The priestly Pimpernel: operating literally under the nose of the Nazi SS, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty's Vatican-based underground rescued thousands of Jews and Allied POWs.

Of the inmates confined to Italy's Gaeta prison, none was as notorious as Herbert Kappler. Prior to his incarceration in 1945, Kappler had been the most feared man in Italy--commander of SS forces in occupied Rome, with the power to kill people at whim.

On October 16, 1943, Kappler issued orders for the Jews of Rome to be rounded up for deportation to the death camps. Five months later, in retaliation for a guerrilla bombing that killed 33 members of the SS, Kappler ordered the summary execution of more than 300 Italian civilians, whom he picked at random. The victims, with their hands bound behind them, were quietly marched to the outskirts of Rome, whence they were transported in trucks to the Ardeatine Caves at Domatilla. There they were unloaded in batches, placed into the caves, and sprayed with machine-gun fire.

For several hours, Kappler personally supervised the butchery. When the last of the victims had been thrust into the caves, the Nazi officer ordered his underlings to detonate charges that had been placed at the cave entrances, thereby entombing the dead--and the still-living--behind several hundred tons of rock.

Among the victims of this atrocity, which came to be known as the Massacre at the Ardeatine Caves, were five members of an underground network organized by Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty. Throughout Rome and its suburbs, members of this network operated safe houses for refugees and escaped Allied prisoners of war. O'Flaherty had begun this work in 1942, when he began to offer sanctuary in the Vatican to prominent Jews and anti-Fascist aristocrats, many of whom he had gotten to know prior to the war. By the spring of 1943, the monsignor had expanded his efforts to include escaped British POWs--a risky undertaking made all the more remarkable by the fact that O'Flaherty, an ardent Irish nationalist, had little love for the English.

Italian Rescuers

Prior to the German occupation of Rome in September 1943, Italian Jews were relatively sale. "Mussolini passed anti-Semitic laws to please his senior [Axis] partner, but he originally tempered them according to limits set by his own ambiguous prejudice toward Jews and by what the Italian public and officials would reasonably tolerate," point out social historians Samuel P. and Pearl M. Oliner. "Italian Jews were highly assimilated and consequently indistinguishable from Italian gentiles. They had extensive personal and public contacts with the latter, to whom they readily turned when they needed help."

Thousands of Italian Jews were able to flee to safety in Switzerland. But the survival of most of the country's Jewish population was due to "the widespread aid extended to Jews by many Italians.... Italian opposition to the Final Solution, compassion, and active courage saved many Italian Jews who would otherwise have fallen victim to it." In the notorious "Black Sabbath" raid mounted immediately after Lt. Colonel Kappler's deportation order, Nazi officials expected to seize more than 8,000 Jews--only to fall far short of that goal because "seven thousand found hiding places among sympathetic Italians."

Much of the "active courage" touted by the Oliners was exercised within the Vatican. In The Altruistic Personality, their study of those who rescued Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, the Oliners recall:

   [T]he Catholic Church concealed
   hundreds of Jews in the Vatican complex
   and several thousand more in
   Roman monasteries and convents
   during this emergency. Other rescue
   rings relied heavily on clerical involvement.
   After Germany occupied
   the Italian sector of France, the irrepressible
   Father Marie-Benoit
   changed his name to Benedetto and
   resumed his activities in Rome, where
   he joined forces with the Jewish relief
   agency for refugees, DELASEM.

From this union sprang a factory for fabricating identity and food-ration cards and a network for distributing them to Jews in hiding. The Benedetto operation ultimately helped 1,500 foreign Jews and 2,500 Italian Jews.

Another operation, run by Padre Ruffino Niccacci, concealed 300 Jewish fugitives in religious shrines in Assisi, where they were given forged documents and provided with the means of reaching Allied lines. In like fashion, Monsignor O'Flaherty aided untold thousands of Italian Jews to escape near-certain death.

An Audacious Priest

Monsignor O'Flaherty's Vatican-based network was hardly unique. What distinguished O'Flaherty from his colleagues was his audacity. Standing alone on the steps of St. Peter's Cathedral, in full view of SS occupation troops, O'Flaherty waited for people to approach him seeking sanctuary.

