The Irish priest who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis’ death camps
By the time of Rome’s liberation in 1944, O’Flaherty’s network was hiding 4,000 prisoners and had by then moved thousands more to safety
IN 1963, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty was a guest on the then new TV show, This Is Your Life. The retired monsignor had travelled from Cahirsiveen to BBC London’s studio for the programme celebrating Major Sam Derry, who had helped run an escape network in Rome during World War II for allied prisoners of war, dissenters and Jews.
Fr O’Flaherty was originally intended to be the subject of the show, having masterminded and set up the operation, earning him decorations from the US, British and Italian governments. The show was seen by eight million people. Two years later, the book, the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican, was published (later made into the movie starring Gregory Peck), by which time the monsignor had died in Kerry. The 1960s was not the most objective era for media to put Monsignor O’Flaherty’s wartime achievements into context. It was just 20 years after VE day and though there was a trend to sentimentalise the war (as illustrated in the mostly rubbishy war movies of the time) there was an acceptance of the casual heroism shown. Now, 70 years on, the story will leave more detached readers shocked and impressed.
Hide & Seek covers an extraordinary period from 1942 to ‘45, from when Italy was still fascist and fighting with the Nazis to when it changed sides and joined the Allied armies invading it from the south. The period was confused and some clergy, civil servants and local police assisted the POWs and Nazi undesirables being rounded up and shipped off to camps, while a great many were also complicit in it.
Above all, Hide & Seek is the remarkable tale of one man’s courage, made all the more readable by his complete lack of vanity or self-importance. Monsignor O’Flaherty was popular, easy-going and modest — despite being a scratch golfer from his days in Killarney.
He was also notoriously squeamish, a poor and terrified car passenger, and yet he played cat and mouse with the local SS commander and showed spectacular courage, compassion and cool-headedness enabling him to escape certain execution — just.
Along with covering the monsignor’s adventures, the book looks in detail at the post-war life of his Gestapo adversary, Obersturmbannfuhrer Herbert Kappler. Both men, the priest and war criminal, became friendly after the war. Kappler was married in prison to the penfriend who later helped him escape in 1977, having some years previously been accepted into the Catholic Church by O’Flaherty. And none of this extraordinary tale is fiction.
In a time of such volatility, it was difficult for the Vatican to appear anything other than ambivalent about the course of the war, when it was in the centre of Mussolini’s Axis state and had little option but to remain unaligned. Politically, the Vatican, where O’Flaherty was employed, remained neutral, but ethically it remained ambivalent too, staying largely non-committal to the cruelty and deportations to concentration camps being carried on around it. By 1942, O’Flaherty at least felt compelled to act, which he did independently, without help or reprimand from Church authorities and instead remained reliant on his own charm and networking skills to build up a chain of safe houses throughout the city. By the time of Rome’s liberation in 1944, O’Flaherty’s network was hiding 4,000 prisoners and had by then moved thousands more to safety.
The Vatican’s stance in the face of mass deportations of Jews and others has already been documented (the Church has been accused of not doing enough to prevent them). But this was less a period of ambiguity then outright moral confusion. After liberation, for instance, another network of Catholic priests ran a “rat line” that enabled Nazis to flee through Italy to South America. An insight into the thinking of the time was regrettably provided by the Irish envoy to Rome, Michael MacWhite, who described O’Flaherty as being like “a travelling postman” to those he was protecting and who had abused his privilege, writing that a period of detention by the Nazis “might develop in him a sense of proportion and responsibility”.
In the midst of all this and the horrors being unleashed across all of Europe, Rome maintained a strange wartime civility, with the Germans for the most part adhering to civil and diplomatic convention. All this ended abruptly in 1944 when Hitler personally ordered retaliatory killings of local civilians for a partisan bombing that killed 28 Nazi policemen; the local SS commander rounded up 355 prisoners, who were shot one by one in the caves outside the city. Kappler was jailed for his role in the massacre, but even though this was carried out brutally, there was still a peculiar — if futile — consideration for civil law and even a reluctance by some SS troops to carry it out, while elsewhere in Europe SS troops were shooting hundreds of thousand of civilians in Kiev, Odessa, Warsaw and others.
The book successfully gives a sense of the city through the period, and though Fr O’Flaherty’s lack of vanity presumably meant he left little in the way of papers or diaries, nonetheless Stephen Walker, an award-winning journalist, does a fine job using interviews, archives and making ample use of other published sources on the subject.
The book is aimed more at readability than profound historical revisionism and the author does have a tendency to embellish dramatised scenes with imagined details which can sometimes grate, such as the memorable line: “Hitler, who was enjoying a restful day at the Wolf’s Lair …”, for instance. Nonetheless, Hide & Seek is a fine book about a genuine Irish hero, who in this country at least (not unlike Antarctic hero Tom Crean who also came from Kerry) may have remained under celebrated through Ireland’s era of troubles and the resulting bigotry that ignored so many Irish who worked with Britain’s military.
Another book was published about him just last year and a musical is apparently underway in London, so perhaps the monsignor’s time has arrived and the stories of similarly-neglected Irish heroes may now emerge.
