Hugh Joseph O'Flaherty

by Jeffery Boothe on August 17, 2010 | photography by Cheryl Kelly

In 1943, Monsignor Hugh Joseph O'Flaherty visited Italian Prisoner of War camps, taking British and other Allied prisoners books and Red Cross packages and sending word to their families via Vatican radio. When Italy capitulated, the Italian guards abandoned many camps, and the POWs sought asylum at the Vatican.

O'Flaherty found places to hide them.

When the commander of German SS forces in Rome, Colonel Herbert Kappler, demanded the Jews pay for guarantees against harassment, deportation, and forced labor, O'Flaherty helped collect the required funds. And when Kappler broke his guarantees, O'Flaherty began hiding Rome's Jews as well.

O'Flaherty's network of clergy, partisans, aristocrats, and Free French secret service agents eventually sheltered over 4,000 POWs and 8,000 Jews until Rome's liberation in June 1944. Despite threats against his life, O'Flaherty continued his work, using numerous disguises to move about in plain sight.

After the war, the Irish priest became a Commander of the British Empire and received the United States Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm. He boxed up these awards and sent them to his sister in Ireland.

Kappler received a prison sentence for war crimes. O'Flaherty visited Kappler every month, and in 1959, O'Flaherty baptized the former Nazi into the Roman Catholic Church.