Hide and Seek: The Irish Priest in the Vatican who Defied the Nazi Command. The dramatic true story of rivalry and survival during WWII.. Stephen Walker

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СКАЧАТЬ monsignor would develop empathy for prisoners and would become more sympathetic to the Allied cause.

      Duca and O’Flaherty began to travel around the country together, but they took very different approaches to the job. Duca was more relaxed and seemed unhurried and when he travelled by car he usually managed to see only one prison camp a day. O’Flaherty used his time differently. He accompanied the Papal Nuncio to the camps, but in the intervals between visits he would return to Rome on the overnight train. Once back in the capital he would pass on messages from prisoners to Vatican Radio to ensure that their relatives knew they were safe. The monsignor also speeded up the delivery of Red Cross parcels and clothing and helped in the collection of thousands of books for the prisoners.

      O’Flaherty’s work clearly improved the morale of the POWs, but he did more than supply them with creature comforts. He became their champion, a significant move for a man who in his youth had little good to say about those who wore the uniform of the British Army. The monsignor began to lodge complaints about the way the men were being treated and his protestations led to the removal of the commandants at the hospitals at Modena and Piacenza. He also visited South African and Australian prisoners at a camp near Brindisi. There he distributed musical instruments including mandolins and guitars. Much to the annoyance of the prison’s management, the trip boosted the morale of the inmates and lowered that of their captors.

      By now the monsignor was seen by the Italian military’s high command as a troublemaker. Pressure was exerted on the Vatican to remove him and eventually O’Flaherty resigned his position. Officially the Italian authorities claimed that the monsignor’s neutrality had been compromised. They said he had told a prisoner that the war was going well. It was a feeble excuse. Unofficially they wanted him out of the way because he was exposing the mistreatment of prisoners.

      His visits to the prison camps made O’Flaherty increasingly aware that more needed to be done to help those who were suffering during the war. He may not have realized it at the time, but it seems likely that his meetings with Allied POWs helped to crystallize his thinking. When hostilities had first begun across Europe, he had viewed the conflict as an independent neutral observer, deliberately refraining from taking sides. He had always felt that both the Allies and the Germans were guilty of propaganda and he didn’t know what to believe. He had even once remarked, ‘I don’t think there is anything to choose between Britain and Germany.’

      Now, as the war came ever closer to the streets of Rome, Hugh O’Flaherty discovered where his loyalties lay.

       Chapter Four SECRETS AND SPIES

      ‘I take my hat off to him’

      Sir D’Arcy Osborne on British escapee Albert Penny

       Autumn 1942

      Gripping the handlebars of his bicycle, Albert Penny nonchalantly pedalled his way into St Peter’s Square. Dressed in workman’s overalls, he blended in with the crowd and managed to evade the gaze of the normally observant Swiss Guards. As escape bids went it was a first-class display of chutzpah. Days earlier the young British seaman had walked out of a POW camp at Viterbo, obtained some clothes, and under his own steam made his way to Rome. In the shadow of the Basilica, he confidently rode around the fountains and slipped into the gardens of the Vatican and soon found himself outside the Santa Marta Hospice. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck.

      Suddenly he was approached by Anton Call, who was most surprised to have discovered a British serviceman on the run. Call, with eight years’ experience in the Vatican gendarmerie under his belt, had a vague recollection that the Vatican’s special international status might help in this situation. Instead of returning the sailor to the Italian police, he contacted Sir D’Arcy Osborne, who was just yards away on the top floor of Santa Marta.

      The British envoy admired Penny’s courage, later declaring, ‘I take my hat off to him.’ He officially petitioned the Vatican authorities to allow the escapee to stay, arguing that this was permissible as the Vatican was a neutral state. Permission was given and Penny lived in Osborne’s flat while his fate was decided, and eventually he was exchanged for an Italian prisoner. The episode clearly struck a chord with Osborne and his neighbour Hugh O’Flaherty. Now for the first time they had an escaped Allied serviceman to deal with.

      By the end of 1942 the monsignor had ended his work as an official Red Cross visitor to the Allied POW camps but he still wanted to help Allied servicemen. O’Flaherty and Osborne probably did not realize it then but the Penny episode was about to be repeated on their doorstep dozens of times. The seaman had not intentionally decided to become a trail-blazer but with his daring escapade on a bicycle he would become a forerunner for the many hundreds of servicemen who would later make a beeline for the Vatican.

      The incident was not without repercussions and the biggest loser was Anton Call, the sympathetic policeman who had discovered Penny and handed him over to Sir D’Arcy Osborne rather than taking him to his superiors. The Italian authorities blamed Call for the affair. The policeman was arrested on a trumped-up charge, expelled from the Vatican and put in prison, although he was later released and given a minor role with the carabinieri. Osborne was furious about Call’s treatment and would record his thoughts privately: ‘It all makes me, against my will, very anti-Vatican and anti-Italian.’

      By the autumn of 1942, watching the activities of the Vatican had become one of Herbert Kappler’s top priorities. In October the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, paid a three-day visit to Rome. He was temporarily running the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Main Office, because its head, Reinhard Heydrich, had been killed by Czech resistance fighters some months earlier. In this capacity Himmler was interested in the continued presence of foreign diplomats in the Vatican. He was convinced they were spying for their respective countries and he wanted the Vatican to expel them. It was made clear to Kappler who should be targeted.

      In Himmler’s sights were two diplomats in particular: the British Minister to the Holy See, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, and the USA’s Chargé d’Affaires to the Holy See, Harold Tittmann. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the Americans’ entry into the war, Tittmann was asked by his bosses in Washington to move into the Vatican. The American diplomat lived under the same terms as Osborne and, like his British counterpart, resided in the Santa Marta Hospice.

      German surveillance of the Vatican took many forms. Some of it was done by simply watching and listening. Diplomats such as Osborne and Tittmann also assumed that, as well as being observed, their mail and phone conversations were monitored. Osborne began to resent it and at one stage complained that it was like being ‘a prisoner in a concentration camp’.

      Much of the minutiae of the targets’ daily life was recorded. In the case of Osborne and O’Flaherty, details of their visitors, their lunch partners, and anyone they met on walks around the Vatican were all catalogued. Kappler had first become interested in O’Flaherty’s activities when the monsignor visited Allied POW camps, and he knew that he was a close friend of Osborne. At this stage O’Flaherty and Osborne had not begun to operate the Escape Line and Kappler’s suspicions about them simply revolved around suggestions that they were passing on intelligence to the Allies. Kappler desperately wanted evidence that the two men were spying, for this would put pressure on the Vatican authorities to act against them. Ambitious and keen to show his superiors in Berlin that he was effective, he knew this evidence needed to be good.

      Kappler’s most reliable information about the personalities in the Holy See came from a 28-year-old translator named Alexander Kurtna, who worked in the Vatican. Kurtna had first been recruited by Kappler in 1939 and the police attaché regarded him as his best source. In recent months Kappler had been able to inundate СКАЧАТЬ