Thus sayeth the Lord: Woe to the city, rebellious and polluted, to the tyrannical city! I will remove from your midst the proud braggarts, and you shall no longer exalt yourself .
—Zephaniah 3:1 and 3:11
T he Nazis’ rise to power provoked a strong reaction among the upper reaches of the Catholic hierarchy in Germany. The new regime responded to growing protests from the bishops by trying to pacify them in order to gain time to entrench the Nazi party in all organizations and mechanisms of power, including the Church.
Shortly after Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 29, 1933, Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen began secret meetings with Eugenio Pacelli. Pope Pius XI did not learn of these meetings until two years later, when he received a report from the Holy Alliance classified as “top secret.” 1
In these talks, which were first informal and then secret, von Papen and Pacelli crafted the major points that would make up the famous concordat signed by Berlin and the Vatican on July 20, 1933. That agreement committed the Reich to allowing free and public practice of the Catholic religion, recognized the Church’s independence, guaranteed it the right to freely appoint its religious officials, and authorized the Vatican to create theology majors in all German universities. But each of these clauses came with conditions. The state could veto bishops’ nominations for political reasons. Once appointed, bishops had to swear loyalty to the Reich and the Fuehrer.
The Holy Alliance learned that Pacelli, at the last minute, had decided to include in the concordat a stipulation that no clergyman could belong to any political party or organization. Franz von Papen accepted this point without understanding why Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli so ardently desired it. 2
A variety of historians and researchers have characterized the signing of this concordat as an acceptance and, in part, a degree of support for Hitler’s Nazi regime by the Holy See. Really, it was more of a concession on the part of Pacelli—the future Pius XII—than of Pius XI. To the former Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, failing to negotiate a concordat with Hitler meant abandoning the Catholics of Germany to persecution. Also, when the document was signed in 1933, the Nazi government had not yet instituted its policy of terror nor the barbarities that soon began.
Pius XI condemned Nazism and its leaders in his encyclical Mit brennender Sorge , dated March 14, 1937. As had Mussolini in Italy, Hitler wanted some kind of religious recognition of his regime to increase his international prestige, and there was no better way to do this than by signing a concordat with the Holy See. By early 1939, the situation was very different. Nazi atrocities began to extend beyond the German border. Pius XI then prepared a new text, which he planned to read in the presence of all the Italian and German bishops on the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Lateran Pacts. Because of the supreme pontiff’s untimely death the day before that anniversary, his plan was not fulfilled. The document was not made public until Pope John XXIII’s accession to the Throne of St. Peter in 1958, almost twenty years later. 3
In the original text, titled Nella Luce , Pius XI highlighted the incompatibility of Fascist ideology and the doctrine of Jesus Christ. Things in Germany were no better. Respected Holy Alliance agents working in the Berlin nunciature began sending the Vatican reports of a Reich department devoted to “purifying” the Aryan race. 4 The Vatican spy service decided to send two expert agents, the priests Gunther Hessner and León Brendt, to Berlin to investigate.
Hessner and Brendt managed to penetrate the mysterious Rasse-Heirat Institut (Racial Marriage Institute), Hessner as a steward and Brendt as a cook. Gunther Hessner had been born in Bavaria to a family loyal to Kaiser Wilhelm II, conservative, nationalist, and therefore followers of the new Reich. Brendt came from a mixed family and had been brought up in an ideologically liberal home, logically opposed to Hitler.
The first report on the Rasse-Heirat Institut arrived in Rome in 1937, signed by Father León Brendt. The eight-page text gave detailed explanations of women classified as Aryan having sexual relations with leading members of the Nazi Party and SS and SA units. The women were treated as guinea pigs, always accompanied and observed, even during sexual acts with an “Aryan” member of the SS. A Nazi party nurse was always present. 5
Another report from León Brendt told how some of these women had agreed to be artificially inseminated. The Vatican immediately responded, sending fifty-five protest notes through its nunciature, none of them explicitly referring to the Rasse-Heirat Institut . The Vatican in no way wanted to put its infiltrated agents in danger.
But alarm mounted in the hallways of the Vatican when the first report from Father Gunther Hessner arrived. Through a chambermaid of the Rasse-Heirat Institut , the Holy Alliance discovered that various hospitals and clinics under Nazi control were carrying out sterilizations and killings of people labeled mentally deficient under the racial laws passed by the Nazi party. 6 Hessner decided to send this report first to three of the most anti-Nazi members of the hierarchy—Cardinal Clement August von Galen, Cardinal Konrad von Preysing, and the Archbishop of Munich, Monsignor Michael von Faulhaber. The latter sent Father Hessner’s report on to the Vatican. With all this material in hand, Pope Pius XI ordered the publication of his encyclical Mit brennender Sorge , which was secretly read in some German Catholic churches on Palm Sunday of 1937.
