'Hitler planned to kidnap pope'

2005-01-16 12:37

Rome - An Italian Catholic daily reported on Saturday that the SS commander in Rome in 1944 warned Pope Pius XII of a plan by Adolf Hitler to abduct the pontiff, publishing what it described as the latest details in decades-old accounts about the alleged plot.

Avvenire noted that accounts of Hitler's alleged plan to spirit Pius out of the Vatican emerged in the post-war Nuremberg trials.

But the daily, published by the Italian bishops conference, said new details had emerged during research to help the Vatican's determine if Pius XII merits beatification.

Avvenire cited a written statement by General Karl Wolff, the head of the SS in German-occupied Rome, saying that Hitler considered Pius a "friend of the Jews" and that Wolff had informed the pope of Hitler's plan to have him abducted.

Pius' dealings about Jews is a volatile issue. Some Jewish groups have opposed efforts to have Pius beatified, which is the last formal step before possible sainthood.

They contend that he didn't speak out or do enough to save Jews during the Holocaust.

The newspaper says Wolff told Pius about Hitler's plan when the commander was granted an audience at the Vatican in May 1944, just a month before the liberation of Rome by Allied troops.

Avvenire said Wolff warned Pius "to be on guard because, even if in no case he would have carried out the order, the situation was in any case confused and bristling with risks". It said Pius asked Wolff, as a sign of his sincerity, to free Italians condemned to be executed by the Nazis, and that was done.

Warned kidnap would prompt backlash

Other testimony about Hitler's alleged kidnap plan surfaced in 1991 in the Italian religious magazine 30 Giorni with the publication of a 1972 letter by Germany's wartime envoy to Italy, Rudolph Rahn, to a Rome-based Jesuit historian.

In the letter, Rahn wrote that Wolff informed him of his conversation with Hitler about the kidnap plan.

Rahn wrote that he and Wolff decided such an action would have "tremendous consequences, and that it had to be impeded at all costs".

Rahn wrote that he spoke to Hitler and was then given a note indicating the Nazi leader didn't want any action to be launched against the pope.

John Cornwell, in his 1999 book Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, wrote that a sworn document by Wolff provided new details on a plan by Hitler to spirit the pope to Liechtenstein, but that the plan was dropped after the SS commander concluded that kidnapping the pope would prompt a backlash throughout Italy that could hinder the Nazis.

Avvenire's account comes a few weeks after a document found in Roman Catholic archives revived debate about the Vatican's attempt, under Pius' tenure, to keep hold of some Jewish children who were baptised as part of efforts to save them from the Nazis.

That 1946 document apparently instructed French Church authorities that Jewish baptised children should remain in the Church, even at the cost of refusing to return them to relatives.

- AP