The Tango War

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by Mary Jo McConahay


  By the 1940s, Hudal was a bishop responsible for a complex of church and seminary classrooms called Santa Maria dell’Anima that covered an entire city block in Rome. Set among narrow, winding streets near the Piazza Navona, the strong, pale ocher walls of the Anima loomed in contrast to graceful, white Italianate churches nearby. A visitor can still see seminarians riding bicycles, their long cassocks flying, arriving at the Anima. Above the door are the words speciosa facta est (“fair she is”), from an antiphon in the Marian vespers, an allusion to the Blessed Mother, her arms open to the stranger. One of the most notorious war criminals who sought help at the door was a perpetrator of the infamous 1944 Ardeatine massacre, which still stands as a symbol in Italy for the egregious Nazi killings of civilians between September 1943 and the end of the war in May 1945. The SS officer’s trajectory from occupied Rome, where the slaughter occurred, to receiving a safe passage to Argentina shows how the Ratlines worked.

  “HE WAS VERY CONTROLLED, VERY COLD…”

  On March 23, 1944, an armed division of 160 SS police made up of ethnic Germans from South Tyrol marched along the narrow Via Rasella in the center of occupied Rome, not far from the Trevi Fountain. A bomb exploded and several troops fell. Italian partisans spilled from hiding places, firing submachine guns and pistols, then disappeared among the streets and around corners. Thirty-three SS police died.

  News of the attack reached Hitler in his Wolf’s Lair bunker in the East Prussian forest. The response was furious. “He is roaring,” reported one officer to the others. “He wants to blow up an entire quarter of the city, including everyone who lives there.”

  An order went out to kill ten Romans for every SS trooper who died on the Via Rasella.

  SS captain Erich Priebke was on the job. At age thirty-one, the light-haired German presented a slim, attractive figure. Priebke had worked in swank hotels in London and Capri before volunteering for the elite “political soldiers” corps in 1936; he interpreted between Mussolini and Hitler when the Fuehrer came to Rome. Part of his job was to serve as liaison between the SS and bishops close to the pope. At night, Priebke took advantage of the after-hours social life for the privileged that percolated through the occupied city. An undercover OSS agent met Priebke at a party and found him “charming, cold and personable, good looking, impeccably uniformed.”

  At Gestapo headquarters on Via Tasso, however, Priebke could be vicious. “He was very controlled, very cold,” said a woman whose husband was one of the prisoners Priebke tortured. “He hit him often with brass knuckles.”

  Priebke’s Gestapo office received the orders to round up 330 Italians and execute them within twenty-four hours in reprisal for the fallen SS police. “The whole of that night we searched the records and could not find a sufficient number of persons to make up the number required for execution,” he later said. Military police nabbed pedestrians on the streets and brought in others because they were Jews. A dozen men who had been released from a prison across town and were picking up their things at the door to leave were grabbed to fill the quota.

  The ultimate register of victims in Priebke’s hands represented a cross-section of Romans, among them sixty-eight military men, including forty-two officers of the Italian army loyal to King Victor Emanuel, who had ceded to the Allies in September 1943. Others were farmers, craftsmen, artists, merchants, a diplomat, a priest, six students, doctors, a lawyer, and civil servants.

  Late on the morning of March 24, Priebke and another officer ordered the men into commandeered meat trucks and drove the Appian Way to an area of tunnels where early Christians, forbidden to bury their dead inside the city walls, had constructed underground tombs. They stopped at a former stone quarry known as the Ardeatine Caves, between the catacombs of San Callisto, which holds the crypt of sixteen popes, and of Santa Domitilla, where first-century Christian martyrs are interred.

  Troops marched five men at a time to a cavern about a hundred feet away as Priebke crossed their names from his list. A farmer secretly watching from a nearby copse noted the moment of the first shot: 3:30 p.m. Soldiers were instructed to eliminate each person with a single shot at the closest possible range, aiming at a certain angle so the bullet entered the brain from the cerebellum, killing instantly. They were not to place the gun barrel in contact with the neck, lest the captive twitch or move in reaction, slowing the process. A medic climbed among the corpses with a flashlight and confirmed that each man was dead. When a few soldiers appeared to balk, Priebke himself shot two of the Italians, to move the process along.

