Newspaper reports Hitler ordered kidnapping of Pope Pius XII

Published: 2005-01-17

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Adolf Hitler personally ordered one of his senior Nazi officers to arrange the kidnapping of Pope Pius XII toward the end of World War II, according to new information cited by an Italian newspaper. Instead of carrying out Hitler's order, the officer met secretly with the pope in May 1944 to warn him of the plot. A month later, the Nazis were fleeing Rome, and Hitler's plan could not be carried out. The reconstruction of the kidnapping scenario was published Jan. 15 by the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire, based on testimony taken by church experts examining a possible declaration of sainthood for Pope Pius. Purported plans by the Nazis to abduct or arrest Pope Pius and take him out of Italy first came to light in the Nuremberg trials after World War II, but details have been sketchy. According to Avvenire, church experts in Germany looking into the canonization cause of the wartime pope received sworn testimony March 24, 1972, from Gen. Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff, head of the Waffen SS, or Nazi elite guard, in Italy. Wolff said that in 1943 Hitler had first raised the idea of abducting Pope Pius and removing him from the Vatican, but his aides were able to talk him out of the idea. Then in 1944, as German forces were in retreat, Wolff met with Hitler again in his general quarters in Germany. "I received a personal order from Hitler to kidnap Pope Pius XII," Wolff told the church investigators.

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