Monte Cassino 1944, Who was to blame E-Book

Nando Tasciotti

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Crimine di guerra, necessità militare o tragico errore? Inganni, abbagli e menzogne portarono il 15 febbraio 1944 aerei anglo-americani a bombardare la millenaria abbazia di Montecassino. Il libro documenta soprattutto il ruolo dei leader. Hitler ebbe la colpa primaria. Ordinò di abolire l'area neutrale promessa al Vaticano e di attestarsi non "dentro" (come ritenevano soprattutto alcuni generali britannici) ma "fin sotto le mura".Un vantaggio militare, sulla Linea Gustav, comunque decisivo.Illecito. Churchill, con un telegramma al generale Alexander, sollecitò l'attacco del generale Freyberg. Motivi e risultati. Poi di Montecassino non parlò più, per anni. E quando lo fece… Roosevelt spiegò: "Necessità militare". C'era? E per Roma, usata militarmente dai tedeschi, inviò un consiglio al Papa. Pio XII non protestò subito e forte, per proteggere Roma. Ma dall'Archivio Segreto emerge un'autocritica: anche l'abbazia avrebbe potuto essere salvata, in una certa fase. E il salvataggio dei Tesori vantato dai tedeschi? Si risolse nel furto di capolavori dei musei napoletani. L'ordine di Göring, d'intesa con Hitler. Ma i monaci nascosero il Tesoro di San Gennaro, proprio su un loro camion.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1- The two Germans

Chapter 2 - The Hitler’s order

Chapter 3 - Treasures, Göring’s looting

Chapter 4 - Assault on 'PAX' gate

Chapter 5 - Lives and stones

Chapter 6 - Churchill's telegram

Chapter 7 - Under the bombs

Chapter 8 - Roosevelt: “Military necessity”

Chapter 9 - “Vatican silent”

Chapter 10 - Propaganda battle

Chapter 11 - The abbot in Rome

Chapter 12 - The Pope's caution

Chapter 13 - Rome as Monte Cassino

Chapter 14 - The red poppies of the Poles

Chapter 15 - “How it was and where it was”

Final considerations

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FILMS, DOCUMENTARIES

WEBSITES

FACEBOOK

NANDO TASCIOTTI

MONTE CASSINO 1944

WHO WAS TO BLAME

Hitler’s deceit

Title | Monte Cassino 1944, who was to blame.

Author | Nando Tasciotti

ISBN | 9791222702032

© 2024 - All rights reserved by the Author.

This work is directly published by the Author through the self-publishing platform Youcanprint and the Author holds all exclusive rights to it.

No part of this book may therefore be reproduced in any form (written, audio-visual, photographic, mechanical or electronic) without the prior written consent of the Author. Only for reviews and comments is the quotation of short parts - indicating title and Author - freely permitted.

Photo credits:

Cover: photo by George Aarons, from "YANK", weekly magazine of the U.S. Army, Feb. 16, 1945, vol. 3, no. 35.

Other images from: Italian Air Force - Historical Photo Library - Rome, APP Monte Cassino and Gustav Line - Rome, Monte Cassino Abbey Archives, Bundesarchiv - Koblenz, Churchill Archives Centre - Cambridge, Imperial War Museum - London, L'Osservatore Romano - Rome, National WWII Museum - New Orleans, Narodowe Archivum Cyfrowe - Warszawa, Pinterest, Victoria University of Wellington, Wikipedia.

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Introduction

The Gustav Line, from Ortona (Adriatic Sea) to Minturno (Tyrrhenian Sea) (APP Montecassino and Gustav Line)

Hitler, after provoking everything, exulted: his generals could finally use those sacred and millennial walls as a fortress of the “Gustav Line”, so as to even more effectively block the Anglo-Americans Allies route to Rome. And immediately he ordered all his embassies to exploit, through a great propaganda campaign, the mistake committed by the Anglo-Americans, accusing them of “barbarisms”.

Roosevelt lied, arguing with little credibility that he had learned it “from an afternoon newspaper”. And he ruled: “military necessity”, since that monastery was already used as a stronghold by the Germans.

Churchill - after having asked General Alexander through one of his many telegrams, just twenty hours before, why the attack of the New Zealanders commanded by Freyberg had not yet been launched - did not officially say a word for years. He hid himself behind the military commanders, writing about it only in his memoirs, after the war, and trying in a tortuous way to involve the Americans (“The Army Commander, General Mark Clark, unwillingly sought and obtained permission [to bomb] from General Alexander, who accepted the responsibility”) in a decision requested instead especially by “his” British generals.

