Hitler Dupes the Vatican/Chapter I

H.G. Wells, who confessed to me a year ago that he had become convinced that I was right about the danger of Rome—he had more than once amiably ridiculed my preoccupation with it—said one of his superbly audacious things about it recently (September 27); and he said this to the most distinguished body the British Association for the Advancement of Science ever got together. This generation, he thought, might have to endure a series of wars waged "in the name of those dead religions that cumber the world today." And he went on to make a parenthetic remark which must have made learned eyes open wide behind their horn-rimmed spectacles:

"A dead religion is like a dead cat—the stiffer and more rotten it is, the better it is as a missile weapon."

It is obvious what religion he had in mind: the religion of Petain, Weygand, and Laval, of Leopold of Belgium, of De Valera, Vargas, and Salazar, of the Quislings of Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, and Croatia, the religion of that Black International which has for ten years helped the arch-criminals of history to dupe and enfeeble the democracies and to smirch our civilization with their foulness and brutality. In the day of reckoning it must stand in the dock with the other murderers.

In these little books I prepare the indictment and furnish the evidence. In the early stage's of this corruption of civilization the four masters of crime—Italy, Germany, Japan, and the Black International, which we may justly personify in the present Pope, Pacelli-Pius—were isolated, like crooks working in different quarters of a large city. Japan was brooding over an old plan to exploit Asia which had been drawn up when Mussolini was a ragged little country lad sweeping the floor of his father's saloon, and Hitler was begging nickels of his drunken and disreputable father in the sticks. The delicate Japanese nostrils would have quivered at sight of them. Even in 1922, when the industrialists and royalists of Italy raised Mussolini, for their own purposes and to his astonishment, to the position of a prince, Japan turned down the overtures of the Vatican. Seven years later the sharp-eyed Japanese statesmen saw the Papacy make Mussolini's tottering throne safe and win world-recognition of it for him by a formal alliance, and they now turned to the Vatican and asked it to—for a consideration—render the same service to themselves, which it did. Then Hitler, impressed by the value of this holy alliance, sought the same spiritual assistance of the Black International and got it.

So the plot, using the international organization of the Roman Church to lull suspicion in other countries, was unified and took on cosmic proportions. Germany, Italy, and Japan were to rule and exploit the earth. The Pope—he thought—would be the universal chaplain, with the plan in reserve, of a League of Catholic power's strong enough to cheek any trickery of Hitler. That will be cold history—or an epitaph—in a few years. I differ from Wells about those "wars of religion" in the future. If this generation which he and I will soon quit does not emasculate the Black International when this war is over it will deserve all it gets, but I have faith in it.

In earlier books I described the insidious preparatory moves in this collegial plot. Under the noses of the democracies, which actually applauded year by year except, for a time, in the case of Manchuria and Abyssinia, 200,000,000 folk were brought under what is politely called the authoritarian regime and added to the 200,000,000 of Germany, Italy, and Japan. . . Wait a bit, you protest. Where do you get these figures? Nobody in 1936 drew our attention to this remarkable development. I need say only: add up the populations of the stolen provinces of China, of Fascist South America, of Austria, Abyssinia, etc., and then find out why your oracles did not warn you in 1936 or 1937.

I have shown that the Black International played a very active and important part in this preparation for the launching of the plot in 1939. Can anybody even profess to doubt the value of the assistance it gave in destroying democracy in Austria, Spain, and Spanish America and supporting the annexation of China and Abyssinia? To this you must add its help in keeping Hungary, Eire, and Poland Fascist, in recommending Fascism (politely called the corporative state) in a solemn Papal Encyclical (Quadragesimo Anno 1931) to the entire Catholic world, in working on Catholic sentiment in France, Belgium, Britain, Holland, and America, and in sustaining the hatred of Russia. We return later to these points.

By 1938 the Axis on which Europe was to run was firmly constructed and ready to operate. Italy was to have Europe south of the Danube, and an African empire. Germany to have all north of that river. Mussolini, the Napoleon of the South, little dreaming that by 1941 he would be an old soldier on crutches begging coppers from Hitler, was blind to the emphatic statement in Mein Kampf that there is no room in Europe for two great powers. The rest of the world was still dreaming its dream of the benevolent and beneficent destruction of Socialism everywhere by these apostles of order and discipline. So Hitler made a bolder move: one that might provoke, and ought to have provoked, war.

He needed Austria and Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary was in the plot and very loyal to the Vatican; and in any case Pacelli was to visit it in 1938. With the control of Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary the conquest of the Balkans was assured, the broad road to Turkey and the East was open, and the blockade by the British fleet, on which small-minded British-statesmen relied, was deprived of its sting. The first step was to get Austria and the Danube, and in this the Black International was very useful.