Hitler’s reaction was not long in coming. Over the next few weeks, Nazi authorities acting through the SS and the Gestapo jailed more than a thousand Catholics, including journalists, priests, friars, seminarians, monks, and leaders of Catholic youth organizations. Early in 1938, 304 of them were deported to the Dachau concentration camp. 7
Father Gunther Hessner continued to serve the Holy Alliance in various parts of Germany, and he informed the Vatican about the Jewish Holocaust until 1941, when the Gestapo arrested him and sent him to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. When camp guards found him giving last rites to an old Polish prisoner in his barracks, he was hanged. The SS arrested Father León Brendt in April 1940 for helping Jews escape to Switzerland by way of a secret network that he had organized without the authorization of the Holy Alliance. According to some reports, he assembled this network with the support of Cardinal August von Galen.
In response to what he had learned of Nazi measures, Pope Pius XI decided to seclude himself in his residence at Castel Gandolfo so as to avoid receiving Adolf Hitler during Hitler’s visit to Rome on May 3 to 9 of 1938. The Holy Father also ordered all Vatican museums closed and requested that L’Osservatore Romano not publish a word about the German chancellor’s visit.
Meanwhile, in the heart of the Vatican, Sodalitium Pianum agents were hunting for spies. Since the late 1920s, the Italian secret services had been infiltrating moles into papal departments. The most important of these was Monsignor Enrico Pucci, a well-connected figure in the realms of the press and papal administration.
Although his position was never formalized, Monsignor Pucci served as an unofficial Vatican spokesman. He wrote and edited a small bulletin that reported on official Vatican events and on papal affairs affecting the city-state. He also freelanced for newspapers throughout Italy. Journalists accredited in the Holy See came to Monsignor Pucci for information about Cardinal So-and-so or about a bishop who had made such-and-such an unofficial statement. Pucci knew everything. Nothing happened within the Vatican’s palaces without his being aware of it. From the doings of monks to members of the Swiss Guard, from cardinals to librarians, Enrico Pucci could be counted on to know.
Monsignor Pucci was also Mussolini’s best spy inside the Vatican from the time of his recruitment in late 1927 by the Fascist police chief Arturo Bocchini. By the mid-’30s, the Holy Alliance started to get reports about a mole inside the Vatican. Pucci, who reported to Italian authorities as “Agent 99,” passed on all varieties of information. His best operation came in 1932, when he succeeded in getting hold of a manuscript copy of Cardinal Bonaventura Cerretti’s memoirs. His Eminence recounted in great detail the negotiations and secret conversations with Prime Minister Orlando that resulted in the 1929 Lateran Pacts, settling the “Roman question” about the Vatican’s status. 8
Holy Alliance agents informed the counterespionage service Sodalitium Pianum that the presence of a mole had been detected. The S.P.’s agents began trying to identify him.
As a tactic, the S.P. circulated a false document signed by the cardinal secretary of state, Pietro Gasparri. This report stated that a certain Roberto Gianille had been passing information about Italy and the Vatican to Britain’s embassy in the Holy See. Of course, Roberto Gianille did not exist. He was merely invented for the purpose.
The S.P. agents succeeded in passing off the report as a real one, and it came into the hands of Monsignor Enrico Pucci. Very quickly, Bocchini ordered that Roberto Gianille be found and arrested for high treason. Neither the Italians nor Pucci knew that Gianille was an invention of the Vatican counterespionage to try and identify the spy. The mole fell in the trap.
Removed from all his official and unofficial functions in the papal administration, Enrico Pucci continued serving the Fascist regime until Mussolini’s fall. Pucci’s exposure brought the collapse of his network, which had consisted of Stanislao Caterini, Giovanni Fazio, and Virgilio Scattolini, all mid-level Vatican officials. 9
Caterini, who was employed by the secretariat of state, had been recruited in late 1929. Until his exposure, he was one of Monsignor Enrico Pucci’s best sources of information, since he worked in the Reparto Crittografico , the Holy Alliance unit in charge of the codes used by the nunciatures in secret correspondence. All communications to and from the Vatican passed through Caterini, who directly informed Monsignor Pucci about the most sensitive matters. For betraying his superiors, he was forced to resign and expelled from the Vatican.