And Pius XII? After trying in vain to prevent that “enormous tragedy” with an ineffectual (for those times of war) “diplomacy of the telegrams”, Pope Pacelli did not protest immediately and strongly, thus generating the amazement of the Allies and the angry surprise of the Nazi-fascists (and Claretta Petacci, in a letter to her lover “Duce” Benito Mussolini, without shame, accused the Pope of being virtually sold for “dollars and gold” to future winners). And when, a week later, he publicly mentioned that tragedy, Pius XII was silent on the death of hundreds of innocent civilians: a certainly painful but political calculation, to save Rome.

“War crime”, “military necessity” or “tragic mistake”? Many decades after that 15 February 1944, the Anglo-American aerial bombing of the millennial Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino – originated by the erroneous belief that the Germans had turned it into a “fortress” or used it at least as a military “observatory” of their powerful Gustav Line in the South of Rome, but in any case provoked by the choice of the Germans to settle right near those sacred walls - continues to be the most visible, dramatic and controversial event of one of the longest bloody battles in World War II.

The “Battle of Monte Cassino” developed in four phases (12 January - 12 February, 15-18 February, 15-24 March, 11-18 May 1944) and involved soldiers from more than twenty nations belonging to the 5th American Army, to the 8th British and the 10th German. For several cold and rainy months they were forced to alternate bloody assaults with a horrible position warfare (even suffering from “trench foot”) and ferocious body-to-body combats. Sometimes they fought with stones, when the ammunition ran out on those mountains of the Latium Apennines. Up there, a robust mule was much more useful than the tanks blocked into mud, in the plain that the Germans had flooded by blowing up the embankments of confluent rivers (Rapido-Gari-Liri, and then Garigliano). Of the dead, wounded and missing, the casualties for the Allies and the Germans were hundreds of thousands, with variable estimates (80-180 and even, according to BBC News, 250,000), that have so far been difficult to establish.

The bombardment of the Abbey of Monte Cassino (rebuilt, after the war, “as it was and where it was”) is the historically best known event of that long battle, from a military, political-diplomatic and even journalistic point of view. It was founded around 529 AD by St. Benedict of Nursia on a rocky spur over the town of Cassino - razed to the ground on 15 March 1944, a month after the monastery - and stretched over the Liri valley, crossed by “Via Casilina”, the state road that after 140 kilometres northward leads to Rome. And it has been debated around the world for the destruction of a religious, historical, cultural and artistic ‘casket’ that is so important to Western civilization, and for the death of over two hundred people among the thousands of refugees (many children, women and old people) who had taken shelter in the “neutrality” of that monument, that had been assured to the Vatican.

A “crime”: so the Germans immediately defined and propagandized it, claiming - even with the testimony of the eighty-year-old abbot Gregorio Diamare and other monks and civilian survivors - that their troops were not “inside” the abbey and that they did not even use it as an observatory.

It was a “military necessity”, the English (and especially the New Zealanders) repeatedly replied, accusing the Germans of having settled inside the monastery and turned it into a “fortress”. Then, in the face of the contrary evidence, they claimed that the Germans had nevertheless made military use of the “immediate surroundings” (and that was true, as Abbot Gregorio Diamare himself later confirmed to the Pope), not respecting the area of neutrality of 300 metres - which the Germans had initially delimited - and even placing shooting posts and ammunition depots in caves beneath the millennial walls, with two tanks firing at night before immediately taking shelter behind the enormous monastery’s outline. They made a shield of it, taking an obvious military advantage, which was prohibited by the still vague legislation in force at the time, the Hague Convention of 1907, and by the customary rules of war.

The Americans officially admitted that it was a “tragic mistake”, after various inquiries following the Second World War, starting with their commander in the field, General Mark Wayne Clark. And in particular they placed responsibility on the general of the New Zealanders, Bernard Cyril Freyberg, for wanting that bombardment, which turned out to be a disastrous boomerang even on a military level: the German “Green Devils”, in fact, immediately managed to transform the ruins into a stronghold and delay for another three, even bloodier, months, the liberation of Rome.

On these various theses, after the war, another struggle - with the memoirs of political and military protagonists, books, articles, films and documentaries - developed largely in Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, USA, India, New Zealand.

The analysis of the events and the military responsibilities is therefore very vast. Instead, the political-diplomatic scenarios that preceded and followed the bombing have so far been less explored: the causes that led to it and also, in particular, the initiatives of the Vatican on the governments of Berlin, Washington and London, first to protect Monte Cassino and then - also on the basis of the experience of that “enormous tragedy” - to save Rome.

It is on these aspects that this book will focus. It is based on interviews with surviving monks and refugees – some, at the time of the first Italian edition in 2014, still alive, with living memories of those days at Monte Cassino and those hours under the bombs - and on research mainly from the documents of The National Archives of London, the Churchill Archives Centre of Cambridge, the Vatican Secret Archives (recently opened also for the years after 1938), the Holy See’s Actes on World War II, and from Italian and American archives.

