Page 36 - Garda Journal Winter 2019

HISTORY | Hugh O’Flaherty
Above: Sealed entrance to the Ardeatine caves where 335 non-combatants were murdered.
O’Flaherty was warned that should he ever leave the Vatican, he would be arrested.
Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty
die. We have a small son. He is only seven and is too young to die in a gas chamber. Each link of the chain will keep him alive for a month. Will you save him?” Hugh O’Flaherty took the chain, hid the young boy, and obtained false papers for his parents. At the end of the war, he returned the boy to his
“family along with the chain.
In the next three months, he managed to hide more than 4,000 in convents, crowded apartments and nearby
farms.''
Hugh O’Flaherty’s nemesis was the Chief of SS forces in Rome, Colonel Herbert Kappler. Kappler gave his top priority to wiping out Monsignor O’Flaherty and his escape network, but he could never capture the ‘Irish Scarlet Pimpernel’. Once, O’Flaherty escaped by a rolling-block charge through Gestapo men. through the doors of St. Mary Major. Another time, he was in the palace of Prince Filippo Doria Pamphili, when the SS surrounded the palace. He escaped through the basement, then up a coal chute, before disappearing in a coal truck making a delivery. Kappler set several traps for Hugh O’Flaherty. He tried to force him over the Vatican city-line into Rome, and even sent two agents into the Vatican in a botched assassination attempt. Finally, Colonel Kappler complained to his superiors in Berlin. Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty received an invitation to a reception at the Hungarian Embassy, with an implicit safe-conduct pass. There, Baron von Weiszacker, the German Ambassador, told him: “Nobody in Rome honours you more than I do for what you are doing. But it has gone too far for us all. Kappler
is waiting in the hall, feeling rather frustrated......I have told him that you will of course have safe-conduct back to the Vatican tonight. But...if you ever step outside Vatican territory again, on whatever pretext, you will be arrested at once......Now will you please think about what I have said?” Hugh O’Flaherty smiled and replied: “Your Excellency is too considerate. I will certainly think about what you have said....sometimes!”
Hugh O’Flaherty’s nemesis was the Chief of SS forces in Rome, Colonel Herbert Kappler.''
Anti-fascist Partisans launched a number of attacks on the Italian paramilitary police and German troops during the Spring of 1944. On March 23rd, a bomb placed in a refuse cart on the Via Rasella killed 33 German soldiers. In a reprisal action, 335 Jews, partisans, black-marketeers and petty criminals were rounded up. They were then taken to the Ardeatine Caves, where a mass execution took place. Some of the German soldiers involved were horrified by the slaughter. A senior officer dragged one soldier, who refused to shoot the prisoners, to the execution site, and forced him to open fire. The bodies of the victims were placed in piles, and buried under tonnes of rock. Military engineers then sealed the caves to hide the grisly atrocity. The caves were abandoned for over a year, but were eventually found, after the Allied 5th Army, under General Mark Clarke liberated Rome on June 4th 1944.
After the war ended, SS Colonel Herbert Kappler was tried before an Italian court for mass murder. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Gaete Prison. Over many years, he received regular visits from a most unlikely person; Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty. Hugh O’Flaherty received the U.S. Medal of Honour, and a CBE. The State of Israel named him as ‘Righteous among the Nations’. He was also offered a life pension from the Italian State. In 1960, Hugh O’Flaherty suffered a stroke, and returned to live out his last few years in Cahirsiveen, he died on October 30th , 1963.
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