In the summer of 1938 I discussed this annexation of Austria with an important German Nazi. He pleaded first that there was no annexation. It was an "adherence" (Anschluss) of the German people of Austria to their natural national unit. The facility with which America accepted this plea is dangerous. Germans will raise it strongly at the settlement—quite recently a German Socialist refugee insisted on it in conversation with me—and it is ominous that British statesmen never name the Austrians amongst the peoples they are going to liberate. However, the chief interest here is an incidental remark that my Nazi friend made. "If," he said, "you had gone to war over Austria, you would have found that we Germans had not enough petrol at the time to last more than ten days." He was an important industrialist, intimate with some of the leaders, and it was very clear to me that he was convinced of this.

How much the Vatican had to do with the criminal failure of France and Britain to begin arming at once—allowing that they were not in a position to fight in the spring of 1938—and drawing nearer to Russia we cannot say, but do not for a moment imagine that here I raise a wild and groundless suspicion. In 1937, as we shall see later, Pacelli had visited Paris—the first Papal Legate to do so since the fall of Napoleon—and on New Years' Day, 1938, Paris had the piquant spectacle of a representative of the Pope decorating and kissing its freethinking Premier and other Ministers. There was much besides this, but we will deal with the whole question of the corruption of France in a later book.

We are here not simply dealing with the overt action of the Vatican, which as in the case of Abyssinia and the Italian Church, often finds it convenient to act through the local hierarchy and itself remain silent. We are studying the share of the Black International in the world-debasement and tragedy. As far as Pacelli-Plus is concerned it is enough that he persisted in his attempts to conciliate Hitler and never said a word of the mildest censure of Germany's action in Austria. He knew that Mussolini had agreed to it as part of the general plan. But that the Church in Austria enthusiastically supported Hitler is not disputed, and no section of the Church was more docile to the Vatican. We shall see in a moment the trickery by which it was represented in America that the Austrian Church acted independently of the Vatican.

The way had been prepared, we saw, by the Church poisoning what the Annual Register calls "the Socialist watch-dog." Hitler would certainly not have had a walk-over in Austria if the Social Democrats, who firmly held Vienna and Linz and had hundreds of thousands of followers in the country, had still been strong in 1988. The Catholic Chancellor, Schusdhnigg, was himself vigorously opposed to annexation, and it is interesting to speculate what would have been the effect of an appeal to Czecho-Slovakia, with its magnificent Skoda arsenal close at hand, Russia, and the Socialists and Radicals of France were there. The Church, by destroying them, destroyed this early chance of defeating the world-plot. It had killed the Socialist leaders, had put tens of thousands of the more spirited Socialists in jail, and had drilled the country into docility to itself.

For Austria was, as we saw, a theocracy, a priest-ruled state as not even Poland or Eire was. Dollfuss, who assassinated the Socialists in 1934 after consultation with Pacelli, was promptly assassinated by the Nazis. His successor, Schuschnigg, hated the Nazis and was opposed to annexation, but the last word was with Cardinal Innitzer, bead of the Austrian Church; and he had the support in the Catholic government of Seyss-Inquart, who was a Catholic and a Nazi and was prepared at any time to stab his leader in the back. The main fact is, however, that since the suppression of the Socialists in Vienna in 1934, the whole country was prostrate at the feet of the cardinal. Socialists were whipped into silence and the whole scheme of education, in school and press, imposed absolute docility to the Church.

That there was an understanding between Cardinal Innitzer and Hitler, who made his usual glib promises to respect and protect the Church, nobody denies. When Hitler marched into Vienna on March 13, 1938, all the church-bells in Austria rang, and a Swastika flag waved over the ancient Cathedral. Two days later Innitzer had a cordial interview with Hitler, and the cardinal and four of his leading bishops issued a manifesto summoning all Austrians to vote for Hitler in the coming plebiscite. The cardinal wrote "Heil Hitler" after his signature. It is a sufficient refutation of the plea that the Austrian's wanted to join Germany that Hitler angrily refused to ask them this by a plebiscite as Schuschnigg proposed. Hitler turned the idea into a farce by making it a plebiscite of the whole German nation. In this farce Innitzer and his bishops concurred and ordered all Austrians—they were now all Catholics in Church law—to support Hitler, calling him the man "whose struggle against Bolshevism and for the power, honor, and unity of Germany corresponds to the voice of Divine Providence." Was a supreme Church authority with a large clerical staff really ignorant of Hitler's true plan and motive? They spoke a common language, remember, and were near neighbors, and there was not the least secrecy about Hitler's plan to exploit Europe, If Innitzer understood the Nazi aim—and it is incredible that he did not—his association of it with "the voice of Divine Providence" was blasphemous from the religious viewpoint and loathsome from any angle.

But did Innitzer take this line upon instruction from or without consulting the Papal Secretary of State? It is not material for my purpose to settle this, as we are studying the share of the Black International as a whole. It happens, however, that the question was referred to the Vatican by Catholics of other countries, probably America, who were outraged by this gross interference in politics, and in favor of a corrupt and very dangerous schemer. And I quote the facts about the Jesuitical action of the Vatican from a Catholic writer, C. Rankin, in his flattering biography of Pacelli-Plus (The Pope Speaks, 1940).

