The Pope's Jews: The Vatican's Secret Plan to Save Jews from the Nazis by Gordon Thomas

Author:Gordon Thomas [Thomas, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

11

THE EXECUTIONER

Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker arrived in Rome by train on the evening of October 8, 1943. He was thirty years old, a slim, lantern-jawed bachelor and his height, six feet three inches tall, did nothing to compensate for his poorly coordinated body movements, which included a tic that continually flicked his head to one side.

Early that year he had carried out deportations from Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia of over eleven thousand Jews to Auschwitz and Treblinka. Previously he had performed similar operations in France, Poland, Belgium, and Holland. In all, Dannecker had sent several hundred thousand Jews to their deaths. Ironically his first girlfriend, Lisbeth Stern, had been Jewish.

As usual Eichmann’s office had arranged for him to travel alone in a reserved compartment to give him time to think how he would plan his latest mission. On the train he had read the dispatches Kappler had sent: his call for more troops to conduct the roundup and his concern about the Rome Resistance. Dannecker understood why Eichmann had decided Kappler was not capable of conducting a successful Judenaktion. Perhaps living in Rome had made him soft. Dannecker had seen that happen before when a local police chief in Belgrade had refused to carry out executions. Dannecker, then a member of the SS Verfuegungstruppe, a specialist combat support force, had shot him. After Eichmann selected him to head the Judenreferat, the Jewish department, Dannecker summed up his work in the words of his hobby. “Over the years I have learnt which hook to use for which fish.”

In his finely tailored SS uniform and polished boots he embodied someone to be feared and hated; a brutal, mean, crude man.

Following his usual custom of remaining unobtrusive on a mission Dannecker stayed in a small hotel on Via Po. The accommodation had been arranged for him by one of the Judenaktion officers who had arrived in Rome earlier; he had worked with Dannecker for a year and knew his habits.

Dannecker had changed out of his uniform into a suit and eaten alone at a nearby restaurant; the quality of the food was indifferent but it was still better than that offered in Berlin. Afterward he had walked around Rome, studying the solid marble statues and the sarcophagi. The city, he decided, was even more impressive than Paris. Rome had its priests in black, white, and purple robes and the Latin Mass which came from a church he passed. And, of course, there were the Romans: children sitting on the marble edges of fountains; the young women, their hair often the color of flame; old men and women sitting at their tables in pavement cafes. How many of those he had seen were Jews? How many would die under his orders?

* * *

Derry had decided that dinner with D’Arcy Osborne in the minister’s apartment in Santa Marta came in three stages. First there were cocktails during which Osborne gave the impression he could handle any problem which could shake, even momentarily, his composure. He had

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