In Europe

place in every European language.
    The Germans and Pope Pius XII declared Rome an ‘open city’, a city that was to be sheltered from war. Yet every day German tanks and trucks rolled through its streets on their way to the southern front lines, and every day the 3rd SS Police Battalion marched ostentatiously through the old city. On 23 March, 1944, partisans detonated a powerful bomb in the Via Rasella during that daily parade. Thirty-two SS troops were killed, many times that number were wounded.
    The reprisal came the next day. Close to the catacombs, in a cave at Fosse Ardeatine, 320 political prisoners were executed: truckload after truckload, they were pulled down, made to kneel, then shot in the back of the head.
    The victims now lie in 320 sarcophagi beneath a monumental slab of stone, the space of two tennis courts full of marble and artificial flowers. After they were finished, the Germans blew up the entrance to the cave, but a shepherd had heard the shooting. The local priest, who had been warned, smelled the odour of rotting corpses, prayed and gave the victims ‘provisional absolution’. On 26 March, Pius XII – who wrongly believed the attack to have been the work of communists – wrote in the
Osservatore Romano
: ‘On the one hand 32 victims, and on the other 320 persons sacrificed for the guilty parties who escaped arrest’; as though the partisans, not the Germans, had been responsible for this massacre.
    The Vatican had been warned as soon as the bodies were found. It did nothing. Family members came to bring flowers, the Germans blocked the entrance to the cave once more, and one of the priests, Don Ferdinando Georgi, was arrested. Still, the Bishop of Rome said nothing, not even when one of his own flock was involved.
    The role of the Holy See in the Second World War was later the subject of heated discussion, and that is understandable. The twenty-year reign of Eugenio Pacelli was indeed marked by major contradictions. An ascetic, he lived on little more than a piece of bread and a glass of warm milk each day, but at the same time he surrounded himself with great pomp and strict norms. His piety was beyond all doubt, but archives and other sources paint a picture of an anti-Semite, a hater of communists, and a cynical opportunist. He sent out internal directives to help Jews, he played an important role behind the scenes in stopping the deportations from Hungary and Bulgaria, but he was also a sly negotiator who, to keep from compromising his own secular power, avoided all conflicts with the Nazi regime.
    In the 1960s and 1970s, Gitta Sereny spoke at length with a number of the former policymakers from the notorious Berlin villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4. They told her – and this was later confirmed by court documents – that they had begun as early as 1939 in conferring with certain church leaders concerning their ‘euthanasia’ campaign. Before the campaign had even begun, the Nazis wanted to know whether the Church would actively oppose it. That turned out not to be the case. Sereny: ‘According to all the information currently available to us – obtained officially or non-officially, by hook or by crook, from real or defrockedpriests – it can be absolutely ruled out that the Church, which according to some has the “best intelligence network in the world”, was ignorant of the case at hand.’
    Something similar took place in France. The occasional bishop openly opposed the persecution of the Jews, but when Marshal Pétain asked the Pope in so many words for his ‘advice’ – read, approval – concerning a series of anti-Semitic measures, two members of the Vatican staff – including Giovanni Batista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI – replied that there could be ‘no objection’ to the measures, as long as they were carried out ‘
avec justice et charité
’.
    In Italy it was later often claimed that Pius XII saved tens of thousands of Jews by ordering all cloisters to open their doors to them. And from 1943 there were indeed impressive rescue operations carried out at the local level, but no clear leadership ever came from the Vatican.
    The most striking incident took place on Saturday, 16 October, 1943, when a few SS battalions drove into Rome's old ghetto and held a mass razzia for the first time. More than 1,000 Jewish men, women and children were taken to the Collegio Militare, only a few hundred metres from St Peter's. The Pope heard about the round-up right