Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak to them all that I command thee. Be not afraid at their presence: for I will make thee not to fear their countenance. For behold I have made thee this day a fortified city, and a pillar of iron, and a wall of brass, over all the land, to the kings of Judah, to the princes thereof, and to the priests, and to the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee, and shall not prevail .
—Jeremiah 1:17–19
H erbert Keller was a dangerous man, ambitious and totally lacking in scruples. A Benedictine monk, he had belonged to a long-established abbey in Beuron, but just before the war his superior had ordered him exiled to a desert monastery in Palestine.
On his return to Germany, Keller had become a sporadic informant for the Abwehr and the SD, the Nazi party’s intelligence service. The monk passed on to the Nazis any bits of intelligence he gathered as he traveled through France, Germany, and Switzerland in search of old books and manuscripts for the abbey’s library. When Hitler and his armies flattened Poland, Herbert Keller found work more in accord with his ambitions, so he left monastic life. 1
His career in the world of espionage was always motivated more by money than by loyalty. His first mission for the Abwehr took him to Switzerland, where he made contact with important figures in the anti-Nazi resistance.
Amidst women, brandy, and good cigars, some of these informants let slip the news that certain Abwehr and Wehrmacht officials were conspiring to depose Hitler and that an Abwehr agent named Müller was in contact with the Vatican and its espionage service, the Holy Alliance, through a priest known as The Messenger. Herbert Keller learned that Müller and The Messenger had been trying to negotiate a peace with the Allies that would take hold once they had managed to topple Hitler.
Keller already knew Müller. They had become bitter enemies when the Munich lawyer had helped the Benedictines investigate the matter that led to Keller’s exile. Hoping to find more evidence against the Holy Alliance collaborator, Herbert Keller set off for Rome. Within a few days, he knew all the details of the conspiracy and of Josef Müller’s mission and his important role in the plot.
Keller returned to Germany with his report. On reaching Berlin, the monk hurried to the headquarters of the Abwehr and the SD. His report was deemed so important that it landed on the desk of Reinhard Heydrich, now head of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Head Office of Reich Security. 2 The former Benedictine’s precision impressed Heydrich, so the powerful RSHA chief summoned Herbert Keller to meet face-to-face. After expressing his hatred of the pope, whom he accused of being the worst conspirator against the Reich, Heydrich told Keller that Josef Müller had been under surveillance since 1936.
Reinhard Heydrich was convinced that Müller was a secret agent in Vatican service, and now that he had in hand a report on the operation called Amtlich Vatikanische , he was sure of it. 3 The first inkling of impending disaster for the plotters leaked out through Arthur Nebe, head of the RSHA’s criminal police. Nebe made a copy of Herbert Keller’s report and sent it to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was in charge of the Abwehr. Canaris took quick action to try to protect as many of the plotters as possible. 4
Canaris was an enigmatic figure motivated by his loyalty to Germany and by his hatred for the Nazi party and its leaders. Those twin motives led him to aid and protect anti-Nazi currents. To mitigate the danger he saw coming, Canaris asked Müller for an urgent report in which he would claim to have discovered a Vatican plot to make peace with the Allies. As the chief conspirators, Müller should name generals Werner von Fritsch and Walter von Reichenau. Canaris knew that von Fritsch had died in the Polish campaign and thus could not be interrogated, while von Reichenau was a well-known and fervent follower of Hitler and the Third Reich. Neither of the two had ever had anything to do with anti-Nazi circles, but Heydrich would surely be seeking some guilty party who could state that Müller was a spy for Pius XII and his Holy Alliance.
Canaris had been much more skillful than Reinhard Heydrich. When the false report reached the Fuehrer, Hitler insisted that Walter von Reichenau was one of his most loyal generals and it was impossible for his “most loyal son” to have conspired with the Vatican against the Reich. Finally, Hitler called the accusation against Werner von Fritsch and Walter von Reichenau “garbage.” The Abwehr chief thus managed to divert suspicion from the Vatican and Josef Müller, at least for a while. 5
In the summer of 1940, German intelligence once again picked up the trail of Operation Amtlich Vatikanische . In May, Adrien Nieuwenhuys, Belgium’s ambassador to the Holy See, telegraphed his ministry in Brussels about Pope Pius XII’s warning of the impending Wehrmacht offensive on the Western Front. His coded telegram was intercepted by the Forschungsamt (Research Office), one of the Third Reich’s code-breaking services.
The decoded message reached the Fuehrer, who ordered the Abwehr to carry out an in-depth operation and expose the traitors. Reinhard Heydrich, who still had Father Herbert Keller’s report fresh in his mind, was kept at arm’s length from this operation because of his report about Werner von Fritsch and Walter von Reichenau. Canaris had maneuvered the SD into being the agency that passed Müller’s false report to Adolf Hitler.
To run the new investigation ordered by the Fuehrer, Wilhelm Canaris chose none other than Josef Müller. The German spy returned to Rome to inform the “alleged” head of the Holy Alliance, the German Jesuit Father Robert Leiber, that they needed to invent a story that would convince Adolf Hitler, something that could credibly end with Ambassador Nieuwenhuys’s message to Brussels about the German threat. Leiber and Müller put their heads together and invented an operation called “Wind Westlich” (West Wind). The two spies’ idea was to create an entire spy operation, but working backwards from the end to the beginning.
