— MONSIGNOR HUGH O’FLAHERTY —
The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican
What have a would-be Irish golf pro turned priest, a ballad singer past her prime and the twelfth Duke of Leeds in common? They are not the start of a dirty joke, nor characters in a lesser known Mills & Boon novel (although, come to think of it, I haven’t read them all). They were, in fact, the key players in one of the most impressive webs of espionage, trickery and heroism in the Second World War.
The Bible has rather a lot to say about the cause of the Gospel uniting the most disparate of figures – whether it be the irascible St Paul making common cause with the docile St Barnabas, or the boisterous Galilean St Philip becoming chums with an urbane eunuch from Ethiopia. Yet, even by the wacky standards of the New Testament, the group that came together in the palazzi on the northern side of the River Tiber were a very mixed bag, united by their conviction that something must be done to help those suffering at the hands of Fascism.
This ragtag group – for alongside performers and peers were myriad priests and nuns, a Maltese widow, a Swiss aristocrat, a madcap soldier with an instinct for survival and a roguish Cockney butler – was led by the Irish priest Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty. He sat, spider-like, at the centre of a web of informants, refuges and disguises, relishing every opportunity he had to outwit the Gestapo. His is a story of daring escapes from stormtroopers, of late-night rendezvous and of cross-dressing clergy – all of it set on the stage of the Eternal City, a place where every paving slab has seen more drama and history than could fill any bodice-ripper paperback. Most of all, however, the story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty is a story of redemption. How an angry partisan went from a narrow nationalism to an understanding that God ‘has no nation’, of how a senior official of a Church, rightly criticised for not doing more to help the Jewish people of Europe in their darkest hour, risked his life doing exactly that. And, like all good stories of redemption, it is a tale of evil being thwarted and lives – thousands of lives – being saved. Unlike many stories of redemption, it is also a tale of false moustaches and nuns’ knickers. So what do a would-be Irish golf pro turned priest, a past-her-prime ballad singer and the twelfth Duke of Leeds have in common? Redemption.
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Amid the hills and inlets of Co. Kerry, on Ireland’s southwesterly flank, nestled on the shores of Lough Leane, sits the Killarney Golf and Fishing Club, an august and venerable institution where the greens are as immaculately maintained today as when the club was founded in 1893. After about five years of the club’s existence, the committee made the decision to employ a steward, one James O’Flaherty, who moved to the emerald valley from the comparative metropolis of Cork with his wife and children, including a newborn son named Hugh. Growing up in a world of balls and clubs naturally did wonders for young Hugh’s handicap (he was a scratch golfer playing off zero by his mid-teens). The exaggerated stories that invariably accompany the post-game bar-side analysis must also have filtered through, as young Hugh became renowned for his anecdotes, delivered in a lilting Kerry brogue. However good his game (and it was said he might have made a living from it), he was no golf club bore, and his charm, quick wit and brains won him a scholarship to a teacher training college.
When Hugh was eighteen, however, his world was changed for ever by events that must have seemed a million miles away from the sleepy golf club on the shores of Lough Leane. The attempt by Irish republicans (with German support) to throw off British rule in the 1916 Easter Rising began a nearly eight-year period of internecine violence as the Irish fought the British and each other in a battle to forge an independent Irish state. Two years after the rising, in 1918, Hugh left golf behind and, to the surprise of many, also left teaching, and enrolled to become a missionary priest. Although prompted by a nascent sense of adventure, Hugh didn’t get very far initially, ending up at a Jesuit training college just outside Limerick, a distance of little more than seventy miles. Meanwhile, as the 1920s began, the violent situation in Ireland grew worse. In the midst of these troubles, young Hugh lost friends in the particularly bloody fighting in the island’s south-western corner as the green valleys of Co. Kerry became choked with smoke and blood. Hugh was very clear about the rights and wrongs of this particular conflict and, with all the fervour one would expect of a man in his early twenties, priestly training or no priestly training, would openly declare his hatred of Britain and all things British.
Indeed, when the violence in Ireland became too much and several seminarians, including Hugh, were moved over to the Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide (a training centre for missionaries) in Rome to finish their training, it was the British whom Hugh blamed. Despite his initial rancour at being made to leave Ireland for the first time in his life, Hugh flourished in Rome. His easy charm and razor-sharp intellect had caught the attention of his superiors and so the chippy golfer who had never left the province of Munster until a couple of years previously suddenly found himself in the Vatican’s diplomatic service, representing the Pope in locations as far afield as Haiti, Egypt and Czechoslovakia. O’Flaherty rose steadily and, in 1934, was made a Papal chamberlain, which earned him the title of Monsignor and placed him near the heartbeat of the Roman Catholic political world.
And rather a murky world it was too. As the forces of Fascism began to rise across Europe, the Roman Catholic hierarchy were left in a quandary. On one side there was widespread fear of Communism among clergy and laity (given that the wholesale imprisonment and murder of religious believers was a key tenet of its programme). On the other there was the fact that Fascism was hardly pro-Christianity. Indeed, the founder of the movement was notorious anti-clericalist and probable occult sex fan Benito Mussolini. Having spent the period prior to the First World War writing unreadable anti-Catholic tracts, Mussolini’s antipathy towards the Church mellowed somewhat when he started to smell power. Consequently, in 1929, he signed the Lateran Treaty with Pope Pius XI, a short-tempered mountaineering enthusiast from near Milan. The treaty established a temporal political entity over which the Pope could rule – Vatican City – thus supposedly resolving the tensions between Church and state, but it also gave Mussolini exactly the sort of endorsement he needed for the gangster state he was constructing on the Italian peninsula. More problematically, it set a precedent for other concordats with equally dubious regimes (most notably with a Germany just a few years from a National Socialist takeover in 1933), making it look as if the Church was primarily concerned with protecting her own interests rather than condemning obvious wrongdoing. In 1939, the rambunctious mountaineering pontiff died, to be replaced by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, a Vatican career diplomat whose brother had negotiated the treaty with Mussolini and who had himself signed the agreement with Germany. The careful policy of the Church’s top diplomats had seemingly received the endorsement of none other than the Holy Ghost.
Meanwhile, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty made himself available at parties hosted by ambassadors and ministers plenipotentiary to the Holy See, with one notable exception: the British. In fact, when war was declared by Britain on Nazi Germany in 1939, O’Flaherty, taking the official Vatican policy of neutrality to its absolute logical extreme, declared that, as far as he was concerned, ‘there was nothing to choose between the British and the Germans’. The man who would be appointed a Commander of the British Empire at the war’s end had quite the journey ahead of him.
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Italy didn’t declare war on Britain and France until 1940, and even that had only a limited impact on the Vatican diplomatic world and on the erstwhile Irish Monsignor. O’Flaherty did know that the British ambassador to the Vatican, having been booted out of his spacious apartment in Italian Rome, was now holed up in a cramped office somewhere in the Vatican. The diplomat in question – the gloriously named Sir D’Arcy Osborne, heir to the Dukedom of Leeds – hadn’t lived in such institutional conditions since his time at Haileybury. But he managed to make the best of it, maintaining an aristocratic charm that won round the paranoid Vatican staff, tetchy at the presence of an enemy of the Italian state. Osborne, and more especially his wheeler-dealer Cockney butler, John May, even elicited the odd courtesy from the arch-Anglophobe, Monsignor O’Flaherty.
Eventually, with the entry of the United States into the war in 1941, only one English-speaking diplomatic mission remained in Rome unhindered – that of the Irish Free State. The Irish diplomatic mission was under the direction of Dr Thomas Kiernan or, more accurately, that of his wife, the formidable Delia Murphy, a renowned singer, the zenith of whose career had been the release of a record entitled ‘Three Lovely Lassies’ by HMV. Murphy was increasingly disturbed about tales she had heard about the treatment of Allied prisoners of war, who, as the war progressed, were arriving in Italy in great numbers. Trapped by the need to maintain immunity and by the fact that many in Dublin made no secret of their desire to see Britain humiliated, even if that meant at the hands of the Nazis, there was little that Murphy could do. O’Flaherty, however, made extensive use of his diplomatic immunity to visit prisoner-of-war camps near Rome and gain as much information as he could about the soldiers held in them. Then, on return to the Holy See, he would ensure that the names of those he had traced were broadcast on Vatican Radio, a service which became a lifeline of hope for families in Ireland, and Britain, in despair at loved ones missing in action.
O’Flaherty’s old passionate Anglophobia was giving way to compassion. It was a transition rooted in his own quietly but deeply held Christian faith; ‘God,’ he told his Irish critics, ‘has no nation.’ It was to become the motto that would guide him through the perilous period between 1943 and 1945. As the Allies invaded Sicily and Mussolini’s government collapsed in the summer of 1943, Italy’s minuscule monarch, Vittorio Emanuele III, ordered an immediate amnesty for prisoners of war. The rejoicing among the newly freed men was, however, short-lived, as the Wehrmacht ploughed across the Alps to install a new regime.
Ahead of the Nazis came a crowd of former prisoners, desperately seeking sanctuary in the neutral territory of the Vatican. Mindful of the fates of Bishop von Galen, Maximilian Kolbe and others, and petrified that the neutrality he had so carefully cultivated might be compromised, Pope Pius XII gave orders that Allied soldiers attempting to hide in or around the Vatican should be turned away. Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty had other ideas. Many of the men remembered O’Flaherty’s kindness during his prison camp visits and asked for him by name. Determined that, as ‘God had no nation’, it was as much his responsibility to save these men as anyone else’s, the Monsignor, in defiance of Papal decree, Nazi diktat and, arguably, common sense, began to put feelers out to construct an elaborate escape network.
First, he recruited sympathetic figures in the Vatican to his cause – notably Delia Murphy, Sir D’Arcy Osborne and the even more marvellously named Swiss envoy, Count Sarsfield Salazar. The count and the ballad singer enjoyed Irish and Swiss diplomatic immunity and free movement, while Sir D’Arcy had links to British intelligence as well as, secreted around the tiny monastic cell that now represented His Britannic Majesty’s Embassy to the Holy See, huge amounts of his own cash that he was more than happy to give to the project. Through his priestly contacts, O’Flaherty had also heard of a wild British officer running a network of escapees in the hill country just outside Rome. Major Sam Derry had been awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in North Africa, later escaping capture by launching himself headlong into a ravine. Recaptured, he escaped again while being transported through Italy and assumed command of a group of fugitive British soldiers. Using a series of disguises (including a cartload of potatoes), some bribes and playing on trusting Italian clericalism, O’Flaherty smuggled Major Derry into the Vatican, to a dinner party with none other than Sir D’Arcy Osborne (who was, for various reasons, disguised as a Monsignor). The real Monsignor and his ersatz English colleague invited the hardy Desert Rat to join them in a coordinating role in what they called ‘the Rome escape line’. Derry accepted and so began O’Flaherty’s career in espionage.
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The principle behind the Rome escape line was simple: hide as many people as possible from the Nazis and, therefore, save as many lives as possible. Achieving it was another matter, owing to the small difficulty of the Nazi occupation of Rome, which had occurred, with an accompanying declaration of harsh punishment for any who resisted, on 9th September 1943. Tasked with achieving the recapture of Allied prisoners and the rounding up of the city’s sizeable Jewish population for deportation to Auschwitz was head of the Gestapo, Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, the man who would play cat to O’Flaherty’s mouse.