It emerges from this that before (with the rescue - and also conspicuous thefts - by the Germans of the cultural and artistic treasures of the abbey and other southern Italian museums that had been hidden there, including the Neapolitan “Treasure of San Gennaro”), but also during and after the destruction, not only bombs but also a heavy barrage of distortions and lies “rained” on Monte Cassino. Hitler’s military and Nazi party officials (who had the primary and decisive responsibility to have placed the fortifications of the Gustav Line almost under the walls of the historic Benedictine monastery), the Allied military commanders (Wilson, Alexander, Clark, Freyberg), and also US President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill all contributed to it.

Some British and American historians have argued that there would not be - or that there has not yet emerged – the evidence to assert that the final decision to bomb the abbey was taken at a level higher than the military (that is, political, governmental). However, at least in the case of Churchill, a strong document-based clue emerged from this research, showing that at least “he could not fail to know”.

With his telegrams, he continually observed what was happening on the front blocked at Cassino, and was greatly worried about Anzio: there too, after the landing (22 January 1944), the Allies were in trouble. From 26 January to 14 February 1944, Churchill exchanged at least 10 telegrams with Generals Alexander and Wilson about Cassino’s front and New Zealand Corps activity. The last one was sent almost twenty hours before the bombing of the abbey. He asked Alexander why the Freyberg attack had not yet been launched: those plans (unknown to Churchill?) envisaged the “softening” with planes of the German military posts on the dominant position of the abbey as fundamental and “preliminary”.

But so far little has been explored of Pius XII's substantial “silence”, in any case the low profile - less pastoral and more political, oriented at that point mainly to saving Rome - after the destruction of Monte Cassino.Yet during the months, days and hours before the bombing, the Vatican Secretariat of State (Cardinal Maglione and his deputies Tardini and Montini, future Pope Paul VI) - surely under the supervision and with the consent of Pius XII himself - had put some diplomatic pressure on the governments of Berlin, Washington and London to avoid that unbelievable event.

The motives behind the Vatican’s enigmatic attitude are also the subject of this investigation, with the reproduction of my interview with the German historian Jesuit Peter Gumpel, who was a longtime speaker in the cause of the beatification of Pius XII.

With the recent opening, decided by Pope Francis, of the Vatican Secret Archives (returned now to its former name of “Archivio Apostolico Vaticano”) also for the years of Pius XII's pontificate (1939-1958), I have found unpublished documents that - compared to the first edition, in Italian, of this book (Montecassino 1944. Errori, menzogne e provocazioni, Castelvecchi, Roma, 2014) - also from the Holy See’s point of view increase the primary “provocative” responsibility of the Germans.

And they also testify how within the Vatican - in the subsequent analysis of those events, from as early as after the liberation of Rome - an awareness emerged that the Holy See should and (perhaps) could have done something more to avoid the tragedy of Monte Cassino: in particular, after the Germans had announced the end of the 300-metres neutrality zone around the monastery (which in reality - as the abbot later wrote in a report to the Pope in Rome a few days after the bombing – “never existed”: it was in fact abolished by the Germans themselves after a week).

That was a decision that should have alarmed the Holy See even more, because it officially incorporated the top of the mountain, and therefore “de facto” the abbey itself, into the German front line. In a later analysis document from within the Vatican Secretariat of State, dated 24 June 1944, it is stressed that the Germans' decision was “underestimated”, instead, “it was a very serious matter, which should have presaged the catastrophe” and would therefore have required an immediate and energetic intervention by the Holy See. With what results? Who knows?

Having established the primary and decisive responsibility of the Germans, the destruction of the abbey remains an historic blunder (also from a military point of view) for the Anglo-American Allies, but within their perennial meritorious and victorious struggle against Nazi-fascism.

And - to never forget the contribution that those political leaders (Roosevelt and Churchill, above all), generals and soldiers of so many nations have given “for our freedom and yours” (as is engraved, in various languages, on the obelisk that at Point 593 commemorates the sacrifice of the brave Polish soldiers) – on my desk, among the books and documents of this inquiry, I always have on display a stone of Monte Cassino mountain and a pebble taken with emotion in Normandy.

Nando Tasciotti

Chapter 1

The two Germans

There was also the Italian version (Amici italiani, ATTENZIONE!...) of these leaflets which, shortly after 13:00 on 14 February 1944, were launched by the thousands from Anglo-American cannons on the millenary Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. They were inside grenades different from the flood of bombs already exploded in that zone of the Lower Latium, in Central Italy, to break the “Gustav Line”. It was a mighty barrage of fortifications that - from Minturno, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, up to Ortona, on the Adriatic sea - the Germans had built from October 1943 to slow down the advance of the Allies from Southern Italy towards Rome. Hitler had ordered his generals to maintain “every metre of land”, “to the extreme”, of that main line of defence, centred precisely on that small mountain with the abbey that overlooked the town of Cassino and dominated the plain of the Liri river. And his generals were succeeding, with heavy losses for the Allies.

