Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (24 page)

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CHRISTMAS WISHES

LATE NOVEMBER–CHRISTMAS 1944

T
he Vatican that greeted OSS Captain Alessandro Cagiati and his travel companions, Marchese Serlupi Crescenzi and a priest named Guido Anelli, was alive with activity. Christmas would be celebrated in a liberated Rome, free of Fascist rule and the presence of German troops. Many meetings were taking place; committees were being organized. Construction and cleanup proceeded with manic intensity. Behind closed doors, political plans were afoot.

Cagiati and Anelli were in town to meet with Monsignor Montini, favored adviser to Pope Pius XII. The Vatican hoped an Allied victory would bring an early end to the war. The Holy See had a keen interest in who would govern postwar Italy and under what form of government. Many inside the Vatican, especially Montini, had grave concerns about the threat of a postwar Communist Italy.

Within a month of the liberation of Rome, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder and Director of the OSS, trusted confidant of President Roosevelt, and a devout Catholic, met with the pope seeking his assistance in three vital areas of interest to the United States: booting the German Army from northern Italy; preventing Communists from securing power in the future government of Italy; and gathering and relaying intelligence on war developments in Berlin and Tokyo.

Donovan found a kindred spirit in Montini, whose progressive political views, especially his disdain of Communism, mirrored official policy of the United States and Great Britain. In the judgment of Vincent Scamporino, a key OSS operative in Italy, Montini was a “trustworthy man . . . the son of a parliament member of the Popular Party, today known as ‘Christian Democrats,’ which has always been anti-fascist and anti-communist. He must be our favored man.”

At five feet nine inches tall, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion, Cagiati did not look much different from thousands of other men walking around the Eternal City. Born in Rome, where his father was a prefect of the Pontifical Library at the Vatican, Cagiati immigrated to the United States in 1934, after great difficulty due to the record high unemployment caused by the Great Depression. His Italian immigration lawyer, one of the guardians of Florence, Marchese Filippo Serlupi Crescenzi—“Pippo” as Cagiati referred to him—had become fond of the young man. Even after Cagiati left Italy, the two men exchanged many letters.

Donovan also liked Cagiati. In December 1942, he wrote to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy:

We should like very much to have the services of Lieutenant Alessandro Cagiati in connection with a secret mission to North Africa. . . . Lieutenant Cagiati is of Italian descent, has spent half his life in Italy, and was educated in Italy and in England. . . . If he could be assigned to duty with the Office of Strategic Services, we would like to have him here for two or three weeks to receive special instruction, and we would then ask that he be ordered to report to our representative in General Eisenhower’s theatre.

During a brief posting to Algiers early in the summer of 1943, Cagiati’s first assignment involved the training of other OSS operatives. His knowledge of Italian had earned him a position with General Clark and U.S. Fifth Army. He landed at Salerno on D-day, attached to Colonel William O. Darby’s Rangers. Three weeks later, Cagiati was the first American to enter Naples.

Using a Counter Intelligence Section pass—Special Pass No. 2—that entitled him to travel freely within Allied-controlled territory, Cagiati continued to recruit new OSS operatives from those who had crossed the German lines. Cagiati made his way into Florence with British Eighth Army, serving as a liaison between partisan fighters on the north side of the Arno and Allied forces on the south. On September 1, he journeyed up the hill of Careggi to Villa delle Fontanelle, relieved to see that Serlupi, his wife Gilberta, and Bernard Berenson and his secretary were all alive and in good health.

The meeting among Cagiati, Anelli, and Montini took place on Saturday, November 25. Don Guido Anelli was the parish priest of Ostia Parmense, a small village near the northern town of Parma. But Anelli’s flock consisted of more than just parishioners; he was also the founder and active leader—nom de guerre: Don Tito—of a brigade of partisan fighters known as the Seconda Julia. Parma was German-controlled territory; the thirty-two-year-old Anelli had secretly crossed enemy lines to reach Florence, where he met Cagiati, who then accompanied him to Rome for the meeting with Montini. Anelli’s mission was to “inform the Vatican of the activities of the Church in the clandestine movement in North Italy” and, most important, to obtain money and supplies for the local partisans before winter descended on them.