The second member of the so-called Pucci Network was Giovanni Fazio, a Vatican police official. His position gave him access to the dossiers of all religious and lay personnel of the Vatican state. Once caught by the Holy Alliance, Fazio was relieved of his post and dishonorably discharged from the papal security force. He continued to work for Italian intelligence until 1942, when he was found hanged in his own home. Rumors at the time called the hanging an execution and attributed it to the long arm of the Black Order, the underground organization of friar-assassins founded in the seventeenth century by the powerful Vatican espionage chief Olimpia Maidalchini on the orders of Pope Innocent X. 10
The third member of the Pucci Network to fall was Virgilio Scattolini, a journalist who served as assistant to Monsignor Mario Boehn, the editor-in-chief of L’Osservatore Romano . Scattolini had been recruited by the Italian secret services and put under Enrico Pucci’s orders in early 1930. Scattolini’s task was to infiltrate anti-Fascist journalistic circles and pass the names of their members to Pucci, who in turn informed Mussolini’s security forces. Virgilio Scattolini resigned his post after being exposed by papal counterespionage. He continued his journalistic career, writing for a variety of Italian news media. 11
Evidently, the Italian spy services had not reckoned with the powers of the Holy Alliance and papal counterespionage. The Germans were not about to make the same mistake. After the signing of the concordat, the Reich’s security services decided to strike as hard as possible at the bases of German Catholicism. In February of 1933, Adolf Hitler stated that the Catholic churches made up an integral part of German life. Only a month later, the chancellor declared, “I vow to completely eradicate Christianity from Germany. You are either Christian or German. You cannot be both.” 12 The first blow fell on the Catholic lay organizations, which the Nazi regime accused of being the nexus of subversive activities against the Party, the Fuehrer, and the German people. All Catholic newspapers and publishers were closed, gatherings of Catholic youth were prohibited, and religious ceremonies were restricted.
Hitler had given his security and spy services direct orders to keep close watch on German bishops, their communications with the Holy See, the flow of their finances, and the activities of their espionage services. He conferred this task on the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party’s espionage service. SD leader Reinhard Heydrich was a true psychopath famous for his cruelty. He was also quite intelligent.
Heydrich was convinced that the pope and his spies inside Germany were a source of continual plots against the Reich and therefore had to be destroyed. Reinhard Heydrich planned to “strangle” the Catholic Church using all the tools at his disposal, including the intelligence services. In late 1933 and early 1934, the SD set up a small unit in Munich designed to keep track of Catholic organizations and their leaders. Its first director was Dr. Wilhelm August Patin, a former agent of the Holy Alliance. 13
Patin had been a priest and had specialized in theology. For years he had acted as a free Holy Alliance agent in Germany, until Hitler came to power. Years later, it was discovered that Patin was a cousin of Heinrich Himmler, the all-powerful Reichsführer .
Patin’s unit consisted of only five agents, whose work was mostly routine. His mistake was to complain to his cousin Himmler, going over the head of his immediate superior, Reinhard Heydrich, which cost him his job. His replacement, Martin Wolff, was one of Heydrich’s trusted lieutenants, but Wolff occupied the post for only a few months because Heydrich soon named him to run the SD’s anti-communist unit. Wolff then offered the anti-Catholic post to his second-in-command, Albert Hartl, who became one the Holy Alliance’s fiercest enemies. Obersturmbannführer and a former Catholic priest, Albert Hartl was an apostate who now abjured all priests and monks. He had begun working for the SD in early 1933 as a paid informant while studying at the seminary of Freising. There he met Father Josef Rossberger and became his best friend.
Within a few months, Hartl learned that Rossberger ran an anti-Nazi propaganda network within the seminary, and that he sometimes helped papal espionage agents carry out their operations in the heart of Nazi Germany. Albert Hartl decided to denounce his best friend to the SD.
The next day, while on his way to a meeting of his network, Father Josef Rossberger was arrested in the street and taken to a secret detention center where he was tortured for seven straight days. His betrayer asked to observe the sessions.
Albert Hartl’s testimony in the trial of Father Rossberger made a deep impression on the Catholics of Bavaria. No one had believed that the Reich’s security apparatus was capable of penetrating the doors of a seminary.
After the trial, Hartl became a protégé of Heydrich, who had begun a brilliant career that took him to the top ranks of Adolf Hitler’s security services. The thirty-year-old seminarian knew how to take advantage of his mentor’s ascent. Heydrich offered him a post in the SD and Hartl accepted. He left the priesthood and embraced the SD with all the fervor of a convert. 14
His first tasks were collecting information on Nazi Party members suspected of close contact with the Church or the Holy Alliance, preparing reports on the history of the Inquisition to be used in the party’s anti-Catholic press campaigns, and writing an extensive study of Jesuit history and organization, because the Reich security forces admired the religious order for its asceticism, discipline, and goals.
