Alleged plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII

Several authors have alleged a plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII by the Nazis when they occupied Rome during World War II. SS General Karl Wolff stated that he had been ordered on September 13, 1943 to kidnap the Pope.

Karl Wolff
SS General Karl Wolff claimed while testifying at the Nuremberg Trials that he had disobeyed an order from Hitler to kidnap the Pope and instead sneaked into the Vatican to warn the Pontiff. Most other allegations of a plot to kidnap Pius XII are based on a claimed 1972 document written by Wolff that Avvenire d'Italia published in 1991 and on personal interviews with Wolff before his death in 1984. Wolff maintained that Hitler summoned Wolff to his office on September 13, 1943, and that Hitler stated: "I have a special mission for you, Wolff. It will be your duty not to discuss it with anyone before I give you permission to do so. Only Reichsfuhrer (Himmler) knows about it.  Do you understand? ... I want you and your troops to occupy Vatican City as soon as possible, secure its files and art treasures, and take the Pope and Curia to the north. I do not want him to fall into the hands of the Allies or to be under their political pressure and influence. The Vatican is already a nest of spies and a center of anti-National Socialist propaganda." Wolff's reliability has been questioned by Holocaust historians. Holocaust denier David Irving's use of Wolff as a source was one of the issues in Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt. Dan Kurzman and István Deák, a professor of history at Columbia University, debated the reliability of Wolff's testimony regarding the plot to kidnap Pius XII in a series of letters to the editor in The New York Review of Books, where Deák had previously reviewed A Special Mission. Deák wrote in his review: "The main trouble with Kurzman's interesting book is the author's credulity; he uncritically accepts the validity of controversial documents and unquestioningly believes in the statements made to him by his principal German interlocutor, the former SS General Karl Wolff, who died in 1984. The book's documentation is modest; the short notes and index contain a great number of vague or inaccurate references. Moreover, it is difficult to believe the arguments of an author who so manifestly lacks the language abilities needed for his work. Kurzman seems to know Italian but no German; he misspells German names and uses almost no German-language sources."

While Deak's review maintained that Kurzman "unquestioningly believes" Wolff's statements, Kurzman says the others he interviewed corroborate Wolff's account.

Erwin von Lahousen and Wessel Freytag von Loringhoven
Colonel Erwin von Lahousen, in his deposition at the Nuremberg Trials on February 1, 1946 (Warnreise Testimony 1330-1430), said that Hitler had ordered the Reichssicherheitshauptamt to devise a plot to punish the Italian people by kidnapping or murdering Pius XII and the King of Italy. But, von Lahousen said, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German counterintelligence service, informed his Italian counterpart, General Cesare Amè, during a secret meeting in Venice on July 29–30, 1943. Von Lahousen and Colonel Wessel Freytag von Loringhoven were also present at this meeting. Amè apparently spread the news and the plot was dropped. The Colonels were later part of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, along with Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Niki Freytag Loringhoven, the son of von Loringhoven, gave a substantially similar account in Munich in 1972 to von Lahousen's deposition in Nuremberg, according to the Italian Bishops' newspaper Avvenire.

Rudolf Rahn
Rudolf Rahn, the German Plenipotentiary to the Italian Social Republic (RSI), sent a letter to Robert A. Graham (one of the editors of the ADSS, see below) in the 1970s, which was published by Italian magazine 30 Giorni in 1991, stating that such a plot existed but that all documents relating to it had been destroyed or lost; Rahn died in 1975.

John Cornwell
John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope (1999) subscribes to the existence of such a plot. The only source that Cornwell's account cites is "Teste manuscript, 822ff, in the keeping of the Jesuit Curia at the Borgo Santo Spirito in Rome." Cornwell's version centers on Wolff, but&mdash;unlike the account of other secondary authors&mdash;does not claim that the matter was not to be put in writing; in fact, Cornwell claims that Wolff "sent in about six to eight personnel reports." As with Wolff's own account, Cornwell casts Wolff as the hero, whose "purpose" was to "impede the deportation of the Pope." According to Cornwell, Wolff was able to persuade Hitler to drop the plan. In Cornwell's view: "all the facts indicate, therefore, that an attempt to invade the Vatican and its properties, or to seize the Pope in response to a papal protest would have seriously hindered the Nazi war effort. And thus even Hitler came to acknowledge what Pacelli appeared to ignore: that the strongest social and political force in Italy in the autumn of 1943 was the Catholic Church, and that its scope for noncompliance with disruption was immense."

