Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (52 page)

But Father Weber, too, said that Hudal was not part of the inner papal circle, nor did he agree for a minute with those who are, he said, now claiming that Pope Pius
XII
was pro-Nazi.

“Do you remember?” he said, “when Hitler visited Rome, and the Pope ordered all Catholic museums to close for the day and himself retreated to his summer residence in Castelgandolfo? Does that sound like a man who wished to collaborate with the Nazis?” (Dr Eugen Dolmann, in his book
The Interpreter,
*
says the Pope retreated to Castelgandolfo out of pique – because he hadn’t been asked to receive Hitler.)

“The Pope liked Germans,” said Father Weber. “He had been happy in Germany. But that’s a far cry from being pro-Nazi. It’s true that the Holy Father’s private circle, those closest to him, were mostly German, or German-speaking priests. But no one is going to claim that Father Leiber who was the Holy Father’s confessor and closest associate, was pro-Nazi. Nor was Monsignor Wüstenberg, who is now Papal Nuncio in Tokyo.…”

I asked Father Weber whether he knew anything about Martin Bormann’s passing through Rome.

“Nothing,” he said. “The only contact I had with Bormann, indirectly, was when I got the Bormann children a special audience with Pius xii in 1950.…”

“What was the routine when people came to ask for your help after the end of the war?”

“The porter would come and say that someone was asking for me. I’d go down into a little reception room we had. Whoever it was would tell me his name – or what he said his name was – and a bit of his story, and in all probability I’d tell him that I wasn’t the right person to help him; I’d say he must go and see Hudal, or the Caritas people, or the International Red Cross, to get papers.”

“You never helped? You never gave them money if they needed it, or found them a place to stay, or put them up yourself?”

“If it seemed necessary I might have given them a bit of money, just to tide them over a day or two, and I might have indicated where they could stay; the
YMCA
you know, or some hostel like that: they were of course all putting people up.”

“But you yourself didn’t help them with papers and lodgings, etc.?”

“I might have helped some of them, if it seemed the right thing to do.”

“What was right?”

“Men in need,” he replied irritably. “That was our function.”

“Did you ever suspect any of them? Did you wonder what their real story – their real past – might have been?”

“Yes, I did sometimes. But there were so many needing help, how
could
we find out more than just the superficial facts they gave us?”

“During the war the Pope entrusted you with assisting baptized Jews, and because you suspected many of those who came of not really belonging in that category, you made them recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria; and no doubt, if they didn’t recite them properly, you didn’t help them. Did you ever, after the war, demand similar proof from the men who
then
came to ask you for your help? Did you ever refuse any of
them
because you weren’t sure they belonged to a ‘proper category’?”

“I may have – I don’t remember exactly. It’s so long ago.”

“Let us put the question theoretically,” I said. “If you
had
known, or suspected, about any of the people who came to you for help, that they had been actively involved in the horrors you had by then knowledge of like everybody else; that they themselves had in fact committed or been party to atrocities or murder; that they themselves were wanted by the courts for crimes; would you have felt that the Church had the right, or perhaps obligation, under such circumstances, to save a man from worldly justice? Would you have helped such a man?”

Father Weber didn’t answer for many minutes; he thought about the question for a long time before he finally replied softly and sadly: “If I had known –
really
known – I think I would have sent them away. I think I would have said, ‘Try somewhere else.’ I think that is what I would have done.” And I believed him.

Earlier we had talked about the most fundamental question, which everyone, without exception, had brought up during these conversations; the extent of the Pope’s knowledge of the true situation concerning the Jews.

“Pius did not know the extent of German measures against Jews,” Father Weber said. “He knew they were being put into camps and all that, but he didn’t know they were actually killing them. There were of course all kinds of rumours, but it would have been unthinkable for the Pope to have delivered an encyclical because of rumours. As long as he couldn’t convince himself of the facts, confirm from his own knowledge that they
were
facts, he couldn’t speak.