He spent a good deal of time on this work but gradually began to leave it behind. He then returned to it when Reinhard Heydrich appointed him Director of Church Affairs for the SD, a unit also called Amt II. 15
From his office, Albert Hartl controlled all operations against the Catholic Church in Germany. Now that Heydrich had been named supreme head of the Geheime Staatspolizei , or Gestapo, Hartl’s ambitions were clear. He wanted very much for the Amt II to stand out from the rest of the SD’s operational units so as to later be absorbed, with all its staff, into the Gestapo. Up till then, the Department of Church Affairs of the Gestapo had been a small office made up of ten agents who processed unimportant anonymous accusations for which they paid out small sums of money. Those arrested by the Gestapo, among them several Holy Alliance agents, were prosecuted only on moral charges. Albert Hartl wanted to escape from mundane bureaucratic police work and make his unit an important department of the Gestapo’s giant assembly of acronyms. He decided to include investigation of Catholic political organizations in Amt II’s tasks. Heydrich, he knew, had a deep distrust of them. 16 Hartl’s agents thus set about shadowing Catholic bishops, priests, diocesan administrators, politicians, editors, and journalists.
Between 1939 and 1941, Albert Hartl became the principal scourge of the German Catholic Church, leader of the Nazis’ own Inquisition against the Vatican, and ferocious hunter of the pope’s spies. The small SD Church Affairs unit became an important organization whose members were trained in a school outside Berlin. 17
Pius XI’s health had been declining since the previous November, and he barely had the strength for the 1938 Christmas celebrations. On Vatican Radio, his voice was noticeably weak. He spent most of the first months of 1939 in bed under the care of his personal physician.
On February 4, he got up early to conduct Mass, but a cardiac crisis sent him back to bed. Five days later, renal insufficiency deepened the crisis. He died peacefully on February 10 at 5:30 A.M .
The election of the next supreme pontiff was one of the most politicized in papal history. The Vatican became the first battlefield of the approaching world crisis. Bets on a successor were placed in all the foreign ministries of Europe and America. London, Washington, and Paris wanted a new pontiff who would continue the line of Pius XI, in opposition to the policies of Hitler and Mussolini. Rome and Berlin wanted a more pro-German pope.
The day of Pius XI’s death, French foreign minister Georges Bonnet suggested to the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Eric Phipps, that France and Great Britain should cooperate in ensuring the election of a cardinal whose sympathies were clearly democratic and anti-dictatorial. The French minister had an individual in mind, Pius XI’s secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli. 18
Britain’s representative in the Vatican, D’Arcy Osborne, assured the Foreign Office that Pacelli stood a good chance of being elected. The francophone cardinals met with the French ambassador to the Holy See, François Charles-Roux, and told him they would be voting for Pacelli. The only dissenter was Cardinal Tisserant, who preferred Cardinal Maglione, former nuncio in Paris with much more anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi ideas than Eugenio Pacelli’s.
Germany and Italy were equally active. The Italian ambassador to the Vatican, Bonifacio Pignatti, met with his German opposite number, Diego von Bergen, to discuss their preferences. Both of them likewise favored Eugenio Pacelli, but von Bergen told Pignatti that the Fuehrer had not discarded the idea of supporting Maurilio Fossati of Turin or Elia dalla Costa of Florence. 19
For Adolf Hitler, Pacelli was the ideal candidate, at the top of his list of preferences. He was a well-known Germanophile, had been an important nuncio in Germany for twelve years, spoke fluent German, and during his time as Vatican secretary of state, he had surrounded himself with an important coterie of Germans.
Ambassador von Bergen was not the only German observer in the Vatican with an interest in the conclave. The Amt II was also present. On Pius XI’s death, the Third Reich’s espionage services had managed to infiltrate an agent into the Holy See. Taras Borodajkewycz was from Vienna, born to Ukrainian parents. He had studied theology and claimed to have excellent contacts within the Roman curia. Obersturmbannführer Albert Hartl’s department decided to send him to the Vatican.
Unfortunately, Borodajkewycz’s contacts were not as good as he believed. Against expectations, his reports to Berlin were not satisfactory. The German spy alleged that one of the strongest candidates to succeed Pope Pius XI was Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, the pro-Fascist archbishop of Milan. In fact, Schuster did not win a single vote in the conclave. 20
Meanwhile, several cardinals and bishops had alerted Vatican counterespionage to the presence of a German agent. The S.P. was determined to eliminate any interference by foreign agents seeking to manipulate the votes of cardinals empowered to elect the next supreme pontiff. But they didn’t count on Albert Hartl and his Amt II’s ability to bring a pro-German pope to the Throne of St. Peter. To achieve this goal, the SD launched the so-called Operation Eitles Gold (Operation Pure Gold). Taras Borodajkewycz was to lead the operation.