Dan Kurzman
Dan Kurzman, a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, maintains in A Special Mission: Hitler's Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII (2007) that the planned kidnapping was real and that the interviews he conducted "leave little doubt that the plot was serious". He calls the plot "a most important and intriguing episode of World War II. Yet, it has been barely mentioned in even the most comprehensive history books about the war. And what has been reported is treated as inconsequential rumor". Kurzman says that the plot was intended to ensure that Pius XII remained silent during the Roman razzia, which deported over a thousand Jews to Auschwitz. Kurzman's book has received substantial attention from Catholic and other Christian news sources and advocacy organizations.

Kurzman acknowledges that there are no official German documents that refer to the plot, claiming that Hitler prohibited the plot to be put in writing, and bases his book on personal interviews with Germans and Vatican officials. Kurzman's principal source is Wolff, whom he interviewed only hours after his release from Allied custody; Kurzman acknowledges that Wolff was demonstrably untruthful in many aspects of his testimony, but notes that "other key persons" corroborate Wolff's account. Kurzman's other interviewees include: Rudolph Rahn, German ambassador to the RSI, Eitel Mollhausen, Rahn's deputy, Albrecht von Kessel, the deputy of Ernst von Weizsäcker, SS Colonel Eugen Dollman, Wolff's liaison to Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Finally, Kurzman cites a personal interview with Peter Gumpel, the Vatican's advocate for canonization of Pius XII, who claims that unpublished documents support the existence of such a plot. Gumpel has also stated that Pius XII made plans to resign in the event of his kidnapping.

Owen Chadwick
Owen Chadwick, a professor of history at Cambridge, studied of the papers of D'Arcy Osborne, the British ambassador to the Vatican during the war, argued that the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE) "found it excellent propaganda to put it about that Hitler was just about to kidnap the Pope". The British propaganda office fabricated at least two German wireless broadcasts in support of the theory, building upon a pre-existing "rumour". First, on October 9, 1943 the British released a fake German broadcast claiming that all preparations had been made for such a kidnapping. Then, two days later, another falsified transmission stated that the Lichtenstein Castle in Württemberg was ready to imprison the Pope and cardinals.

Osborne himself considered the odds of such a kidnapping incredibly unlikely, as the Pope's presence in the Vatican prevented the British from bombing the key communications center of the German army in Southern Italy, which was adjacent. Ernst von Weizsäcker, the German ambassador, had already ensured that the Vatican itself would be unoccupied when the Germans occupied Rome after the collapse of Mussolini's government.

Alvarez and Graham
David Alvarez and Robert A. Graham, one of the Jesuit priest-historians chosen by Pope Paul VI to edit the ADSS, concur with Chadwick, concluding that "the evidence concerning an alleged plot to kidnap the pope is, at best, mixed". Noting that such a kidnapping would have outraged Catholics around the world and seriously destabilized the Third Reich's occupation of majority Catholic nations, Alvarez and Graham argue that Allied propagandists "did not shrink from the opportunity" to claim such a plot.

Alvarez and Graham cite the PWE fabrications mentioned by Chadwick, but also prior PWE propaganda pieces featuring various claims about the Pope contemplating abandoning the Vatican due to Axis threats. Although such rumors were picked up even by German diplomats, Alvarez and Graham conclude that "the clearest evidentiary trail in the tangle of rumor, memory and fiction that surrounds the purported plot to kidnap the Pope is the one that leads back to London instead of Berlin". Alvarez and Graham go further in indicting the scholarship of those claiming a plot: "Historians have yet to uncover a single piece of contemporary evidence indicating that Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, or any other authority had any serious intention, let alone plan, to invade Vatican City and carry out Pope Pius XII. As for all the smoke, the recollections are post-war and suspiciously self-serving; the rumors and warnings second- and third-hand; the alleged plans and concentration of forces undocumented. The few bits of credible evidence that do exist suggest that, in fact, there was no plan to move against the Pope."

In popular culture
The plot is featured in a 2010 Italian television film starring James Cromwell as Pius XII: formerly titled Sotto il Cielo di Roma (English translation: Under the Roman Sky). The plot of the film centers on the topic of Pope Pius XII and the Roman razzia.