Original subtitles

NARRATOR: In the darkest days of World War II,

St. Peter's was shrouded in the shadow of the swastika.

RONALD RYCHLAK: Hitler actually gave the orders

to invade the Vatican.

[speaking German]

ROBERT EDSEL: Hitler didn't want to kidnap the Pope.

He wanted to kill him.

PIUS XII: But it's not too late to stop him.

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Pius XII,

who some have branded as Hitler's Pope,

was actually plotting against him.

HITLER: Sieg Heil!

CROWED: Heil!

MARK RIEBLING: Pius said, 'It must be done.

Change the regime, and good things will happen.'

[shouting in German]

NARRATOR: It is a chapter of the war long forgotten,

a secret showdown between the vicar of Christ

and the Antichrist.

GEORGE RUTLER: It's right out of James Bond.

Well, it's better than James Bond because it's real.

[explosion]

¶ ¶

[choir singing in Latin]

HANS: Amen.

[singing in Latin]

NARRATOR: Adolf Hitler and Eugenio Pacelli,

the future Pope Pius XII, were both born and raised Catholic,

but only Pacelli embraces the identity wholeheartedly.

RYCHLAK: According to family tradition,

on the day of his birth, an uncle held him up and said,

'63 years from today, this baby will be given great honor.'

And it was indeed 63 years later

that he became Pope of the Roman Catholic Church.

NARRATOR: The other, Hitler,

will one day seek to destroy the church of his youth.

[speaking Latin]

ADOLF HITLER: Amen.

RIEBLING: Deep in his boyhood,

Hitler had wanted to be a priest,

and he would stand up on a little stool in his kitchen

and put his mother's apron around him

and practice his sermons.

NARRATOR: As Hitler and Pacelli come of age,

their paths will diverge dramatically

along the courses of good and evil,

each man propelled by uncommon intelligence,

ambition, and opportunity.

But their fates will intersect decades later,

when they compete for millions of hearts, minds, and souls

during the most harrowing conflict

in the history of mankind.

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: In the 1930s, before the outbreak of World War II,

Hitler begins waging an undeclared war on the Church.

¶ ¶

RIEBLING: In Hitler's mind,

there was no room for any other gods before him.

As he himself put it, 'We want no other god but Germany.'

They did things like send out brown shirts

to smear altars with excrements

and behead statues in cathedrals.

[smash]

ERIC METAXES: They were in some places

replacing crosses with swastikas.

[speaking German]

RIEBLING: They threw one of the cardinal of Vienna's assistants

out a window and broke his legs.

[speaking German]

[screaming]

[Nazis laughing]

RIEBLING: One of Hitler's deputies said,

'In the end, world views are decided by weapons.'

And so they turned all the weapons they had

against the Church.

RYCHLAK: And the plan was to raise Hitler up

into a Christ-like figure.

Mein Kampf, Hitler's book, 'My Struggle,'

would replace the Bible at the altar.

All lessons, all preaching would come from Hitler's teaching.

NARRATOR: Repeated church protests

against these Nazi persecutions

only seem to make the situation worse.

German Catholicism seems targeted for extinction,

unless a new pope can save it.

In February 1939, Pope Pius XI dies.

Three weeks later, after the shortest conclave in centuries,

the Vatican's Secretary of State becomes its commander in chief.

BISHOP: Cardinale Pacelli!

[cheering]

ROBERT VENTRESCA: Pacelli came into that conclave in 1939

as the second most powerful man in the Vatican.

Pius XI had let it be known

that this would be an ideal successor.

[speaking Latin]

¶ ¶

VENTRESCA: Some people saw him as the consummate politician.

[cheering]

NARRATOR: Cardinal Pacelli is now Pope Pius,

and he assumes spiritual leadership

of a continent that is coming apart at the seams.

Hitler has already annexed Austria.

In just three days, he'll invade Czechoslovakia,

and he's also threatening to steamroll

Eastern Europe's most stalwart Catholic enclave--Poland.

[speaking German]

RIEBLING: In August 1939,

about two weeks before the second World War began,

Adolf Hitler summoned his supreme military commanders

to his private mountain in the Bavarian Alps,

and there he described what he was going to do in Poland,

how he was going to eradicate the Polish clergy.

NIGEL JONES: This appalled the generals, who were mainly



of a Christian background, and they regarded this

as going against all Christian and ethical standards.

But most of them sadly went along with the orders.

[artillery fire]

ANNOUNCER: It was in September 1939

when Warsaw first made front-page news.

NARRATOR: The Nazi invasion of Poland

is sudden and devastating.

Within weeks, tens of thousands of Poles, especially Jews,

are mercilessly slaughtered.

To choke all voices of dissent,

the cultural and intellectual leaders of Poland

are specifically targeted.

In a country with a nearly 90 percent Catholic population,

that means open season on the clergy.

RIEBLING: Suddenly there were

Catholic bishops and Catholic priests

being hauled off into concentration camps,

and hundreds of priests were shot

in the first weeks of the occupation

as a deliberate policy of terror.

Reports of atrocities

began filtering back to Pius XII by October,

and he was really tied in knots over this.

NARRATOR: The new Pope must decide how he will respond

to the genocide in Poland.

Should he condemn Hitler publicly and risk his wrath?

Or keep quiet to protect his flock from even greater horror?

VENTRESCA: The dilemma or the choice for him

is laid bare by bishops and others

who are saying exactly one of two things--

Speak out. Be more explicit. Be more emphatic.

Don't speak out. Be careful.

Temper your language,

because there are reprisals that are beyond our control.

SHMULEY BOTEACH: Poland lost 90 percent of its Jews.

3.5 million Jews before the war, 350,000 survive.

That's astonishing. It's a deeply Catholic country.

Could you imagine if the Pope had said,

'This is a dark evil that we have to resist?

I am calling on all Catholics to resist Hitler.

It is your moral and spiritual responsibility.'

Could the Holocaust have happened in Poland?

