Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (4 page)

SECTION I

INCEPTION

Works of art are not like diamonds. However valuable a diamond may be, you can always get another like it. But the
Mona Lisa
or the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican are unique. Their creators are dead, and no money could ever replace them.

—GENERAL SIR H. MAITLAND WILSON,
SUPREME COMMANDER, ALLIED FORCES
MEDITERRANEAN THEATER

1

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

MID-JULY–EARLY AUGUST 1943

M
eetings of heads of state, even in an emergency, normally require days if not weeks to arrange. Scheduling the July 19, 1943, meeting between the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, and Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini took less than twenty-four hours.

Alarming news on the situation in Italy had reached Hitler two days earlier. Only seven days had passed since American and British forces had fought their way onto the beaches of Sicily, yet German brigade commanders had already begun receiving reports of Italian troops abandoning the front lines—surrendering in such numbers that it burdened the Allied advance. Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief South, griped that “half-clothed Italian soldiers were careening around the countryside in stolen lorries.” Germany’s Fascist partner seemed unable, or—worse—unwilling, to defend its own homeland from the Allied invaders. Hitler and his general staff knew that even in the best of scenarios Mussolini’s public bluster did not match the actual military capacity of his country; more German forces would be required to defend this newly opened second front. Given the mind-numbing loss of one million German soldiers the previous winter—many killed at Stalingrad, the “most catastrophic defeat hitherto experienced in German history”—something had to be done, and quickly.

The meeting took place at Villa Gaggia, near the town of Feltre, some fifty miles north of Venice. After spending the night at his Alpine home in Berchtesgaden, Germany, Hitler arrived by plane in the Italian town of Treviso, where Mussolini greeted him. Together they boarded a train for the short distance to Feltre. It would be Hitler’s last trip to Italy.

In 1926, Hitler wrote about Mussolini in
Mein Kampf
, expressing his “profoundest admiration for the great man south of the Alps who, full of ardent love for his people, made no pacts with the enemies of Italy, but strove for their annihilation by all ways and means.” In fact, Hitler’s admiration extended to Mussolini’s self-proclaimed title,
Il Duce
(The Leader)—so much so that he chose for himself the same title,
Führer
. During the latter half of the 1920s, Hitler considered Mussolini’s successful leadership of Fascist Italy a model for National Socialism in Germany. Editors of
Time
magazine placed Mussolini’s image on its covers in 1923 and 1926, calling attention to his “remarkable self-control, rare judgment and an efficient application of his ideas to the solving of existing problems.” Pope Pius XI referred to Mussolini as a man “like the one that Providence has provided us with.”

Initially Mussolini had no interest in forming an alliance with Germany, a nation weakened by sanctions after World War I. He considered Hitler’s racial theories of Aryan supremacy ludicrous. But in 1936, the two leaders developed a closer relationship following Italy’s and Germany’s interventions in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) in support of General Francisco Franco and his Nationalists. By November 1 of that year, impressed by Hitler’s consolidation of power and the remarkable turnaround of German industry, Mussolini delivered a speech in front of Milan’s towering cathedral, the Duomo, in which he hitched the future of Italy to the ambitions of the German leader. He boldly predicted that the rest of Europe would soon revolve around the “axis” of Europe’s two most powerful countries.

In the early years of their alliance, Mussolini believed that he could manage Hitler, but by 1943, any question about who managed whom had been laid to rest. Hitler had militarized Germany, building it into a war machine with state-of-the-art technologies. The nation and its people existed to serve the Führer in whatever manner he determined; no sacrifice would be too great.

Fond of delivering grandiose speeches but less skilled at long-term logistics, Mussolini made no such provisions to prepare the Italian people and its industry for the hardships ahead. Food riots began in southern Italy as early as January 1941; food rationing began nine months later. Government disorganization resulted in misallocation of resources. Labor shortages coexisted with unemployment. Poverty increased in the countryside as the war “tore their sons from the plough.” Time and again, Mussolini’s leadership proved inadequate. But like an apprentice whose allegiance to his mentor endures even after recognizing his elder’s failings, Hitler maintained his affection and admiration for Mussolini.