By the fall of 1944, partisan forces in Italy had succeeded in creating a war within a war. In addition to the battle raging between Kesselring’s Wehrmacht troops and the Allied armies, partisan fighters were successfully disrupting German operations in the mountainous area behind the Gothic Line. These isolated actions became such a threat that the German commander of 14th Panzer Corps, Lieutenant General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, began traveling in a small Volkswagen with no identifying marks. Partisans had already killed another German general after they identified his command car.

As head of the police activities in Italy, SS General Karl Wolff held responsibility for controlling partisan activity behind the front lines. But increasingly their attacks were aimed at German officers and soldiers on the front line. This forced Kesselring to order his troops “to adopt the severest measures. . . . Should troops etc. be fired at from any village the village will be burnt down. Perpetrators or ringleaders will be hanged in public.” In his view, the partisans were insurgents who were murdering his men and demoralizing military operations. The partisans proved so difficult to fight that, according to Kesselring, “Only the best troops . . . are barely good enough.” As such, he believed they fell outside any rights accorded a uniformed enemy soldier. The subsequent burning of villages and shooting of innocent men, women, and children, some as young as three years old, by German Wehrmacht troops only escalated partisan anger and their attacks. Don Anelli and his parishioners needed urgent help.

Cagiati’s report summarized the course of discussion and the events that followed: “During the interview lasting one hour [Montini] questioned Don Anelli very closely concerning the resistance movement in N. Italy, with particular reference to the work of the Church, and the position of the Christian Democrat party.” Serlupi’s wife recorded an even more detailed account in her diary: “Cagiati and the other partisan liaison officers discovered, through [Anelli’s] words, that the mass of Partisans were Christian Democratic and not communist, as they had thought, and therefore decided to give them more support.”

Subsequent meetings took place with Monsignor Domenico Tardini—Deputy Secretary of State for Extraordinary Affairs—the following day, and then representatives of the Christian Democratic Party on Monday. During those meetings, Anelli pleaded for the Vatican to assist the resistance fighters, either directly or through the party. Cagiati reported that Don Anelli had done an excellent job establishing his credibility and explaining why the Vatican needed to take immediate action. He wrote: “The news that large numbers of partisans are fighting under the aegis of the C.D. Party, and that there is much that the Church can do in the movement seemed to come as a complete surprise to [Montini], and the Pope himself has expressed intense interest.”

The last portion of Cagiati’s report confirmed for General Donovan and the OSS that developing connections with the Vatican had other significant upsides: “From an OSS point of view. . . . there may be some valuable contacts and the present inestimably valuable cover and protection and information service afforded by the Church in Italy and elsewhere.” Simply put, the OSS envisioned using the Vatican’s extensive network of churches, especially those behind enemy lines, to aid in the gathering of information about Nazi Germany.

Vatican officials and representatives of the Christian Democratic Party quickly granted Don Anelli’s wish. Weapons and supplies were dropped by parachute to the partisans; a large cash contribution of 13 million lire followed.
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One fellow partisan later explained: “That money saved our squads when two weeks later, during a blast of harsh winter weather, the most extensive and violent search [by German troops] of the entire war was raging. Thousands of soldiers were saved from starvation and freezing thanks to those blessed millions which the Fatherland had given us, and that a humble priest from the countryside had brought us from the sky.”

After almost a month in Rome, Anelli was eager to return home to celebrate Christmas. But he and Cagiati both knew the terrain; crossing enemy lines on foot in winter weather was out of the question. The safest and quickest solution, one embraced by Anelli, was to drop him by parachute. Ironically, the man who would become known as “the flying priest” had, in fact, never been in an airplane. Before boarding, Don Anelli, wearing his helmet and parachute, posed for a photograph with the crew in front of the C-47. Legend has it that after the successful drop, one of the crew members noticed a prayer book in Anelli’s abandoned seat, so the pilot circled back while the crew member wrapped the prayer book in a cloth. As the plane reached the drop point, it banked, and the prayer book followed Anelli’s path to earth.