Leiber proposed that the leak should come from someone in the orbit of Italy’s foreign affairs minister, Galeazzo Ciano. Of course, Ciano had been told of the impending Wehrmacht operation by his opposite number, Joachim von Ribbentrop. 6
The next step was to explain that the information about the military operation had been leaked by someone unknown, close to Ciano, and come to the attention of Father Monnens, a Belgian Jesuit who in turn had passed it on to his country’s ambassador in Rome, Adrien Nieuwenhuys. Robert Leiber knew that neither Nieuwenhuys nor Father Monnens was within the German security services’ reach. Nieuwenhuys had diplomatic immunity, while Father Monnens was on a mission somewhere in the jungles of Central Africa. Müller and Leiber thought this version would calm the Nazi leaders, but they were wrong. Reinhard Heydrich was not inclined that way.
An Abwehr lieutenant colonel named Joachim Rohleder, a friend of Heydrich’s, smelled a rat in the story. Rohleder studied the Belgian ambassador’s intercepted and decoded telegram. In the text, Nieuwenhuys mentioned a German source who had left Berlin on April 29, 1940, arrived in Rome on May 1, and stayed in Rome until the 3rd. With these data, Heydrich’s friend the Abwehr official decided to review the list of all German citizens who had left the country on that day. Among the names appeared Josef Müller’s. He had entered Italy on April 29 and returned on May 4.
Rohleder then contacted the Abwehr station in Munich, to which Müller was attached, to ask whether he had gone to Rome on the indicated days. Josef Müller, the Holy Alliance collaborator, had covered his tracks by reporting Venice as his destination. He had made use of Italian Holy Alliance agents within the Border Guard who had stamped his passport to demonstrate his entry into the beautiful city of the north. But Rohleder remained convinced that Josef Müller’s contacts with the papal espionage service were the key to this mystery, and he told Heydrich as much. For a while the investigation stalled, until the Abwehr station in Stockholm took an interest in a well-known Catholic journalist, Siegfried Ascher. Ascher had visited Rome for the first time in 1935. Shortly afterwards, he got a job as secretary to Father Friedrich Muckermann, a German Jesuit famous for his fierce anti-Nazi statements. 7
Alongside Muckermann, Ascher found his way into all important sectors of the Vatican curia, amassing a long list of friends. In 1937, when the Jesuits assigned Muckermann to Vienna, Ascher went along. When Germany annexed Austria in the so-called Anschluss, Ascher had to escape to Holland and then to Switzerland, where he got a job as Vatican correspondent for the Basler Nachrichten newspaper. After the approval of the racial laws, Ascher had needed to change cities, because his hidden secret was that his first name was not really Siegfried but Gabriel. He had converted from Judaism not so many years before.
At the end of 1940, Ascher found a new and better source of income—Abwehr Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Rohleder. The German counterespionage official had not given up his investigation of Josef Müller. Armed with valuable anti-Nazi credentials from his work with Father Muckermann, Ascher began to penetrate the security barriers with which Pope Pius XII had surrounded the Holy Alliance after the Amtlich Vatikanische case.
In January 1941, Siegfried Ascher was ready to travel to Rome from Berlin after having gone through rigorous training in the Abwehr’s school for agents. 8
Ascher got the editor of the Basler Nachrichten to write him a letter of accreditation as correspondent in the Holy See. The Abwehr spy told his boss that he didn’t need payment, because he would be paid directly by the Vatican. Of course, he was lying. At the end of April, Siegfried Ascher met in Berlin with Lieutenant Colonel Rohleder to get the necessary funds for his trip to Rome. Before leaving, he telephoned the Vatican’s nuncio, Cardinal Cesare Orsenigo, asking him for a letter of introduction. The cardinal referred Ascher to an influential figure in the Vatican secretariat of state, Monsignor Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. In the Holy See, within only one week, Siegfried Ascher was received by Montini, Father Leiber, and Monsignor Kaas. Thanks to his cover as a journalist specializing in Church affairs, nobody suspected him at first. But Father Robert Leiber could not believe that someone of Jewish origin could travel freely through Germany. Leiber contacted his agent Niccolo Estorzi, The Messenger, to find out all he could about Ascher.
Leiber also got a warning from the highest official of the Benedictine order that Ascher might have had contacts with Herbert Keller, the SD agent and former monk. Estorzi told Leiber that a Jew masquerading as a journalist had recently been trained at the Abwehr school, in the counterespionage division, and that perhaps he was Swedish in origin.
Leiber then called Siegfried Ascher, planning to ask him about his travel through Germany. The spy excused himself from meeting with Leiber, claiming work pressures made it impossible. Robert Leiber then told Montini that his Holy Alliance agent in Germany had asserted that Siegfried Ascher might be a dangerous Gestapo agent. 9
The fact was that by late February 1941, Rohleder’s agent had a more or less clear idea of Josef Müller’s mission in the Vatican and of Pius XII’s complicity in warning the Dutch and Belgian governments in the spring of 1940 about the possible German intervention that soon came to pass.
Siegfried Ascher’s final report was absolutely conclusive, and Rohleder communicated this to Canaris. The Abwehr chief tried to downplay the report, saying that without more concrete proof, it would be impossible to arrest one of his agents most skilled in Vatican affairs. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was not going to let Rohleder and Ascher capture Müller. Finally, the report, labeled “Müller, Josef,” was hidden in the depths of the Reich’s military intelligence archives.