The SD’s agent in the Vatican had convinced Hartl that with three million marks in gold ingots, the Reich could buy the election. Borodajkewycz assured Hartl and Josef Roth, director of the Catholic section of the Department of Religious Affairs for the Reich, that with this sum of money it would be possible to convince several cardinals to shift their votes to the two German favorites, cardinals Maurilio Fossati and Elia dalla Costa. A wave of optimism swept through the headquarters of the Amt II and the Department of Religious Affairs of the Reich in Berlin.
The next morning, the head of Amt II was ordered to appear, alongside Josef Roth, for an audience with the Fuehrer. Roth spoke first, explaining to the Nazi leader that if the Third Reich would supply the three million marks in gold ingots, perhaps they could “buy” the election of the new pope. Hartl was much more cautious than his colleague. Intelligently, he preferred to keep more in the background and not appear too optimistic in Hitler’s eyes. After all, if Operation Eitles Gold did not turn out as hoped, the responsibility would then fall on Josef Roth and his Department of Religious Affairs of the Reich. 21
Hitler approved the plan and ordered the Reichsbank to turn the three million marks in gold over to Himmler’s subordinates. The gold was sent to Rome by special train. While the valuable cargo was on its way to the Eternal City, the Holy Alliance received word of it. A report from the Berlin nunciature informed papal espionage in Rome that a cargo of gold had been shipped to Italy for the purpose of bribing high Church officials and possibly even cardinals who would be asked to change their votes during the conclave.
Taras Borodajkewycz, Hartl’s spy in the Vatican, had contacted a priest who claimed to work in the secretariat of state as a messenger between the members of the College of Cardinals. This priest told Borodajkewycz that he would take charge of sounding out Their Eminences. The German agent told his contact that Hitler and Himmler had personally approved a plan to give him three million marks in gold ingots from the Reichsbank. His idea was to keep some of the shipment for himself and turn the rest over to the cardinals who would vote for Germany’s favorites. 22
Borodajkewycz’s priestly contact assured him that with this quantity of money, they could live luxuriously somewhere in Switzerland. The German spy feared only the long arm of the SS, for he did not believe that Heinrich Himmler would simply sit on his hands after learning that one of his agents had made off with three million German marks that belonged to the Reich.
On March 1, 1939, at six in the morning, the conclave began with sixty-two cardinals assembled in the Sistine Chapel. On the first ballot, Pacelli received twenty-eight votes, followed by Cardinal dalla Costa and Cardinal Maglione. The necessary majority was not reached, and the vote was repeated.
In this second round, Cardinal Maglione won more votes, a total of thirty-five, which provoked another fumata nera , the plume of black smoke signaling an inconclusive vote. At 5:25 P.M . on March 2, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli won the papacy on the third ballot with forty-eight votes. This was the shortest conclave in three hundred years. Pacelli chose the name Pius XII in deference to his predecessors. 23
The news surprised the foreign ministry in Berlin, as it did the SS. Heinrich Himmler summoned Josef Roth and Albert Hartl and ordered them to get the shipment of gold back from the SD’s agent in Rome, Taras Borodajkewycz. The problem was that for some days, the SD spy had failed to communicate with Berlin. The gold did not appear.
Borodajkewycz’s last contact had come on February 27, three days before the papal election. That morning he had met with the priest from the secretariat of state in an apartment in Rome’s Trastevere district. After that, he vanished.
The Italian police found the SD spy’s body hanging by the neck from the roof of a small temple in one of the Eternal City’s parks. The Reich’s gold disappeared. Two versions of the story circulated for a long time. One said the German agent Taras Borodajkewycz had been executed by members of the SS sent to Rome by Heinrich Himmler and that the gold had been returned to the Reichsbank’s vaults. 24 The other widely repeated version, which grew nearly to the stature of a legend, was that Borodajkewycz’s priestly contact was really an agent of the Holy Alliance. This clergyman, allegedly, belonged to a secret society within the papal espionage service known as the Assassini , the heirs of the Black Order created by Olimpia Maidalchini in the seventeenth century.
