Hugh O’Flaherty

Hugh O’Flaherty was an Irish Catholic monsignor of the Roman Curia in Vatican City during the German occupation of Rome between September 1943 and June 1944. He was forty five years old in 1943 and worked as a notary in the Holy Office, the Vatican department responsible for matters of doctrine. He was known to the Roman ecclesiastical and diplomatic community as a passionate scratch-handicap golfer, an Irish nationalist, a man with a substantial private network of contacts across Roman society, and an irreverent friend of the difficult cases. From the moment of the German occupation he ran what came to be called the Rome Escape Line, the largest single escape network for Allied prisoners of war and Italian Jews in the German-occupied capital. The network is estimated to have saved approximately six thousand five hundred lives during the nine months of the German occupation, making O’Flaherty one of the most quantitatively successful individual rescuers of the war.

The German army occupied Rome on 8 September 1943 after the Italian armistice with the Allies. Tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war who had been held in Italian camps were released by the Italians as the armistice took effect, and many made their way to Rome to seek shelter. The Italian Jewish community of Rome, around twelve thousand people, was at the same time facing the German extermination programme. The German Aussenkommando in Rome staged a major round-up of Italian Jews on 16 October 1943, taking around twelve hundred and fifty Jews from the Roman ghetto and deporting them to Auschwitz. The remaining Roman Jews went into hiding across the city. Allied prisoners and Italian Jews together formed a hidden population in Rome of around eight thousand people that depended on the Roman Catholic Church and on the city’s network of religious houses, private apartments and sympathetic Italian neighbours for survival.

O’Flaherty had begun his rescue work earlier, in 1942, by visiting Italian prisoner of war camps as a Vatican monsignor and identifying particularly badly treated Allied prisoners for whom he could pull diplomatic strings. The Italian armistice and the German occupation transformed the work into the larger operation. Working from his small office and from his living quarters at the Collegio Teutonico, the German college within the Vatican walls, O’Flaherty assembled a network of around two hundred sympathetic helpers across Rome. The helpers included priests and nuns at the major Roman religious houses; the British minister to the Holy See, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, and his butler John May; the Maltese widow Henrietta Chevalier; the Italian Communist couriers Aldo and Augusta Zenobi; and a wide range of Italian shopkeepers, doctors and ordinary citizens. The network identified and placed escaping Allied prisoners and Italian Jews in safe houses across the city, including in religious houses inside Vatican territory and in extraterritorial Vatican properties around Rome. The safe houses were rotated, with refugees moved every few weeks to avoid attracting Gestapo attention.

O’Flaherty’s principal antagonist on the German side was the SS officer Herbert Kappler, head of the Aussenkommando Sicherheitspolizei in Rome. Kappler had a thick file on O’Flaherty by autumn 1943, knew that he was the central figure in the network, and made repeated attempts to lure him out of Vatican territory in order to arrest him. The most notorious attempt was the painted white line that Kappler had drawn across St Peter’s Square in late 1943, marking the boundary of Vatican neutrality. The German police were posted on the secular side of the line and were under standing orders to arrest O’Flaherty on sight if he crossed it. O’Flaherty crossed it regularly. He went out of the Vatican in disguises that included a workman’s overalls, a coal merchant’s cap, a Swiss Guard’s uniform on one occasion, and on at least one famous occasion a nun’s habit. He moved across Rome to inspect safe houses, deliver food and forged identity papers, and bring out refugees who had been compromised. He was nearly caught at least three times. The Vatican authorities were aware of his activities and tolerated them, although they were never formally authorised. The Pope, Pius XII, was kept informed but maintained an official distance.

Rome was liberated by American forces on 4 June 1944. O’Flaherty’s network had survived the German occupation with the loss of around fourteen helpers killed by the Gestapo and the Fascist police. The refugees were almost all alive. Herbert Kappler was tried for war crimes after the war for his role in the Ardeatine Caves massacre of 24 March 1944, in which three hundred and thirty five Italian civilians had been murdered in reprisal for a partisan attack. He was convicted in 1948 and sentenced to life imprisonment. O’Flaherty visited him at the Italian military prison at Gaeta once a month for the rest of Kappler’s incarceration, on the basis of his Christian commitment to forgive his enemies and his sense that the visits would be useful to Kappler’s eventual rehabilitation. Kappler converted to Catholicism in 1959 in part as a result of those visits, and was baptised by O’Flaherty himself.

O’Flaherty returned to Ireland in 1960 after a stroke. He died at his sister’s house in Cahersiveen, County Kerry, on 30 October 1963 at the age of sixty five. The Italian state awarded him the Cavaliere of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity. The British government awarded him the CBE. The American government awarded him the Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm. Yad Vashem has not, on the present record, named him Righteous Among the Nations, although the case has been raised periodically. The 1983 television film The Scarlet and the Black, with Gregory Peck as O’Flaherty and Christopher Plummer as Kappler, brought the case to the wider English-speaking audience.

See also

Sources

  • J. P. Gallagher, The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican, Coward-McCann, 1967
  • Brian Fleming, The Vatican Pimpernel: The Wartime Exploits of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, Skyhorse, 2008
  • Stephen Walker, Hide and Seek: The Irish Priest in the Vatican Who Defied the Nazi Command, Collins, 2011
  • Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, Yale University Press, 2000
  • The Hugh O’Flaherty Memorial Society, Killarney, archives
  • Owen Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War, Cambridge University Press, 1986