In late 1942, the SS arrested Ascher on a street in Berlin. Someone had filed a report in the form of an accusation, conveniently demonstrating the German spy’s Jewish origin. Ascher was turned over to the Gestapo without the Abwehr being informed. When Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Rohleder, head of counterespionage, learned of Ascher’s arrest, it was too late. The journalist had died under interrogation. Various writers and historians have said that by this time, Canaris had fallen into disgrace in Hitler’s eyes, and a chasm had opened between the Reich’s security forces, the Abwehr and the SS. Perhaps for this reason, when Himmler’s SS agents got the report demonstrating the Abwehr agent’s Jewish origins, they preferred to turn him over to the Gestapo for interrogation. 10
Other sources claim that during the months before Siegfried Ascher’s arrest by the SS, The Messenger of the Holy Alliance had been traveling through Holland and Sweden gathering information about the journalist. In fact, it was Father Robert Leiber, head spy of Pius XII, who ordered Father Niccolo Estorzi to set up this way of getting rid of the dangerous Siegfried Ascher. Once again, the long arm of the Vatican’s Holy Alliance had struck a decisive blow against one of its enemies.
Meanwhile, Josef Müller, thanks to protection from Colonel Hans Oster and Major Hans Dohnanyi, both members of the anti-Hitler network, was named head of the Abwehr station in the Vatican.
A new danger faced the Holy See with the arrival of another German spy. Paul Franken reached Rome in February 1943 to serve as a history professor in a German school on the Nomentana, though in fact he was a military spy.
His preferred contacts were Josef Müller, Monsignor Kaas, Krieg, Schönhöffer, Ivo Zeiger, and the head of papal spies, Robert Leiber. Because of his background as a Catholic student who had been involved in workers’ movements before the war, Franken had been arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to two years in prison for activities against the regime. 11 All this helped him to swim in the deep and dark waters of the Roman curia.
Jacob Kaiser, a former labor leader, recruited Franken for the Abwehr because of his knowledge of Vatican politics, and that was what caused him to be sent to the Holy See. Leiber once again got in contact with The Messenger, in search of information about Franken. Two weeks later, Estorzi sent his chief a coded message from an Austrian city. The message, coded in “Green,” was deciphered. The Holy Alliance agent’s text warned Leiber about Paul Franken’s true intentions, though without many definitive statements. Pius XII’S spy decided to keep the German “in quarantine.” 12
On July 25, 1943, the Holy Alliance’s alarm bells rang again when King Victor Emmanuel II, supported by generals and Fascist leaders, decided to dismiss Mussolini and name Marshal Pietro Badoglio as his replacement. Il Duce’s dreams of creating a new Roman empire dissolved at the same rate as the Italian army. The Allies had invaded Sicily on July 10, with the goal of freeing the entire Italian peninsula from the German yoke. After Mussolini’s fall, Hitler, anticipating the collapse of the Italian army, decided to send German troops to northern Italy. News reaching the Vatican from its agent Niccolo Estorzi gave clear indications that Wehrmacht units were assembling to prepare for an assault on Rome. The papal spy’s warnings came true on September 8, when Badoglio officially announced the signing of an armistice with the Anglo-U.S. forces that had by now occupied the southern part of the country. Hitler and his generals gave the go-ahead for German occupation of the Eternal City. 13
The German leader’s intentions were unclear. Rumors spread through Rome that the Fuehrer was convinced that Pius XII and his spy services had helped bring down Mussolini. In any case, papal authorities did not have many illusions about the respect Hitler would show for Vatican neutrality or the figure of the supreme pontiff. According to reports that papal espionage had already gathered, in the spring of 1941, during a meeting between the Italian foreign affairs minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had suggested the possibility of expelling Pius XII from Rome, because “the new Europe has no room for the papacy. In the new Europe dominated by National Socialism, the Vatican will be reduced to a mere museum.” 14 In spite of calming messages from the Italian government, the rumors grew ever more real toward the end of 1943, the Nazis’ tenth year in power. By then, German paratroopers already controlled the perimeter of the Piazza di San Pietro under the apprehensive eyes of the Swiss Guard.
Anticipating an attack on Rome by the troops of the Third Reich, foreign embassies had destroyed documents classified as “secret” or “sensitive,” as well as their cryptographic coding machines. The Swiss Guard’s commander received word that the Holy Father did not want any bloodshed and that his troops were not to resist a German invasion of the Vatican if it came. 15
The officer refused to accept such an order, and he had to be called personally before the pope to confirm it. In fact, Hitler’s plans did not include capturing the Vatican or the supreme pontiff. Adolf Hitler found himself between pressures from two sides. Josef Goebbels, the Reich’s sinister Minister of Propaganda, told the Fuehrer that an invasion of the Vatican would have a devastating effect on world public opinion. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, advised Hitler to take advantage of the opportunity to rid himself of such a nuisance as the pope. 16
In May of 1944, Paul Franken returned to Germany just as the Allied armies threatened to take Rome from the Axis. In February, after a series of mistakes by the Abwehr and the desertion of several of its members, Hitler had signed a decree subordinating it to the RSHA, the Nazi organization that controlled all the police and intelligence forces of the Reich. Admiral Canaris was demoted to a lesser job in the war economy department, while the Gestapo grew ever more interested in the strange contacts between civilians and Abwehr personnel.