The consensus is that it could not have happened.

DAVID ALVAREZ: He feared that if he were to do

some of the things that people called on him to do,

things would only get worse.

And there is a little bit of evidence that that's the case.

ALVAREZ: When the Dutch bishops issued a letter

condemning the deportation of Dutch Jews,

the deportations increased, they didn't decrease.

RYCHLAK: There were statements

back from the concentration camps.

Every time we get a message from the Vatican,

more of us get killed.

The Pope, at some point,

issued a letter to the people of Poland.

The bishop got it and burned the letter.

He sent a note back to the Pope

and said, 'Holy Father, thank you.

This is great and profound, but I am not going to read it

because people will be killed if I read this.'

NARRATOR: As the new pontiff seeks divine guidance,

a treasonous plot is taking shape in Germany

that could answer his prayers.

For years, the Vatican has relied on a network

of Catholic informants inside the Reich

to gather evidence of Nazi crimes against the church.

The key man in that spy ring is a stocky,

hard-drinking Catholic lawyer known as Joey Ox.

RIEBLING: He was more or less a fixer, if you would,

someone who could solve problems.

He was, I'd say,

part Oskar Schindler and part Vito Corleone.

ALVAREZ: The German bishops used Müller to carry communications,

messages to the Vatican.

He became in effect a courier, a secret courier.

NARRATOR: In September 1939,

Müller is called to Berlin for a meeting

with Hans Oster, the deputy commander of the Abwehr,

Germany's military intelligence agency.

He assumes his covert efforts for the church

have been uncovered

and that this meeting will be his last.

[speaking German]

HELMUTH VON MOLTKE: The Abwehr,

which is really

the counterintelligence branch

of the government,

one would think would be very strongly influenced

by policy of the government,

but in fact, the Abwehr was a place

where people who were anti-Hitler could find a home.

NARRATOR: The head of the Abwehr,

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was at the Eagle's Nest

when Hitler revealed his diabolical plans for Poland.

¶ ¶

And he soon saw them put into practice.

RIEBLING: As he wandered Warsaw on September 20th,

he saw a blood red sun and rats eating corpses

and a rabbi in the middle of the road

over his dead wife crying out,

'There is no God! The Nazis are the only gods!'

Canaris returned to his quarters and vomited

and returned to Berlin a broken man.

It was all he could do at that point

to raise his glass in a toast

to some of his associates and say...

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: The Abwehr conspirators

want to move quickly

to eliminate Hitler and end the war,

but they also recognize that killing the Führer

without a solid strategy to replace him

could embolden their enemies at home and abroad.

ALVAREZ: The problem was,

why should Britain make peace with Germany?

Even if Hitler's removed,

how are we going to be better off?

Are you guys just going to continue the war?

Only under different leadership?

What about all those countries you've occupied?

What are you offering us

in return for us sitting quietly while you overthrow Hitler?

RIEBLING: They needed someone to guarantee their good faith,

some kind of power that could certify

that the German resistance to Hitler was real

and that Nazi crimes were real.

NARRATOR: Canaris and Oster quickly realize

there is one leader in Europe

whose jurisdiction straddles both sides of the battlefield,

a moral authority who would bring unique power and prestige

to their cause.

Before the conspirators set out to kill the Führer...

[speaking German]

...they will seek the blessing of the Pope.

RYCHLAK: Pius is very nervous about this.

He realizes he can get people killed

for what he's going to do.

[explosion]

[artillery fire]

NARRATOR: In September 1939,

with Nazi forces on the warpath in Poland,

a group of German intelligence operatives

set out to commit high treason and kill Adolf Hitler,

but first, they need a credible ally

to broker a deal with the British

that protects German sovereignty after the coup.

They quickly zero in on the Pope.

RIEBLING: They trusted Pacelli.

They thought that he had Germany's interest at heart,

but they also knew he was very anti-Nazi,

even if publicly what he said was, was rather limited.

Their problem then became how to make contact with the Pope.

Since they were Protestants. they really had no idea

how to establish a secure line of communications

to Pius XII in Rome.

NARRATOR: That's where Joey Ox comes in.

Longtime Vatican spy Josef Müller

is the perfect conduit to the pontiff.

At a time when the Nazis control

all lines into and out of Germany,

he can, quite literally, fly under the radar.

RIEBLING: Josef Müller, as a member

of the Bavarian Sports Pilot Club,

would on Sunday afternoons take a flight from Munich

over the Alps to Merano, Italy,

and he would have a briefcase full of secret documents,

which were really proving Nazi atrocities

and violations against the Church specifically.

He would hand them off to a Vatican agent in Merano

who would take them then down to the Vatican.

NARRATOR: In October 1939,

Müller touches down with a top secret proposal for Pius.

ALVAREZ: He would use

what intelligence services refer to as a cutout.

He would not directly speak with Pius,

but he would contact and speak with people

who in turn would speak with Pius.

[speaking German]

RIEBLING: Monsignor Ludwig Kaas was an exile from Germany,

and he was one of the Pope's closest advisors

on German affairs.

¶ ¶

[speaking Italian]

RYCHLAK: This was an incredibly bold move by the Pope

to decide to throw in with one side.

Pius is very nervous about this.

He realizes he can get people killed

for what he's going to do.

I personally think if they could have ousted Hitler

without killing him,

Pius would have been fine with that,

uh, but that wasn't going to happen.

It was going to take this assassination,

and when that happens,

Pius understood that there are times

when it's necessary to take an action like that.

NARRATOR: Pius finds justification

in the teachings of Saint Thomas Aquinas,

who said, quote,

'He that kills the tyrant for the liberation of the country

is praised and rewarded.'

RUTLER: Clearly, in the case of the Nazis,

you have whole races who were being slaughtered.

And what do you do to stop that?

No question that Pius XII understood

the legitimacy of tyrannicide in the case of Hitler.

With the pontiff on board, the conspiracy begins in earnest.

