John Davis
Special to THE DAILY

Perhaps one of the most successful Soviet disinformation programs was directed against Pope Pius XII. They sought to defame him by claiming he was a sort of collaborator with the Nazis.

They hoped thereby to discredit his overwhelming popularity after World War II.

The communists wanted to destabilize Western Europe, and to do so they hoped to undermine Pius, perhaps one of their greatest opponents.

Dan Kurzman — author of the well-received "Fatal Voyage," which recounts the secrecy surrounding the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, as well as "Genesis 1948," about the first war at the birth of the State of Israel — offers yet another aspect of this controversy surrounding Pius.

Hitler's plot

He presents here a study of "Hitler's Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII." This review of the plotting by Nazi officials in Italy and Germany after Mussolini was deposed claims to reveal how far Hitler's henchmen would go to destroy the church and Christianity.

We follow primarily the actions of SS Gen. Karl Wolff. As Heinrich Himmler's understudy, he became privy to Hitler's plan to avenge himself on the methodical Pius.

He wanted to deport the Italian Jews, invade the Vatican and assassinate all the prelates therein. Kurzman, who interviewed Wolff upon his release from prison, contends that it was because Pius wished to avoid this horrific end that he was blackmailed into silence when the Jews of Rome were rounded up.

Machinations

Kurzman is thorough in his research of the machinations of such as Wolff, who delayed much of his commander's decrees in order to play both sides of the field
at the end of the war. Indeed, Wolff contacted the American OSS (precursor of the CIA) contact man in Switzerland to assure certain military arrangements would be followed rather than unconditional surrender.

Simultaneously, Wolff sought to indirectly accommodate his Fuhrer, visiting him in his headquarters, there to outline in the vaguest forms his goal of overcoming American military victories in Italy.

All in all, the strength of this book is its readability and its capturing of the utter betrayals mounted by Hitler's "loyal SS men" toward the end of the war.

Conversely, Kurzman is wrong about Pius. To suggest that a man such as Pius, so thoroughly hated by Hitler, would remain silent about the Holocaust as the price of protecting himself and his Vatican is simply demonstrably wrong.

Historians have shown over and over that Pius acted nearly immediately to stop the Nazi round-up of the Roman Jews once he became aware of it.

That action ended on 2 p.m. the very day it began, and Pius directed the Jews be hidden in Catholic monasteries, convents, and rectories, indeed in the papal apartments themselves.

What could have stood on its own merits, instead played to popular conceits, and thus Kurzman takes a close study of a sinister Nazi plot and infers what cannot be substantiated.

Pius' alleged silence was perhaps loudest heard in Nazi Berlin, where he was denounced as "a tool of Jewish conspiracy." Strange to call a man thus hated by the Nazis a silent collaborator.

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