Those grenades disintegrated before touching the ground, throwing not splinters but clouds of paper. A couple of those leaflets were collected, with great danger, in the vegetable garden of the monastery by some young people from Cassino, refugees in the “rabbit hutch”, a large gallery at the base, outside the walls, with its own entrance. They were part of that thousand of civilians pushed up there by the bombs on the front and who, up to ten days before, had all camped in the caves and in a farm near the abbey. On the morning of 5 February 1944, terrified by an infernal cannonade, they had rushed towards the barred entrance of the monastery, which had been declared a “neutral zone”. The Germans had already cleared it of a first wave of refugees who had been progressively accommodated there since September 1943, after the first Allied bombings of the town of Cassino.

That 5 February the women, above all, with their children in their arms, had first implored, then raged against the monks, threatening to set fire to the main gate. For pity's sake, the elderly abbot Gregorio Diamare had ordered the enormous entrance (now topped by the Latin inscription "PAX" [PEACE]) to be opened again, and inside those mighty walls all those desperate people at that point had felt safe. The governments of Berlin, Washington and London had, in fact, assured the Vatican that the war in that territory would have spared at least that sacred and historic monument founded almost 1,500 years ago, where the works of Greek and Roman writers, poets and philosophers, and fundamental documents of the history of Western civilization had been collected, transcribed and preserved over the centuries.

Instead, those clouds of leaflets announced that the abbey would also enter the battle that had been going on all around it for months.

***

The first signs of war in Cassino (almost perpendicularly dominated by the small mountain with the monastery at the top) were seen around May 1943: the Germans had begun to use that agricultural and commercial town - 22,000 inhabitants at the time, in southern Latium, 140 kilometres from Rome and 95 from Naples - to assist their wounded, which had increased after the landing of the Allies in Sicily (10 July). Then, in the night between 19 and 20 July - while the Tiburtino, San Lorenzo and Prenestino districts were being bombed in Rome - the nearby airport of Aquino, which served to supply the troops engaged in the South, was hit by Allied planes.

The direct tragedy of the war had arrived suddenly, on 10 September, the day after the troubled landing of the Allies in Salerno and two days after the announcement of the armistice between the Italian government led by Marshal Pietro Badoglio (that had succeeded Benito Mussolini) and the Anglo-Americans. In Cassino, too, the German troops had reacted to that announcement by occupying strategic positions: the station, the Carabinieri barracks, the post office and an artillery depot that many years earlier had been a camp for German and Austrian prisoners of the First World War (among them, the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: taken prisoner on 3 November 1918, he remained in Cassino until August 1919).

But the war, for many, seemed to be over now, and no one had worried when - around nine o'clock in the morning of that 10 September - some squadrons of planes had appeared from the South. Like other times, it was thought, they would go bombing elsewhere. Not even the alarm siren had been triggered in time. Instead, a cluster of bombs - dropped, without hitting it, on the station with its locomotive depot and, perhaps by mistake, also in other areas of the city - had left more than a hundred dead and many wounded.

From that day on, there were other bombings, even at night, and many families had begun to leave their homes and settle in the countryside or in nearby small towns. As the front approached - on 1 October, with the revolt of the population, Naples had been liberated, two weeks later the Allies had crossed the Volturno river and were about sixty kilometres from Cassino – more than a thousand people had decided to take refuge in Monte Cassino and its surroundings. And a sort of daily procession began, in groups, along the medieval mule track, built at the time of St. Benedict on a route from the Roman era. It was paved with wide stones, and among holm oaks, olive trees, brooms and blackened rocks it climbed “that mountain on whose slope Cassino stands”, as Dante Alighieri mentions in his Divine Comedy 1 in the verses in which St. Benedict tells how he had founded his abbey up there, after having eradicated the pagan cults of the Romans of Casinum: right on that mountain, between the mighty walls of the acropolis, they had erected a temple to Apollo, and in a sacred grove continued propitiatory sacrifices.

Other groups of families also went along the paths of the Janula Fortress, a medieval castle that Abbot Aligerno had begun to build in 949 AD on a hill halfway up Monte Cassino, where, in Roman times, according to tradition, there was a temple dedicated to Janus. That fortress was used for troops and defensive materials, to protect the abbey above and the village of medieval Cassino below, which was then called San Germano. In 1230, Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX had signed there the “Peace of San Germano”, a temporary agreement “which provided for Frederick II to renounce the right to express consent to the election of bishops of the kingdom and any territory directly controlled by political power”.2

On the other side of the mountain, halfway up the slope, other families had found temporary refuge - until they were thrown out by the Germans - even among the mosaics and frescoes of the Pompeian nymphaeum of an ancient Roman villa overlooking the archaeological site, on the branch of the Via Latina that passed through the ancient Casinum, near the amphitheatre (the Colosseum), the so-called mausoleum of the matron Ummidia Quadratilla and the Roman Theatre.