  Massacres take time. Hours passed. When troops began to react with revulsion or appeared shaken by the work, officers distributed cognac; aim became less precise, so that three or four shots, not just one, might be needed to kill. Some who died were in their seventies. Outside, those waiting, like nineteen-year-old Gino Cibei and his younger brother Duilo, fourteen, could hear the shots and only wait their turn.

  When the job was done the Germans set an explosion that collapsed the vault of the cave, entombing any wounded who might still be alive. Three months later, after the Allies took Rome, soldiers removed the fallen rocks and exhumed remains, but forensic scientists could not identify all the bodies.

  * * *

  At the end of the war, tens of thousands of Germans, including officers like Erich Priebke, were held in crowded Italian prisoner-of-war camps while the Allies sorted out who they were. Priebke kept his head down. On New Year’s Eve 1946, he escaped with some fellow captives, cutting through perimeter wire while British guards were drinking, and the Polish guards were already drunk.

  He made his way to South Tyrol, where his wife and two small boys had moved. The Priebke family—he never changed his name—blended seamlessly into the local Germanic culture. Other refugees from the Reich were all around—you didn’t have to worry about being denounced. The wife and ten children of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and one of the Reich’s most powerful men, settled in Merano to await (ultimately in vain) her husband’s arrival.

  By 1944, many of Merano’s big hotels and clinics had been converted into Nazi military hospitals. Meran—the town’s name in German—became an officially designated Lazerettstadt, a “hospital city.” Red crosses on white flags flying from rooftops sheltered neighborhoods from Allied bombs. They protected Nazi officials and collaborators already on the run.

  In 1948, Priebke saw not only that Hitler’s closest collaborators had been tried at Nuremberg but also that former Nazis at various levels were continuing to be charged elsewhere with war crimes. SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, head of the Gestapo in German-occupied Rome and Priebke’s superior, was already in jail, and Italians wanted Priebke for the Ardeatine massacre. He decided it would be prudent to leave Europe.

  Many looking to escape went to Madrid or Lisbon, where certain neighborhoods were well known as refuges for those seeking a way out of Europe. Small Merano, then with a population of about eighteen thousand, offered as many opportunities to get on a Ratline as either of those bigger cities. Priebke started by seeking out a local Roman Catholic cleric.

  Parish priests, especially in northern Italy, commonly confirmed the Catholic faith and good standing of Nazi fugitives and collaborators. Whether a priest was still sympathetic to Mussolini’s Fascism, which had given concessions to the Church in exchange for support, or was an admirer of the Reich because it fought communists or was anti-Semitic, the cleric would attest in writing that a person seeking documents was a practicing Catholic of good character, allowing him entrance to the Church escape system. To protect himself, Priebke underwent a “rebaptism.” Mayors, too, and other city officials like those in Merano provided written recommendations asserting that a person on the run had presented proof that he was stateless, another victim of the shifted borders that affected millions at the war’s end.

  With the references, refugees both real and bogus could obtain documents from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), certifying t
heir status as persons unable to return to their homelands. Migration officials accepted the ICRC papers as identification for international travel, as good as a passport. The ICRC failed to vet those who received the certificates, or officials knew who they were and issued papers anyway.

  At Santa Maria dell’Anima, Bishop Hudal greeted Erich Priebke warmly. The former SS officer later described the bishop as “a gentle man.” Before Priebke left the seminary, Hudal handed him a blank Red Cross passport stamped with an Argentine visa on which his family could travel.

  Not far away, another cleric was sheltering entire groups of Croatian fascists. The church of San Girolamo degli Illirici, whose pleasing travertine facade faces a small plaza on the Tiber, is a half hour’s walk along the river from Hudal’s Santa Maria dell’Anima. Until the 1890s, a sweep of stone steps descended from the door of San Girolamo down to the Port of Ripetta. Today the riverine port is gone, but San Girolamo and the stolid building complex to which it belongs remain in place, as they have for more than five hundred years.