On April 1st, apparently in reply to Catholic complaints of Inititzer's conduct—for so public a rebuke of a cardinal would otherwise be unprecedented—a Jesuit speaker on the Vatican Radio censored the Austrian cardinal and regretted that he had not recognized "the wolf in sheep's clothing." It is clear that this brought German protests, for the Vatican organ then declared that the radio talk was not official. Even the pious and rather obtuse Ransom adds that "it was characteristic of the extreme delicacy of the situation" that this denial was not published but was "telephoned direct to foreign correspondents by persons instructed by the Vatican to do so." He seems to be unaware of the irony of his words. The Osservatore said that Innitzer's action was not authorized: Radio said that it was opposed to Vatican policy and anonymous officials in the Vatican press bureau then said that the criticisms of Innitzer were not authorized. The cream of the joke is that all three—radio, printing press, and press bureau—are in the Pope's back yard, so to say, and would not dare to say a word on a matter of importance without consulting the Secretariat of State. About this time some American film company put into circulation a very impressive film, with most edifying and largely untruthful commentary on work in the Vatican City. It did not point out the convenience of the above arrangement.

Innitzer was invited to Rome to explain his action, and the Vatican was careful not to declare that he had been censured. Instead of this, the Osservatore on April 6 gave a long and sympathetic account of the cardinal's reasons for his action. Keesing's Contemporary Archives gives the gist of Innitzer's arguments, as published in the Swiss press at the time, but there is no need to consider them here. The Black International had rendered a new and most important service to the crooks, and the Vatican had neatly dodged the censure of Catholics in democratic countries.

Pacelli knew that, as we have seen several times, local Catholic hierarchies will, in their own interest, finally submit to anything that the Papacy does. For a year or two Mundelein had roused American Catholic's to a white-hot indignation against the Nazis for persecuting the Church and besmirching the fragrant lives of the communities of lay brothers. You would expect apoplexy when the news came that the Church had sold Austria to the Nazis, and given them control of the Danube, and smoothed the path of their bloody ambition, yet there was only a momentary flutter. Catholics bowed to the "unauthorized" assurance that Innitzer had not consulted the Vatican, and, as the world at large soon forgot Austria and resumed its admiration of Nazi efficiency, the matter was dismissed.

One needs no documentary evidence that this conspiracy between the Austrian Church and the Nazis was directed from Rome. National branches of the Church of Rome are bound to consult the Papacy before taking action on any issue of grave importance. That is what the Secretariat of State is for. And when the issue is one that affects other countries and the international policy of the Vatican the obligation to consult headquarters is so strong that an evasion of it is unthinkable. The question of joining Austria to Germany was clearly of this character. Such union would not only strengthen Hitler's position to a very important extent, so that it was a most valuable opportunity for one of those bargains for which the Vatican is always alert, but to put an additional 7,000,000 Catholics under Nazi rule after what had happened to the Church in Germany this was so serious a matter that the suggestion that Innitzer acted on his own initiative may be dismissed as frankly childish.

But, while the concurrence and lead of the Vatican is certain, the ground of its policy is not clear. The key to it seems to be the extraordinary persistence of Pacelli in trusting the promises of Hitler. He had in 1932 made, in return for valuable service, a promise of a very favorable agreement with the Vatican. He had immediately dishonored the agreement, yet Pacelli and the German bishops had continued to appeal to him. In 1936 he had opened the series of vice-trials of priests and monks which had dealt the Church a heavier and more ignominious blow than ever, yet the Vatican had, with occasional mild complaints about persecution and paganism—never about crime and brutality until Catholic Poland was threatened with extermination—remained friendly. We shall see that at the opening of the great war he had made new promises to the Church, and we shall find the German bishops in 1941 complaining, while they still supported him, that he had not fulfilled his promises! This persistence in looking to the man who had plainly said years before in his book that he made his own moral law—"What is Necessary is Right" is the title of a chapter of Mein Kampf—is the key to this strange development. I say strange because, even if we admit that the annexation of Austria was inevitable, we should expect the Austrian Church to have met it with quiet dignity instead of waving Swastika flag's and chanting "Hell Hitler" like the treacherous scum of every country that Hitler invaded.

Whatever Hitler promised Cardinal Innitzer in their very cordial interview he cheated with his usual fluency. At the moment of writing this it is confidently reported—and as confidently denied, of course—that Myron Taylor has taken to Washington certain terms of peace, or certain new promises, which the Pope is transmitting on behalf of the arch-liar of modern history. One would have thought that by 1941, when the Pope had seen Hitler lie and cheat so brazenly for eight years, he would have been ashamed to produce any proposals from such a source. For within three months of his pleasant and confiding talk with Hitler the cardinal was a prisoner in his palace, and hundreds of his priests and monks were in the hands of the police, generally on the usual disgraceful charge. Swiss papers said that "50,000 Austrians have left the church this quarter, and a further 50,000 are expected to quit in the next quarter." The Church in Austria was, as a result of its trust in Hitler, disestablished and reduced to the same pitiful condition as the Church in Germany. It had helped Hitler to secure one of his bloodless victories. It now bled.