Those who (occasionally crossing on their medieval path the nine kilometres of main road) had gone as far as Monte Cassino, a hundred metres below the abbey - on a small protuberance called Monte Venere, where the hollow on a boulder is called "the knee of St. Benedict"3 - had passed near the now useless cableway installations: the cable had been truncated in September 1943 (after the first Allied bombing of Cassino) by a German plane, which then crashed near the railway station and the remains of the ancient Roman villa of the scholar Marcus Terenzius Varro lapped by the Gari. It is a river that rises right at the base of the mountain of the monastery, and its sources are among the most abundant in Europe.

Near the abbey, not far from the Cyclopean walls of the Samnite period, some groups of families had settled in the chapel of St. Agatha, which the abbot Andrea di Faenza had built in 1373 wishing the Saint’s protection from earthquakes. The one of 1349 had in fact destroyed the monastery, which in its history had already suffered two devastations: in 577, by the Lombards of Zotone, the Duke of Benevento, and in 883, for the invasion of the Saracens, who also killed the abbot Bertario, founder of the medieval Cassino town. But - as its motto says in Latin “Succisa, virescit” [“cut down, it grows again”], comparing it to a strong oak that over the centuries has withstood the natural and political turbulence - the abbey had always risen, becoming a crossroads of Christianity and Western culture.

Other families had found refuge in St. Joseph, a building a hundred metres from the entrance of the abbey, which the monks used as a guesthouse and for agricultural tools deposit. Together with the three religious communities of Cassino (the Benedictine nuns of St. Scholastica, the Sisters of Charity and the Stigmatine Sisters, with the girls of the orphanage), other groups had finally camped in various rooms inside the abbey, which was now without electricity and running water, due to the destruction of the power plant and pipes.

Many refugees had arranged themselves along the “Royal staircase”, bordered at the entrance by two large stone lions of the 10th century and with an entrance hall punctuated with protruding ancient stones. On that staircase, about forty metres long and surmounted at the beginning by a Roman tower, kings and emperors (Totila, Charlemagne, Henry VI, Roger II, Charles of Bourbon, Ferdinand IV, William II, Victor Emmanuel III), popes (Celestine V, Boniface VIII, Benedict XIII) and generals (Championnet, Joseph Bonaparte) had solemnly passed through the centuries. More humbly, future Saints (Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola) and humanists, writers, poets, historians (Poggio Bracciolini, Flavio Biondo, Torquato Tasso, Charles Dickens, Ferdinand Gregorovius, …) had also gone up to Monte Cassino for their studies.

Leaning on the walls of the staircase were many Roman finds. On one side, near the remains of the ancient Roman tower (the “Torretta”) - which had been inhabited by St. Benedict after his arrival from Subiaco and where, in a small cell, he had written his “Rule” based on the “ora et labora et lege”, the interweaving of prayer, study and manual labour - there were also funerary gravestones, with rare inscriptions on two sides.

At the top of the solemn staircase, the scenery of the Paradise cloister, known as “by Bramante” (built in 1595 in the style of the great Renaissance architect), seemed even more reassuring to those refugees, with the octagonal cistern, the two Corinthian columns surmounted by an artistic architrave with pulley and bucket chain, the slab floor, the large arches of the porches, the autumn light of the “Loggia del Paradiso” overlooking the Liri valley. It was the plain - 35 km long and 17 km wide, flanked on the left by the Aurunci and Ausoni mountains that separate it from the Gulf of Gaeta - that the Allies should have conquered to open up, along the Route 6 “Casilina”, the road to Rome.

In the cloister, the eighteenth-century statues of St. Benedict and his sister St. Scholastica delimited the two sides of the wide, monumental open-air staircase. The crow Nicò (as he repeated to those who called him by name) often jumped there, in the wake of the legend that links these birds to St. Benedict.4

The staircase led to the highest part of the abbey, to an anti-portico (with the statues of the pontiffs Urban V and Clement XI) leading to the highest cloister with the 16 statues of the Benefactors of the monastery,5 and then to the basilica. It had been built at the highest point of the mountain 6 and still had bronze doors cast in Constantinople at the time of the great abbot Desiderio (1066), who under the name of Victor III was pope (successor to Gregory VII) for just a year.7

The magnificent basilica of Desiderio was destroyed by the earthquake in 1349. In the basilica rebuilt in 1649 on the initiative of Abbot Domenico Quesada (designed by Cosimo Fanzago) the walls were dominated by frescoes and paintings of the Neapolitan school, especially by Luca Giordano.8 There was also the splendour of the inlaid marble altar (under which lay the tombs of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica), the walnut wood choir (carved between 1692 and 1708), the seventeenth-century organ, and the funerary monuments of Piero de' Medici (the eldest son of Lorenzo il Magnifico, work of Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane) and that of Guido Fieramosca, where three other bodies were buried, perhaps including that of his brother Ettore, the protagonist of “Barletta's Challenge” (13 February 1503) between thirteen Italian knights and as many French knights.