An Abwehr report asserted that the SD agent Taras Borodajkewycz could have been executed by a papal agent named Niccolo Estorzi, with whom he had been in contact. The German military spy report claimed that Estorzi was a tall, handsome, dark-skinned man of about thirty with long black hair. Born in Venice, Estorzi had studied in a Roman seminary and, thanks to his knowledge of several languages, spent some months working for the Sodalitium Pianum . Soon afterwards, he joined the Holy Alliance, where he carried out special Vatican missions abroad.
Il Duce’s secret service had kept Borodajkewycz under close surveillance and even observed his meetings with the Holy Alliance agent. The last Italian espionage report is dated February 26, 1939. It claims that “Taras Borodajkewycz spent the entire day visiting foundries on the outskirts of Rome along with a tall, handsome, dark-complexioned man.” Evidently the German agent needed to erase any vestige of the Reichsbank symbol on the ingots, which led him to seek a foundry where he could recast the three million marks into new gold ingots.
Estorzi, it seems, could have made off with the gold after killing Taras Borodajkewycz. From Rome, the valuable cargo may have gone to the island of Murano, across from Venice, home for centuries to famous glass factories. In its ovens, the metal could have been recast into smaller ingots and from there taken to deposit in a Swiss bank, where it would rest under the Vatican seal displaying the papal tiara and two crossed keys, symbolizing those given by Christ to the Apostle Peter.
The truth is that the three million German marks in gold ingots disappeared from the face of the earth without leaving the smallest trace. Even today, the gold employed in Operation Eitles Gold remains one of the great mysterious treasures that vanished during the Second World War. 25
Four days after his election as pope, Pacelli decided to summon the four German-speaking cardinals, Their Eminences Bertram, Schulte, Faulhaber, and Innitzer. During the meeting, Pius XII brusquely informed them that he would continue personally directing the Catholic Church’s German affairs. At the end, he showed them a draft of a letter he was sending to Hitler the next day.
While Pius XI had planned to issue a strong protest against Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich regime, Pius XII wanted to moderate that position. His letter said:
To the illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Fuehrer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of Our Pontificate, We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people entrusted to your leadership…. Now that the responsibilities of Our pastoral function have increased Our opportunities, how much more ardently do We pray to reach that goal. May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God’s help, to fruition! 26
Pius XII’s explicit support for Hitler and his regime was confirmed when the supreme pontiff ordered Archbishop Orsenigo, his nuncio in Berlin, to open a gala reception on the occasion of the Fuehrer’s fiftieth birthday. From that year on, and throughout the years of the worldwide conflict, Adolf Hitler received an annual greeting from Cardinal Bertram of Berlin. The text was always the same:
Warmest congratulations to the Fuehrer in the name of the bishops and the dioceses in Germany. Fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars. 27
At the same time as Pope Pius XII’s birthday wishes reached Adolf Hitler, Hartl and his assistants at SD headquarters were analyzing and processing each bit of incoming data about people and organizations related to German Catholicism, including the Holy Alliance branch inside the Reich. In May 1939, Albert Hartl met with Josef Roth, former priest and theology professor who now directed the Catholic section of the Department of Religious Affairs of the Reich. Roth’s job was to maintain frequent contact with the country’s German bishops and lay Catholic leaders. His department controlled funds coming from outside the country for bishops and for priests traveling to the Vatican. Roth thus gathered a network of informers with whom he could discuss the results of their meetings in the Holy See. During one of those meetings, a priest told Josef Roth and Albert Hartl that the Vatican, through its espionage service the Holy Alliance, had a spy who came and went in and out of the Reich’s territories carrying funds and bringing messages from high Church figures back to the Holy See. This agent was known as The Messenger. 28
Hartl assigned several Amt II SD agents to uncover the Holy Alliance’s Messenger. All the priests he had interviewed spoke of this figure as if they had met him, but none had actually seen his face. No one could recognize him.
The Messenger spoke fluent German and thus managed to cross easily into the Reich. He was, in fact, none other than Niccolo Estorzi, the member of the Assassini who supposedly had eliminated the SD’s agent in the Vatican during Operation Eitles Gold .
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, for his part, had chosen a new head for the German military intelligence unit in Rome. His name was Josef Müller. When he stepped off his train onto Italian soil in the Central Station, newspaper headlines were announcing the entry of German troops into Poland. It was September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War began.
The so-called White Plan, meticulously prepared by Hitler and his generals since the previous April, was put into effect on the anticipated day, as the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and the Luftwaffe bombarded its cities and strafed its civilian population. After having conquered Austria and Czechoslovakia without firing a shot, Germany now overwhelmed Poland, which disappeared from the European map. 29
From that day on, Pope Pius XII ordered the heads of the Holy Alliance and the counterespionage unit Sodalitium Pianum to take measures affecting their communications with agents abroad and especially those operating in sensitive or war-torn zones.
