Alois Hudal

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Dr. Alois Hudal, Roman Catholic bishop – and,
for a short time during the 1930s, a revered
and honoured Nazi Party member.
Title page of the book The Foundations of National Socialism.

Alois Hudal (also known as Luigi Hudal; born 31 May 1885 in Graz; died 13 May 1963 in Rome) was a Rome-based bishop of Austrian descent. He is famous for his 1937 book The Foundations of National Socialism, in which he moderately praised Hitler and his policies at the time, and for the "ratline" he helped to establish after the end of World War II, allowing prominent Nazi war criminals to escape trial.

[edit] Biography

Bishop Alois Hudal was born on 31 May 1885 in the Austrian city of Graz, where he studied and received his doctorate. He was ordained to the priesthood in July 1908. He ministered as a parish chaplain in Kindberg, before leaving to study in Rome. Though the professorate promised to him at Vienna's university was never given, Hudal became a noted specialist on the liturgy, doctrine and spirituality of the Slavic-speaking Eastern Orthodox Churches. After completing his studies in Rome (1911-1913), he began residency in the faculty for Old Testament Studies at the University of Graz in 1914. In 1923 he became rector of the Collegio Teutonico di Santa Maria dell’Anima (or simply Anima) in Rome, a theological seminary for German and Austrian priests where he had begun his career as a chaplain in 1911. He was also Father Confessor for the German-speaking community in the city. In 1930 he took on the role of a consulter for the Holy Office, and in 1933 was consecrated Titular Bishop of Aela by Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli (see "Hudal, Alois C." in BBKL [1]). He was a protégé of Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, ten years his elder and Archbishop of Vienna from 1932 to 1955.

Hudal was a committed anti-Communist, but he also vehemently opposed Liberalism. Before Nazism, he was already highly critical of Democracy. His ideas were most similar to the political and economic ideas of his fellow Austrians Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg, as well as Franz von Papen in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. "Hudal squarely fitted into a formula current at the time, the category of Clero-Fascism" (Greg Whitlock, "Alois Hudal: Clero-Fascist Nietzsche critic", see below). Chancellor Schuschnigg used the term 'Clero-Fascism' to describe his own politics, exactly as Chancellor Dollfuss had used it before him. See also Clerical Fascism and Austrofascism.

Hudal was most concerned about the class conflict tearing apart European society, in particular the rise of the international Communist movement and worker parties in Austria. Fear of "Bolshevism", as he called it, was his starting point, but this feeling turned into an aggressive political doctrine towards Russia: "Essential to understanding Hudal's politics is his fear that Bolshevist military forces would invade Italy through Eastern Europe or the Balkans and would be unstoppable until they destroyed the Church. Like many within the Church, he embraced the bulwark theory, which placed hope in a strong German-Austrian military shield to protect Rome. This protection involved a pre-emptive attack on godless Communism, Hudal believed, and so he felt an urgent need for a Christian army from Central Europe to invade Russia and eliminate the Bolshevist threat to Rome" (G. Whitlock, ibid.)

However, Communism was not his sole (and surely not his oldest) concern about Russia, since he was aiming at Eastern Christianity as well. In fact, Hudal's long-term goals were also "the reunification of Rome with the Eastern Orthodox Church and the conversion of the Balkans from the Serbian Orthodox Church to Catholicism" (G. Whitlock, ibid.) The invasion of the Soviet Union would also serve these fundamental aims. Especially since Pope Benedict XV and the Russian Revolution of 1917, which crushed the Russian Orthodox Church and was regarded by Catholics as a historical opportunity, Rome was anxious about ending the thousand-year East-West Schism that separated Christianity (Hansjakob Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican 1917-1979. Athens, Ohio University Press, 1981).

Hudal is said to have received a Golden Nazi Party membership badge (Karlheinz Deschner, Ein Jahrhundert Heilsgeschichte, vol. II, Leck, 1983, pp. 135, 139), but the fact is disputed. In 1937 Hudal published a book entitled The Foundations of National Socialism, with an imprimatur from Archbishop Innitzer. Despite being an enthusiastic endorsement of Hitler (praised by the author's dedicacy as "the new Siegfried of Germany's greatness and hope"), in the end the book was banned by the Nazis. The previous condemnation in 1934 by the Holy Office of Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century had in fact been based on a Hudal's assessment of the book, which made the Austrian bishop suspicious to many Nazi anti-Catholic extremists. In his own 1937 book, Alois Hudal proposed a reconciliation and a compromise between Nazism and Christianity, leaving the education of the youth to the Churches, while the latter would leave politics entirely to National Socialism. The reaction of Rosenberg to his ideas was nevertheless violent, and eventually the book was not allowed to circulate in Germany. "We do not allow the fundaments of the Movement to be analyzed and criticized by a Roman Bishop" - said Rosenberg (cited by Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity, p. 31). In 1935, even before he wrote the Foundations of National Socialism Hudal had said about Rosenberg: "If National Socialism wants to replace Christianity by the notions of race and blood, we will have to face the greatest heresy of the twentieth century. It must be rejected by the church as decisively as, if not more severely than [...] the Action Française, with which it shares some errors. But Rosenberg's doctrine is more imbued with negation and creates, above all in the youth, a hatred against Christianity greater than that of Nietzsche" (A. Hudal, Das deutsche Volk und christliches Abenland, p. 24, cited by Greg Whitlock, see below).