Driven by strategic expediency, the Germans grudgingly respected the Vatican's sovereignty. Upon occupying Rome, the SS drew a white line marking the limits of the Vatican's jurisdiction. Eventually, O'Flaherty was warned that crossing the white line would mean immediate arrest. Both Colonel Kappler and Ludwig Koch, the inventive sadist who presided over SS torture sessions at the Regina Coeli prison, made it abundantly clear that interrogation, torture and execution awaited the monsignor if he fell into their hands.

"Monsignor O'Flaherty hid Jews in monasteries and convents, at Castel Gandolfo, in his old college of the Propaganda Fide, in the German College and in his network of apartments," recounts an official history of County Kerry in Ireland, where O'Flaherty was born in 1898. "Every evening, he stood in the porch of St. Peter's, in plain view of both the German soldiers across the piazza and of the windows of the Pope's apartments. Escaped POWs and Jews would come to him there."

"One Jew made his way to St. Peter's and, coming up to O'Flaherty at his usual post on the steps and drawing him deeper into the shadows, proceeded to unwind a solid gold chain that went twice around his waist," recalls J.P. Gallagher in Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican. "My wife and I expect to be arrested at any moment," the desperate man told the monsignor. "We have no way of escaping. When we are taken to Germany we shall die. But we have a small son; he is only seven and is too young to die in a Nazi gas chamber. Please take this chain and take the boy for us, too. Each link of the chain will keep him alive for a month. Will you save him?"

"Of course," replied O'Flaherty, "but I have a better plan. I will put the boy somewhere safe and I will look after the chain for you. I will not use it unless I have to. I will get you and your wife new [identity] papers, Italian papers, and you can continue to live openly in Rome." Within a short time the monsignor had obtained the forged documents and secreted the young child in a safe house. At the war's end, he reunited the child with his parents, who had survived the war. He also returned the gold chain, intact, to its owner.

Often disguising his charges in clerical robes or the uniform of Swiss Guards, O'Flaherty would smuggle them to relative safety within his network of apartments. On more than one occasion the SS or its subordinates in the Fascist police managed to infiltrate his organization, and some of O'Flaherty's helpers ended up in the Gestapo's hands, where they were tortured and, occasionally, killed. But Kappler wasn't content to snag a few minor players; he desperately wanted to get his hands on O'Flaherty himself.

Close Calls

One morning in March 1944, Kappler attempted to grab the monsignor in a blatant power play. Striding up to the white line at the boundary of St. Peter's, the SS officer explained his plan to the two Gestapo thugs in plain clothes accompanying him. As recounted by Gallagher, Kappler sputtered:

   That is him--Monsignor Hugh
   O'Flaherty--a mad Irish priest, but
   dangerous, too dangerous to live. He
   has given us more trouble than any
   other man in Rome and it must stop.
   He knows he will be arrested if we
   catch him outside Vatican territory
   and we have so far failed to
   lure him across that line, or
   spot him when he has slipped
   away into the city, which he
   does whenever he feels like
   it! Since we can't take him
   frontally, we shall try from
   the rear. Listen carefully. He
   does not know you.... Tomorrow
   you will attend service in
   St. Peter's.... As they start to
   come out you will come out
   also, but use the door immediately behind
   where O'Flaherty stands now.
   Seize him, hustle him down the steps
   and across the line. When you get him
   away and into a side street, free him--for
   a moment. I don't want to see
   him alive again and we certainly
   don't want any formal trials. He will
   have been "shot while escaping."

Fortunately, Kappler's plan became known to John May, an Englishman who provided key services (including document forgery) to the O'Flaherty underground. When the Gestapo agents showed up according to plan, they were quietly intercepted by a pair of burly Swiss Guards, who led the thugs out of the chapel. The SS men had expected to rejoin the group of German paratroopers who kept station just beyond the white line. However, the Swiss Guards steered the secret policemen to another exit, where they found a much different welcoming committee--a group of Serbian expatriates. As Gallagher wryly records, "it was a very battered and bruised pair who reported yet another failure to Kappler later that morning."

O'Flaherty's closest call came during a visit to the Pallazo Doria, where he was visiting with Prince Filipo Doria Pamphili to request funding for his underground. The prince provided the monsignor with a gift of 300,000 lire and promised to take up "a little collection among our friends--your friends." "There's nothing to worry about," he assured O'Flaherty. "We won't let you down."

At that very moment, the prince's secretary burst into the room and gestured frantically toward a window: "Oh, yes, there is something to worry about--look here." The street below was clogged with SS troops. Kappler himself could be seen emerging from his black saloon car, his face a mask of arrogant triumph.

"I'm afraid this is it, Hugh," Prince Filipo said quietly. "There is no point in resisting. There is no way to escape this time." "Don't you believe it!" replied O'Flaherty, grabbing the much needed donation. "We'd better find some other place to meet next time. I mustn't compromise you. If the Germans don't find me here they can't prove I was here. I'll think of a new rendezvous.... God bless you."

O'Flaherty dashed downstairs, where the prince's staff was trying to delay the SS officers angrily banging on the door. Urging the servants to stall for just a minute longer, O'Flaherty bombed down a narrow, steep stone staircase to the Pallazo's cellar. As SS men began to tear apart the building looking for him, the monsignor cast about desperately for a hiding place or a means of escape. A sound akin to a landslide alerted him to the fact that the prince had chosen that day to take in his winter supply of coal--offering the monsignor a providential escape route.

After rushing to the coal room, O'Flaherty scrambled up a small, shifting mound of coal and carefully opened a trapdoor to the courtyard. There he found a coal sack laden with dust. Peeling off most of his clerical vestments, the monsignor smeared coal dust over his face, hair and chest to disguise himself. From the shadows of his hiding place, through the open trapdoor, the monsignor tersely whispered to one of the coal workers, "Stay exactly as you are and listen.... I'm a priest. The Gestapo are after me. Leave that sack on the side there and come down here a moment!"

After recovering from his surprise, the coal man heaved his sack as requested, then crouched down to speak with the priest. "A new assistant I have, eh?" he commented, a conspiratorial grin spreading across his face.

"There's no time to waste," O'Flaherty warned his new friend. "I want you to stay here a minute or two, no more. As soon as I've gone through the gates you can come out and get on with the delivery." "Right, Father," replied the coal man, warning him not to let his co-worker Marco see his face. "He's so dumb he might give you away."

Grasping the heavy coal sack, O'Flaherty strode quickly but calmly across the courtyard, toward a narrow gap in the SS lines through which the actual coal workers had passed. Eager to avoid soiling their uniforms, the SS men gave the filthy priest-cum-coalworker a wide berth, never wondering why a supposed coal man would be carrying a sack of coal out. The priest marched through the Pallazo gates to the coal truck, then around the corner and into the nearest church. After bathing and changing back into his clerical robes, O'Flaherty headed back to St. Peter's, where (after a brief but necessary delay) he placed a call to Prince Filipo.

"Some day you must tell me how you did it!" the prince told O'Flaherty. "I'm afraid Colonel Kappler is a very angry man. He spent two hours here, and he did say that if I happened to see you I was to say that one of these days he will be entertaining you"--at a Gestapo torture facility.

Shortly after this narrow escape, O'Flaherty was invited--with a promise of safe conduct--to a reception at the Hungarian Embassy, where the German ambassador gave him a pointed warning on behalf of Berlin. "Nobody in Rome honors you more than I do," insisted Baron von Weiszacker. "But it has gone too far for us all. Kappler is waiting in the hall, feeling rather frustrated.... I have told him that you will of course have safe-conduct back to the Vatican tonight. But--if you ever step outside Vatican territory again, on whatever pretext, you will be arrested at once."

Hide-and-Seek

Though inclined to ignore the German warning, O'Flaherty heeded the pleas of his colleagues, who insisted that he was too valuable to run such risks. Accordingly, the monsignor delegated the legwork to others--such as the redoubtable John May and Major William Simpson, an escaped British POW. But O'Flaherty was very much in charge of the daily operations of his underground. By war's end, thousands of escaped Allied prisoners, and most of Italy's Jewish population, were still alive--thanks in no small measure to the intrepid work of the "Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican."

