictator, returning control of Italy’s military from Mussolini to the king, and restoring the constitutional order. They nervously wondered what fate would befall those who dared vote in its favor.

It was now well past midnight, July 25, 1943. Following hours of heated argument, the fateful vote was taken. Nineteen of the twenty-seven men—while fearful they might not survive the night—voted for the motion. They were relieved, perhaps even a bit surprised, when no Fascist militiamen stopped them as they left the room.

Mussolini headed home, angry but confident that the king would support him. Later that day, as he set out to inform Victor Emmanuel
what had happened, his wife, Rachele, tried to stop him. She did not trust the king. Now that it was clear that Mussolini was on the losing side of the war, the cowardly king would be eager to cast all the blame on him and find a way to escape responsibility for the disaster he had played such an important part in creating. Rachele’s intuition proved right. The king had Mussolini arrested and appointed General Pietro Badoglio, hero of the Ethiopian war, to head an emergency government.

The following weeks were chaotic. The regime that had ruled Italy for two decades had fallen, but it was unclear what could take its place. The king and other Italian leaders were eager to remove themselves from Hitler’s grip. But with thousands of Italian troops fighting alongside Nazis in eastern Europe, and Nazi troops fighting alongside Italian troops in Sicily and stationed elsewhere in the peninsula, disentangling themselves from the Germans was far from simple.

Tacchi Venturi saw his chance. On August 10, amid the pandemonium gripping Rome, he wrote Cardinal Maglione to remind him of all the efforts made by the Vatican on behalf of Catholics who continued to be considered Jews by the state. Amazingly he was still trying to burnish Mussolini’s image with the Holy See. Mussolini, he wrote, had considered the situation of the Catholics treated as Jews by the racial laws to be “painful.” As far back as July 1941, he claimed, the Duce had prepared a new law to alleviate the problem. Had the war not gotten in the way, it would have been enacted.

The Jesuit envoy had excellent relations with many in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and, he told Maglione, thought they would be open to the changes the Vatican had been urging. He asked for permission to make three requests. The first was to have mixed families—meaning those that contained a converted Jew—deemed “fully Aryan.” The second was to ensure that Jews who were in the process of conversion before October 1, 1938, and only baptized later, be considered Christians and not Jews. The third was to permit state recognition of marriages between two Catholics, one of whom had been born Jewish.
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On August 18 Maglione wrote back, saying Pius XII had given his approval.
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Tacchi Venturi then met with the minister of internal affairs to make his request.
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According to his subsequent, highly revealing report to Maglione, he confined them to the three changes approved by the pope. He was very careful not to ask for an end to the racial laws, which, he wrote to the cardinal secretary of state, “according to the principles and the tradition of the Catholic Church, have some provisions that should be abrogated, but certainly contain others worthy of confirmation.”
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Although the political situation in Rome was chaotic following Mussolini’s arrest, it is astounding that neither the wily Tacchi Venturi nor the politically experienced Cardinal Maglione nor Pius XII himself realized that the anti-Semitic laws they had so long supported could not be propped up any longer.

On September 8 the king announced he had signed an armistice with the Allies. Fearing the advance of German troops, he and Badoglio ignominiously fled south to the Adriatic city of Brindisi, which was under Allied control, leaving the Italian military without any orders. Hitler, who had been preparing for this moment since Mussolini was deposed, sent troops flooding through the Italian peninsula. In a dramatic rescue, German forces plucked Mussolini from his captivity and established him as the puppet head of the Italian Social Republic, based in Salò, far in the north. A bloody civil war began, as Allied soldiers pushed northward through the killing fields.

On September 10 Nazi troops reached Rome and seized the city. Among their highest priorities was to hunt down Italy’s Jews and send them north to the death camps. Later that month, aboard a British naval ship near Malta, Marshal Badoglio, representing Italy, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, for the Allies, signed a pact committing Italy to the Allied cause. Among the provisions that Eisenhower insisted on was one nullifying all the racial laws and freeing the Jews still imprisoned in Italian-run concentration camps.
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On the morning of October 16, the Nazis surrounded Rome’s old ghetto and went house to house hunting for Jews. While most of the roughly seven thousand Jews still living in Rome succeeded in fleeing, some hiding in the city’s monasteries and convents, 1,015 were captured and imprisoned in a building near the Vatican. There they awaited their fate.

