Armistice between Italy and Allied Forces 1943
September 3rd. – 8th. 1943. Not a week to remember and be proud of if you are Italian. Italy signed an Armistice with Allied forces when the Vatican and Rome was still under German occupation, an occupation which would last until May 1944, six months after the Anzio landings. On September 9th. the Germans sank the battleship ‘Roma’ off Sardinia, and 1,400 lives were lost.
Pope Pius XII and Hitler
Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, known to some as ‘Hitler’s Pope’ was convinced that the Third Reich were planning to kidnap the wartime Pontiff, so a quick plan to decamp to a friendly country, most probably Portugal, was planned as contingency. The bishops would run, re-establish the new seat of the Roman Catholic Church, reorganize finances and appoint a new Pope overseas. Peter Gumpel is the man everyone is talking about, after all, the German Jesuit has full and private access to The Secret Vatican Archives. It is said that what he knows may curtail the beatification of Pope Pius XII. Secrecy over what ‘millions’ of wartime Vatican files contain may expose Pacelli as anti-Semitic, indeed, supportive of Nazism, ergo his fear of being ‘kidnapped’ may have been a most carefully spun web of grave deceit by the Vatican. Who’d have thought? A more conservative opinion, however, suggests that Pacelli simply knew of their plans via a Catholic SS Officer. He is regarded as a saviour of Italian Jews from Nazi extermination camps. The truth will out. We don’t include the more nefarious tales of Vatican history on our website, after all, we are selling Rome Tours of the Vatican, but we’ll keep reading and perhaps one day offer a Vatican Tour about Pope Pius XII and the Vatican in wartime.
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