“As I know the situation,” he continued, “one must remember that, whatever they say now, most of Germany was
with
Hitler. I think that if the Pope, with his scant knowledge of the situation, had spoken out and repeated these unconfirmed rumours to Germany’s Catholics, fifty per cent of them would have been outraged; it would have resulted in bitter anger against the Pope for allowing himself to be used for enemy propaganda.”

“You don’t think the German Catholics would have believed the Pope?”

“No, they wouldn’t have.”

*
When Father Weber said this I was moved, yet again, to think of Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII. In August 1944, when immense efforts were being made by all of the civilized world to halt the murder of the Hungarian Jews, the field representative of the War Refugee Board, Ira Hirschmann, had gone to see Monsignor Roncalli, who was still Apostolic Delegate in Turkey. Monsignor Roncalli asked Mr Hirschmann whether he thought the Jews of Budapest would be willing to be baptized – “only to save their lives,” he said, “not to really convert them, you understand.” Mr Hirschmann replied that he thought the Jews would welcome the opportunity to live. And two weeks later Monsignor Roncalli confirmed in a letter to Mr Hirschmann that he had sent “thousands of baptismal certificates” to the Papal Nuncio in Budapest, Monsignor Angelo Rotta.

*
Anyone who has heard Eichmann speak in his pronounced Austrian German, might find it difficult to understand how Father Weber could have accepted this story.

*
Hutchinson, 1967.

7

D
R
E
UGEN
D
OLLMANN
is one of the rare Germans who has never denied his membership of the Nazi Party – in fact one feels that he makes quite a point of not apologizing for it. He was seventy-two years old when I met him in 1972 at the exclusive Munich residential hotel Das Blaue Haus, where, a very urbane bachelor, he lives with his beautiful dog for company. Dr Dollmann looks a great deal younger than his age, carries himself – although he is not tall – very erect, wears exquisitely well cut clothes, and is well versed in art and antiques.

During his period as Hitler’s interpreter in Rome, he also interpreted for all the other important Germans who came there – Himmler, Heydrich, Göring, visiting diplomats and
SS
generals. He attended every major German-Italian conference, in Rome and Berlin, and repeatedly stayed as Hitler’s guest at the Berghof. There is no reason for him to deny his adherence to the Party: he clearly never did anything beyond his glamorous job which – as he appears to have been everybody’s confidant – was both gratifying and challenging. He made it quite plain, both in his book,
The Interpreter,
and to me, that he was fascinated with this life. “My book was never published in German,” he said. “They didn’t dare.” Reading it, one doesn’t quite understand why they wouldn’t have dared, except perhaps that it might interfere with the illusions of those who like to think of the Nazi world as rather more hardy. The picture Dollmann paints – extremely well – of life in war-time Rome, is certainly different from how it has been described by others, and his portrait of Hitler is unusual, to say the least.

“Of course,” he said, “my life during those years was not very different from my life in peacetime. I really had nothing to complain of: I had my own delicious flat in Rome; I had innumerable equally delicious Italian friends. And amongst the Germans – well, I
chose
my friends, as one would do. Obviously, one could only really associate with those who had a sense of humour. As you know, that would limit one rather sharply amongst Germans. Still there were some.”

It would appear that even after Germany’s defeat, Dr Dollmann’s life continued fairly agreeably.

“When it became sticky”, he said, “I went into hiding. I hid for a year in a monastery in Milan. Of course, I hadn’t
done
anything – but, on the other hand, I had worn
that
uniform. So, on paper, after all, I had been in the
SS.
And you know what
that
meant when the Allies came. So I went to stay with the Cardinal in Milan. It was a nice year. He used to come to my room – my cell – each evening and say, ‘Now let us have a glass of wine together,’ and we would talk about art and music and people – the things that mattered.

“I am always amused at the nonsense people talk about Hitler,” he said. “AH that business about his tantrums, his china-throwing and carpet-chewing sessions, you know. When I finally reported to the Americans, after hiding for that first year-undue haste in reporting wouldn’t have paid off – they listened to my story and later they wrote out a statement and asked me to sign it. I started reading it over and they said that really wasn’t necessary. But I said I was certainly going to read anything I signed. At the very end they had written that I had said I’d seen Hitler have these mad tantrums, throw china about, gnaw carpets and all that nonsense. So I said I wouldn’t sign. They said they were prepared to pay me a considerable sum in dollars – but I said I didn’t need their dollars, that I had never seen such a thing and that I wouldn’t sign. So they said that was certainly to my disadvantage – but they crossed it out.

