Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (51 page)

“On the whole his story sounds reasonable to me; he could have talked himself out of being taken by the
carabiniere
in Merano if they just stopped him in the street. Of course, once he’d actually been processed into prison, he’d have ended up in a camp – lots of people did. About the passport thing – well, I told you what I think about that – but, perhaps I don’t know enough about this; perhaps Hudal
did
get batches of passports for these particular people. And yes, he would certainly have given him money. The Pope did provide money for this; in driblets sometimes, but it did come.…”

*
Anti-communist, under the authority of the Polish government in exile.

†
Anti-communist, joined the German invading army.

*
Giovanni Mercati was made a cardinal by Pius XI in 1936 and given the post of librarian and archivist for the Vatican; he died in 1957.

*
It has frequently been forgotten that there was a Brazilian Corps attached to the Allied armies.

5

“W
E HAD
no means at the time of knowing where the money came from for these people,” said Madame Gertrude Dupuis, who has held an important position in the International Red Cross in Rome since before World War
II.
Slim, elegant and quick, Madame Dupuis, within the limits imposed by her position, was sympathetic to the purposes of this book and frank in her replies to my questions. “But certainly”, she went on, “we never doubted that the money came from the Vatican who, after all, had quite legitimately been providing financial help for refugees for years. What Monsignor Bayer told you about people having to apply personally, pick up and sign for the Red Cross paper in this office, is perfectly correct. However, if Bishop Hudal asked for some of the
laisser-passers
to be made out according to his specifications (I don’t myself know whether he did, but he could or might have done), which then lacked only the holder’s signature to make them valid, and if he asked for them to be sent to him … well, they probably were. It
was
comparatively simple for him to achieve this; he was a bishop, don’t forget – that did help. It did have some effect. Certainly, it is highly unlikely that Stangl, or people like him, would have risked … or perhaps that Hudal would have risked for them, or would have allowed them to risk – formulate it as you wish – coming down here to queue up with hundreds of people. We had dozens of Jewish camp survivors around. Any of them might have been someone who would have recognized an individual like Stangl. This was well known. So how could he have risked it? Yes, of course, if Hudal enabled Stangl and others like him to avoid the necessity of a personal visit to these offices – and they obviously did avoid it – then one is driven to the conclusion that Hudal knew who these people were; or at least knew that they were wanted.… Hudal was always a very questionable personality,” she said. “We had none but the most formal relations with him. I myself
don’t
think that he was ‘close’ to the Pope at all.” (This was said by everyone I spoke to in Rome. Bishop Weinbacher, Hudal’s successor as Rector of the Anima, was the only person who was convinced that the Bishop had been close to the Pope. Although, as he had probably known Hudal for longer, and better, than any of the others and had taken over his office, personnel, and files, he was, one might think, in a unique position to form such an opinion. It is also possible that it was not from files, but from the Bishop’s own claims, that he had gained this – possibly mistaken – opinion.)

“It is certainly a fact”, said Madame Dupuis, “that Hudal helped people – different people – before he began to ‘specialize’.”

Madame Dupuis said that during some of that period they issued as many as 500
laisser-passers
a day. “They were never meant to be passports; they were intended to provide a means of identification which at the same time would allow the holder to proceed from Italy to his next and, hopefully, permanent place of residence. You see, what was important – no, essential – at the time, was to move the thousands of refugees, to break the bottle-neck Rome had become. Italy had enormous administrative and, of course, economic difficulties of her own at the time, and it was essential to keep this floating population moving. The identity paper usually had a validity of six months. But we know there were people who used them for much longer, particularly in South America where they were accepted as quasi-passports for years; some people are still using them now.… There were of course also instances, possibly more than we realized at the time, of people forging them.”

She remembered being called in by the police on one occasion when, the Delegate being away on a mission, she was Acting Delegate. “I saw some of them lying on the desk as I entered the room,” she said, “and I could see from several feet away that they were forged. Not only were they filled out differently from how we do it ordinarily, but my signature was obviously forged. So you see, even though, as I told you, it was simple for Bishop Hudal to get these documents, it is also possible that for some of the
SS
people they were forged.”

I asked Madame Dupuis whether they were ever suspicious of some of the people to whom they issued the
laisser-passers.

“Yes, of course we wondered,” she said. “But there was literally nothing to be done about it. There were so many who needed help; the practical difficulties we faced almost defy description. We were, after all, an ‘aid’ organization, not detectives. In the end, the most important thing was to help the many for whom our help was legitimate … of course, if one had had proper sources and the time and staff to spend on investigation, or even just on thinking about individual cases, there would have been many doubts – one often talked about it. As it was, we always asked certain questions, but we knew perfectly well that we couldn’t really check the replies. So, if there were witnesses, just anybody to corroborate what anybody said, or above all – as happened many times, particularly in the cases of the sort of people you are talking about – if their replies were corroborated or guaranteed by a member of the clergy, then this was accepted. How could we refuse to accept the word of priests?”

6

M
OST OF
the clerics I approached in the course of this research – and there were more of them than I have found necessary to quote, since several merely confirmed, or duplicated what others had already said – appeared ready to speak frankly. They recognized, I think, that my purpose was to achieve a more balanced view of the involvement of the Catholic church in these controversial matters. On only one of them did I virtually force an interview – reluctantly, and only because I felt it was absolutely essential to the full picture. This was Father Anton Weber, a Palatine priest at the St Raphael Society in Rome, who, in the context of the subject we are concerned with, is probably the most vulnerable cleric still active there. It took me several months before I could communicate with him, and when I met him at last, he was convalescing at his brother’s house in southern Germany after a serious illness. There can be little doubt that he was deeply involved in assisting
SS
escapers. But although he appeared still to be trying to convince himself that he had acted rightly, Father Weber also gave me the impression of being a very troubled man.

