Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (46 page)

I approached with considerable scepticism claims that priests could knowingly have aided men who were accused of such monstrous crimes to escape secular justice. Such conduct was contrary to everything I had seen myself in occupied France, where almost all the clergy, from archbishop down to the humblest village
curé
and the youngest convent novices, gave constant proof of the highest moral principles and humanity. It was also contrary to what I had learned immediately after the war from many displaced persons, including Jews of all nationalities whose lives were saved by priests and nuns. It is of course true, and often forgotten or minimized, that in the final analysis, everything that is done is done by individual men and women with individual powers of decision. Whatever religious faith a priest, pastor, monk or nun belongs to, he or she remains an individual person and – an essential point – a national of his or her country of origin. It is true that many priests – particularly from Poland – died in concentration camps for their
religious
convictions, their martyrdom unrelated to their nationality. There have been saintly beings like this throughout the ages. But during the period we are discussing here, many more religious acted against the Germans at least in part for reasons of personal patriotism. Great numbers of the heroic French, Belgian, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Czech, Polish and other priests and pastors who hid Allied airmen, aided underground organizations, operated radio transmitters and helped anti-Nazi Germans to hide amongst the local populations, were acting above all for the sake of their countries, rather than for their Church. Many of them have readily said so. Throughout Europe Jewish children were hidden in convents by nuns. In occupied France I came across several of these noble women, and more than once, when I remarked on their courage, I received the answer:
“Mais je suis Fraçaise, à la fin.”

Exceptions that, extraordinarily enough, only prove this rule are those German and Austrian religious who, in time of war, acted
against
the laws of their country. I have talked to some of them, too, and each of these admirable men and women spoke of battles of conscience, and a decision made as an individual who could not accept “that” government and “its” laws as representing the country’s true interests. Thus they, too, were acting primarily as morally outraged nationals of their countries who happened to be priests, nuns and pastors.

If, of course, we accept such national loyalties within the Churches as inevitable and right in such circumstances, then it must follow that it was no less right for German and Austrian priests to help Germans and Austrians in general who were in dire straits after the war. So we come back to the central question, the one that appears to raise its head in all these polemics concerning the attitude of the Catholic Church during that period: how much did they know?

We have been told the Church did not know about the Nazis intention to institute euthanasia in 1939, even though a moral theologian, active at the time as Professor at a Catholic university (of which he had previously been Rector), worked for six months on an officially commissioned Opinion.

We have been told the Pope could not protest against the extermination of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, because – although he had heard rumours of these horrors – he didn’t really
know
. And we are told that, although it is admitted that after Germany’s defeat leading Nazis escaped abroad through Rome, their identities were unknown to those who helped them.

I was open to be convinced on all these claims, but on all of them the proof to the contrary is overwhelming.

As far as the escapes are concerned, even if one discounts all or most of the dramatic stories, and even if one is prepared to ascribe most of the aid given in Rome to perfectly legitimate humanitarian motives,
*
we are still left with a number of incontrovertible facts which establish that, apart from the genuinely charitable activities of the Roman clergy, there was, on the part of some amongst them (almost all Germans and Austrians), a deliberate effort to aid specific individuals who were particularly implicated in Nazi crimes.

In the interest of fairness, however, one further point needs to be made: in all of wartime Europe, Rome – primarily because of the Vatican – was the city most protected from
overt
acts of terror by the Germans. I do not wish to minimize the deportation of the Roman Jews in 1943–4,
*
but there was never in Rome the continuous and unabating horror that existed elsewhere. People in Rome, priests included, were to some extent spared the dreadful lessons learnt by those who lived in the midst of terror, so that at least a measure of psychological exoneration may be conceded to those who now plead general – if not specific – ignorance.

Equally – and this again seems to me a crucial element when evaluating these events – much of the initiative and final responsibility for escape and for their subsequent lives overseas rested in the individuals themselves. The best proof of this lies in the comparatively modest lives led in the countries they escaped to, by those men we really know about now (rather than have heard or read dramatic rumours about).

It appears to me that Stangl’s escape – and the events preceding it – as described by himself, by his wife, and by a number of other people directly or indirectly involved, provides a significant example against which to measure other, and perhaps less well authenticated reports.

*
Central Authority for Investigation into Nazi Crimes.

*
Telegram from Halifax to Sir Francis d’Arcy Osborne, British Ambassador to the Holy See, May 5, 1939.

*
See
this page
.

*
Friedrich Zipfel,
Kirchenkampf in Deutschland 1933–1945
(de Gruyter, Berlin 1965) page 511.

*
The Nuremberg document is, of course, on record, but I have been unable to trace such a leaflet through the Imperial War Museum or the RAF Museum.

*
Before the German defeat such help was extended equally readily to nationals of Allied countries.

*
2,091 Roman Jews were deported; 102 of them survived. Italy was, throughout the war, in the forefront of the countries who protected their Jewish citizens, and five-sixths of all Italian Jews survived the war, many of them having been hidden in convents and monasteries in the provinces.

Part V

1

“I
T WAS
too strange, you know,” said Stangl. “I had no idea how one went about finding a bishop at the Vatican. I arrived in Rome and walked across a bridge over the Tiber and suddenly found myself face to face with a former comrade: there, in the middle of Rome where there were millions of people. He’d been in the security police in France and they wanted to put him on trial there. He’d been extradited from Glasenbach by the French and escaped in the Tyrol when on the way to France. Anyway, he said at once, ‘Are you on your way to see Hulda?’
*
I said yes, but that I didn’t know where to find him. So he told me, but he said not to go until the next day and he told me where I could go for the night. But I didn’t see why I shouldn’t go at once, so I did – it couldn’t have taken me more than half an hour to get there. The Bishop came into the room where I was waiting and he held out both his hands and said, ‘You must be Franz Stangl. I was expecting you.’ ”

“What did Bishop Hudal do for you?”