Cardinal Maglione, alarmed, called in the German ambassador, Ernst von Weizsäcker, to plead on behalf of the captives. The Holy Father, said the secretary of state, was pained to see such suffering for a people simply because they belonged to a particular stock.

The German ambassador asked him, “What would the Holy See do if things were to continue?”

Maglione replied, “The Holy See would not want to be put in the position of having to say a word of disapproval.”

For the past four years, said Weizsäcker, he had admired the Vatican’s attitude, its willingness to “maintain a perfect equilibrium” in dealing with the two sides in the war. After having done this so well, he asked, was this really the time to place the Vatican’s relations with Germany in danger? The order, the ambassador made clear, had come from Hitler himself. Did the secretary of state really want him to tell his government that the Vatican was considering a protest over the deportation of Rome’s Jews?

“I observed,” wrote Maglione of the unsettling conversation, “that I had begged him to intervene by appealing to his humanitarian instincts. I left to his judgment whether or not to mention our conversation, which was such a friendly one.” He then told the Nazi envoy “that the Holy See had been, as he himself had recognized, extremely prudent so as not to give the German people the impression of having done or wished for anything against Germany during a terrible war.

“Meanwhile, I repeat,” Cardinal Maglione told the German ambassador, “Your Excellency has told me he will try to do something for the poor Jews. I thank you for it. As for the rest, I defer to your judgment. If you think it more opportune not to mention our conversation, so be it.”
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At the nearby building where the Jews were being held, frightened mothers tried to comfort their sobbing children. Two days later Germans herded them into trains bound for Auschwitz. Of the thousand, only sixteen would survive. Over the next two months, seven thousand more Jews were seized in Nazi-occupied Italy, many with the help of Italians loyal to Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. From the time the first racial laws were proclaimed in 1938 to the end of the war seven years later, six thousand Jews in Italy converted to Christianity in the hope of gaining Church protection and avoiding the fate of their brethren. In all, Nazi forces and their Italian cronies sent 7,500 of Italy’s Jews to Auschwitz. Few would leave alive.
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EPILOGUE

W
HILE THE JEWS WERE BEING TAKEN TO THEIR DEATHS IN POLAND
, Cesare De Vecchi, Mussolini’s first ambassador to the Vatican, was being hidden by Salesian priests. They had taken him in following the regime’s demise in 1943. Having voted against Mussolini at the last Grand Council meeting, De Vecchi lived in fear not only of the approaching Allies but of the Nazis as well. Later, at the war’s end, when Italy’s surviving Fascist leaders were put on trial, he escaped capture, still hidden by the Salesians. Worried that their fugitive might be discovered, the priests managed to get him a Paraguayan passport and onto a ship bound for Argentina. There local Salesians protected him until a 1949 amnesty allowed him to return home. He died in Rome a decade later.
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With Mussolini’s arrest in July 1943, Galeazzo Ciano also found himself in an untenable position. Jubilant crowds celebrating the end of the regime filled Rome’s streets, embracing one another and tearing pictures of the Duce to pieces. They blamed Ciano, as much as Mussolini, for the disastrous decision to go to war. But because he had voted to depose his father-in-law, he was not at all certain that the Germans, should they arrive in time, would treat him any better than the Allies, marching northward from Sicily.

Ciano and his wife, Edda Mussolini, sought refuge in the Vatican,
but their request was denied. Whether it was ever seriously considered we do not know, as the Vatican archives for these years are not yet open.
²
On August 27 Ciano and his family evaded the Italian police detail outside their home and boarded a flight that they thought was bound for safety in Spain but that took them to Germany. A few weeks later Ciano was sent to Verona, in northern Italy, under the control of the Republic of Salò, the Nazi-installed puppet government led by Mussolini. He was not entirely surprised when members of the Fascist militia met him at the airport. They put him in a car headed for the nearby prison, where he joined other members of the Grand Council who had voted against Mussolini at that fateful meeting.

On the morning of January 11, 1944, following a brief trial, Ciano and his codefendants were driven to a military firing range near Verona. Two days earlier his wife, Mussolini’s daughter Edda, had crossed the Swiss border. Before leaving, she had sent letters to both her father and to Hitler with a last-minute threat. If they did not spare her husband, she would have his secret diary published. Its revelations, she said, would embarrass both the Duce and the Führer. As she walked through the open field leading to the Swiss border, expecting to be seized by German troops at any moment, she had the diary strapped to her waist.