Code names are assigned.

Müller goes by Mr. X.

Pius' personal secretary, Father Leiber,

who teaches at Rome's Gregorian University,

is called Gregor.

Pius himself is the Chief.

MAN: Heil Hitler!

NARRATOR: Secret messages about the plot

are passed from Rome to Berlin,

buried in regular intelligence reports

under the heading 'Current Possibilities for Peace.'

RIEBLING: Pius XII, he seemed to take a buoyant delight

in these kind of boyish enterprises.

He liked to keep threads in his own hands,

and he rather relished engaging

in the nuts and bolts tradecraft of papal espionage.

NARRATOR: The conspirators are off to a fast start,

but then, an unexpected wrinkle arises

when another would-be assassin strikes first.

¶ ¶

RIEBLING: Georg Elser, a communist in Munich,

knew that Adolph Hitler spoke every November 8th

at the Bürgerbrãukeller, a Munich beer hall,

on the anniversary of his failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

Elser, who was quite a shrewd, self-taught carpenter,

had slept in the beer hall at night for months ahead of time

just so that he could hollow out a column

c

where he knew Hitler would be standing by

and implant in this column

some chemical explosives with a clockwork mechanism

which would make it go off during his speech.

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: Elser sets his bomb to detonate at 9:20 P.M.,

at which point, he calculates, based on previous years,

that Hitler will be in the middle of his speech.

HITLER: Sieg Heil!

CROWD: Heil!

HITLER: Sieg Heil! CROWD: Heil!

HITLER: Sieg Heil! CROWD: Heil!

[applause]

NARRATOR: But this year is different.

JONES: He cut short his speech and rushed off very quickly.

He had been told that the weather was worsening

and fog might delay his journey back to Berlin

on his special train.

And he wanted to order

o

the invasion of Western Europe, in fact,

and that was why he wanted to get back to Berlin in a hurry.

[ticking]

[explosion]

RIEBLING: The chairs were flying, bodies were flying,

eight people were killed, dozens were maimed,

and Hitler escaped.

JONES: He became imbued with the sense

that Providence was on his side

and that he would be spared long enough

to fulfill his destiny to lead Germany to victory.

Stringent security was set in place

after Elser came very, very close to killing Hitler.

No one was allowed to carry arms and weapons

in Hitler's presence, even officers of the army,

so that made the conspirators' job all the more difficult.

NARRATOR: But they remain determined to see it through.

PIUS XII: Good evening, Ambassador.

D'ARCY OSBORNE: Good evening, Holy Father.

NARRATOR: In January 1940, Pius summons

Britain's Vatican minister, Sir D'Arcy Osborne,

to a top secret midnight meeting

and reveals his true allegiances in no uncertain terms.

PIUS XII: I suppose you must be wondering

why we're meeting so secretly, so late at night.

OSBORNE: I have my suspicions.

PIUS XII: I have been contacted again

by a very trustworthy source inside the German military,

someone who means what he says.

Germany intends to attack the West by the middle of February,

or possibly even earlier.

I am told it will be violent, bitter,

and utterly unscrupulous.

Hitler is convinced

he will be parading through Paris by summer.

But it's not too late to stop him.

OSBORNE: Your Holiness?

PIUS XII: Some of the generals want a regime change.

They intend to get rid of Hitler.

RIEBLING: Osborne was very impressed by this,

and he conveyed in his telegraph to London,

'There's more to this than we've given credit to.'

Pius XII was not merely

neutrally, tepidly passing on information.

Pius XII came off to the British as almost pushy.

He took the initiative,

and he argued that the Allies should take this seriously

and begin a dialogue

on what the terms of regime change would be.

NARRATOR: Through the pontiff,

the conspirators set the negotiating terms

for a post-Hitler peace with the British.

After they depose the Führer, they must disarm his military,

restore the rule of law in Germany,

prevent war in the West, liberate Poland,

and let the other conquered nations vote

on whether to remain with the Reich.

In exchange, the conspirators

seek Britain's promise not to invade Germany

or interfere with its new government.

The Pope's secret exchanges with the British

pave the way for the assassination of Adolf Hitler.

Now it's up to the conspirators to pull the trigger.

NARRATOR: In the early weeks of 1940,

the conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler gains new momentum,

thanks to an effort by Pope Pius XII

to secure British support for the coup.

Now, the time for talk is through

and the need of action urgent,

because the Führer has his sights set on another invasion

that will make him all but unstoppable.

¶ ¶

MAN: Heil Hitler!

MAN: Ja.

RIEBLING: After the British and the German resistance

had actually agreed upon a peace program,

certified by the Pope and to be implemented by the Pope,

the German Resistance now had to take this

to the head of the German military.

Franz Halder was the chief of staff,

the number two in the German military.

He had an intense dislike for Hitler,

and so the conspirators,

knowing that Halder was sympathetic to their aims,

approached him.

RIEBLING: They put these terms

in something called the X Report,

which had on it the papal insignia.

And on there was, in Father Leiber's handwriting,

these key peace terms.

This one piece of paper,

if it fell into the hands of the Nazis,

could bring them all to the gallows

and even conceivably serve as a pretext

for arresting and kidnapping the Pope.

NARRATOR: General Halder could be an ideal assassin.

He secretly despises Hitler,

and before the Munich beer hall bombing,

he had even concealed a pistol in his jacket,

hoping for the right moment to strike.

But now, with beefed-up security

surrounding the Führer and his popularity at an all-time high,

Halder has cold feet.

RIEBLING: Halder, who was a very kind of by-the-book guy

and was really at the limits of his imagination,

said to Hans Oster and Canaris, through an intermediary,

'If I draw this sword, it will break in my hand.

The German people are not behind me if I do this.'

NARRATOR: Ultimately, Halder's dedication to duty

overpowers his outrage,

and he's not alone.

