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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Teutonicum, the German College, as an official of the Holy Office. Although this building was technically apart from the Vatican, it had some protection under international law. Despite its name, the German College was probably the safest place in Rome from which to run an Allied escape operation as it stood very near the walls of the Vatican and a few hundred yards from the British legation. Church scholars studied at the college, which was under the stewardship of a German rector who was helped by a group of nuns. The place had an international feel to it, and O’Flaherty’s neighbours included a German historian and several Hungarian scholars.
When he first arrived in Rome, O’Flaherty became a student at the Propaganda College, where he became vice rector. He was ordained in 1925 and obtained doctorates in Divinity, Canon Law and Philosophy. While still in his mid-thirties he was promoted to monsignor. This title, bestowed on a number of priests by the Pope, indicated how the upper echelons of the Church viewed the Irishman’s potential.
In the German College, where O’Flaherty would spend most of his career, the accommodation was basic but comfortable. His room had a wardrobe, a few chairs, bookshelves, and a desk always crammed with papers, with his prized typewriter beside them. Nearby stood his golf clubs. A curtain divided off a part of the room and behind it were a single bed and a washbasin. A radio kept the monsignor in touch with world events.
That evening, as O’Flaherty worked at his desk, there was a knock on the door. Seconds later, in came John May. Of medium build, with bushy eyebrows and a shock of dark hair, he worked as a butler for Sir D’Arcy Osborne, the British Minister to the Holy See. May was O’Flaherty’s ‘eyes and ears’, a fixer who had contacts throughout the city and an uncanny ability to find supplies officially deemed unobtainable. May’s success at sourcing rare items in wartime Rome was legendary and O’Flaherty would declare that he was a ‘genius’, the ‘most magnificent scrounger I have ever come across’.
When May called on O’Flaherty, he looked every inch the English manservant, dressed formally in a white shirt, grey tie, black jacket and dark, striped trousers. In his broad cockney accent, May came straight to the point, telling the monsignor what he had just discovered from a contact who had access to Kappler’s plans. Having revealed details of the kidnap operation, he insisted that the monsignor should avoid the next morning’s early mass and disappear from view for a few days. O’Flaherty, who had been a boxer in his younger days, dismissed his visitor’s concern and responded characteristically: ‘So long as they don’t use guns I can tackle any two or three of them with ease. Though a scrap would be a bit undignified on the very steps of St Peter’s itself, would it not?’
The next day May arrived at mass in good time, keen to make sure the kidnap attempt would be foiled. As expected, two SS men sat in the congregation and tried to blend in, unaware that their hosts had prepared a welcome for them. Even though the would-be kidnappers were dressed in plain clothes, they stood out from other church-goers. Throughout mass May kept his eyes on them at all times. When the service ended, the worshippers rose and slowly made their way towards the exits. As the crowd moved towards the daylight that streamed in from the square, several Vatican gendarmes suddenly appeared at the shoulders of the SS men. Outnumbered, the unwelcome visitors were then ushered outside into the morning air, past their intended victim, who was standing close to the door. The monsignor simply watched as the two men were bundled into a side-street and disappeared from view.
It was over. O’Flaherty had outfoxed his rival.
Soon afterwards Kappler was informed that the kidnapping had not succeeded. The battle against the escape organization would continue, but he knew he would need to adopt new tactics. For a man so used to getting things his own way, the failure to remove O’Flaherty from the scene was a rare setback.
Kappler controlled the city from the former offices of the German embassy’s cultural section. Number 20 Via Tasso housed the Gestapo headquarters as well as a prison and interrogation centre, and all over Rome the address spelled police brutality and torture. Here partisans, Jews, communists, gypsies and those who harboured Allied soldiers were interrogated and physically abused. Few came out of Via Tasso unscathed.
‘Catholicity makes us pure-minded,
charitable, truthful and generous’ Hugh O’Flaherty
September 1943
In the four years during which Herbert Kappler had lived in Rome he had come to love the city. He felt at home, so comfortable in fact that he encouraged his parents to move there from Germany. Well-read and politically literate, he knew much about his hosts, having studied Italian history. But he was a loner, with few friends, and was trapped in an unhappy marriage. Hoping to divorce his wife, he meanwhile embarked on a series of extramarital affairs. During his time in Rome he would have a string of mistresses, among them a Dutch woman who worked alongside him as an intelligence agent.
Outside work, Kappler’s interests included growing roses, walking his dogs, and photography. He also enjoyed good food and had a penchant for collecting Etruscan vases. He loved to spend time with his adopted son Wolfgang, who was a product of the Lebensborn programme, a Nazi social experiment where children were procreated by Germans deemed to be of pure Aryan stock. The project had the blessing of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, who encouraged his officers to have children with true Aryan women.
Born into a middle-class family in Stuttgart in September 1907, as a young man Kappler showed little interest in a career in the police or the military. After secondary school he wanted to learn a trade, so he studied to be an electrician and obtained jobs with various firms. By his mid-twenties he had decided that his future lay elsewhere. In the early 1930s Germany was undergoing enormous social and political change. The Nazi Party was on the rise and Kappler was becoming increasingly attracted to its ideals.
In August 1931 he joined the Sturmabteilung, or SA, a paramilitary group which had a key role in the Nazi Party and played an important part in Hitler’s rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. However, when Hitler seized control of Germany in January 1933, banning political opposition and turning the country into a one-party state, the Schutzstaffel, or SS, came to prominence and would be placed under the control of Heinrich Himmler. SS members generally came from middle-class backgrounds whereas the SA had a more working-class membership. In December 1932 Herbert Kappler made the move to the SS.
As the world around Kappler was changing, so too was his personal life. In September 1934 he married 27-year-old Leonore Janns, a native of Heilbronn, and they took an apartment in Stuttgart.
With German rearmament in full swing, Kappler was called up to complete military training three times between the summer of 1935 and the autumn of 1936. By now he had secured his first promotion, to SS-Scharführer (sergeant), and worked in Stuttgart’s main Gestapo office. His potential was spotted by his superiors, among them Reinhard Heydrich, who, as head of the Gestapo from April 1934, was already a key figure in the Nazi regime. This connection in particular would help Kappler later in his career.
Another promotion followed for the ambitious Kappler and as an SS-Oberscharführer (staff sergeant) he was later selected to attend the Sicherheitspolizei, or Security Police, leadership school in Berlin, becoming the first non-Prussian to graduate from the institution. Now he was a Criminal Commissioner and clearly destined for higher things. He was fast-tracked and shortly before the Second World War broke out he was posted to Innsbruck, which, after the Anschluss, was within Hitler’s Reich. Kappler’s work in Austria caught the attention of senior military figures in Berlin and he had soon established a reputation as a hardworking, loyal Nazi who acted swiftly against opponents. Not surprisingly, his stay in Austria was brief.
In the autumn of 1939, as Britain and France went to war with Germany, Kappler’s travels continued and he found himself in Rome, working as a police attaché at the German embassy. He had been selected to join a new wave of staff who would work out of German diplomatic missions. Kappler replaced Dr Theodor Helmerking, whose time in Rome had been regarded by senior figures in German intelligence as disappointing because he was not interested in the work. By contrast,