Despite the banning of his book, and despite many harsh National Socialist restrictions against German monasteries and parishes, and effective attempts by the Nazi government to forbid Catholic education at schools (going as far as banning the crucifix in schools and other public areas, see the Oldenburger Kreuzkampf), even despite the destruction of Austrian convents and the official banning of Catholic newspapers and associations in annexed Austria ("Ostmark"), Bishop Hudal remained close to the Nazi regime's officials. Hudal was somewhat close to Franz von Papen, though the former Centre politician Papen was considered dangerous by the Nazi government and disliked for his Catholicism. During the war, Hudal had contacts with Walter Rauff in Rome (see below).

After the war, Hudal became involved with processing Displaced Persons. This allowed him to organise the escape of war criminals such as Franz Stangl, commanding officer of Treblinka. Stangl himself told Gitta Sereny (see Bibliography) that he went looking for Hudal in Rome, because he had heard that the bishop was helping the Germans. Other Nazi war criminals allegedly helped by Hudal were Gustav Wagner, commanding officer of Sobibor, Alois Brunner, organizer of deportations from France and Slovakia to German concentration camps, Adolf Eichmann (see Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust). In 1994 Erich Priebke, a former Nazi captain, told an Argentinian reporter that Hudal helped him reach Buenos Aires (see Robert Katz, Dossier Priebke). Hudal's activities caused a press scandal in 1947, and he resigned as rector of the German College in 1951, silently residing in Rome until his death in 1963. Despite his protests against anti-Semitism in the 1930s, in his memoirs, with full knowledge of the Holocaust as of 1962, Hudal said of his actions in favour of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS officers and soldiers: "I thank God that He opened my eyes and allowed me to visit and comfort many victims in their prisons and concentration camps and [to help] them escape with false identity papers” - where these "victims" were Axis prisoners of war and their "concentration camps" Allied detention camps" (Römische Tagebücher, English translation quoted in Greg Whitlock, see below.)

[edit] Closeness to the Vatican

Hudal's promotion to Bishop has been cited as evidence that he had close ties to members of the Vatican, particularly Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII who had previously been Papal Nuncio in Germany. Given his openly pro-Nazi views from 1934 to 1945, it is also surprising that Hudal was given work with Displaced Persons after the war, and that he was chosen to minister to German internees in Italy. The Vatican arranged for him to have an Allied travel pass for this purpose. Hudal's Ratline was financed in part by Rauff, with some funds allegedly coming from Giuseppe Siri, the recently appointed Auxiliary Bishop (1944) and Archbishop (1946) of Genoa (see Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity, p. 39-40).

The Vatican was involved in a great deal of post-war humanitarian work concerning Displaced Persons, and some historians take the view that Hudal was only a small player whose Ratline activities did not reflect any official policy. In particular, Catholic historians like Robert A. Graham (1913-1997) - an American jesuit and a longtime Vatican operative who was co-editor of the 11-volume Acts and Documents of the Holy See relative to the Second World War (Vatican City, 1965-1981) - estimated Hudal as "small fish" and as someone who was acting on his own behalf. A French Jesuit historian, Fr. Pierre Blet, another co-editor of the above-cited Acts and Documents, only mentioned Hudal to signal his role as an alternative go-between, at the direct request of the pope's nephew Carlo Paccelli, for the contacts of the Vatican with the Nazi authorities in October 1943, in order to end the razzias and spare the life of thousands of Jews sheltered in the convents of Rome, after the city was occupied by the Germans in September. These contacts, which had been preceded by direct pressures at diplomatic level in Rome (ambassador Weizsäcker) and Berlin, were apparently successful and many Jewish lives were saved by this Vatican diplomacy, according to Blet. Simon Wiesenthal admitted that Hudal had in fact assisted in saving Italian Jews from deportation due his good relations with Nazi German officials. Hudal's admiration for German imperial policies, combined with his personal opposition to racist anti-Semitism, make this action plausible.