JONES: Every German soldier

from the top ranking commander in chief of field marshals

down to the lowest, humblest private,

had to take a personal oath of loyalty

to Adolf Hitler as Führer

that they would obey every single command

that he issued without question.

And so many Germans schooled in the Prussian habits

of discipline and obedience

used that as an excuse for failing to move against Hitler.

SOLDIER: Heil Hitler! OFFICER: Heil Hitler!

NARRATOR: With every passing week,

the conspirators and the Pope

lose credibility with the British.

Meanwhile, Hitler is bolstering his war machine

for an all-out assault on the West.

A preemptive strike against him

would save millions of lives at the expense of one,

but time is quickly running out.

And on May 10, 1940,

the window of opportunity slams shut.

PETER GUMPEL: Hitler attacks France

and therefore invades Holland, invades Belgium,

invades Luxembourg, and, of course, then the war starts,

and at that moment, of course, there is no longer any chance

that the English would make an agreement

with these German generals

who are in the midst of an actual war now.

And so that stopped the whole thing.

METAXES: Suddenly all of the generals

who they have been lining up to stand against Hitler

are thinking, whoa, it looks like he's going to win.

We want to go with the winner.

RIEBLING: The failures of these first round of plots

left Pius extremely disillusioned.

He felt like he really went out on a limb,

put his personal prestige in the dock here,

and nothing had happened.

NARRATOR: A long year and a half passes,

with Hitler and the Nazis in command of the continent,

but in December of 1941,

two developments reveal new cracks in the Nazi facade.

On the Eastern Front, the German army is on the run

after a resounding defeat in the battle of Moscow.

While far to the West...

ANNOUNCER: Planes were swooping down on Pearl Harbor.

[explosions]

NARRATOR: ...Japanese bombs arouse a sleeping giant.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: We will gain the inevitable triumph,

so help us God.

[applause]

NARRATOR: On December 11th,

the U.S. declares war on Germany,

and Hitler's victory is no longer assured.

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: The German people loved him.

After he started winning the war in '39 and '40,

they had to keep quiet, but as the years passed,

they knew he'd lost the war by first of all invading Russia

and secondly, by declaring war on the United States.

VON MOLTKE: The war became

more and more terrible,

and the numbers of lives being lost became so huge

that more and more people said, 'We've got to do something.'

NARRATOR: Soon, talk of a conspiracy

returns to the shadowy recesses of the Vatican,

where Pope Pius is apprised of a new plan

to resurrect the long-lost sacred Germany

by blowing the Führer out of the sky.

NARRATOR: In 1943, the fourth year of World War II,

there are widening cracks in the foundation of German power.

On the Eastern Front,

the Nazis are in the throes of a disastrous defeat at Stalingrad.

In the West, the Allies are regrouping behind a new leader,

the United States.

And the divine Führer is looking more vulnerable than ever.

RIEBLING: At this point, officers on the Eastern Front

began to take serious measures

to make sure that Hitler would meet with an accident.

Pius XII was very encouraging and enthusiastic

about what the German conspirators had planned,

and he said, 'Change the regime,

and I believe good things will happen.'

NARRATOR: In March, with the implicit support of the pontiff,

high-ranking rebels in Hitler's army make their move.

METAXES: They disguised a bomb as a gift of brandy.

At the last minute, someone runs up to Hitler's plane and says,

'Oh, would you mind taking this to so and so?

I lost a bet, and I owe him this brandy.'

And so they put it on the plane.

[airplane engine starts]

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

METAXES: They're waiting and waiting and waiting

because they know that someplace, as Hitler's plane

is flying in this western direction to Berlin,

this plane is going to blow up.

¶ ¶

[telephone rings]

METAXES: It never blew up,

and they couldn't figure out why.

It's just unbelievable. They were sure that this was it.

JONES: For some reason, the primer hadn't tipped over

and it hadn't gone off, so we don't know really why,

but it was probably cold air at a high altitude that stopped it.

It's almost as if the devil was on Hitler's side,

because if something could go wrong for the conspiracy,

it did.

[telephone rings]

[speaking German]



NARRATOR: Less than a month after the failed plane bombing,

Vatican spy Josef Müller

is implicated as an anti-Hitler conspirator.

¶ ¶

ALVAREZ: By the spring of 1943,

��

people in the Nazi police and security services

were very suspicious of Müller.

He had long been on their radar.

They thought he was up to something.

They just couldn't get the evidence.

NARRATOR: Müller knows if the SS finds any records

of his correspondence with the Vatican,

everyone involved in the conspiracy,

all the way up to the Pope, will be in grave danger.

¶ ¶

[speaking German]

RIEBLING: Müller had a little bit of advanced warning

that the Gestapo was going to come,

and he took the time, such as he had, before the Gestapo arrived,

to bond with his young daughter.

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

NARRATOR: Müller's arrest is a crippling blow to the conspiracy

and its connection to the British through the Pope.

For the moment,

it looks as if the quest to kill Hitler is finally dead.

But a new rebel is about to emerge

to carry the torch of the resistance.

Just two days after Josef Müller's arrest,

Nazi colonel Claus von Stauffenberg

is gravely wounded in North Africa.

His war is over,

but his crusade is about to begin.

NARRATOR: April 7, 1943,

German colonel Claus von Stauffenberg

is riding in a Nazi convoy across the Tunisian desert.

[artillery fire]

Seconds later, he is barely alive,

gravely wounded in an Allied air raid.

In that moment, the conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler is reborn.

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: By the summer of 1943,

the Resistance has been hopelessly stalled

by several failed assassination attempts,

and the movement desperately needs new blood.

JONES: It was only with the arrival really of Stauffenberg

that we have a man, who I call the head,

the heart, and the hand of the conspiracy,

who was prepared to go the whole hog.

SUSANNE WAGNER: He had the vision.

He had the drive. He had the guts.

He was ready to act and not just discuss.

NARRATOR: Stauffenberg is,

by all appearances,

the model German warrior.