Their investigations led to the arrest of Colonel Hans Oster and Major Hans Dohnanyi, two of the most important anti-Nazi thinkers in the Abwehr. Both refused to talk about their contacts with the Vatican and the Holy Alliance, despite being tortured. Finally they were executed. Each man was shot in the back of the head and his body hung from a butcher’s hook.
The next to face arrest and brutal interrogation was Josef Müller. The agent denied all charges and any role in anti-Nazi plots involving the Vatican. He was one of the few Abwehr members to escape death.
Paul Franken, for his part, resigned his post in the Wehrmacht’s military intelligence, trying to avoid the attention of the Gestapo and the SS. He got a new job as a translator for Italian workers in Germany. He managed to survive the Nazi regime and the war. 17
In those years, everyone in the Vatican, and especially the Roman curia, was in favor of one side or the other. The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Maglione, and his top aides, Monsignors Montini and Tardini, had given orders to all high-ranking members of the curia not to talk or maintain any kind of contact with members of the German embassy to the Holy See.
Soon, however, the Holy Alliance reported nearly daily contacts by Bishop Alois Hudal, 18 the pro-Nazi rector of the German religious schools in Rome, with high members of the Third Reich’s diplomatic staff. In a few years, Hudal would become one of the key figures in the “Odessa” 19 organization, created by former SS members to help war criminals escape to South America along the so-called Vatican Ratline. Little by little, the tide of war turned against the Axis. The remnants of Germany’s glorious Sixth Army surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad; in Africa, Marshal Erwin Rommel’s powerful Afrika Korps surrendered along with Italian units to the Anglo-U.S. forces, leaving the Mediterranean coast open to the landing in Sicily. U.S. bombers tirelessly pummeled the Nazi war industries, while the British reduced entire cities to ashes, as in the case of Dresden, bombed on Tuesday, February 14, 1945, in revenge for the Nazi bombardments of London.
Ernst von Weizsäcker, who had replaced Diego von Bergen as head of the German embassy in the Holy See, wanted papal mediation to end the war, but this was merely a dream. Now he needed to convince Pope Pius XII to negotiate a European peace that would avoid a total German defeat with the concomitant “Sovietization” of the whole continent or of Eastern Europe at the least. There were two spies left in the diplomatic legation, Harold Friedrich Leith-Jasper, whose cover position was press attaché, and Carl von Clemm-Hohenberg, an obscure intelligence officer assigned as commercial attaché. In the fall of 1942, Leith-Jasper informed Berlin of repeated trips by Myron Taylor, President Roosevelt’s representative to the Vatican. Curiously, despite the U.S. being at war with Italy, Taylor could enter and leave Rome without problems. This report reached Heinrich Himmler in Berlin. The powerful SS chief ordered Carl von Clemm-Hohenberg to “liquidate” Myron Taylor during one of his trips. The order went through the German foreign affairs ministry, in a special dispatch.
At the same time, another dispatch arrived at Holy Alliance headquarters in the Vatican, informing them of the possible assassination of an Allied diplomat. Father Robert Leiber reported the information gathered by his agent, Father Niccolo Estorzi, to the supreme pontiff.
The Holy Alliance also alerted U.S. and British secret services to the threat, adding the contents of another dispatch from the same source, which said that three Gestapo agents had been sent to Rome to carry out the attempt. Leiber knew he had to save the American representative. On the morning of January 22, 1943, the three Nazi agents reached Italy by train and were aided by Italian agents. They moved into a small apartment from which they planned to run the operation.
For weeks, they watched Myron Taylor’s every move. Finally, at the end of February, they decided it was time to strike. Their plan was to follow the American diplomat’s car and machine-gun it at a propitious moment. The day before the attempt, one of the Gestapo agents disappeared without a trace, but his two partners decided to go ahead.
On a highway leading out of Rome, the two Nazi agents saw their target parked by the side of the road. They opened their windows and started shooting at the car and its single passenger, and then they fled.
After the shooting, they returned to the train station and disappeared. Once in Berlin, they reported to Himmler to tell him of their successful operation. That was a mistake. The man they had killed in the diplomat’s car was the vanished Nazi agent. Someone had kidnapped him, drugged him, and put him in the car. Myron Taylor continued his special missions between Washington and the Vatican for President Roosevelt, without ever knowing that the papal spy service had saved his life.
It was Harold Friedrich Leith-Jasper who informed Himmler that a German secret agent had seen Myron Taylor entering the Vatican alive, to the surprise of the much-feared SS chief.
The Reich’s intelligence operations aimed at the Vatican and the Holy Alliance multiplied in the last years of the war. In June 1941, Walter Schellenberg, a young and fanatical officer, had taken control of Amt VI , the RSHA division in control of foreign espionage. From then on, Amt VI was in ultimate charge of intelligence operations in the Vatican.
With the creation of the RSHA, Albert Hartl’s intelligence section for Church affairs was transferred to the Gestapo, the secret police. Hartl, the SD specialist, was not much liked by the Gestapo commanders, mainly because he defended his own freedom of action, preferring to do his work without indiscreet observation by colleagues. 20
Hartl was also accused of hiding important information and knowledge from his opposite numbers in other security departments. This charge reached the ears of the Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, who viewed Hartl’s methods with hostility. He decided to open an investigation to gather evidence that would allow him to charge Hartl with high treason. A week later, Müller concluded that Hartl, the former priest, was in fact a Jesuit and a double agent serving the Holy Alliance from inside the German secret services.
Adding to his troubles, Hartl had made himself famous in Berlin’s nightlife scene for his sexual conquests. His indiscretions with female RSHA personnel had brought him serious sanctions, but he was not inclined to sacrifice his personal life for the Fuehrer’s cause.
During a trip from Vienna to Berlin, Albert Hartl tried to seduce a sixteen-year-old girl who turned out to be the daughter of a high SS officer. Heinrich Müller then decided to demote Hartl and assign him to the Jewish extermination squads on the Russian front. When Reinhard Heydrich learned this, he issued a counterorder. In memory of past services rendered, Albert Hartl was sent as an RSHA field officer to Kiev, with the task of controlling public opinion in the occupied Ukraine. The man who had created one of the Nazis’ most effective units for use against the Vatican and the Holy Alliance never again ran an espionage operation. From then on, Third Reich intelligence services responded to the “Heydrich Directive.”
In 1941, Heydrich had attended a conference at Gestapo headquarters, at which the most important topics had been espionage operations against the Catholic Church, which included the “Vatican International Policy and Our Intelligence Operations” and “Intelligence Operations in the Conflict with the Political Catholicism within the Reich.” Heydrich had spoken to those present about the need to improve espionage against the papacy through counterespionage operations to detect agents of the Holy Alliance and the Sodalitium Pianum in Germany and the occupied countries. 21
The so-called Heydrich Directive ordered all the Reich’s espionage and security forces to double their efforts to penetrate Vatican security. The first measure implementing the Directive was the dispatch of RSHA agents to all German embassies to collect information on Vatican connections in each country. This was Reinhard Heydrich’s idea, and he convinced Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, to create “police attachés” in the foreign legations. The police attaché in Germany’s Vatican embassy was Richard Haidlen, an unscrupulous man loyal to Heydrich.
In early 1942, Haidlen was replaced by Werner Picot, a policeman well-connected inside the RSHA and the foreign affairs ministry. Picot was also a loyal Heydrich man. Each day, the all-powerful head of the Central Security Department of the Reich was kept informed about the actions of foreign secret services, the Holy Alliance, and the Italian intelligence service by concise reports that Picot wrote personally. Little by little, Werner Picot became a fixture at social events in the palaces of the Holy See, where he was invited by pro-Fascist cardinals. When the RSHA officer was out of the embassy, Heydrich turned the security work over to Major Herbert Kappler, the police attaché at the German embassy to Italy. 22 Kappler was a violent man, a lover of torture. He was short and blond and had a face scarred from the duels of his youth.
Kappler’s first agent inside the Vatican was the assistant to a professor at the Gregorian University, the Jesuit university in Rome. This man had volunteered his services after reading Hitler’s political manifesto Mein Kampf . Kappler’s spy used his position at the Gregorian to open professors’ mail and listen to their conversations so as to personally inform Herbert Kappler later. Named monitor in charge of students, the spy was called to Berlin by Archbishop Michael von Faulhaber. The Sodalitium Pianum had informed Pius XII’S spy Robert Leiber about a supposed German agent in the Gregorian University. On Leiber’s insistence, the German spy was sent back to Berlin.
Another of the famous Nazi spies in the Vatican was Alfred von Kageneck, son of an aristocratic German Catholic family. Recruited by Kappler’s assistant Helmut Loos in May 1940, Kageneck was sent to Rome because of his excellent relations with Father Leiber, a family friend. On each trip to Rome, the German spy gathered important information for his superiors in Berlin, but what no one knew until after the war was that Kageneck actually worked for the Holy Alliance’s Teutonicum , the papal counterespionage division in charge of feeding disinformation to the Third Reich’s security services. 23
Both Kappler and Loos were convinced that at last they had managed to penetrate the hermetic papal spy services. Alfred von Kageneck had been recruited by the Holy Alliance in April of that same year and immediately assigned to the Teutonicum by Father Robert Leiber. During his first trip to Rome, Kageneck confessed his connections with the Nazis’ Amt VI to the Jesuit, as well as the purpose of his visit. Leiber informed Pope Pius XII and the Jesuit superior-general. Both advised Leiber to continue his contacts with the double agent.
For each meeting, the Holy Alliance prepared a report with documents that would appear important and sensitive. The Teutonicum agent in turn passed them on to Helmut Loos at the German embassy in Rome.
In the following years, information came and went from the Vatican to Berlin and vice versa, always by way of Alfred von Kageneck. The double agent betrayed to the Holy Alliance the names of German spies recruited by Amt VI to infiltrate the Vatican. His reports brought down Charles Bewley, a former Irish diplomat who had been ambassador in Germany and the Vatican. They also brought the downfall of Werner von Schulenberg, a German ex-army officer who had retired to Rome in hope of becoming a writer. Schulenberg frequented the aristocratic and intellectual circles of the Eternal City on the pretext of strengthening German-Italian cultural relations. Both Bewley and Schulenberg worked for the German spy apparatus for money. 24
Heydrich was determined to penetrate the halls of the Vatican one way or another. He suggested to various priests loyal to the Reich that they should lend their hands to the effort. One of the most effective was the director of the College of Santa Maria dell’Anima—or simply “Anima” for short—a religious center near the Piazza Navona. The director was Bishop Alois Hudal, whom the Holy Alliance called the “Black Bishop” because of his sympathies for the Nazi regime and Heinrich Himmler. At first Hudal had been declared persona non grata by the secretariat of state because of a Sodalitium Pianum report suggesting the Austrian was really an agent of the Third Reich’s secret services.
