Saint of Silence?

Judaism, Summer-Fall, 2006 by Suzanne Brown-Fleming

The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944, By ROBERT KATZ, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

In 1942, the British ambassador to the Holy See, D'Arcy Osborne, wrote in his diary, "The more I think of it, the more I am revolted by Hitler's massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand, and, on the other, the Vatican's apparently exclusive preoccupation with the ... possibilities of the bombardments of Rome." (1) Today, historians still debate--viciously--the role of the Holy See, and of the wartime universal leader of the Roman Catholic church worldwide, Pope Pius XII, during the occupation of Rome (Sept. 8, 1943, to June 4, 1944).

In this symphonic, well-crafted book, Robert Katz capitalizes on sources that have become available since the publication of his first book on the subject, Black Sabbath: A Journey through a Crime Against Humanity (1969). Specifically, he looks at the declassified documents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), released by the CIA between 2000 and 2002; the declassified and subsequently published diplomatic papers of the Vatican archives (Actes et Documents du Saint Siege Relatifs a la seconde guerre mondiale, or ADSS), 11 edited volumes published by the Vatican between 1965 and 1981; records relating to the two Rome trials of SS officer Erich Priebke; and other materials. Katz does not hide his clear interest in the role played by Pope Pius XII during the occupation of Rome and, as this topic remains the subject of intense historical and broad public debate, it is the most intriguing sub-theme in what is a riveting and beautifully written account of this nine-month period.

For specialists studying the papacy and the Holocaust, the newly declassified OSS materials represent the only primary source not yet mined in the hundreds of books on the papacy that have appeared to date. It is on these materials, then, that this review will focus, for it is here that Katz brings hitherto unpublished evidence to the fore.

On the basis of OSS cables, Katz concludes that Pope Pius XII tried "continually to turn the Western powers away from the unconditional-surrender formulation to reach a separate accord with Nazi Germany." Why? German Ambassador to the Holy See Baron Ernst von Weizsacker wrote to his superiors in Berlin, "The pope's dream is a union of the old civilized countries of the West with the insulation of Bolshevism toward the East in the same way that Pope Innocent XI unified the continent against the Moslems." (2)

Most interesting are Katz's new findings related to the immediate events surrounding the deportation of Roman Jewry. On Oct. 16, five weeks into the occupation, SS officers rounded up 1,023 Roman Jews and deported them to Auschwitz. Only one, Settima Spizzichino, returned. With regard to the Vatican, Katz offers nothing new that would change our understanding about the lack of an official papal protest. Katz does find new evidence in the recently released OSS files that SS Lt. Col. Herbert Kappler, chief of the Gestapo in Rome, "sought ... to avert the roundup of the Jews of Rome." In his famous Sept. 26, 1943, meeting with Ugo Foa, president of the Jewish community in Rome, and Dante Almansi, president of the national Union of Italian Jewish Communities, in which Kappler demanded 50 kilograms of gold, he was, according to Katz, "actively seeking to thwart [Heinrich] Himmler's plan to seize the Jews of Rome."

Kappler, Katz reports, wrote to Berlin regarding his concerns about security. Apparently, he did not believe there were enough SS men in Rome to conduct such an operation, and the SS men who were there in any case had no experience in deportations. Kappler was also convinced that the non-Jewish population would resist. In his cable to Berlin, Kappler gave the example of Naples, a town with 670 Jews: "Because of the attitude in the town and uncertain conditions [the] action could not be carried through." (3) Kappler knew also that 50 kilograms of gold "extorted from the Roman Jews would add little to the wealth of his nation," in that the Germans had already "emptied the gold reserves of the Bank of Italy in the amount of 110 metric tons." (4)

On Oct. 6, 1943, Kappler sent a cable to Ernst Kaltenbrunner "reminding him of Field Marshall Albert Kesselring's approval of using Roman Jewish labor." (5) Five days later, Kaltenbrunner insisted that the deportations go forward. In a cable to Kappler, he wrote: "It is precisely the immediate and thorough eradication of the Jews in Italy which is in the special interest of the present internal political situation and the general security in Italy.... [Undecoded] has been instructed in executing the RFSS [Himmler's] orders to proceed with the evacuation of the Jews without further delay." (6) This particular cable was intercepted, decoded and translated by Ultra. The CIA released the document in 2000.

Fritz Kolbe, Foreign Office official in Berlin whose job it was to "sort and prioritize cables of the highest order of secrecy to/from German missions abroad," had been "secretly bringing home duplicates" of sensitive documents. In August 1943, while in Switzerland, Allen Dulles (chief of the Bern office, OSS, and future director of the CIA) had recruited Kolbe as a spy. Kolbe's code name was George Wood; the cables were code-named Kappa cables. They are among the newly released OSS documents.