  In the mid-1940s, brusque young men in civilian clothes, visibly armed, kept guard all around. Sometimes they exchanged a Nazi-like salute and cried out in the Croatian language, “Za dom spremni!” (“For the homeland, ready!”) The true protector of the fugitives inside, however, was San Girolamo’s director, the Reverend Krunoslav Draganović.

  Tall, with thinning hair and piercing brown eyes, Draganović was a native of Bosnia-Herzegovina who had thrown in his lot early with the Ustashi, the revolutionary Croatian independence movement. Its founder, Ante Pavelić, bombed civilian trains and collaborated in political assassinations, including the 1934 murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. Ustashi thinking was a dark brew of nationalism, fanatic Roman Catholicism, and fascism, its mission to defend Europe’s Christian civilization from threats by “Eastern” Serbs. When Hitler and Mussolini handed the “Independent State of Croatia” to Ante Pavelić on a platter, Ustashi forces murdered more than two hundred thousand Orthodox Christian Serbs, thousands of Freemasons, Moslems, and Communists, and almost all of the land’s Roma and Jews. Draganović held a minor post in the government before coming to Rome. He considered Pavelić a “torchbearer of freedom.”

  Sometimes Krunoslav Draganović was called the “Golden Priest” for using bars of ore from the Croatian treasury to guarantee new lives for thousands of ordinary Croatians who fled a new communist regime at the war’s end. At San Girolamo, he sheltered the former Ustashi government’s finance minister, propaganda minister, deputy foreign minister, commander of the gendarmerie, and commander of the air force. When Ante Pavelić arrived in Rome disguised as a humble Peruvian priest, Draganović helped him get a travel passport from the International Red Cross and passage on a ship out of Genoa to Buenos Aires. San Girolamo was a destination for some of Friedrich Schwend’s gold and money that left Schloss Labers.

  THE “WORLD-DANGER OF BOLSHEVISM”

  Hudal, Draganović, and other clerics who aided travelers on the Ratlines reflected Church thinking at the highest levels. Pope Pius XI, who reigned from 1922 to his death in 1939, set the tone. A librarian by profession, Pius XI did not sympathize with Nazi territorial goals or methods, but he saw Hitler as the only world figure besides himself who was truly standing up to the “world-danger of Bolshevism.” His 1937 encyclical, Divini Redemptoris, cast the fight against universal communism in the light of the age-old “struggle between good and evil.” The world was in convulsion, the pope said, with people “in danger of falling back into a barbarism.”

  The danger was “Bolshevistic and atheistic Communism, which aims at upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization.” Historically, the Catholic Church shared political and social rule with kings and governments. But in communist countries, the Church would not have a dominant role and might not be tolerated at all.

  Men like Hudal and Draganović lived within a clerical culture that had coexisted for years with Italian Fascism, an ideology that the pope viewed as keeping socialism and communism at bay in the heartland of the Church. The Vatican itself created the atmosphere for development of the Ratlines with public ambivalence about condemning Nazism, but the position had its roots in the Holy See’s collaboration with Mussolini.

  In the 1929 Lateran Treaty, Mussolini recognized Vatican City as a sovereign, independent state ruled by the pope. Il Duce mandated Catholic education in schools and promised the Church money. In return, the Vatican pledged to stifle political opposition by Catholic democratic groups and to support Mussolini’s Fascist state. Bishops were required to take a loyalty oath to the government. The pope was overjoyed at the restoration of Vatican property and churchly privileges that had been suspended since the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century.

  “Newspapers throughout the country, including the Vatican daily, hammered on the theme that the historic event could never have happened if Italy had still been under democratic rule,” wrote Vatican scholar David Kertzer. “Only Mussolini, and fascism, had made it possible.”

  Pius XI envisaged an Italian confessional state where Catholicism would be the official religion, figuring he could Christianize Fascism. Instead, Mussolini created his own political religion, sometimes riding piggyback on Catholic tradition. When Il Duce promulgated the racial laws in 1938, he quoted from medieval anti-Semitic Catholic tracts.