Alois Hudal had important social relations with members of the powerful Roman curia, so he circulated easily in its carpeted salons. One day the Holy Alliance informed Robert Leiber that Hudal was writing a paper he planned to present to both Adolf Hitler and Pope Pius XII. The paper put forth a series of arguments in favor of reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the National Socialist regime. Leiber ordered his agents to make off with the document before it could become public. He gave that mission to Alfred von Kageneck, the Holy Alliance spy in the RSHA. Kageneck had been introduced to Hudal during a Holy Week celebration in 1941. It didn’t take much for him to get a job at the Anima promoting German-Italian cultural relations.
When the original document was nearly complete, the manuscript disappeared from Hudal’s safe. It was never found, but some sources allege that it found its way to Leiber and from him to the pope, who ordered it sent to the Vatican Secret Archive where it still rests today, long forgotten. Several writers and historians have claimed that the document clearly showed Pius XII’s knowledge of the “Final Solution” 25 to the Jewish problem and the extermination of Orthodox Serbs by pro-Nazi Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic’s Ustashe movement. The pope always refused to send a clear message of protest and condemnation of these atrocities. 26
Pope Pius XII and the members of the papal espionage services had for years seen the Croats as the Catholic Church’s outpost in the Balkans. When Hitler decided to invade the country on April 6, 1941, as part of his offensive against Greece, the Croatian Fascists declared independence. On the 12th, Adolf Hitler announced a plan that awarded “Aryan” status to an independent Croatia led by Ante Pavelic. Pavelic’s group, the Ustashe, 27 had opposed the formation of a southern Slavic kingdom after the First World War.
Between 1941 and 1945, the Ustashe carried out a terror campaign based on the systematic killing of Orthodox Serbs, gypsies, Jews, and communists. Ante Pavelic’s idea was to create a pure Catholic Croatia through forced conversion, deportation, and extermination. The massive torture and killing were so terrible that even some members of German army units sent reports to their superiors in Berlin denouncing the Ustashe excesses.
The historical legacy behind the formation of the so-called NDH (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska , or Independent State of Croatia) consisted of a combination of old loyalties to the papacy that dated back thirteen centuries and a flaming resentment of the Serbs and their Orthodox religion because of injustices committed in the past. 28 For the Catholic Croats, the Serbs were guilty of favoring the Orthodox religion, encouraging schisms among Catholics, and colonizing Catholic areas so as to make them majority Orthodox. From the start of Pavelic’s government, Pius XII publicly supported Croatian Catholic nationalism. He stated during a pilgrimage of Croats to Rome in November 1939 that the Ustashe were “the great outpost of Christianity,” using the same words that had been spoken by Leo X. “The hope of a better future seems to be smiling on you, a future in which the relations between Church and State in your country will be regulated in harmonious action to the advantage of both,” said Pius XII to the group who had come to the Vatican under the leadership of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb. 29
O n April 25, 1941, the new authorities decreed a ban on all printed materials in the Cyrillic alphabet. A month later they approved anti-Semitic laws. At the end of May, the first Jews of Zagreb were deported to extermination camps. The Holy Alliance began to send coded telegrams to Father Robert Leiber in the Vatican about massacres of civilians and of Orthodox priests. Mysteriously, the secretariat of state urged its agents deployed in the Independent State of Croatia to avoid any “brushes” with the authorities.
On July 14 of that same year, the Croatian minister of justice gathered the country’s bishops to inform them that an important sector of the population, mostly of Orthodox religion, should not be included in the forced conversions so as “not to contaminate Catholicism in Holy Croatia.” When Stepinac asked what to do with those people, the official replied, “The options for them are deportation or extermination.”
On this premise the Ustashes, whom the pope had called the “great outpost of Christianity,” set out on a wave of indiscriminate killing. Holy Alliance agents, despite the warnings coming from the Vatican, continued to document the atrocities. 30
On April 28, 1941, an agent who signed his communications with the initials L.T . sent Father Leiber a report describing how “a band of Ustashe attacked six villages in the Bjelovar district and detained 250 men, including a schoolteacher and an Orthodox priest. The victims were made to dig a ditch and were bound with wire. Then they were pushed into the ditch and buried alive.” Another report that came through an agent of the papal counterespionage unit Sodalitium Pianum and was dated May 11, 1941, said: “The Ustashe took 331 Serbs prisoner, including an Orthodox Serbian priest and his nine-year-old son. The victims were hacked to pieces with axes. The priest was forced to pray while his son was torn apart. Later they tortured him, pulling out his beard, gouging out his eyes, and skinning him alive.”
After the massacre, about which the Vatican had been informed by its secret agents, Pavelic (who styled himself Poglavnik , the Croatian equivalent of the German Fuehrer) decided to visit Italy to sign a pact with Benito Mussolini. During this visit, Ante Pavelic had a secret meeting with Pius XII. The Poglavnik ‘s action of kissing the papal ring not only symbolized the Holy See’s recognition of the Independent State of Croatia but also sealed the pope’s silence about the past and future atrocities committed by the Ustashe mobs in the name of the Catholic religion.
In his book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII , writer John Cornwell states that almost 487,000 Orthodox Serbs and 27,000 gypsies were killed between 1941 and 1945. Some 30,000 to 45,000 Jews who made up the Jewish community of Yugoslavia died as well. Of these last, 20,000 to 22,000 perished in Ustashe concentration camps, while the rest were deported to the gas chambers.
The Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac, 31 supported the fundamental principles of the new State of Croatia from the outset and pressured Pope Pius XII to recognize Ante Pavelic as one of the principal bulwarks of the Catholic Church in Slavic Europe. To Stepinac, Pavelic was “a sincere Catholic,” as the monsignor wrote in his diary. From the pulpit he asked his parishioners to offer their sincere prayers for the Poglavnik , while other priests, always Franciscans, actively participated in the massacres. 32
A Holy Alliance agent reported to the Vatican:
Many of them [Franciscan priests] go around armed and carry out their murderous actions with extraordinary zeal. A priest named Bozidar Bralow, known for always carrying a machine gun, was accused of dancing around the corpses of a hundred and eighty Serbs killed in Alipasin-Most, and another of haranguing the Ustashe mobs with crucifix in hand while they cut the throats of Serbian women.
That last vignette was also related by an Italian journalist who added in his report that the massacre had taken place in Banja Luka.
Another researcher, Jonathan Steinberg, had access to the document and photograph archives of the Italian ministry of foreign affairs, which contained images of the massacres and decoded reports from papal espionage agents informing their superiors of the extermination of whole Orthodox cities and towns. All his discoveries appear in his book All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941–1943 . The question posed by many people then and now is how and why the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, the Vatican, Catholic authorities in Croatia, and Catholic intelligence services did absolutely nothing to stop the massacres, or even simply to denounce them.
Steinberg unearthed a letter sent by the Primate Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac, to the dictator Ante Pavelic in which the priest cited the favorable opinions of all the Croatian bishops toward forced conversions and affirmed that the bishop of Mostar, Monsignor Miscic, was very much in favor of using all means necessary to “save countless souls” in Croatia. Stepinac, after praising the religious conversion operations of the Croatian authorities, went on to say, “In the parish of Klepca, seven hundred schismatics from the neighboring villages were slaughtered.” Many of those were executed in the Jasinovac concentration camp, one of the largest of the time. 33
The majority of the bishops, the Holy See itself, the secretariat of state, and even Pope Pius XII took advantage of Yugoslavia’s defeat by the Nazis to increase the power and reach of Catholicism in the Balkans. The Croatian bishops’ inability to distance themselves from the regime, to denounce it, to excommunicate Ante Pavelic and his accomplices, stemmed from their desire to take advantage of the opportunities this “good occasion” offered for constructing a powerful Catholic base in the Balkans.
The writer and investigator John Cornwell also gained access to documents in the Vatican Secret Archives, including a report from the Congregation for the Eastern Churches that indicated that the Vatican knew about the forced conversions as of July 1941. Cornwell also found a Holy Alliance document that described the deportation of nearly six thousand Jews to a barren island without food or water. “All attempts to come to their assistance had been forbidden by the Croat authorities,” the report of the papal espionage service said. There is no record of any Vatican response or initiative on this subject.
Father Cherubino Seguic, Ante Pavelic’s special representative, came to Rome to rebut what he called “rumors spread by communists and Jews and members of the Vatican secret service.” On March 6, 1942, the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant—a Balkan expert, member of the Masonic Grand Orient Lodge, and confidant of Pope Pius XII—had a secret meeting with Nicola Rusinovic, who was the semiofficial Vatican representative of Pavelic’s regime. Tisserant told Rusinovic:
I know for a fact that it is the Franciscans themselves, for example Father Simic of Knin, who have taken part in attacks against the Orthodox populations so as to destroy the Orthodox Church. In the same way you destroyed the Orthodox Church in Banja Luka. I know for sure that the Franciscans have acted abominably, and this pains me. Such acts should not be committed by educated, cultured, civilized people, let alone by priests.” 34
The truth is that Pope Pius XII never ceased to look benevolently on Ante Pavelic’s regime. For example, in July 1941, the supreme pontiff received a hundred Croatian security agents led by the Zagreb police chief, who after the war would be accused of “crimes against humanity” and of having personally executed six women and their nine children in front of witnesses. On February 6, 1942, Pope Pius XII held an audience with a small group belonging to the Ustashe Youth, whom he reminded that they were “the defenders of Christianity.” Later he told a Pavelic regime official that “in spite of everything, no one wants to acknowledge the one, real, and principal enemy of Europe; no true, communal, military crusade against Bolshevism has been initiated.”
With respect to Russia, the Vatican’s Holy Alliance espionage service began a new operation during World War II. When Hitler unleashed his “Operation Barbarossa” on June 22, 1941, Pope Pius XII saw a chance to penetrate into the heart of the Bolshevik enemy by means of evangelization. He summoned Cardinal Tisserant and his spy chief Father Robert Leiber. The supreme pontiff ordered them to craft a plan that would allow the dispatch of Catholic missionaries in the wake of the Wehrmacht as the German armies marched toward Moscow, “liberating” the territories of the Soviet Union. Cardinal Tisserant, working with Leiber, prepared a true espionage operation that would become known as the Tisserant Plan.
Hitler, however, had other ideas. He declared that “Christianity is the hardest blow that ever hit humanity. Bolshevism is just the bastard son of Christianity; both are the monsters engendered by the Jews.” Franz von Papen, in his testimony at the Nuremberg Trials beginning on October 12, 1945, stated:
The reevangelization of the Soviet Union was a Vatican operation, whether carried out through its missionary department or its secret services. 35
The Tisserant Plan was personally directed by Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, not by Robert Leiber, even though its main operatives were Holy Alliance agents. Inside the Soviet Union, it was led by Niccolo Estorzi, The Messenger.