Almost immediately, Kappler informed the Jewish population of Rome that they might escape deportation if they provided him with a bribe of fifty kilograms of gold (equivalent to about £1.5 million today). O’Flaherty helped persuade Pope Pius to offer the sum to the Jewish community as an interest-free loan without a set repayment date – but in the end the Jews managed to come up with the sum themselves. The Jewish community, however, aware of Nazi double-crosses that had occurred across Europe, began to approach O’Flaherty in increasing numbers, asking whether they too might take advantage of the escape line. O’Flaherty now found himself at the head of an operation involving the clandestine and highly illegal movement of thousands of people, from Australian commandos to Italian-Jewish grandmothers.
O’Flaherty was not only the manager of the network – he was himself involved at the very front line of the missions and intrigue, taking him across Rome. It was O’Flaherty who sneaked across Rome in the dead of night to the flat of redoubtable Maltese widow Henrietta Chevalier and asked if she would take in escaped prisoners of war. It was O’Flaherty who rented the safe house on the Via Firenze, where Major Derry had first been secreted, and where countless others were hidden, and it was O’Flaherty who, when the Gestapo requisitioned the building opposite, laughed it off and reassured those hiding there, in his lilting Kerry drawl, that ‘sure, they’ll never look under their own noses’. (He was right.)
All this activity, however, soon came to the attention of Kappler. By observing the Vatican and through tracking down some prisoners hidden in religious houses, the Gestapo had deduced that a priest was responsible for their frustrating inability to track down Allied escapees and for the seeming disappearance of swathes of Rome’s Jewish population. Kappler worked out that the Irish Monsignor was the mastermind behind it all and decided that he would put a stop to the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican’, as O’Flaherty was becoming known, using force if necessary.
Ironically, it was Mussolini who indirectly saved O’Flaherty’s life. While the Germans had occupied Rome, they were unable to occupy the sovereign and independent territory of the Holy See without enraging the sizeable Catholic population in Germany, as well as the few remaining neutral countries (such as Spain and the nations of South America) on whom they relied for economic and diplomatic links. So the Pimpernel was safe as long as he remained ensconced behind the colonnades of St Peter’s. Kappler, aware that he couldn’t touch O’Flaherty, wanted the priest to know that, as soon as he strayed into occupied Rome, there would be a price on his head.
One crisp autumn morning, a group of SS men arrived at the point where St Peter’s Square meets the Via della Conciliazione. They were armed not with guns, but with pots of white paint. Priests and nuns watched on, bemused, as the crack troops of the Third Reich carefully marked out a long white line across the flagstones. This was no enforcement of parking regulations, nor an attempt at Fascist weather-proofing. It was intended as a sign to O’Flaherty – one that Kappler underlined by sending a message to the Monsignor’s office informing him of the orders he’d given to the men who surrounded the Vatican compound: if the Irish priest crosses the line, shoot him. O’Flaherty was characteristically unfazed – indeed, over the course of the next few weeks, he ensured that he held each one of his meetings, often with contacts involved in the Rome escape line, on the steps of St Peter’s Basilica, in full view of the German snipers on the other side of the white line.
With his identity revealed, O’Flaherty now had to watch his every move, but he didn’t cease his involvement in the operation, nor his night-time forays into occupied territory. Kappler had developed a pathological hatred of the jovial Irish priest and now tried every trick in the book to eliminate him. He sent a group of heavies to try and jostle the clergyman over the fatal white line, to no avail. He dedicated large chunks of the military force defending Rome to surrounding locations which he believed O‘Flaherty frequented, only to find that the Pimpernel had vanished into thin air. One reason the Monsignor appeared to have the powers of bilocation was that he had managed to get the tram and trolley bus drivers of Rome onto his side – saying private Masses for the devout drivers in return for concealment on a tram or bus as it trundled through the deserted streets with a ‘not in service’ sign clearly illuminated above it. The Pimpernel had managed to wangle his own private taxi service in the middle of one of the most closely watched and repressive cities on earth.