But the evacuated people of Cassino had not gone up to the Basilica. And many, among the youngest, after a few days, had been taken to work on the construction of the most robust of the various defensive lines that the Germans had decided to build in Central Italy.

Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander of the German troops in Southern Italy, had in fact gone to the area of Cassino on 19 September 1943 to study in person its geographical-military characteristics. It had not been difficult for him to hinge right on Cassino and on its mountain with the abbey the Gustav Line, that is the main defensive barrier to hinder the advance of the Anglo-Americans towards Rome. Already in 1909 the Italian General Staff, with a study by General Alberto Pollio, had judged the natural characteristics of that territory the most effective defence against an army advancing from the South: that border area between the Latium, Abruzzo and Campania regions was considered by the strategists one of the most unassailable natural defensive positions in Europe, and military schools from all over the world still continue to study it.9

Monte Cassino is in fact a rather low spur, a small protuberance (516 metres) of Monte Cairo (1,669 metres), in the Latium Apennines. And the abbey, up there, really looked like a fortress. It was an enormous trapeze of travertine, with the longest side of 280 metres and walls over 40 metres high, at the top of that “promontory” stretched into the valley crossed for over thirty kilometres by the Liri river and that separates it from a lateral valley, smaller, just ten kilometres, crossed by the Rapido. It is a short river: just beyond Cassino it joins the Gari river, that originates right at the foot of Monte Cassino. Near the village of St. Apollinare their confluence with the Liri forms the Garigliano river, which flows into the nearby Gulf of Gaeta, in the Tyrrhenian Sea. From Monte Cassino you can dominate both valleys, crossed by those rivers joining together and bordered by high mountains. It is a “closed system”, in short, difficult to access and formed by formidable natural obstacles. And its enormous defensive potential was well evaluated in Berlin, after a close confrontation.

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of the German troops in Northern Italy, aimed to abandon Rome and the South in order not to risk being surrounded by an eventual Allied landing north of the capital. He had proposed to establish the main defensive front on the Gothic Line, on the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, near the Po Valley. Hitler, however, after a long hesitation, on 4 October had rejected that plan and had chosen precisely the strategy suggested by Kesselring, based on a defense metre by metre and only gradual retreats. And he had given him orders to prepare the strongest line of defence right in the middle of the peninsula, so as to block the advance of the Allies on the axis of the rivers Sangro-Garigliano, and on the Apennines of Abruzzo and Latium: in short, in the narrowest point of Italy, from Ortona (Adriatic Sea) to Minturno (Tyrrhenian Sea). Monte Cassino was already the natural stronghold.10

While the Allies were being stopped north of Naples at the Volturno river (crossed on 15 October) and then in the gorges and mountains of the Bernhardt (or Reinhard) Line (referred to by the Allies as the Winter Line), further north the fortifications of the Gustav Line had been strengthened. The general of the German Military Engineers, Hans Bessel, had ordered the Todt Organization (the great construction company, which exploited above all prisoners of war and the forced labour of the raked men in the occupied countries) to set up a powerful system of dynamic defence, with minefields, tunnels, caves, barbed wire, pill-boxes and emplacements protecting each other. In Cassino the houses were knocked down with dynamite, in order to free the shooting range and increase the defensive barriers.

But, above all, north of the town the Germans blew up the banks of the Rapido river, causing huge flooding that would have blocked the manoeuvre of the Allied tanks right at the entrance of the Liri valley crossed by the Casilina road. It was, in fact, the only route that - given the bottlenecks between the sea and the mountains of the Appia road on the Tyrrhenian side, and the mountains and transversal rivers of the Abruzzo, on the Adriatic sea - the Allies believed they could use with relative agility for their tanks to Rome.