“You see, I never saw Hitler be anything but totally courteous. In fact, on all the many social occasions I spent with him, indeed on which I was there to advise him as a kind of aide – all heads of state take advice on protocol – I never once saw him make a false move. Extraordinary, really, for a man with his background. He had a very quiet voice, shy and appealing to Germans, with his soft Austrian accent. [Lord Boothby said the same thing: “Soft, hesitant and thoughtful,” was how he described Hitler’s voice.]

“Of course, Mussolini was very different. He was, you know, a real man; an Italian; full of life, charm – culture too. Yes, he was a warm, a loving sort of man. Hitler was cold,” said Dr Dollmann. “The atmosphere around him was ice cold. But he was incredibly receptive to information. He asked, and he listened. He was very clever at social chit-chat, you know. The sort of thing one wouldn’t have expected him to enjoy or excel at. You know, when he received Roman socialites, I’d say a few words between each presentation, you know the sort of thing: this is the Principessa something or other, she has a great estate near Florence, husband on the Duce’s staff; this is the Contessa
X,
five children, particularly interested in child welfare, or gardens, or zoology as the case might be. And he’d always catch on at once and converse along those lines. And he had a phenomenal memory – never forgot anything.”

“What did you think of the rumours that Hitler was a homosexual?” I asked him.

“Well, I think it’s possible,” he said. “You know, nobody has ever mentioned, in all the stories and histories of the period, how extraordinarily handsome all the young men in Hitler’s immediate circle were. They weren’t thugs, you know; they were very well brought up, very well connected young people – and they looked like young gods.”

“What about Eva Braun? Do you think there was a normal relationship between them?”

“Certainly not a normal physical relationship. She was nice, you know, but terribly stupid. I used to have to make a programme for her when she came to Rome with him; all she ever wanted to do was see the shops, go and buy clothes and things; she couldn’t
wear
anything, with the Italian sort of elegance, but she bought. At the Berghof – yes, I stayed there several times – one could watch her adoring Hitler; she just sat and adored. She had no conversation, no thoughts in her mind, no mind in fact. I expect that’s what he liked and sought in her; someone he didn’t have to say anything to, who just worshipped at his shrine. He must have needed it more arid more as things got worse and worse for him.

“The Jews? No, I never heard Hitler mention the word ‘Jew’ in private, or even in ordinary conversation. He spoke about ‘
Staatsfeinde
’ [enemies of the State], and with that he meant anyone who was against Germany, including the Allies, Russians, etc. But, as I said, never did he mention the Jews in my hearing.… Of course, don’t forget that there really was no Jewish problem to speak of in Italy, and of course it was Italian questions that were within my competence as his interpreter. In Italy there were a few people of note who were Jews – industrialists, scientists, writers, to whom, of course, nothing happened; they left in time, that is, before September 1943 when Italy’s status changed from ally to occupied nation. Or else they were hidden by Italians, often in convents and monasteries. So of course there really was no call for Hitler and Mussolini to discuss the Jewish question.

“I never heard Pius
XII
mention the word ‘Jew’ either. But then, of course, he always spoke in very general terms; he spoke of ‘suffering humanity everywhere’, ‘excesses’, etc, but he never specified beyond these generalities.… Except once,” he said later. “But that was very late, in 1944, on the occasion of the last audience General Wolff had with him; he requested Wolff to arrange at once the release of a young man, the son of a childhood friend – they were Jews. And this was done immediately. During that same last meeting he demanded that ‘all excesses’ in Italy must cease forthwith, and they did. General Wolff sent put an order that no one was henceforth to be
touched,
and that food, etc, should be improved immediately in prisons and camps. But, of course, he could have made a special point of the Jews – but even then he didn’t.