He served with distinction in Poland, France, and Russia,

even receiving the Iron Cross for valor.

But with every atrocity he witnessed in the war zone,

his conscience weighed more heavily.

JONES: He quickly became disillusioned

by the disgusting activities

such as killing the mentally and physically handicapped,

the atrocities on the Eastern Front against Jews,

against captured Russians, and captured Poles.

He also, of course, saw Hitler mismanaging and meddling

in military affairs and making stupid decisions.

[cannon fire]

And he decided that Hitler had to be killed come what may.

In Tunisia, he was extremely badly wounded.

He lost an eye, he lost a hand,

and he lost all but 3 fingers of his remaining hand,

so he had one eye, one arm, and only half a hand left.

RIEBLING: While he was in this body cast,

he did a lot of soul searching.

He had failed to heed the call of his own conscience

for many years,

but when the doctors broke Stauffenberg's body cast,

a new man emerged.

¶ ¶

NARRATOR: As Colonel Stauffenberg

recovers in a Munich hospital,

the Pope's top German spy

is also adjusting to new surroundings.

Josef Müller, Joey Ox, has been arrested

on suspicion of high treason.

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: For Pius XII,

Müller's arrest comes at a particularly bad time.

1943 has brought the war to his doorstep.

With Allied armies preparing to invade Italy from the south,

it will only be a matter of time

before the fighting engulfs Rome itself.

And if Müller talks or his secret files are found,

Hitler may turn his wrath on the Vatican.

[explosions]

[speaking Italian]

[explosions]

x

NARRATOR: On the morning of July 19, 1943,

8

Pius' own beloved city becomes a war zone.

X

More than 500 American bombers

Z

annihilate German military targets in and around Rome.

�

EDSEL: Many people described the sky

as just filled with airplanes.

There were bombs that went off target

and hit a very, very densely crowded neighborhood,

killing thousands of people.

NARRATOR: The Pope knows that neighborhood well.

One of the city's oldest and most venerated churches,

the Basilica of San Lorenzo, is directly in the line of fire,

and so is the cemetery next door,

where Pius' own parents are buried.

[explosions]

[speaking Italian]

[explosions]

RYCHLAK: When the bombing raid ends,

he tells people, 'Get the car, get blankets,

get medicine, get money.' Goes out.

WOMAN: Il Papa! Il Papa!

¶ ¶

He finds where his parents had been interred,

and their bodies are blown out of the crypt.

Most people, you would expect

that might be a breakdown for them,

but he couldn't break down there.

He had to be there

for the people who had been injured, killed,

who were suffering.

He was the father figure, and he was strong,

and people drew great solace from that.

EDSEL: World War II had come home

in an extraordinarily personal way--

witnessing bodies that had been lined up

one next to the other in the street,

the Pope kneeling down to provide blessings

and blood staining his cassock.

This is a Pope that returns to the Vatican

with this very, very personal connection to World War II,

and it takes on a gravity that wasn't there before.

VENTRESCA: The bombardment angers him.

It saddens him.

But it actually just confirms for him

that no good can come of war.

NARRATOR: After the bombing,

developments in Rome come fast and furious.

[speaking Italian]

NARRATOR: Just six days later,

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini

is arrested by his own government,

and the future of Italy is more uncertain than ever.

[speaking German]

EDSEL: Hitler's convinced that it's a plot,

that somehow the Vatican's involved

in the removal of Mussolini

and that this is a prelude to the Italians switching sides.

NARRATOR: Word of Hitler's designs on the Vatican

quickly reaches Admiral Canaris,

who relays a warning to the Pope.

With a threat of a Nazi invasion looming,

Vatican City hunkers down.

ALVAREZ: Assistants to the Pope were instructed

to keep two suitcases packed for immediate departure.

One they should keep at their home

and the other one they should keep next to their desk

in case they have to leave quickly.

NARRATOR: The day of reckoning arrives on September 8th,

when the new Italian government

announces an armistice with the Allies.

Immediately, Nazi paratroopers storm into Rome.

Within days, the Vatican is surrounded.

RYCHLAK: There's a white line on the ground--

Swiss guards with their pikes on one side,

Nazi soldiers on the other side with submachine guns.

NARRATOR: The Holy See now borders Hitler's Reich,

and Pius' Vatican is under siege.

EDSEL: It later comes out, during the Nuremberg trials,

where General Erwin Lahousen was asked the question

about the intentions of Hitler trying to kidnap the Pope,

and he said they didn't intend to kidnap him,

they intended to kill him.

NARRATOR: On September 13, 1943,

Nazi paratroopers surround St. Peter's,

and the Church of Rome is under siege.

ALVAREZ: The concern was that the Germans

would enter Vatican City,

seize the Pope, seize the archives,

seize the paintings, the artworks.

RYCHLAK: Hitler wanted to bring the treasures back to Berlin,

recreate Vatican City inside of Berlin.

Knowing not only that they might take stuff

but even that they might just destroy stuff,

the Vatican tried to protect these antiquities,

and they did hide things under the floor,

they did hide things down in the crypts.

NARRATOR: But there is more at stake than precious artwork.

Rome's Jewish population,

a fixture in the city for more than two millennia,

is suddenly threatened with extinction.

By the fall of 1943,

about 5,000 Roman Jews are hiding on church property.

RYCHLAK: I talked to a priest once who was in seminary,

and he said, 'We had so little food.

We were on wartime ration, and then the Pope told us,

Here's 100 Jews you have to take in,

and you have to share your rations with them.'

There are accounts of,

they'll be in the middle of a Jewish prayer,

and there's a knock at the door,

and they break into singing the Ave Maria

because they're trying to pass themselves off as being Catholic

to avoid the persecution from the Nazis.

NARRATOR: Word of the church's covert efforts

to save Rome's Jews soon filters back to Hitler.

The Führer fears the Pope may finally go a step further

and publicly denounce the Holocaust

that is now playing out in his own backyard.