Like many of the priests with whom I spoke, he was anxious to bring the conversation round to what the Church had done for the Jews.

“How many Jews did you yourself hide during the war, in your House?” I asked.

“Until September 1943,” he said, “it was full of Jews; baptized Jews. And don’t forget, the Nazis never bothered us – they bothered none of the monasteries and convents, although they knew perfectly well that we were all hiding refugees.”

(“Allowing these few Jews who were in hiding in these places, to survive,” said another priest who does not wish his name to be quoted, “was a very small price for the Nazis to pay, to keep the Vatican silent. They knew perfectly well there were decent and outraged men amongst the religious community in Rome – indeed at the Vatican too – who were only ‘kept at bay’ because the convents and monasteries still remained places of safety and could continue to be counted on for hiding people.”)

“What do you think would have happened to all these Jews,” said Father Weber, “if the Pope had been more explicit in his remonstrations?”

“If you were so certain of Nazi leniency on this point, would it not have been possible to give refuge to Jews who were not baptized, who were, after all, in even graver danger? Did they never ask you for asylum?”

“Oh yes, but I was responsible for baptized Jews only. There was one monsignor in Milan who was very intent upon the argument that in times like that one didn’t ask whether a man was baptized or not. He used to compare it to a ship sinking: ‘You save whoever you can grab,’ he used to say, ‘you don’t ask him for his identity papers before you pull him out of the water.’ ” He laughed.

“How did you feel about that?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It wasn’t so simple; the Brazilians, for instance, offered us 3,000 visas for baptized Jews; but they had to have been Catholics for at least two years.” He laughed again. “Of course, they were all claiming to be Catholics.…”

“But you didn’t believe them?”

“I made them recite the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ave Maria; that proved in a hurry who was genuine and who wasn’t.”
*

He had told me originally that there were about 20,000 Jews of all nationalities in Rome.

“Of the 20,000 you say were in Rome …” I said, and he interrupted: “Only about 3,000 of those were baptized.”

“Of the 3,000 or so who were baptized then, how many did you actually get out?”

“Two or three hundred,” he said. At the very beginning of our talks, however, he had said that two or three thousand people had left Genoa in sealed trains, and that a ship had sailed illegally from Spezia to Barcelona from where they went on to Lisbon.

Asked about Bishop Hudal, Father Weber said he really didn’t know him very well. “Did Bishop Hudal have private means?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. Though he did buy a villa after he left the Anima – still, I don’t think he had money of his own; not much, anyway.”

“About this question of helping
SS
officers get out of Europe after the war; how was this financed?”

“Well, there were funds available for aid to refugees.”

“Available from the Vatican?”

“That too,” he said vaguely. “But of course, we didn’t really know who the people were we aided. At least, we knew nothing beyond what they themselves told us.”

“I have heard that you are supposed to have got Eichmann out?”

“But if a man called Klement came to me and said that was his name – and had papers to prove it, and you can be certain that
these
people were the first to have legitimate-looking papers – and perhaps someone else came with him to corroborate his story, how on earth could I know that he was someone else?”

I sympathized with that argument. I don’t think that – if he didn’t know from the outset who the person who came to him was – he
could
have found out. But an hour or so later he mentioned Eichmann again. “Yes,” he said, “someone called Richard Klement came to me. He said he came from East Germany and didn’t want to go back there to live under the Bolsheviks, so I helped him.…”
*

“How much did it actually cost to get each of these, people to wherever they were going – South America or whatever?”

“They were usually given a hundred dollars to keep going on, and the journeys cost about two to three hundred dollars. Of course, when they got to where they were going they were helped there – or looked after themselves. In Chile, for example,” he said, “the Palatines gave guarantees for refugees. I had a liaison man in Lisbon, a Palatine, Father Turowski, and he used to get visas from the Uruguayan [honorary] Consul, and with the Uruguay visas they were able to get Portuguese transit visas. The Spanish Consul in Rome also helped with transit visas.” He had mentioned earlier that the Uruguayans had been “very good about the Jews”.

A little later, coming back to Bishop Hudal, he suddenly said, “Did you go to the Anima? Did you talk to the porter?”

I said that I had talked about the Anima with the Auxiliary Bishop of Vienna, Weinbacher, but that, no, I had not spoken to the porter.

“Well, how can you expect to find out the truth,” he said testily, “if you don’t speak to the porter? Of course he is old now. But even so, if Hudal was ‘stormed’ by thousands of
SS
people, he would have had to know; he would have let them in.”

I asked him who had claimed that there had been “thousands”?

“That’s what is said, isn’t it?” he replied. Coming back once more to Eichmann, he said that even if Eichmann-Klement had given him his real name, it wouldn’t have meant anything to him. “I never heard that name until much later,” he said.

I told him that Stangl had told me that he had reported to Bishop Hudal under his real name and that Bishop Hudal, who had appeared to know about him, had obtained papers for him in that name.

“I can’t answer for Hudal,” said Father Weber, “though I would doubt that he was aware of the former functions of the people he helped any more than I was.” Aside from that however, Father Weber’s references to Bishop Hudal were anything but friendly. “He helped Austrians,” he said, “not Germans. During the war he had a ‘Greater Germany’ flag on his car; as soon as the war ended, he was the first to change it – suddenly his flag was Austrian.”