At the same time, about ten kilometres to the north, behind the Gustav Line hinged on the spur of Monte Cassino - with Monte Cairo, 1,669 metres, behind it, Monte Cifalco, 947 metres, to the side, and Monte Maio, 940 metres, in front of it - another defensive line was created, called "Hitler" or "Senger": from Piedimonte S. Germano and Aquino it reached diagonally to the coast of Terracina. In short, the hill of Monte Cassino was like the pivot of a defensive gate with two shots. Another line, the "C", was closer to Rome.11

Rescue (with thefts) of Treasures

The front was therefore approaching, and on 14 October - the day after the declaration of war against Germany by the Kingdom of the South Italy government headed by Marshal Pietro Badoglio that had succeeded Benito Mussolini - two German officers arrived separately in Monte Cassino abbey, unbeknown to each other: Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel (a Catholic, one of the founders of the Nazi party in Austria, and the owner of a transport company and a garage in Vienna) and Captain Doctor Maximilian Becker, not exactly a Nazi (his mother was English, his father a Protestant pastor, who later became a Catholic). Both belonged to the Hermann Göring Division, which operated in the area of Teano, south of Cassino. There, on the previous day, 13 October, the Division commander General Paul Conrath had indicated on the map the area of Cassino to his officers as the pivot of the new German resistance frontier: the Gustav Line.

On the afternoon of that same 13 October – while the Germans were carrying out a horrible massacre of civilians in Caiazzo, a small town not far from Teano, north of Naples - it was Captain Becker 12 who first suggested to his superiors (in particular, to Lieutenant Colonel Siegfried Jacobi, in charge of supplies, who - as he told Becker – “expected something” from it, adding immediately after that he was... joking) the need to save the Library and Archives of the Abbey of Monte Cassino.

Becker was indeed a lover of art and archaeology, and the idea - as the Benedictine historian don Tommaso Leccisotti, one of the monks of that time in Monte Cassino, wrote - came to him because “in charge of establishing a military hospital in the convent of St. Antonio in Teano, he nedeed to clear three rooms occupied by books from Neapolitan libraries. To save the books, he thought of having them transported to Spoleto [north of Rome, about 250 km from Cassino, A/N], where the headquarters of the Göring Division, which was responsible for the transport of food and ammunition, was located. He then thought of attempting a similar rescue for Monte Cassino”.13

Becker had therefore presented himself that 14 October to the abbey, accompanied by two Franciscan friars, John Joseph Carcaterra and Baldassarre Califano. But he had been preceded, to his great surprise, by Colonel Schlegel, who had also been advised and sent there by Jacobi, as the officer responsible for the vehicles. With a South Tyrolean soldier as interpreter, Schlegel was already in conversation with Abbot Gregorio Diamare, who was assisted by Father Emmanuel Munding - a sixty year old German monk, who came for some years to Monte Cassino from his monastery of origin, Beuron, in Germany - and by the librarian, don Mauro Inguanez, who was instead Maltese and who, Schlegel wrote later, “saw in me the wolf as a lamb”.14

After Schlegel, the abbot also politely received Becker in his studio, and the two Germans met at the door with obvious embarrassment.15

After those two difficult and tense talks, the position of the monks was dramatic: the monastery would have been in the line of fire. The two officers therefore urged the abbot to save the artistic and cultural heritage, providing him with means of transport and also urging the entire religious community to leave Monte Cassino.

Monsignor Diamare was surprised and very upset. He - born in Naples on 13 April 1865, baptismal name Vito, the first of ten children - was almost eighty years old. On 12 March 1928 he had been consecrated Bishop, titular of Constance of Arabia, but even earlier, since 1909, he had been authoritatively running (as the 187th successor of St. Benedict) the most famous Benedictine monastery in the world. He entered Monte Cassino in 1884, at the age of 19, after a brief period of university studies in Engineering. He never imagined having to leave that oasis of religion, history and culture, a true heritage of humanity, in that way.

“Shortly after their departure”, wrote another monk, don Anselmo Lentini, in his diary, “I found myself by chance in the room of the abbot along with his secretary [don Martino Matronola]. The animous old man tried to compress all his pain, but when he saw himself alone with two of his ‘sons’, in the imminence of such a lacerating exodus, he could no longer hold back and emitted a strong hiccup accompanied by tears: ‘We were ordered to clear!’. ‘We monks too?’. ‘Yes, all of us!’. But the hiccups were brief: the solid moral energy soon prevailed, and immediately he began to give the appropriate instructions”.16

Hours of anguish and lacerating doubts for all the monks. And the tension emerged conspicuously when, on the afternoon of the following day (Friday, 15 October) - while the Allies were crossing the Volturno river - Monsignor Diamare gathered the monastic community together. It was a very agitated meeting. The monks were wary of the Germans. “There are in fact those who maintain that the proposal to clear the area is a trap set by the Germans to take possession of everything”, don Tommaso Leccisotti noted in his personal diary. “This is the thesis especially of the archivist don Mauro Inguanez, who does not admit the possibility that the Allies do not respect this place, and proposes that we limit ourselves to hiding the objects on the spot. I, too, close to him, shared his views. But the opinion of the abbot and the majority prevailed”.17

In fact - one reads also in the “Diario di guerra” (WarDiary) written by don Eusebio Grossetti and don Martino Matronola, which constitutes the principal direct source of the history of those dramatic months within the monastery – “the Father Abbot definitely opposed to the codices and parchments of the Archive being scattered [in the various parishes of the diocese, A/N]. He took the decision to hand over the Archive and the Monumental Library to the German officers: it was thus possible to preserve them to civilization and one day more easily get them back”.18

That same evening, fearing a search by the Germans, the monks began to hide some of the Treasures not owned by the monastery that - in previous months, from various places of Italy - had been brought to Monte Cassino just to preserve them, considering the abbey a place more than safe, which would never be violated.