ROBERTSON: Nazi policy depended very significantly

on the Pope remaining silent

so that all the Catholics in the SS

could believe that God might still be on their side.

The Pope's condemnation would have sounded around the world

and been disastrous for German foreign policy.

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: After the war,

Hitler's SS commander in Italy, General Karl Wolff,

would claim he received top secret orders

right after the conquest of Rome

to invade the Vatican and kidnap the Pope.

ALVAREZ: Karl Wolff is an interesting,

not to say infamous, character

in the history of the Second World War.

His story is that he did everything he could

to delay and to undermine this directive

so that he would not have to invade the Vatican

and kidnap the Pope.

This claim is very controversial

because Karl Wolff was a notorious fabricator.

He, on more than one occasion,

rewrote history in order to improve his standing in history.

KARL WOLFF: Heil Hitler!

NARRATOR: Wolff would also tell of a secret meeting

he arranged with Pius months later

to inform him personally of Hitler's plans

and urge him to refrain from publicly criticizing Hitler.

[speaking German]

¶ ¶

WOLFF: Heil--

NARRATOR: With the Nazis in command of his own hometown,

Pius again faces an agonizing moral quandary--

to condemn the Holocaust to the world

or hold his tongue for fear of Hitler's retribution.

¶ ¶

VENTRESCA: The occupation of Rome

and then the deportation of Jews in October of 1943

really dramatizes that dilemma that he's been grappling with.

He has to decide whether to say something emphatic and public

or again continue along the path of private diplomatic channels.

He chooses the latter again.

NARRATOR: On October 18th, more than 1,000 Jews

are taken to Rome's main railroad station

and herded into boxcars.

70 percent of them are women and children.

Of these 1,000, only 16 will survive the war.

BOTEACH: This happened quite literally

under the windows of St. Peter's

because the Jews were being rounded up in a military school

just a few blocks from the Vatican.

Now, imagine if the Pope would come out

in his flowing white robes and say,

'Gas me first, but you are never going to take these Jews,

who live under my protection, in Rome.'

The Pope could even have alerted the Jews

to the fact that they were going to die.

Even that alone would have been

something very, very significant.

ROBERTSON: Had he made it clear that participation

in the extermination of a race was a mortal sin,

that you would burn in hell if you participated in it,

it certainly would have prevented decent Catholics

from participating in the killings of millions of Jews.

RYCHLAK: If he had made a statement,

what would the impact have been there?

He was pretty well convinced

that his words never got behind enemy lines.

So, I mean, is it a fair question to ask and think about?

Yes.

Do I think it would have resulted in something better?

I don't really think so.

¶ ¶

NARRATOR: While Hitler imposes his reign of terror on Rome,

to the south, Allied forces are advancing up the boot of Italy.

For those trapped inside the Vatican,

liberation can't come soon enough.

Meanwhile, 700 miles to the north,

a devout member of Pius' flock

is plotting a liberation strategy of his own.

German Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg

is determined to destroy Adolf Hitler once and for all,

and a new assignment will soon offer him

the best chance yet to succeed.

NARRATOR: November 5, 1943.

As the battle for Rome intensifies,

bombs fall on Vatican City.

HAROLD TITTMANN: All of the sudden,

these loud explosions took place and everything,

windows rattled and, uh, everything shook,

and it was quite scary.

The next day we saw how much damage had been done.

Actually, it was a miracle that nobody was killed.

NARRATOR: The explosions damage a Vatican office building,

the mosaic factory,

and priceless stained glass windows

designed by Renaissance icon Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

The bomber's identity is never determined.

But the mysterious attack

underscores the ever-present danger

looming over Pope Pius and his Church.

As the pontiff prays for deliverance

from the evil that surrounds him,

a Catholic holy warrior

is preparing to strike at its source.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg

is the last, best hope for the German Resistance.

[speaking German]

JONES: After recovering from his injuries,

he was recruited as chief of staff of the Reserve Army,

whose official purpose was

to act as a sort of National Guard

in American terms.

They were chiefly meant to be used

in case there was a rising in Germany

by the thousands and thousands of slave workers

who were, by that time, the soul source of German economy.

Under the cover of this plan

to put down a rising by the slave workers,

which was code named Valkyrie,

Stauffenberg devised a plan within a plan called Valkyrie 2.

NARRATOR: It would be the ultimate ruse.

Stauffenberg would use his Reserve Army

not to protect the Nazi regime, but to dismantle it.

After killing Hitler,

he would mobilize his units throughout the Reich

to suppress civil unrest, while he worked secretly

to implement a new anti-Nazi government.

[speaking German]

RIEBLING: We know from the testimony of Father Leiber

that Pius XII was briefed in great detail

about what Stauffenberg had planned,

namely Hitler's elimination

through a bomb that was going to be planted

by a Catholic agent in the German Resistance.

[door opens]

[speaking Italian]

[door closes]

¶ ¶

NARRATOR: As Colonel Stauffenberg sharpens his sword,

American forces triumphantly enter Rome.

ANNOUNCER: As Army men drive through the city,

past the Colosseum,

place of ancient Roman holidays of quite a different nature,

the population gives itself up to excitement

as the shackles of German domination fall away.

NARRATOR: On June 4, 1944, after a nine-month siege,

Vatican City's prayers are answered.

[bells ringing]

[cheering]

¶ ¶

...et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: Six weeks after the liberation of Rome,

Claus von Stauffenberg stands on the eve of infamy.

JONES: He was a devout Catholic.

We know that he went into a Catholic church in Berlin

the night before the conspiracy and prayed.

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

RIEBLING: He went into a confessional booth,

and he asked the priest there for St. Leo's absolution,

which Catholics can traditionally be granted

before battle or before some extraordinary event,

which is likely to lead to their death.

¶ ¶

RIEBLING: Stauffenberg then left the church and got into a car,

and told his driver to pick him up early the next morning,

went inside his house, closed the drapes,

and packed his suitcase with two lumps of plastic explosive.