The German High Command had urged Hitler to demand control of all Italian ground and air forces. Any hope of stopping the Allied advance in Sicily depended on it. The Italian High Command,
Comando Supremo
, expected Mussolini to explain Italy’s predicament to the Führer using words from a telegram they drafted for him the previous day: “The sacrifice of my country cannot have as its principal purpose that of delaying a direct attack on Germany. . . . My country, which entered the war three years earlier than was foreseen and after it already had engaged in two wars, has step by step exhausted itself, burning up its resources.” Of the two, Mussolini had the more difficult assignment.

At 11 a.m., Mussolini, accompanied by General Vittorio Ambrosio, Chief of Staff for the Italian Army, and two government representatives, entered the main lounge of the villa with Hitler and his four-man entourage. The meeting began with a lengthy monologue by Hitler, without translation, about the progress of the war, the outcome of which would “determine the fate of Europe.” Sometime after 11:30 a.m., Mussolini’s personal secretary burst into the room carrying an urgent message, which the Duce then read aloud in German: “At this moment the enemy is engaged in a violent bombardment of Rome.” Hitler resumed his one-sided narration with barely a pause.

After Mussolini failed to convey the message his generals had drafted, General Ambrosio took advantage of a short break before the private lunch between the two leaders. He insisted to Mussolini that Italy exit the war within fifteen days. Mussolini replied: “It sounds so simple: one day, at a given hour, one sends a radio message to the enemy . . . but with what consequences? . . . What attitude will Hitler take? Perhaps you think that he would give us liberty of action?”

Although Mussolini later pleaded for additional German military support, the shame of admitting that Italy’s resources had been exhausted was simply too great. Under his leadership, Italy had entered the war aligned with Hitler and the Nazis. There would be no easy way out, especially now, after the Allies had attacked Rome. At that moment, the Italian leader could only think about how his absence during the attacks would be seen by Romans.

THE FIRST PLANES
of the formation appeared over Rome at 11:03 a.m. on a cloudless summer morning. Aircraft soon filled the sky above the Eternal City. An enormous formation of more than five hundred B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators—virtually the entire Northwest African Strategic Air Force (NASAF) of the United States Army—skirted the Vatican to begin their bombing run. From an altitude of more than twenty thousand feet (twenty “angels”—American pilots referred to every one thousand feet of altitude as one “angel”), the bombers released their payload, some two million pounds of explosives targeting the Littorio and Ciampino Airdromes and the railway marshaling yards at Littorio and San Lorenzo. Each bomb took seventy seconds to fall to the earth.

The risky mission reflected the importance Allied leaders placed on disrupting enemy communications and interdicting the supply of German and Italian forces from Florence and Genoa into Rome. They also wanted to avoid the resupply from Rome to Sicily via Naples farther south. Littorio and Ciampino posed the lesser problems; both were located more than five miles from the city center. But the San Lorenzo rail yards lay less than a mile and a half from Rome’s most famous monument, the Colosseum, and immediately adjacent to one of the Seven Pilgrim Churches of Rome, the
Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura
(Basilica of St. Lawrence Outside the Walls).

Plumes of smoke rising from the southeast disturbed the normally splendid view of the city from the open-air gallery of the Vatican’s Loggia di Raffaello. Even as the sound of nearby antiaircraft fire and distant explosions echoed across the hills, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, Vatican Deputy Secretary of State for Ordinary Affairs, could not believe that the Allies would bomb Rome.
*

The smoke seen by Montini originated from the San Lorenzo rail yards and the surrounding densely populated neighborhoods. While the raid devastated the marshaling yards, some bombs missed their target and hit adjacent university and hospital buildings, the nearby Verano Cemetery, and the Basilica of San Lorenzo, where the body of Pope Pius IX, the longest-reigning pope in history, had been reinterred in 1881. More than two thousand people lay dead—most were civilians from working-class neighborhoods. A large number of the victims had been packed in streetcars in the piazza facing the church. One woman noted in her diary: “death . . . comes from where we look when we pray to God.”