Until 1939, the Vatican had used a code known as “Red.” It consisted of twelve thousand numerical groups, printed in a codebook with twenty-five lines per page. To heighten security, the Holy Alliance had established that the numerical groups should be converted to letters that would replace the page numbers by way of a diphthong drawn from a pair of tables to be used alternately on even and odd dates. The Vatican’s most secret messages—that is, all those sent by the supreme pontiff or those affecting the papal espionage services—were referred to as “Yellow” or “Green.”
“Yellow” was a code of thirteen thousand numerical groups used through diphthong tables that represented page numbers and randomized mixed alphabets to represent line numbers. These tables and alphabets rotated every day. The “Green” code, still used today, is one of the Vatican’s most closely guarded secrets, but indications are that it involves five-digit numerical codes assigned via short additive tables, each of which contains more than a hundred five-digit additive groups. Neither the “Yellow” nor the “Green” code was a mechanical one, which made them very difficult for the Italian and German intelligence services to break. 30 Out of almost eight thousand Vatican messages sent, the Italian Servizio Informazione Militare (SIM) succeeded in deciphering only about four hundred. Apparently, help in this effort came from the SIM’s infiltration unit, the Sezione Prelevamento , which had agents inside the papal police and the secretariat of state.
N ews of Poland’s tribulations had barely begun. While its thirty-five million inhabitants, most of them Catholics, faced the German blitzkrieg, Pope Pius XII remained silent. He ordered his secretary of state and the Vatican Radio (directed by the Jesuit superior-general Vladimir Ledochowski) to reduce radio broadcasts in German and temper their criticisms of the Reich about the invasion. The Polish ambassador to the Holy See hoped desperately for a public papal protest against Hitler’s policies. When the Vatican did not respond, he petitioned Pius XII to grant an audience to the prominent cardinal August Hlond. The meeting lasted two and a half hours, but the result was the same. The supreme pontiff refused to speak in Poland’s defense. 31
Reports on the German war machine signed by The Messenger continued rolling in to the Vatican from various parts of Germany. Thus the Holy Alliance became a real information source for other secret services, both those of the Allies and those of the Axis powers.
Josef Müller, the Abwehr agent, was a familiar figure in Rome, thanks to his many visits to the Eternal City. At the military intelligence headquarters at number 74 Tirpitz Ufer Strasse in Berlin, on the other hand, he was a mysterious, obscure character. Nobody knew where he had come from, which perhaps made him more dangerous in the eyes of his superiors. Curiously, something similar occurred within the Vatican hierarchy with respect to the Holy Alliance agent, the priest Niccolo Estorzi. What no one knew was that Müller and Father Estorzi were friends. Müller, a prestigious Munich lawyer, devout Catholic, and fervent anti-Nazi, had been assigned by Admiral Canaris to contact Pius XII by way of the Holy Alliance. To avoid raising suspicions, Canaris made his emissary head of the Abwehr station in Rome. 32
Before leaving Berlin, Müller met with Niccolo Estorzi to explain the dangerous mission on which Canaris was sending him to the Eternal City. The papal spy prepared the way for the German agent who had collaborated with the Holy Alliance in earlier times. The Messenger sent a long message in “Green” code to Cardinal Luigi Maglione, who had become secretary of state. These pages were filled with facts about Josef Müller and “Operation Amtlich Vatikanische” (Vatican Sources). 33
Müller, like his Abwehr assistants Colonel Hans Oster and Major Hans Dohnanyi, belonged to the circle of important anti-Nazis led by the retired general Ludwig Beck. Müller first met with the exiled Monsignor Ludwig Kaas (former leader of the Zentrum and now archpriest of the Basilica of St. Peter) and with Monsignor Johannes Schönhöffer (a member of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide). The meeting took place in the Dreher beer hall, much frequented by the German community in Rome.
Müller told Kaas and Schönhöffer that he needed to speak with the supreme pontiff in private to give him an important message from high dignitaries of his country and that he had strict orders not to speak with anyone other than the pope himself.
Kaas told the Abwehr agent that he would have to speak first with a German Jesuit and professor of ecclesiastical history named Robert Leiber. What few people knew was that this Jesuit was a sort of “special affairs” assistant to Pius XII. In Leiber, the Holy Father had a perfect assistant for intelligence matters, and many members of the curia claimed the Jesuit was, in fact, the head of the Holy Alliance. In any case, Father Robert Leiber was well-acquainted with the deepest secrets of the papacy. 34
During the meeting that ensued between Müller and Leiber, the German told the pope’s assistant that a wide circle of high-ranking German officials opposed to Hitler’s war policy wanted Pope Pius XII to sound out London about a possible negotiated peace, including a change of government in Berlin.
