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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the men’s families that their loved ones were alive. It was an old trick that O’Flaherty had first perfected when he was an official visitor to the POW camps. When the monsignor returned to Rome from seeing prisoners, he would pass on their personal details to Father Sneddon. It was a simple way to let people know that their relative was alive, and this method went undetected by the Germans.
The Vatican reflected the outside world and the atmosphere in the Holy See was nervous and apprehensive. Osborne and O’Flaherty wondered what their lives would be like in a post-Mussolini world. Rumours filled the void of uncertainty. There was much talk about an Italian surrender followed by a German invasion of Rome. One fear that wouldn’t go away was a suggestion that the Germans would capture the Vatican and seize the Pope and take him abroad.
There was good reason for this worry. Days after Mussolini’s kidnapping, in the Wolf’s Lair an angry Hitler berated the Pope and the Holy See: ‘Do you think the Vatican impresses me? I couldn’t care less. We will clear out that gang of swine.’
Hitler was considering kidnapping the Pope, arresting the King and Marshal Badoglio, and occupying the Vatican City. The threat to seize Pope Pius XII was believed to be so likely that, in early August, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, summoned all the cardinals in Rome to a special meeting. He explained that the Germans had plans to seize Rome and then take control of the Vatican buildings and remove the Pope. The threat was regarded as so plausible that the commander of the Pope’s Swiss Guards was ordered not to offer any resistance when the German troops tried to gain access to the Vatican.
Staff inside the Holy See started to take precautions should the Germans seize the site. Sensitive Church documents were hidden across the Vatican and some diplomatic papers were burnt. Sir D’Arcy Osborne, now beginning to worry that his personal diary would be seized if the Nazis took over, had to think carefully about what he was committing to paper. He made some entries designed to fool prying eyes and others which were light on detail. At one stage he wrote: ‘I wish I could put down all the facts and rumours these days, but I can’t. It is a pity for the sake of the diary.’
The Germans were continuing to watch the Vatican intently, and the behaviour of Badoglio’s administration was put under constant scrutiny. The Nazis knew that an Italian surrender was coming after German code-breakers listened to a conversation between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in which the two leaders discussed an armistice. The Nazis had also discovered that secret talks were underway between the Allies and the Italians and were able to dismiss Badoglio’s official response that he was fully supportive of the Nazi war effort. Because they suspected that it was only a matter of time before the Italians surrendered, the discovery and restoration of Benito Mussolini as leader was becoming urgent.
The events in Rome and the questions surrounding Italy’s future in the war had initially overshadowed the efforts to find Mussolini, but now senior Nazis were becoming restless. They put pressure on Kappler, making it clear that he must locate the former dictator within days.
Kappler’s network of informers, who were being partially funded by Skorzeny’s fake banknotes, had so far failed to deliver solid intelligence on Mussolini’s whereabouts. Rumours abounded as to his precise location. Every time a story surfaced or there was an alleged sighting of the man, Kappler and his team had to investigate it. One rumour suggested that he was being held in hospital in Rome awaiting an operation, but Kappler discovered this to be untrue. There was another story that Mussolini hadn’t left the royal residence at Villa Savoia, but that also proved a false trail. Each alleged sighting of Il Duce contradicted the last one.
Trying to stay one step ahead of the Germans, the Badoglio administration began to move Mussolini around. Through a contact in the Italian police, Kappler had learnt that the country’s most famous prisoner had first been taken by ambulance from Villa Savoia to the Podgora barracks in Via Quintino Sella, a thirty-minute high-speed drive from the royal residence. Kappler was also able to establish which part of the building Mussolini had been held in. He now knew that he had slept in a camp bed, in a small office which overlooked the parade ground where the cadets marched.
Fascinating though this information was, for Kappler it was all too late. Mussolini’s captors had already moved their precious charge on. He had been driven from Rome to the port of Gaeta, where he was put aboard a vessel named the Persefone and taken to the island of Ponza, twenty-five miles to the north. Ponza, which was around five miles long, had a history as a penal colony.
Kappler’s efforts to find Mussolini did not go unnoticed. The Führer himself was keeping an eye on his attempts to track down the former dictator. The previous month, August 1943, Hitler had called the police attaché in to see him. Having completed four years in Rome, Kappler thought he was about to be moved elsewhere in the Third Reich, but Hitler had other ideas. For the young SS man the meeting went better than he had expected. Hitler praised him and made it clear that his work in Rome was very important. He told him that he valued his contacts and that he was needed in the hunt for Mussolini and for future work organizing surveillance in the city. Ironically the very mission that Kappler had doubts about, the rescue of Mussolini, had secured his future in Rome.
Day by day Kappler’s office tried to piece together Mussolini’s secret journey from Villa Savoia. The police attaché’s staff tried a variety of methods. Pro-Nazi officers in the Italian Army and police force were constantly badgered for titbits of information. Staff also monitored the airwaves for any unusual reports or coded messages.
Finally they made a breakthrough. One of Kappler’s agents, who had been listening to Italian communication networks, came across an intriguing phrase. He heard the words, ‘Security preparations around the Gran Sasso complete.’ The message had been sent by an officer named Gueli, one of Mussolini’s captors, and was meant for one of his superiors.
At 9 p.m. on 5 September Kappler sent a cable to senior offices in Berlin informing them that it was extremely likely that Mussolini was in the vicinity of the Gran Sasso mountain. He also informed that he had sent out a fresh reconnaissance party which would report back shortly.
Kappler’s team would quickly discover that the former dictator was indeed where they suspected, in the Apennine mountains in the Abruzzo region of eastern Italy. He had been taken by boat from the island of Ponza around Italy to a villa on Maddalena, an island off Sardinia, and from there was flown to the winter resort of Campo Imperatore, near the Gran Sasso. The Italians had chosen Mussolini’s final hiding place wisely. They put him in a room in the Hotel Campo Imperatore, some 7,000 feet above sea level.
As a hiding place the secluded location was ideal, as it was close to the highest peak in the Apennines and could be reached only by a ten-minute ride in a cable car. Although he was surrounded by hotel staff and policemen, Mussolini was the only official guest at the hotel. In conversations with his captors, Gueli and Faiola, he referred to his new surroundings as the ‘highest prison in the world’. As he played cards, read and listened to the radio, Mussolini was unaware that his German allies, after six weeks of searching, were just one step away from rescuing him. Kappler, although a reluctant participant in the manhunt, had proved his worth.
As the rescue plans were finalized the Allies and the Italians struck in different ways. Allied bombers took to the skies over Italy. This time one of their targets was the major headquarters for German troops at Frascati. In a lunchtime attack 400 tonnes of explosives fell on the town, killing and injuring many hundreds of residents and German soldiers. The German military complex was hit and Otto Skorzeny’s quarters were wrecked. Field Marshal Kesselring climbed from the wreckage unharmed. He sensed the bombing was only part of a planned series of events.
Kesselring was right. The attack was a forerunner to an Allied landing in Salerno, but there was more news to come. That evening, as smoke still hung over large parts of Italy, Marshal Badoglio announced on the radio that Italy had surrendered. The Italian leader said that he had requested an armistice from the Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, which had been accepted. Badoglio’s radio address took the Germans by surprise. They had known it was coming, but not when. The timing, rather like that of Mussolini’s kidnap in July, had caught them out.
Colonel Eugen Dollmann, who had been assisting Kappler