¶ ¶

NARRATOR: For five years, a brave group of Germans

has quietly conspired to reclaim their country

from the grip of evil.

Today, with their country sputtering

hopelessly toward annihilation,

they will make their final stand.

NARRATOR: All hopes rest with Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg,

a decorated warrior and dedicated Catholic

who believes his cause is justified

by St. Thomas Aquinas' teaching on tyrannicide.

ESCORT: Heil Hitler!

STAUFFENBERG: Heil Hitler!

NARRATOR: At 11 A.M., he arrives

at Hitler's top secret military complex in East Prussia,

known as the Wolf's Lair, with two bombs in his briefcase.

[speaking German]

JONES: Some minutes into the conference,

he made an excuse to leave the room,

allegedly to take a telephone call

that would apprise him of the latest news from Berlin.

METAXES: He wasn't planning to die with Hitler.

He was planning to live. He had a wife, children,

so he leaves and basically hustles out of there.

[explosion]

WAGNER: He heard the explosion. He saw it.

Windows were smashed.

Bodies were flying through the air.

[car starts]

JONES: He immediately got into his car

and drove through the two inner and outer perimeter gates

of the headquarters.

¶ ¶

NARRATOR: Within minutes,

Stauffenberg is on a plane back to Berlin,

certain that his mission has succeeded.

[explosion]

JONES: He arrived back shortly after 4:00,

at the headquarters of the conspirators

in the Bendlerblock.

He then set about phoning officers

all around occupying Europe,

giving them the code word Valkyrie,

setting off the conspiracy,

but the news came through that Hitler had survived the bomb,

that he'd only been lightly wounded.

[hangs up phone]

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

METAXES: It's hard for us to believe that history can hinge

on something as strange, as quirky, as furniture design.

[explosion]

He sees that the bomb has gone off, but what he doesn't know

is that in the two minutes or so that he'd been out of the room,

someone who had been sitting at the table

or felt the briefcase,

and it was just sort of in an awkward position,

so that person looks down and just picks it up

and moves it a couple of feet

to the other side of what was a plinth,

a gigantic piece of wood holding up the table.

So, it wasn't held up by standard legs.

That pillar holding up the table

deflected the blast of the explosion

such that Hitler survived.

NARRATOR: Hitler escapes with injuries so minor

that he is able to keep an afternoon appointment

with deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini,

who is now in Nazi protective custody,

and even give him a tour of the bombing site.

That night, the Führer appears on the radio

to quell the fast-spreading rumors of his demise.

JONES: Hitler gave immediate carte blanche

to arrest all the conspirators,

and that was the end of the conspiracy.

[shouting in German]

[rifles cocking]

[shouting commands]

[gunshots]

JONES: Stauffenberg was taken down

into the courtyard of the Bendlerblock

and executed by an impromptu court-martial.

[shouting]

¶ ¶

[shouting command]

[shouting command]

STAUFFENBERG: Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!

[gunshots]

[shouting command]

JONES: His last words were,

'Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!'

Long live our sacred Germany.

NARRATOR: For years, this conspiracy to kill Hitler

has operated in the shadows,

largely evading the notice of an all-seeing regime.

The Stauffenberg plot was to be

its long awaited moment of redemption.

[shouting command]

NARRATOR: Instead, it will be the death knell.

[shouting command]

[gunshots]

JONES: Because Hitler comes so close to being killed,

he took revenge, and the whole conspiracy began to unravel.

[drill whirring]



RIEBLING: In September 1944,

a bunch of documents were uncovered

in a safe in the Abwehr headquarters

incriminating not only the German Resistance

and plot against Hitler,

but showing their links to Pius XII.

NARRATOR: Among the documents is the handwritten note,

on papal stationery,

endorsing the removal of Hitler's regime.

ALVAREZ: This is the most incriminating evidence

as far as the Vatican is concerned

that they could possibly find, because what used to be

only a supposition of the Pope's involvement

now becomes a near certainty.

RIEBLING: This piece of paper

and other documents which were found

put the Nazis back on their heels.

And when Hitler saw what they contained,

he couldn't get out of bed for a week.

[door opens]

RIEBLING: The medical reports show

that he had a very disturbed nervous system.

WAGNER: He was utterly frustrated when he realized

how widespread this July 20th event, in fact, was.

He really was hoping it was just a small group of officers,

and then he realized that it was much more widespread,

that it was not just within Germany,

but it was, in fact,

also leading all the way up to the Vatican.

That was a shock to him.

[footsteps]

RIEBLING: Perhaps this was so upsetting to Hitler

because he had once had been a very believing Catholic.

As he came toward the end of his life,

it was probably deeply and subconsciously disturbing to him

to think that the supreme authority

of Christian moral power in the world

had aligned itself against him and his projects.

[speaking Latin]

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

NARRATOR: Hitler is finally roused from bed

by eye drops laced with cocaine.

His vigor restored, he resolves to annihilate

all the members of the conspiracy

while he still can.

JONES: Revenge was very sweet for him.

He was in an almost bloodlust outburst of killing.

[explosion]

NARRATOR: In the weeks after the Wolf's Lair attack

on Adolf Hitler,

the conspiracy against him unravels quickly,

and the trail of evidence leads all the way to the Vatican.

Pope Pius' top German spy, Joey Ox,

has been in prison for over a year,

but now, he's headed to death row.

[door slams]

RIEBLING: In November 1944,

when Josef Müller was in Gestapo custody,

he was presented by an SS officer

with the original piece of papal stationery

on which Father Robert Leiber, the Pope's deputy,

had written the British peace terms in 1940.

This was a clear smoking gun and, at this point,

Müller knew that he and Pius XII were caught dead to rights.

¶ ¶

RIEBLING: The Gestapo officer went silent, and he said...

[door closes]

RIEBLING: And he left the room. Well, Müller wasted no time.