Under such circumstances, O’Flaherty’s network of unlikely heroes became even more important. Delia Murphy started making increasingly regular trips in her husband’s diplomatic car to less than salubrious locations across the city. This was no extramarital dalliance by a bored embassy wife – she was in fact using the vehicle as a makeshift ambulance to smuggle wounded prisoners of war and partisans to Vatican hospitals under the very noses of the Nazis. John May’s web of illicit contacts in Rome’s seedy underbelly became crucial to O’Flaherty’s escapades, earning the Cockney rogue O’Flaherty’s admiration, with the priest describing him as ‘the most magnificent scrounger that ever lived’. Major Derry and his associate Lieutenant Simpson spent hours digging up parts of the Vatican gardens in order to find the biscuit tins filled with false documents that they had secreted there with O’Flaherty’s blessing. At one point, threatened with discovery, they needed to effect a speedy costume change and the Monsignor, by now used to wearing a cassock, found himself short of a credible labourer disguise to lend and so gave Simpson the closest thing he had – his pair of lucky golfing trousers.
Changes of outfit became O’Flaherty’s modus operandi. On one infamous occasion, he was visiting Prince Filippo Doria Pamphili, an urbane aristocrat with anti-Fascist sentiments, in order to collect a sizeable donation to the escape line. Kappler had watched O’Flaherty arrive and, as soon as he was upstairs, being entertained by the peer, surrounded the palazzo with Gestapo officers and ordered that the Monsignor be given up. In the panic, O’Flaherty ran down to the coal cellar, where, as luck would have it, the winter delivery was just being unloaded. O’Flaherty stripped down to his vest, threw his clothing in a sack, smeared coal dust on his face and made good his escape while Kappler’s men stood by. On another occasion, he needed to make the journey across Rome on foot and, while the sight of a six-foot-two nun lumbering through the streets around the Vatican did elicit comment, O’Flaherty got away with it again. It wasn’t only his own safety that he secured through disguise. Not long after the near-miss in the coal cellar, Kappler, infuriated that O’Flaherty had hoodwinked him once again, decided to arrest his collaborator Prince Doria instead. O’Flaherty got news of this and had the nobleman smuggled into the safety of the Vatican, dressed in the bright, distinct uniform of the Swiss Guard.
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O’Flaherty’s escapades were not, however, limited to these shows of priestly panache – every day he was engaged in the run-of-the-mill smuggling of individuals and families, with increasing numbers of Jews seeking safety. O’Flaherty would wait on his perch at the porch of St Peter’s every evening and let it be known that those who needed help should come to him. In October 1943, aware that the status quo would not continue for much longer, an increasingly desperate Jewish couple came and begged the priest to hide their son, insisting he take a valuable gold chain as security. O’Flaherty went one better, disguising the couple themselves as a priest and a nun and giving the boy papers identifying him as an orphan. O’Flaherty then secured him a place in a Church-run hostel. When the couple returned to Rome, shaken but safe, after the war, O’Flaherty reunited them with their son and with their chain – which he had kept in his desk for the duration of the war, determined to return it to them.
By the time the infamous razzia, or round-up, of Rome’s Jews occurred in late October 1943, of the nearly seven thousand still left in the city, the Nazis could only find a thousand and fifteen. O’Flaherty himself had helped persuade the paranoid Pope Pius XII that he had to open the Vatican to ‘non-Aryans’ at risk of deportation, which he did two days before the razzia, saving nearly five hundred lives. Yet the majority were already hidden in the monasteries, convents, presbyteries and Church properties that are around every Roman street corner. Many clergy were involved in the cover-up (notably the feisty French forger of passports Father Marie-Benoît, and, of course, the jovial martyr of the Esquiline Hill, Pietro Pappagallo), but the largest number owed their safety to the Pimpernel. By most estimates, he and his unlikely network hid nearly seven thousand people – whether Jewish, British, Polish, Italian or American.
Such bravery was not without a price. Five of O’Flaherty’s associates were killed in the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves in March 1944. Others were captured, tortured and imprisoned. O’Flaherty himself used up more lives than a cat, such was the regularity of his brushes with capture. He was capable of making such a difference, undoubtedly, because of his high-ranking diplomatic position, but also, crucially because of his kindness and good humour. His network was so extensive because he was so persuasive, and he was so persuasive not because of clerical hauteur, but because of a disarming good humour combined with his simple, endearing faith in God (and a dash of elan).
