Pope Pius XII - Inside the Vatican of Pius XII: the memoir of an American diplomat during World War II

Acknowledgments

Editing these memoirs would have been far more difficult and time consuming had it not been for the remarkable work performed by Lucy Tittmann, my sister-in-law, in organizing my fathers manuscript and related papers. She devoted much time during my fathers last years, as well as after his death, to this task, thus greatly facilitating the production of this book.

My brother Barclay has been most helpful in proposing improvements to my text, as well as in supplementing and correcting my recollections of our Vatican sojourn.

I am also grateful to Father Peter Gumpel, S.J., of the Jesuit Order headquarters in Rome, for his careful review of the manuscript of this book and correcting a few factual errors.

Finally, a word of thanks to Jo Esterhazy, who was my secretary many years ago, for efficiently transcribing my fathers manuscript onto my computer.

Introduction

H arold H. Tittmann, Jr., my father, served thirty-eight years in J. A the U.S. Foreign Service, rising to the highest rank of Career Ambassador, a remarkable feat for a man who lost a leg and suffered other severe wounds in World War I. He was of course proud of his ambassadorships, but considered the two and a half years he spent inside the Vatican City as Charg dAffaires of the United States during World War II to be the high point of his career. This unprecedented assignment and its evident historical interest inspired him to write these memoirs, the story of a unique episode in the annals of U.S. diplomacy.

The Tittmann family originated from the Saxon city of Dresden. My fathers grandfather emigrated to the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, settling in St. Louis, Missouri, where my father was born in 1893. He graduated from Yale University in 1916, and after a year in business, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Service when the United States entered World War I. In June 1918, he was assigned to Eddie Rickenbackers famous 94th (Hat in the Ring) Pursuit Squadron, based at Toul, in northeastern France. On July 3 of that year, while on patrol over German-held territory, he was attached by five German fighter planes, one of which he probably shot down. Although severely wounded, he was able to fly back to the French lines and crash-land in a wheat field.

At the U.S. military field hospital where he was taken, his conditionwas considered hopeless, but endowed with a strong will to survive, he nevertheless recovered, losing his right leg, a kidney and half of one lung, incurring as well major bone damage to his arms and remaining leg. He spent nearly two years in Army hospitals, and was reputed to be the most severely wounded-in-action American to have survived in the First World War. He was awarded the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross for Extraordinary Heroism, as well as the French Croix de Guerre.

In 1920, my father joined the U.S. Foreign Service and was assigned to the American embassy in Paris as Third Secretary. In 1925, he was posted to the Rome embassy, where he remained for the next eleven years, thus becoming one of the State Departments leading experts on Fascist Italy. There he met Eleanor Barclay, from San Antonio, Texas; they were married in 1928. I was born in 1929 and my brother Barclay followed in 1932.

In 1936, my father was transferred to the State Department in Washington, spending three years in the Division of Western European Affairs. In August 1939, a few weeks prior to the outbreak of World War II, he was assigned to Geneva, Switzerland, as Consul General. His involvement with the Vatican began in February of the following year, when, in addition to his Geneva post, he served as part-time assistant to Myron Taylor, President Roosevelts newly appointed personal representative to Pope Pius XII. At the end of 1940, he was transferred to Rome as Counselor at the U.S. Embassy, where the State Department, in view of the tense situation between the United States and Italy, believed his experience could best be put to use. Shortly thereafter, he was permanently attached to Myron Taylors Vatican mission, spending two and a half years inside Vatican City with his family following Italys declaration of war on the United States in December 1941. After Rome was liberated in 1944, he moved back there, where he remained as assistant to Myron Taylor until 1946, when he was appointed Ambassador to Haiti. In1948, he was named Ambassador to Peru, a post he held until 1955. After three years as Director of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration in Geneva, he retired in 1958 and moved to Washington, D.C.

In retirement, my father devoted himself to writing the memoirs of his Vatican assignment, covering the period from August 1939 to June 1944, when Rome was liberated and our family moved out of the Vatican. In putting together this book, I have adhered to the original text of my fathers writings except where I felt they needed editing to improve their readability. I have not, however, modified in any way his opinions and recollections. His narrative is well organized and generally complete up to the end of 1943. But the manuscripts covering the first half of 1944 were unfinished, and consequently, they had to be extensively edited and reorganized. In doing so, I have relied primarily on my fathers main sources, namely the State Departments Foreign Relations of the United States and the Vaticans Actes et Documents of the Second World War. He preserved many of his wartime letters to his family and other persons, which have also been helpful in completing the narrative.

My fathers narrative appears in this book in roman type; the italic print represents my contributions, consisting primarily of a commentary providing background information and filling in the occasional gaps in my fathers narrative. In addition, I have included some childhood memories of the Swiss and Vatican wartime period, based in part on a diary I kept, as well as my brother Barclays recollections.

My father died in Manchester, Massachusetts, on December 29, 1980, a few days prior to his eighty-eighth birthday.

19391940

I n August 1939, my father was appointed U.S. Consul General in Geneva, Switzerland. At that time, Hitler was threatening to invade Poland if the Poles did not meet his demands regarding Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Despite British and French commitments to support Poland if the Germans attached, Europeans did not want to believe that the Polish crisis would lead to yet another major war. Nevertheless, World War II broke out shortly after my father began his new assignment in Geneva, and he recorded his impressions of this dramatic event in his memoirs:

A week before the Nazis invaded Poland, I arrived in Geneva to assume my new job as Consul General. It was the end of August in 1939. I had come from Washington where I had been in the Division of Western European Affairs at the State Department. Looking back, it seems extraordinary that, although we knew many of the details regarding efforts to keep the peace, we somehow lacked awareness that Europe was on the brink of a real disaster. My family was with me; after docking at Le Havre, we motored through France, stopping on the way to enjoy the countryside and to leave our ten year old son, Harold, with American friends outside of Paris for a visit. But he surprised us by arriving in Geneva on the train only one day after we ourselves arrived, explaining as he got off the train that his hosts had suddenly departed for the United States, convinced that France was about to go to war. During our brief stay in France we had not been conscious of the imminence of such danger, and the French people we talked with did not seem at all disturbed. Even when I arrived at my office in Geneva, I encountered little sense of impending danger. Our son had first brought us the sad tidings.