"He was a fantastic man," enthuses Simpson, himself a Scottish Presbyterian, about Monsignor O'Flaherty. "He used to play games with the Germans.... It was the most gigantic game of hide-and-seek you've ever seen"--one that lasted for eight months and involved scores of thousands of POWs and Jewish refugees.

Despite the grim, deadly seriousness of his work, O'Flaherty was unthilingly optimistic--almost to the point of insouciance, at least from the perspective of some of his associates. A large, athletic man, the monsignor had been a standout as a boxer. (On one occasion, the monsignor eluded capture through the simple expedient of lowering his shoulder and bowling over several SS men.) He was also an ardent golfer--a pastime not looked on with favor by his clerical superiors, but one that allowed him to cultivate the ties with Italian aristocracy that eventually facilitated his lifesaving work.

Growing up in Killarney, County Kerry, O'Flaherty became a devoted Irish nationalist. When several of his boyhood friends were shot by the "Black and Tans"--a British occupation force recruited largely from the prison population--O'Flaherty developed a passionate hatred for England. Like many millions of decent people at the beginning of World War II, the monsignor initially supported neutrality and hoped a mediated solution could be reached. But he also recognized National Socialism for the unalloyed evil that it was, and risked his life on countless occasions to rescue its would-be victims.

Love and Redemption

After the war, O'Flaherty was castigated by detractors who accused him of being a glory-seeking opportunist, or--in the words of one detractor--a "jumped-up Irish peasant." "None of these people believed in his motives because they had no experience, nothing that could enable them to comprehend them," explains biographer J.R Gallagher. "Though trained to believe, and to preach that charity is the greatest of all virtues, none of his critics could even begin to understand O'Flaherty's simple--yes, if you like, peasant--interpretation of the doctrine, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' Yet this was what shone through all O'Flaherty's actions."

O'Flaherty's most remarkable application of that Christian commandment came in his personal dealings with Colonel Kappler--the butcher of the Ardeatine Caves, the despised SS commander who had repeatedly sought his life.

Late in the war, with the American army closing in on Rome, according to one account, Kappler finally succeeded in capturing O'Flaherty. An SS man disguised in priestly robes snuck into the monsignor's room, put a pistol to his head, and hustled him to a waiting car. The priest was driven to the Coliseum, where Kappler awaited him.

"I know about you," said the SS commander. "People have told me you can't pass a beggar without giving him money, that you will help anyone, Americans, British, Jews, Arabs, all the same. They say you believe in brotherly love."

"It's why I became a priest," replied O'Flaherty. "What do you want?"

"The American army is closing on Rome now," Kappler observed. "It won't take them long to get here. As you know, my wife and family are here. There is no German transport to take them back home. If the partisans capture them, they will kill them. I want you get them to safety. You know how!"

For a moment, O'Flaherty's charity apparently failed him. "You have sent thousands of families to their deaths, but now you want me to save yours! No! It is the reward of your evil! I will not do it!" Defying Kappler's wrath, O'Flaherty strode away.

"It's all a lie!" bellowed Kappler at the departing monsignor. "Your God, love, mercy--all lies! You're no different than anyone else!"

But, as Kappler would learn following his capture, O'Flaherty was different. Questioning the SS commander about infiltration routes to and from Rome, an Allied interrogator asked him: "Who got your family to Switzerland? Tell us and it will go easier for you at your trial?

The stunned Kappler suddenly realized that O'Flaherty, his fit of indignation notwithstanding, had carried out the request to save his family--just as he carried out a similar request on behalf of the family of SS torturer Ludwig Koch.

Nor was that the monsignor's final act of charity toward his would-be assassin.

For more than a decade of his lonely, ignominious imprisonment at Gaeta, Kappler received only one visitor: Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty. For more than 14 years, the monsignor patiently taught the Nazi about Jesus of Nazareth--a humble Jewish Man whom believers worship as God Incarnate. In March 1959--15 years after Kappler had first tried to kill O'Flaherty--the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican baptized his onetime arch-nemesis into the Catholic Church.