The Allies had acted despite numerous pleas by Eugenio Pacelli—Patriarch of the West, Successor of the Chief of the Apostles, Primate of Italy, Vicar of Jesus Christ, but most commonly known as His Holiness, Pope Pius XII—that Rome be spared. Aware of his concerns, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote the pope on July 10, 1943. Even while Allied forces were landing in Sicily, he restated his previous assurances: “Your Holiness. . . . Churches and religious institutions will, to the extent that it is within our power, be spared the devastations of war during the struggle ahead.”

The Holy Father’s refusal to publicly criticize Nazi Germany’s devastating bombing of London, Coventry, and other culturally rich European cities made his preoccupation with protecting Rome and the Vatican appear hypocritical to some. Britain’s Minister to the Holy See, Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, commented, “The more I think of it, the more I am revolted by Hitler’s massacre of the Jewish Race on the one hand, and . . . the Vatican’s apparently exclusive preoccupation with the . . . possibilities of the bombardments of Rome.” Informed of the raid shortly after it commenced, Churchill replied, “Good! Now also our old Mussolini will understand how it feels to have a ceiling about to collapse on your head at any moment.”

For the duration of the two-and-a-half-hour raid, the pope stood at a window in his private study and watched the bombing through binoculars. Upon learning the extent of the damage, he decided to “carry out his pastoral duties as the Bishop of Rome” and comfort the survivors. Ignoring security concerns, the pope departed Vatican City for the San Lorenzo area in the papal vehicle, a black Mercedes, accompanied only by Monsignor Montini and their driver.

They arrived to find a bloody and chaotic scene. Many of the bodies, dragged from the rubble, had been lined up, side by side, and covered with newspapers. Desperate cries of “
Santità
” and “
Pace
” (“Holiness” and “Peace”) filled the air. Seeing the yellow-and-white papal pennants attached to the front fenders of the vehicle, throngs of people began to gather around the car. The pope emerged. “His face pale with grief, he stood up on his car to contemplate the damaged Basilica, and then he walked in the street to mingle with his flock. The Pope knelt down in the rubble and prayed for the victims of this and other raids.” More than words were dispensed: the pope and Montini distributed some two million lire
*
to survivors of the attack.

This watercolor drawing, printed in the weekly Italian paper La Tribuna Illustrata, shows Pope Pius XII blessing victims of the second Allied bombing attack of Rome on August 13, 1943. Note the blood stains on his cassock. [Biblioteca Comunale Centrale “Palazzo Sormani,” Milan]

The papal trip to San Lorenzo marked the first time in three years that Pius XII had left the safety and isolation of Vatican City. He returned late that evening with his white cassock stained with dirt and blood. War had engulfed Rome. As the person vested with the responsibility of protecting Vatican City, the pope now had to attend to the safety of its thousands of inhabitants as well as an immense trove of church documents, works of art, and other priceless relics.

EFFORTS TO REMOVE
Mussolini from office began immediately upon his return to Rome late on the evening of July 19. On Thursday, July 22, the Duce met with Italy’s King Vittorio Emanuele III for his routine twice-weekly audience. The seventy-three-year-old monarch, ruler of Italy for almost forty-three years, had already been briefed on the Feltre conference. He knew that Mussolini had obtained neither what his country needed (German troops, aircraft, and equipment) nor what it wanted (an exit from the alliance once proclaimed as the “Pact of Steel”). Twenty years after appointing Mussolini, the king realized his prime minister had to go.

At 5 p.m. on Saturday, July 24, after more than three years without a meeting of the Grand Council, the Fascist Party’s governing body assembled. The tension heightened after some of the leaders realized that others were concealing pistols and grenades. Mussolini’s lengthy opening statement did little to assuage their concerns or the discordant mood. For nearly ten hours, the men heard impassioned speeches, reasoned presentations, and even sobbing as the chaotic meeting stretched into the early hours of Sunday. At 2:40 a.m., by a margin of nineteen to seven, the Grand Council returned full executive power, including command of Italy’s armed forces, to the king.