However, according to several other sources, bishop Hudal may at the same time have been a Vatican-based informer of German intelligence (Abwehr) under the Nazi regime. Vatican historian Fr. Robert Graham SJ held that view more categorically (Nothing Sacred, see the bibliography below). On Hudal as a German spy, see also Klaus Voigt, Zuflucht auf Widerruf. Exil in Italien 1933-1945, I, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1989. Several other authors mention his contacts in Rome with SS intelligence chief Walter Rauff, the developer of the alleged mobile extermination with gas vans, who was sent to Rome in the spring of 1943 for a period of six months without any specific assignment. Hudal is said to have met Rauff then and to have begun cooperation with him in the setting up of an escape network for Nazis. After the war Hudal was in fact one of the main Catholic organizers of the Ratline nets, along with Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganovic, who was also involved in pro-Fascist espionage and would become involved into pro-NATO espionage during the Cold War. A smuggler of fascist (ustasha) war criminals, Draganovic was recycled by the U.S. during the Cold War - his name appears in the Pentagon payrolls in the late 1950s and early 1960s - and was eventually granted immunity in Tito's Yugoslavia, where he died in 1983 at 79.

Furthermore, since the works of Graham and Blet were published, historian Michael Phayer, a Catholic professor at Marquette University, has alleged the close collaboration between the Vatican (Pope Pius XII and Giovanni Battista Montini, then "Substitute" of the Secretariat of State, and later Paul VI), on the one side and Draganovic and Hudal on the other, and has sustained that Pius XII himself was directly engaged in ratline activity. Against these allegations there are some opposing testimonies and the firm denial by Vatican and secular officials of any involvement of Pius XII himself. But according to Michael Phayer, the American Bishop Aloisius Muench, Pius's own envoy to western Germany after the war, "wrote to the Vatican warning the pope to desist from his efforts to have convicted war criminals excused". The letter, written in Italian, "is available in the archives of the Catholic University of America" (M. Phayer, "The Author replies", Commonweal, June 6, 2003 [2]).

In his posthumously published memoirs (see below his main works), Hudal instead recalls with bitterness the lack of support he found the Holy See to give to Nazi Germany's battle against "godless Bolshevism" at the Eastern Front. Hudal several times in this work claims to have received criticism of the Nazi system rather than support for it from the Vatican diplomats under Pius XII. Hudal until his death was convinced he had done the right thing, and said, that he considered saving German officers and politicians from the hands of Allied prosecution, a "just thing". He said that the justice of the Allies had resulted in show trials and lynchings.

[edit] Important works

• Die serbisch-orthodoxe Nationalkirche (Graz, 1922) - The Serbian Orthodox National Church.
• Die deutsche Kulturarbeit in Italien (Münster, 1934) - The German Cultural Activity in Italy.
• Ecclesiae et nationi. Katholische Gedanken in einer Zeitenwende (Rome, 1934) - The Church and the Nations. Catholic Thoughts in the Turn of an Era.
• Rom, Christentum und deutsches Volk (Rome, 1935) - Rome, the Christendom and the German People.
• Deutsches Volk und christliches Abendland (Innsbruck, 1935) - The German People and the Christian Occident.
• Der Vatikan und die modernen Staaten (Innsbruck, 1935) - The Vatican ad the Modern States.
• Das Rassenproblem (Lobnig, 1935) - The Race Problem.
• Die Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus (Leipzig and Vienna, 1936-37 and facsimile edition Bremen, 1982) - The Foundations of National Socialism.
• Nietzsche und die moderne Welt (Rome, 1937) - Nietzsche and the Modern World.
• Europas religiöse Zukunft (Rome, 1943) - The Religious Future of Europe.
• Römische Tagebücher. Lebensbeichte eines alten Bischofs (Graz, 1976) - Diaries of Rome. The Confession of life of an Old Bishop.

[edit] Bibliography

• Mark Aarons and John Loftus Ratlines: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets, William Heinemann, 1991 (republished in the U.S. as Unholy Trinity).
• Robert Graham and David Alvarez, Nothing Sacred: Nazi Espionage against the Vatican, 1939-1945, London: Frank Cass, 1998.
• Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, Indiana University Press, 2000.
• Pierre Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican, New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
• "Krunoslav Draganovic", in The Pavelic Papers at http://www.pavelicpapers.com/documents/draganovic/ Warning: this independent site about "The Butcher of the Balkans" and the Ustasha movement has been closed for unknown reasons since July 2006.
• Greg Whitlock, "Alois Hudal: Clero-Fascist Nietzsche critic", Nietzsche-Studien, volume 32, 2003.
• Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness, London, Deutsch, 1974.
• Robert Katz, Dossier Priebke. Anatomia di un processo, Milano, Rizzoli, 1996.
• Erika Weinzierl, "Kirche und Nationalsozialismus" at http://www.doew.at/service/ausstellung/1938/22/22.html, with photos of Hudal, Archbishop Innitzer and fac-simile of several documents concerning the Anschluss and its welcome by Innitzer.
• Luigi Hudal, bishop of Aela Alois Hudal's position in the Catholic hierarchy
• Hudal, Alois C. Biographisch Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL)