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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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 his bosses in Berlin with intelligence reports peppered with Kurtna’s observations.
Kurtna’s personal journey to becoming an agent in Rome was a fascinating one. He was born in 1914 in Tsarist Estonia, where his father was a civil servant and his mother a teacher. After spending time in the Estonian Army he decided to become a Catholic priest. He converted from Russian Orthodox and attended a Polish seminary run by the Jesuits. He was then awarded a scholarship and went to Rome to study at the Pontifical Russian College, which educated priests who were to be sent on missions to the Soviet Union.
But life in the holy orders was clearly not for Kurtna. Although he was academically gifted and fluent in several languages, including Russian and German, the Jesuits decided that the young Estonian was not suited for the priesthood. He left the Pontifical Russian College and managed to get work as a translator with the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, a Vatican department which looked after priests based in eastern Europe.
Kurtna’s new job required him to translate letters and reports and brought him into contact with a small circle of priests, monsignors and Vatican officials. He became acquainted with Cardinal Eugène Tisserant and Monsignor Giovanni Montini.
Before long Kurtna took on outside work, putting his language skills to greater use. Keen to develop his contacts, he began to make connections with Rome’s German community. He met Dr Ferdinand Bock, the director of the German Historical Institute, which officially supported a series of research projects and unofficially was a cover for a German spying network. Bock and the young translator got on well and the academic agreed to fund Kurtna to carry out research. It is clear Bock had other reasons to support a young student with good connections within the Vatican.
Kurtna’s skills were now in demand. His frequent trips to Russian-occupied Estonia and his relationship with the Vatican had also been spotted by Soviet intelligence officers. The Russians were particularly interested in Kurtna’s relationship with Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, the director of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, the group that Kurtna translated for. The cardinal was believed to be trying to smuggle priests into eastern Europe to promote Catholicism. Kurtna was asked to watch events in the Vatican and report back to a Russian diplomat based at the embassy in Rome. He agreed. The former seminarian was now living an exciting life and playing a dangerous game and it was about to become even more complicated.
Dr Bock was a friend of one of the most important people in Rome: Herbert Kappler. It was a friendship that would ultimately benefit Kurtna. Within days he found himself sitting opposite Kappler in his office at the German embassy. As they talked the SS commander was impressed by the Estonian’s contacts and experience, and a deal was struck. Kurtna was quickly put to use by the police attaché and tasked with preparing reports on Vatican–German relations and in particular the activities of the Catholic Church in Poland and the Baltic States. Using his contacts in the Vatican and through his role as a translator, Kurtna was able to discover much confidential information on the Church’s work in German-occupied areas of eastern Europe.
Kappler’s relationship with the young man was complex and problematic. He knew that Kurtna was a double agent and understood that whatever information the Estonian discovered about the Vatican would go straight back to Moscow. He also knew that Kurtna could report German activities