The cardinal’s activities in Eastern Europe had already been noticed in 1940. Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi leader and fervent anti-Catholic, prohibited the entry of priests into “liberated” areas of the Soviet Union. But it fell to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Office of Reich Security, to hunt down the Holy Alliance and Vatican agents in Russia. On July 2, 1941, Heydrich circulated a document titled “New Tactics in Vatican Russia Work” among high-ranking Nazis. In this document, the powerful RSHA chief explained that the Vatican and its espionage services had conceived an operation known as the Tisserant Plan to smuggle Catholic priests into areas under Wehrmacht control. The essence of the plan designed by the Holy Alliance was to recruit chaplains, aided by Spanish and Italian priests, to accompany the units fighting on the eastern front.
These priests, under Estorzi’s leadership, would go to work gathering information that would allow the introduction of Catholicism, under the protection of the German advance. Heydrich’s report went on to explain:
It is necessary to prevent Catholicism from becoming the real beneficiary of the war in this new situation that is developing in the Russian area conquered by German blood. The pope’s agents are taking advantage of the situation, and this must be stopped. 36
An order dated September 6 required unit commanders to inform the army high command of any “sign of the activation of Vatican operations and those of its intelligence services in Russia.” In fact, the Tisserant Plan was not really a new operation designed at this time, but dated back to the papacy of Pius XI.
Niccolo Estorzi set about interviewing the candidates for implementing the Tisserant Plan one by one. The abbeys of Grotta Ferrara in Italy, Chevetogne in Belgium, and Velehrad in Moravia became the staging areas. There flocked the Holy Alliance agents seeking to take part in the Tisserant Plan, to participate in one of the most important operations in the history of the papal intelligence service.
Some traveled eastward in the guise of merchants, with folded crucifixes inside their fountain pens. Others pretended to be stable boys, blending in with the rear guard of the German advance. Once they reached areas that they deemed appropriate for holding clandestine Masses, the pope’s spies left the German columns and continued on their own. Many were welcomed by the local residents, while others were executed by communist partisans or arrested and sent to Siberian labor camps. According to unofficial sources, an estimated 217 members of the Russicum , belonging to the Holy Alliance, died in the implementation of the Tisserant Plan.
Niccolo Estorzi, the head of operations for the plan, remained inside Russia until February 1943, when he rejoined the German troops in their disorderly retreat in the face of the Red Army’s advance. On January 31, General von Paulus had surrendered at Stalingrad. Of the 330,000 men who made up the German Sixth Army, only 91,000 survived. Many died in POW camps in Siberia.
The German surrender at Stalingrad was the beginning of the end of the “Thousand-Year Reich” of which Adolf Hitler had dreamed. Meanwhile, after the failure of the Tisserant Plan, Pope Pius XII said in his encyclical Ecclesiae decus of April 23, 1944:
The chief object of Our constant desires and prayers is that … the day will dawn at last when there shall be one flock and one fold, all obedient with one mind to Jesus Christ and to His Vicar on earth … Christ’s faithful ones should labour together in heart and endeavour for union in the one Church of Jesus Christ, so that they may present a common, serried, united, and unyielding front to the daily growing attacks of the enemies of religion.
Nonetheless, historians John Cornwell, Carlo Falconi, Jonathan Steinberg, and Harold Deutsch all agree that Pope Pius XII’s ambition to evangelize Eastern Europe does not explain his silence in the face of the extermination of six million Jews in the so-called Final Solution. 37 This historic silence about the killing of millions of Jews—silence from the Vatican in general and Pope Pius XII in particular—provoked a statement by the British ambassador to the Holy See, Sir D’Arcy Osborne:
A policy of silence in regard to such offenses against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and authority of the Vatican; and it is upon the maintenance and assertion of such authority that must depend any prospect of a papal contribution to the reestablishment of world peace. 38
On April 19, 1945, Soviet troops reached the gates of Berlin, the heart of the Reich. On the 30th, in a dark and dank underground bunker of the Third Reich’s chancellery, the man who had been lord and master of Europe took his own life. Adolf Hitler had just turned fifty-six. Three days before, on April 27, Il Duce Benito Mussolini had also died, his body hung upside down in the Piazza Loreto of Milan.
As to the World War II activities of the Vatican and its espionage services, the Holy Alliance and the Sodalitium Pianum , a statement made by Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, head of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, is worth quoting. In a letter to Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard in May of 1940, he wrote: “I fear that history will reproach the Holy See for having practiced a policy of selfish convenience and little else.” Even near the beginning of the Second World War, this statement shows, the Vatican feared that its policy of “hidden” neutrality might be “judged” and “condemned” by history, as indeed it has been.
Of the Thousand-Year Reich, only ruin, death, and destruction remained twelve years after Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power. Those who died during the Second World War totaled more than fifty-five million people, both civilians and soldiers. Six years and one day after Hitler’s attack on Poland, the guns fell silent. The new task was to save what survived in the ruins. Meanwhile, the killers, the executors of the Fuehrer’s policies, began to flee from international justice by way of what became known as the Vatican Ratline and an organization called Odessa. The communist empire began to extend its tentacles through Eastern Europe. A new war loomed over the world: the Cold War.