During the height of his infamy, O’Flaherty was faced with a prisoner of war who would die if not operated on for appendicitis. Rather than give up on him, the Monsignor got the nuns at the San Spirito hospital (at this point requisitioned for German military purposes) to discreetly add the name of the man to the operating list. He was transported to his appointment in a diplomatic car secured through the aid of Delia Murphy and Sir D’Arcy and, when he arrived, was operated on by a German military surgeon and given time to recuperate in a ward full of Nazi officers, all at the expense of the Third Reich.
On another occasion, towards the end of the war, a German soldier who had collapsed in the street near the Irish delegation was brought to him by Delia Murphy, with the claim that he was, in fact, a priest, conscripted into the Wehrmacht, who had been fasting in an attempt to show contrition to God. O’Flaherty quizzed him and, when satisfied with his theological bona fides, accompanied the weakened man to the altar of the nearby chapel, and enabled him to celebrate Mass. As Delia Murphy watched, she was deeply moved not only by the moment of shared humanity but also, she wrote, by an awareness of the ‘foolishness of war and the sacrifices of life’. Monsignor O’Flaherty had panache, a foolhardy bravery, but, above all, he had a deep love for his fellow man, regardless of what uniform they wore. Quite a journey for the angry and patriotic would-be golf pro from Killarney.
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On 5th June 1944, forces under the American Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark finally liberated Rome. Like all good commanders, Clark did a tour of the sights of the newly freed city, including, of course, the Vatican (which, for better or for worse, had actually been ‘free’ all along). Among those on the steps of St Peter’s, he was introduced to a tall, mop-haired Irishman, who said simply, ‘Welcome to Rome – is there anything I can do for you?’ By anyone’s standards, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty had already done plenty. He was, of course, showered with awards and medals for his heroism, including a medal from the British Empire, an irony given his past political enthusiasms. British or otherwise, O’Flaherty wasn’t interested in medals, sending all of them to his sister back in Killarney to be kept in a drawer. In fact, at the end of the war, he famously remarked that the only thing he really wanted was the return of his lucky golfing trousers.
The motley crew that had run the Rome escape line disbanded, going on to lead their separate lives. Sam Derry secured a military promotion, but refused all other recognition. He was surprised (and not overly pleased) to appear in an episode of This Is Your Life in the early 1960s, where one of the guests who helped tell his tale was none other than Hugh O’Flaherty. Sir D’Arcy Osborne eventually inherited the title of Duke of Leeds but, preferring the weather, elected to remain in Rome, where he cut a debonair figure wandering idly through the city’s streets. Delia Murphy continued to charm society wherever her husband was posted, meaning she ended up as the consort to the first ever Irish ambassador to Australia. John May, it will be of little surprise to learn, disappeared into thin air.
Herbert Kappler was arrested for the appalling crimes he enabled and committed in Rome during the Second World War. Sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, he was locked away in the military prison at Gaeta, just outside Rome. Such was the disgust at his actions that almost no one was prepared to visit him, with one exception: Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty. Kappler was so impressed by O’Flaherty’s desire to forgive that he converted to Catholicism, with the man he had spent several years trying to have shot administering the baptism. In 1977, a terminally ill Kappler managed to escape from military hospital by hiding in an enormous suitcase lugged in and out by his wife, ably assisted by two unwitting guards. He returned to Germany, where he died six months later. Perhaps it wasn’t only Catholicism that he learned from O’Flaherty after all.
And what of the man himself? O’Flaherty remained in Rome for most of the fifties until, weakened by a stroke, he returned to the rolling green hills by the golf course at Killarney to live with his sister. It was there, where his adventure started, that he died in 1963. His life inspired countless books, a Hollywood film (The Scarlet and the Black, in which O’Flaherty was portrayed by none other than Gregory Peck), and also a stage play. The title is, of course, God Has No Country.