Hide and Seek: The Irish Priest in the Vatican who Defied the Nazi Command. The dramatic true story of rivalry and survival during WWII.. Stephen Walker
Soviet handlers misleading information. Even though the entire exercise was difficult, Kappler clearly felt it was a risk worth taking. The former seminarian offered the police attaché an insight into the Vatican which to date no one else had been able to match.
In his reports to Berlin Kappler did not hide Kurtna’s Soviet links and, while he did not identify his source, he put the Russian connection to good use, informing his boss that he had established links with the Soviet intelligence service.
Kappler’s dossiers would be passed to the foreign ministry of the RSHA, based in Berlin. The RSHA was one of twelve SS administrations and had been set up in 1939 to bring together the Nazi Party and other similar government groups. It had a foreign-intelligence division, Amt VI, and Reinhard Heydrich, its overall head until his assassination in June 1942, had made the gathering of such intelligence a priority.
Heydrich also had a track record of targeting the Vatican. In an instruction to staff in 1940 he had encouraged his agents in the field to exploit intelligence opportunities surrounding bishops and priests and to step up surveillance relating to theological students in Rome. In particular, Heydrich was keen to learn more about Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, one of Kurtna’s main contacts. In the wake of the German advance across eastern Europe, he was sure that the French-born cardinal wanted to spread the Catholic faith to Russia and other Baltic states. The RSHA firmly believed that the Vatican’s ultimate goal was to convert thousands of people so that Germany would eventually be surrounded by Catholic countries.
The ambitious Kappler, keen to keep his boss Heydrich happy, used Kurtna’s information to the full. His star agent’s discoveries formed the basis for a series of his reports, and the police attaché felt that he was making great progress in infiltrating the Vatican and keeping tabs on its leading personalities. But it didn’t last for long, for Kurtna was unmasked by Italian military intelligence through a piece of old-fashioned detective work. Having placed a flat in Rome under surveillance, they raided it and discovered a transmitter hidden behind a radiator which was being used to communicate with Moscow. The Italians then intercepted radio messages from Russia. One transmission had directed the contact to go to another flat in the city to deliver a message to the occupants. The messenger was told that when he went to the apartment he would meet a couple, a blonde woman and a man dressed as a priest. The man who would have the appearance of a priest was in fact Kurtna; the woman was his wife, Anna Hablitz from Leningrad, whom he had just married. Members of Italy’s military intelligence arrested Hablitz outside her flat and then waited at the railway station for her husband, who was returning from Estonia. Kurtna’s arrest and incarceration in the summer of 1942 brought to an end Kappler’s drip-feed of quality information on figures within the Vatican. The Estonian had been his most important source inside the Vatican, so it was an enormous blow to the police attaché.
Other contacts continued to pass on details of Church matters to Kappler, but their intelligence could not match that of the Estonian. Two German nationals provided occasional pieces of information. They were an academic called Engelfried and a woman, Frau Kühn-Steinhausen, who worked in the Vatican’s Archives.
Kurtna’s detention by the Italians meant Kappler had to rely on a disparate and often bizarre group of potential informers who were motivated by politics, personal circumstances, and very often money. One such individual was Charles Bewley, who had served as the Irish Ambassador to Germany and the Vatican. Bewley had an impressive background and a close examination of his CV shows why he was of interest to German intelligence. A member of a Dublin family well known in business circles, he had been brought up as a Quaker and became a Catholic while a student at Oxford. He had a successful academic career in England and was the only Irishman apart from Oscar Wilde to win the Newdigate Prize for English verse. He returned to Dublin to practise law and became involved in politics, supporting Sinn Fein during its early years. Fervently anti-English and holding pro-Nazi views, he had gained experience of dealing with German officials during his years in Berlin.
When Bewley was appointed as Ireland’s envoy to the Vatican one journalist prophetically wrote, ‘As a student of affairs he is well aware that the first representative of the Irish government will need to walk very warily if he is to avoid pitfalls.’ When Bewley left the Irish diplomatic service he retired to Italy and kept up his German and Vatican contacts. Kappler was informed by his bosses in Berlin that Bewley was an Amt VI agent and was paid monthly. The Irishman was a regular on the social scene and used such occasions to garner information which he included in the reports he sent to Berlin.
For Kappler it may also have seemed an ideal way to target Hugh O’Flaherty. On paper it would have seemed logical that Bewley as an Irishman with what appeared to be good contacts in the Vatican was well placed to uncover details about the activities of his fellow countryman in Rome. However, there was a major problem with Bewley’s ‘intelligence’: it was mainly gossip he had picked up from parties or from Vatican contacts and he was unable to answer specific questions Kappler put to him.
At one stage German intelligence chiefs thought it would be possible to use Bewley’s Irish connections to good effect. Kappler was told to ask the former ambassador to make contact with Irish theology students who were in the Vatican, in the hope of gaining some intelligence. Bewley was unable to provide a list of the students’ names and in the end the idea was abandoned.
By now the war had entered its most frightening stage, for the Nazis had begun to put in place the Final Solution, an unprecedented plan to exterminate millions of Jews. Deportations from Germany began and death camps were established in remote areas of German-controlled Poland. By the summer of 1942 a million Jews within Nazi-controlled Europe had died. German military intelligence chiefs were anxious to know how Pope Pius XII would respond to the mass deportations of Jews. If he condemned the Nazi regime’s actions, how would this change its relationship with the Vatican? Berlin decided to put extra effort into intelligence-gathering in Rome and Kappler was now helped with extra staff, including Helmut Loos, who became his special assistant and had specific responsibility for organizing intelligence on the Holy See.
The arrival of Loos aided Kappler’s efforts to penetrate the Vatican, for his new assistant had an exemplary track record. He had worked as a Vatican specialist for Amt VI, the RSHA’s foreign-intelligence section, and had experience of running agents. In Rome he quickly made contact with a series of people who had been recruited by Amt VI. They included people such as aspiring journalists, translators and publishers. Even so, the quality of information Loos was offered varied greatly. Some of it was of genuine interest, but, like the material offered by Charles Bewley, much of it was merely gossip and rumour. For Kappler and his assistant it was crucial to learn how to differentiate fact from fiction. Their intelligence-gathering operation received a boost when Berlin approved the installation of a radio transmitter on the roof at Via Tasso. It meant Kappler could send reports back to Germany in an instant. Previously he had used the German embassy’s radio transmitter, which was considered safer than the telephone. As Kappler and Loos’s fight against the Vatican entered a new phase, on the coast of Sicily dramatic events were about to change the course of the war.
In the early hours of 10 July 1943 British, American and Commonwealth troops landed. The arrival of a 160,000-strong force raised hopes among the people of Italy that Mussolini’s men would surrender soon and that it would speed up an Allied march on Rome. The Italian capital was now in the sights of British and American commanders, but, worryingly for those in the Vatican, the Allies were looking at the city from the air and not the ground.
Chapter Five THE END OF MUSSOLINI
‘At this moment you are the most hated man in the country’
King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy to Benito Mussolini
19 July 1943
Pope Pius XII spent most of the day gazing at the sky through binoculars as wave after wave of Allied bombs pounded his beloved city. From a window in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace he watched as 300 bombers blitzed the south-eastern part of the capital. The attack killed nearly 1,500 people and injured many thousands more. As the Bishop of Rome, he had long feared and indeed predicted this moment. So grave were the Pope’s