  * * *

  When Vatican secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli, scion of one of Rome’s finest families, succeeded to the papal throne in 1939 as Pius XII, an important difference between the two prelates emerged. By the end of his life the old pope, Pius XI, had come to regard militaristic Nazism, with its suppression of individual liberties, to be just as threatening as atheistic and materialistic communism. In Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern), written in German to the German Church, he condemned Nazi “neo-paganism” and the “so-called myth of race and blood.”

  His successor, Pius XII, did not make such public condemnations of the Nazis. He was openly impressed when fascist forces crushed the leftist forces of Republican Spain with the help of Hitler’s air force, and he blessed Italian troops on their return from fighting with Franco. In Spain, fascists showed they could stop communism.

  As papal nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929, Pacelli signed the Concordat with Hitler meant to protect twenty million members of the German Catholic Church. There were trade-offs in the deal—bishops had to swear allegiance to the Reich. But an understanding prevailed that the pope’s first obligation was to protect the Church so its priests could administer the sacraments that give the faithful the graces necessary for salvation.

  Whether Pius XII did not want to unleash Hitler’s wrath on Catholics under Reich control or whether his will was weak, the fact remains that as pope he acted with an excess of caution. He did not roundly condemn the mass killing of Jews. He failed to excommunicate the Fuehrer, a baptized Catholic. He did not support the Italian resistance—partisans were suspect because most were communist.

  In his role as the bishop of Rome, Pius XII also tread lightly in 1944 lest occupying Nazis destroy the Eternal City and the independent Papal State. The day after the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves, the official Vatican mouthpiece L’Osservatore Romano lamented equally the Nazi troopers’ deaths and the dead of the cave who were “sacrificed for the guilty parties who escaped arrest.” In this way the papacy cast guilt for the Gestapo murders not on the Germans but on the partisans who fled the Via Rasella.

  * * *

  The Vatican did not by itself run the Ratlines. But the popes gave a green light for clerics to implement escape routes amid the confusion and pain caused by movements of people torn by the war.

  William Gowen of the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), who was looking for Ante Pavelić in 1946, got word that up to ten truckloads of purloined gold had been unloaded at Draganović’s San Girolamo from a convoy bearing Vatican license plates. He couldn’t find it. Later, when Draga
nović had been recruited into the U.S. intelligence network, he confirmed to Gowen that the convoy arrived, commanded by an Ustashi lieutenant colonel. According to one report, a Croatian stash of US$530 million—a staggering amount for the time—flowed “through the Vatican’s pipeline” to Spain, then to Argentina. The Vatican denied it.

  What is clear from the Holy See’s own records, however, is that no other state had a network with such capacity for knowing where people were and moving them as the Vatican had. For the most part, the Vatican systems were used to assist legitimate wartime refugees at a time of terrible displacement. Through the Vatican Refugee Organization, which aided twelve million legitimate refugees in Europe between 1945 and 1953, some of those running from justice also obtained the coveted cartas di reconicimento, the friendly letters that got them travel documents from the ICRC.

  The papal Office of Information tracked missing persons through its networks of parishes and monasteries and facilitated correspondence between families and loved ones in POW camps or at the front. The office maintained a wartime central index of persons on four million cards. Working closely with the inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Pope Pius XI established Vatican Radio in 1931; the station broadcast a million wartime messages, often to reconnect families.

  From 1940 to 1946, agencies operating out of the Vatican helped about 860,000 persons, mostly civilians, to repatriate or move to safe havens. Probably some 30,000 were war criminals and collaborators who took the Ratlines. After the war the Vatican directly interceded with Washington and London for certain war criminals and Nazi collaborators sheltering in Italy, including some protected by Hudal and Draganović, lest they be extradited to countries where they would face a death sentence.

  Almost all the escape routes ran through the Church infrastructure, but members of the Roman Catholic Church were not the only ones to use the Ratlines to abet fugitives. The Allies also used them to move their former foes to freedom.

 

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