Leiber, through his agent Father Niccolo Estorzi, knew that the disorganized anti-Nazi resistance could never pull off a coup d’etat against Hitler and his men. What Müller’s superiors wanted was for London and Paris not to take advantage of any coup or coup attempt to make military advances against Germany.
Josef Müller’s relationship with the Holy Alliance dated from when German bishops and cardinals had discovered that their correspondence was being intercepted by the Gestapo. Thus Müller had become the secret courier between Germany and the Vatican, and vice versa. It was also Müller who helped set up the cover for Father Niccolo Estorzi, The Messenger, in Berlin.
After a brief stay in Munich, Müller was called to Rome through Father Estorzi. When Müller reached Italian soil, Leiber told the Abwehr agent that Pius XII had decided that the German opposition’s voice ought to be heard in London. This papal decision launched Josef Müller on a true clandestine mission that encompassed several months and many trips between Berlin and Rome.
Really, Müller succeeded not in talking directly with the supreme pontiff but only in communicating with him through Father Robert Leiber. Müller and Leiber met at first in the Jesuit priest’s rooms in the Gregorian University, but for security reasons, the meeting place then changed to a Jesuit church on the outskirts of Rome. 35
At last, in the spring of 1940, Leiber told Josef Müller that Pius XII had decided to receive him in his private rooms in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. The meeting would also be attended by Sir D’Arcy Osborne, the British ambassador to the Holy See.
The German repeated his whole story to the pope and Osborne, including the organization of the Operation Amtlich Vatikanische . When the Foreign Office was informed, the British government displayed skepticism about the credibility and the declared motives of the conspirators. Winston Churchill did not believe that they had sufficient support within either the military or the civilian population to successfully stage a coup against Adolf Hitler. Time proved him right, when Wehrmacht units conquered France and Holland.
To demonstrate the conspirators’ good faith, Josef Müller traveled to Rome at full speed to inform Pius XII that Hitler was preparing to launch a military campaign against France by way of Dutch and Belgian soil. The pope in turn ordered his nunciatures in Brussels and The Hague alerted and insisted they should put the governments of these nations on alert as well.
Leiber secretly informed the Belgian ambassador to the Holy See, Adrien Nieuwenhuys, who sent a cable to Brussels. For his part, Pius XII held a private audience with the crown prince of Italy, Umberto, and his wife, Princess Marie-Jose. The pope underlined the danger threatening Holland and the urgent need for Princess Marie to inform her brother, King Leopold. All these contacts took place between May 2 and May 4, 1940. On the 8th, however, both the Belgian and Dutch governments responded skeptically to the warnings and more so when they learned the source of the information was an Abwehr spy working for the Holy Alliance. That was their mistake. On May 10, the first German panzer units crossed the border on their way to France, blazing through Holland and Belgium in a trail of blood and fire.
The slight attention the Belgians and Dutch paid to the papal warning annoyed Pius XII and led him to order the Holy Alliance to set up secret relations with the British intelligence services and the Resistance in occupied France. By collaborating in secret negotiations with foreign governments and passing German and Italian military information to Allied countries, Pius XII put the Vatican’s traditional neutrality in grave danger. The pope ordered his advisor and spy Father Robert Leiber to destroy any papers, including both documents and notes, that bore on the relations between the Vatican state and the Allies or the German resistance.
Inside the Vatican, only three more men knew about those contacts: Luigi Maglione, the cardinal secretary of state, and his two trusted lieutenants Monsignor Domenico Tardini and Monsignor Giovanni Montini. All three carried the secret to their tombs.
The pope ordered his loyal spy and advisor to write up a list of people who could have had some kind of contact with Operation Amtlich Vatikanische . On the list appeared Monsignor Johannes Schönhöffer, Josef Müller’s friend; Monsignor Paul Maria Krieg, chaplain of the Swiss Guard and Schönhöffer’s confessor; Ivo Zeiger, a Jesuit at the Germano-Hungarian College of Rome; Augustine Mayer, a Benedictine monk and professor at the College of San Anselmo; Father Vincent McCormick, the American rector of the Gregorian University and Robert Leiber’s immediate superior; and the superior-general of the Jesuits, Father Vladimir Ledochowski. Pius XII ordered the six clergymen, under pain of excommunication, never to make public any aspect of Operation Amtlich Vatikanische . To the rest of the world, even today, none of this ever happened. Thus was forged another legend in the long history of the Holy Alliance.