Several months passed before Cagiati and Anelli would meet again, but the relationship they forged during that last week of November would play a vital role in the Allied effort to locate and save the missing artwork of Florence.

ON DECEMBER 9,
Fascist Radio broadcast a report stating that Carlo Anti, General Director of Fine Arts under Mussolini’s Social Republic, had inspected the Florentine works of art and judged the storage facilities and conditions perfectly adequate. Anti penned a more personal reflection in his diary: “I am choking as to all this beauty in exile.” Although the report didn’t identify the locations of the works, the announcement was clearly designed to quell increasing public concern, in particular among the foreign press, about the safety of the works of art and criticism of German intentions.

The following day, Dr. Josef Ringler, who had selected the hiding places for the art, received a telephone call informing him that two men acting on specific orders from Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, would be arriving in Bolzano to inspect the Florentine artworks. One of the men, Dr. Helmut von Hummel, was Bormann’s special assistant; the other was Dr. Leopold Rupprecht, head of the Arms Collection of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.

While Ringler didn’t know the purpose of their mission, he, like everyone else, knew of Martin Bormann. The name alone was terrifying. Ringler knew that these two men had to be on a mission of highest importance if they carried an order from the person closest to the Führer. So, too, did SS General Wolff. Determined to monitor all activity concerning the works of art, Wolff made arrangements for his own representative—Reidemeister—to accompany Bormann’s men on their inspection. When Ringler realized that Reidemeister wouldn’t arrive in time, he drove Hummel and Rupprecht to one of the two repositories.

Their trip took them along a mountain road, past hills and scenic cottages blanketed with the first winter snow. After a little less than an hour, they entered a small town thirteen miles from the border of the Reich and pulled to a stop alongside a three-story building that served as the municipal courthouse and local jail. As the men entered the building, the jailer produced a massive ring containing at least fifty keys to open a series of jail cell doors where the “prisoners”—the great Florentine paintings—were stored. Ringler’s choice of hiding place had been unorthodox, but there had been no other safe option for storing such important artworks.

The inspection was brief; examining hundreds of paintings crammed into very tight spaces wasn’t feasible. Later that evening, an art dealer from Munich arrived, apparently part of Hummel’s inspection team. No one told Ringler why the art dealer was there, or the purpose of the inspections. But he knew that Rupprecht was building an arms collection for the Führermuseum in Linz, which caused Ringler great consternation. He had yet to learn that Hummel was in fact responsible for the formulation of “the directives governing confiscation and purchase” for the Führermuseum.

AS CHRISTMAS APPROACHED,
the temperature in Italy, as throughout Europe, sank below freezing. Midmonth, news arrived of a major German offensive in the densely forested area of the Ardennes in Belgium—what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler, hoping to split two of the Allied armies, had mounted a charge toward the Belgian port city of Antwerp. The attack caught the Allies by surprise, forcing a quick retreat. General Eisenhower admonished his senior commanders during a December 19 conference: “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.” Four days later, clear skies allowed Allied air superiority to turn the tide, punishing the enemy’s tank and supply-line columns and dooming the German offensive.

News of the Battle of the Bulge filled American newspapers, heightening the concern of those who had loved ones overseas. In letters to his family, Keller, like other married men in service, regularly downplayed the risks of his particular assignment. But he didn’t hesitate to share them with his mentor and friend, Tubby Sizer, who by that time had been discharged due to illness and had returned home from England.

One letter described the random dangers of Keller’s work:

On entering the city hall, we all had our revolvers drawn. . . . We learn where to walk and how to put the foot down on a staircase or a step. There may be a trip wire running under the tread. No doors that are locked are broken open until carefully inspected with flashlight—No one with any sense enters a shop, door blown in with enticing souvenirs on the shelves, one boy and his companions were blown to bits in a music shop—saxophone lying innocently atop the piano and one picked it up.