Weeks before Nazi troops abandoned Rome, Adolf Hitler personally ordered the SS to kidnap the pope so he could be brought back to Germany and locked up in a castle, according to previously unpublished testimony made available at the weekend.
The newspaper Avvenire, which is owned by the Catholic church in Italy, suggested the kidnap plot was part of a wider plan to ”abolish” Christianity and replace it with a religion in which Hitler would be worshipped as the saviour of humankind.
It said that, instead of carrying out the Führer’s orders, the head of the SS in Italy, General Karl Wolff, went to the Vatican to warn Pope Pius XII of the danger he was in.
Avvenire said Wolff had revealed details of the affair in a written statement to Vatican officials weighing the case for setting Pope Pius on the road to sainthood. The paper said he had given his testimony in Munich on March 24 1972.
Like other papers relating to the intensely controversial issue of Pope Pius’s possible beatification, it had been kept secret until now.
But criticism of the late pontiff’s attitude towards the Jews flared up again last month, and Italian commentators said the extracts from the document seemed to have been published at the instigation of his supporters to reaffirm his credentials as an enemy of the Nazis.
The Vatican’s other papers relating to the war years have yet to be released.
Wolff was quoted by Avvenire as saying: ”I received from Hitler in person the order to kidnap Pope Pius XII.”
This is not the first time that such claims have been hinted at. Wolff testified at the Nuremberg trials that Hitler had talked of seizing the pope in 1943.
The original idea was to occupy the Vatican, ”secure the archives and the art treasures, which have a unique value, and transfer the pope, together with the curia [the papal bureaucracy], for their protection, so that they cannot fall into the hands of the allies and exert a political influence”.
But Wolff talked the Führer out of his idea and it became the stuff of gossip, and the odd footnote in scholarly histories. What was not known until the weekend was that Hitler had returned to the project in all seriousness the following year.
Avvenire said that, on his return to Rome after seeing Hitler, Wolff had asked to see the pope ”to report on serious and very urgent matters regarding his person”.
With allied troops advancing northwards through Italy, the general, wearing civilian clothes, went to the Vatican for an audience on the evening of May 10 1944, accompanied by Father Pancrazio Pfeiffer, superior general of the Salvatorian Fathers.
Wolff was said to have assured the pope he would not carry out his orders, but added that in such a confused situation the pontiff was at real risk.
Pius asked that, as a token of his goodwill, the general save the lives of two condemned prisoners, and this was arranged. In the event, the Germans evacuated Rome on the night of June 4-5.
Pope Pius’s record came under fire again at the end of last year after the publication of another document. This appeared to show that after the war he had sent out orders that Jewish children who had been handed over by their parents to the church for safe keeping should not be given back if they had been baptised in the meantime.
Catholic scholars have since questioned the status of the document. – Guardian Unlimited Â