¶ ¶

When the SS officer returned about 10 minutes later,

he just pretended

that the piece of paper had never even existed.

NARRATOR: Gone is a direct piece of evidence

implicating Pius in the plot to kill Hitler.

But for Müller and his accomplices in Gestapo custody,

the punishment is only just beginning.

[grunting]

METAXES: That was the dark hour of these people.

Müller and others were tortured horribly.

RYCHLAK: He was chained, he was beaten, he was cut,

and they held virtually nothing back.

But he never broke.

¶ ¶

NARRATOR: A long, agonizing winter passes

in solitary confinement.

Outside the prison walls,

Hitler's Reich is crumbling by the day,

L

and the Führer focuses his final wrath

on those who betrayed him.

ROBERTSON: He ordered that Canaris,

great figure in German military history of the first World War,

should actually be killed in the most torturous way possible.

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

[choking]

¶ ¶

JONES: They deliberately strung out his hanging

so that he lost consciousness

and then revived him and hung him again

so that he would, as they put it, taste death twice.

¶ ¶

[speaking German]

[choking]

ROBERTSON: And Hitler directed the best cinematographer

to take colored movies of the agonies

of Canaris and the other plotters,

and these were delivered to him in the bunker

so that he could, as it were, rub his hands

and delectate over the monstrous way

that his enemies were being killed.

¶ ¶

NARRATOR: Those films captured the final moments of Canaris

and many other conspirators, but not Josef Müller.

[speaking German]

[airplanes]

RIEBLING: Müller prayed. He thought of his daughter,

who was that day going to receive her First Communion,

and he thought,

'Well, at least as I am being led to my death at the gallows,

maybe even at this same moment,

my daughter is walking down the aisle

to receive the bread of eternal life.'

¶ ¶

¶ ¶

RIEBLING: He, any second, expected to be joining

Canaris, Oster, and the others who were hanged,

but as he stood there, nothing happened.

[aircraft approaching]

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: In the waning hours of World War II,

with Allied forces closing in fast,

Pope Pius' most valued secret agent

stands on the precipice of imminent death.

[airplanes]

RIEBLING: Josef Müller was taken to the gallows.

He was held there for a couple hours

while bombers were going overhead.

And, after a while, he was led back inside.

¶ ¶

And the next morning,

he got up and looked out the bars of his cell,

and he saw what seemed like snowflakes drifting in,

and the flakes floating into Müller's jail cell

were all that remained of his friends.

It wasn't until after the war

that Müller realized that he had been saved

by a telephone call literally at the last minute.

NARRATOR: It turns out Joey Ox

has an old friend in Hitler's bodyguard.

During a cigarette break outside the Führer's Berlin bunker,

SS General Hans Rattenhuber

hears about Müller's impending execution

from fellow officer Ernst Kaltenbrunner,

who had led the manhunt for the conspirators.

RIEBLING: Rattenhuber said,

'Can't you strike his name off the list?'

And Kaltenbrunner agreed under the pretext

that, well, maybe Josef Müller,

because of his close connections to the Vatican,

could help negotiate more favorable surrender terms

during the last days of the Reich.

[airplanes]

[distant explosions]

RYCHLAK: I mean, talk about a man who really was a hero.

When you read the torture he went through,

how close he came to actually being executed.

Müller went on to be an important man

throughout Europe after the war.

He's sometimes called the godfather of the euro,

and helping build Europe into a stronger, unified entity.

¶ ¶

[speaking Italian]

RIEBLING: On June 1, 1945, Joey Ox, Josef Müller,

entered Pius XII's apartment in Rome.

According to Müller, Pius crossed the room,

greeted him like a long-lost son.

They embraced and, during the next two or three hours,

Pius XII would not let go of Müller's hands.

They talked about all that Müller had been through,

and they discussed the plots against Hitler.

[speaking German]

NARRATOR: Pope Pius XII would serve

another 13 years as pontiff,

dying in 1958 at the age of 82.

At the time of his death, he was lauded the world over

as a towering figure in the cause of world peace.

¶ ¶

But in the decades since his papacy,

he has been criticized for his decision

not to condemn the Nazis by name during the war.

Some have even called him 'Hitler's Pope.'

ROBERTSON: I believe that although he wasn't

in any sense pro-Nazi,

he was nonetheless Hitler's Pope in the sense that his silence

for four or five years during, uh, these terrible events

was simply a profoundly mistaken decision.

BOTEACH: No one's saying the Pope

never helped to save Jews secretly, quietly.

What we are saying is that he never put his life on the line.

He didn't put the Church on the line.

The most effective way of stopping Hitler

was not through these secret spy networks.

The world did not need Pope Pius

to suddenly become the head of the CIA.

We needed him to be what he was, or purported to be--

the moral voice to the world.

NARRATOR: But supporters of Pius contend that his silence was

a justifiable strategy to avoid adding fuel to Hitler's fire.

EDSEL: I think sometimes in the debate

what gets missing is that Pope Pius XII,

before he was the Pope, was a man,

and no man is perfect.

I think Pope Pius the XII had sincere determination

to protect the Church.

It's an awesome responsibility,

one that's hard for any of us to fathom.

For those that say he was the silent Pope,

consider that circumstances are unpredictable.

They have unpredictable consequences.

NARRATOR: In the midst of this battle over Pius' legacy,

there was an ongoing movement to make him a saint.

In 2009, he was declared venerable,

the first of three steps to canonization.

VENTRESCA: The biggest problem I have

with the canonization cause is those doubts,

that nagging sense that, perhaps at times,

he just was too timid or too diplomatic

and just didn't show enough of the prophetic voice.

Those lingering questions, I think,

make it very difficult to think of this man as a saint.

Robert Leiber, who knew him well,

worked with him very closely, reportedly said, in Italian,

'Grande, si. Santo, no.'

Great, yes. A saint, no.

NARRATOR: This debate about Pius' wartime conduct

provokes broader questions that transcend history.

How directly should religious leaders intervene