“Well, first he got me quarters in Rome where I was to stay till my papers came through. And he gave me a bit more money – I had almost nothing left. Then, after a couple of weeks, he called me in and gave me my new passport – a Red Cross passport.”

“Did it actually say ‘Red Cross Passport’?”

“Yes. It was a whitish booklet and there was a red cross on the cover – it was the same sort of thing, you know, as the old Nansen passports. [He had seen those when he was in the police in Linz.] They’d reversed my name by mistake; it was made out to Paul F. Stangl. I pointed it out to the Bishop. I said, ‘They made a mistake, this is incorrect. My name is Franz D. Paul Stangl.’ But he patted my shoulder and said, ‘Let’s let sleeping dogs lie – never mind.’ He got me an entrance visa to Syria and a job in a textile mill in Damascus, and he gave me a ticket for the ship. So I went to Syria. After a while my family joined me and three years later, in 1951, we emigrated to Brazil.…”

“Paul wrote me from Rome sounding very depressed,” said Frau Stangl. “The other man who had escaped with him – his name was Hans Steiner or something like that – had given up; he returned to Austria and surrendered to the Americans.” (Frau Stangl didn’t tell me then where Gustav Wagner went – she was always reticent about him – but it seems that he too obtained papers for the Near East, and later for South America.) “Paul was billeted at the Germanikum,” she said. “I don’t know how long it was before I heard from him again – perhaps not very long, but to me it seemed an eternity. Then suddenly I had a letter from Damascus. He said Bishop Hudal had found him a job in a textile mill and that he had a room in an Arab house and had found friends who had got there ahead of him, and soldiers too – and there were some generals who had come there from Egypt. His letters began to sound quite different: relaxed, calm, liberated.…”

I spoke to many people in Rome and elsewhere about Frau Stangl’s saying that her husband was billeted at the Germanikum, and they all considered it very unlikely. The Germanikum is the Jesuit hostel for German theological students and is usually full. German priests in Rome said that he might have stayed at one of several monasteries, at a convent, or at Bishop Hudal’s own Anima. Stangl himself didn’t use the word “Germanikum” but simply said “Bishop Hulda [Hudal] billeted me”, which could mean either that the Bishop found him billets elsewhere, or that he put him up at his own House. No one in Rome denies that Catholic institutions sheltered escapers. What they deny is that any of the priests, and particularly the Vatican, knew the real identity of those of the people they harboured who had “something on their conscience”. Of course, it still remains odd that Frau Stangl, who doesn’t know Rome, should have thought of the “Germanikum”. However, just before I finished this book, she wrote to say that she had salvaged another name from her memory: “…  the ‘Salvatorianerkloster’ [convent] in or near the Vatican, but I’m not certain in what connection Paul spoke of it,” she wrote. “Could
that
be where the men slept?”

“The many many German civilians slept on mats on the floor in their Vatican quarters,” she had said in Brazil, “and in the morning they had to get up at dawn and get out, and they weren’t allowed back into the building till the evening; there was a priest who supervised it all. They were given meal-tickets for lunch [at a mess run by nuns, according to priests who were in Rome at the time], but otherwise there was nothing for them to do except run around in the streets and do their utmost not to attract attention by sitting on benches in the Pincio Gardens, where they might be picked up by the
carabiniere
who took all German and Austrian nationals without Italian documents to the dreaded concentration camp at Frascatti. He wrote that he had run his feet bloody and that he felt totally hopeless about life and about ever being in a position to help me and the children. And then finally he wrote in another letter that he had volunteered to do masonry work for the nuns and that one of the Sisters was giving him extra food. He spoke of crossing St Peter’s Square with her, carrying a mason’s bucket, and he described going to Mass in the morning in – I think he said – a Vatican chapel, and I remember he said there was a nun there who sang so loudly and so dreadfully off-key that his ears kept rumbling all day long afterwards. And he wrote – and told me repeatedly later – about his audiences with the good Bishop, who in the end had given him the Red Cross passport. But he never said that anyone questioned him about himself – still less that he had to fill out any sort of questionnaire.…”

Frau Stangl’s remark about a questionnaire referred to a book I had told her about,
Flucht vor Nürnberg
(Escaping Nuremberg), written in 1964–6 by an unrepentant Nazi, a former chief of the Hitler Youth, Alfred Jarschel, under the pseudonym “Werner Brockdorff”.
*
In this extraordinary and partly autobiographical account of, amongst other things, the so-called “Roman Escape Route”, Jarschel describes how escaping Nazis were welcomed to Italy by members of the Catholic clergy, were often accompanied by them to Rome dressed in monks’ habits, were given money, sheltered in convents and monasteries, and finally, after writing a kind of extended
curriculum vitae
and submitting to an examination by a “board” of priests, were issued with International Red Cross passports and means for travelling overseas.

While I found some of the more dramatic points impossible to prove – and this book may indeed be a highly coloured account of events (the author died in 1967, but I have talked at length with his wife and have seen his publisher) – many other, less vividly written, more factual descriptions, and now my own research, go a long way towards confirming some of the essential details.