First of all, it was necessary to hide the Treasure of San Gennaro. It was contained in three sealed cases of fir, which Prince Stefano Colonna di Paliano, vice-president of the Deputation of the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro, in agreement with the mayor of Naples, lawyer Giovanni Orgera - who presided by right over that Royal Deputation - had brought to Monte Cassino on 26 May 1943, begging Abbot Diamare to keep them in custody in the monastery. How precious the content of the three cases was - and, according to Lloyd's of London, now even priceless - is evident from the original list found in the archive by Paolo Jorio, when he was director of the Museum of the Treasure of San Gennaro:

Treasure of San Gennaro

List of joys put in 3 cases

Case 1: - chalice donated by the Duke of Sangro, chalice donated by Francis II in 1860, golden chalice from His Holiness Pius IX in 1849, chalice with diamonds and rubies donated by Ferdinand IV in 1761, gold pyx with sapphires, emeralds and diamonds, donated by Ferdinand II in 1831.

Case 2: - Mitre, Infulas, Monstrance with gems and pearls, Cross of emeralds and rubies, case with ring, other case with 3 emeralds and an aquamarine, in one six items.

Case 3: - A gem-studded necklace

Naples, 26 May 1943, XXI [21st Fascist era]

So, there was also the Mitre, the bishop's headgear that a goldsmith of the eighteenth century - with the twenty thousand ducats collected from all classes of the city, from the king to the common people - had made by setting 3,700 rubies, emeralds and diamonds. And there was also the necklace, with large solid gold meshes, with hanging crosses of sapphires, diamonds and emeralds donated by Charles of Bourbon, the princes of Saxony and Maria Carolina of Austria, Joseph Bonaparte and Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy.19

In the delivery report, Stefano Colonna declared that he had “chosen the Abbey of Monte Cassino among the other Sanctuaries and Convents for this purpose, both because of its location and because it is considered less exposed than any other to the danger of air raids, and because of the trust that inspires the sanctity of the order and the strict observance by the Monks, whom he had known for many years”. Abbot Diamare, in taking those cases in custody, had assured: “We do not own caves or premises that can be considered protected from the destruction of war: we will store the Treasure in the Library, where we keep the most valuable, after the Saint’s relics, our wealth, but be assured that the Treasure of San Gennaro will be looked as equals to what is most dear to us”.20

But it was also necessary to hide the “Medagliere” [Medal collection] of Syracuse. It was a case that contained seven boxes, with coins from Magna Graecia: in all, almost 400 kilos, with the most rare or unique examples in the world, including “the silvery Decadramma with the profile of Aretusa, which belongs to the series of coins engraved by the artists Eveneto and Cimone in the period of greatest perfection of Greek currency (415-350 BC), and the Coin of Queen Philistid, from the time of Jerone II”, a few years later Luciano Matarazzo revealed. He was the official of the Ministry of National Education who, at the beginning of June 1943, had been sent by military plane from Rome to Sicily to collect and save those precious coins. On his return, the pilot managed to evade the Anglo-American fighters with an adventurous three-hour flight in the open sea, and that precious cargo had been taken first to Rome, to the Galleria Borghese, and then - on 3 July 1943 - to Monte Cassino.

The monks opened that case on 15 October and the seven boxes it contained - five with medals, one with jewellery and another with three ancient wooden statues - were scattered and hidden among the sacred objects, books and parchments belonging to the abbey that were to be transported to the capital.21

Previously, the silverware of the monastery, the precious chalices, the rich pectoral crosses with gold chains, the abbey rings, the ancient gold and silver coins, the medals and other precious objects, and also the public bonds of the Diocese and the Monastery, worth, at the time, a few million liras, had already been buried (and then everything remained buried under the rubble).

The next day, Saturday, 16 October - a few hours after the SS in Rome had concluded the atrocious raking in the Jewish ghetto (of the 1,024 deported to Auschwitz, among them 200 children, only 16 survived: one woman and no children) - the two German officers returned to Monte Cassino to save the Treasures. That time they presented themselves together, after having clarified, also with their superiors, the respective roles and modalities of the operation: Becker would have taken care of the organizational aspects, of cataloguing (but, little by little, he would be marginalized), and Schlegel those of packaging and transport.

In front of the monastery door, Becker saw two men in museum guards uniforms: one he had met a few months earlier, in Pompei. “In confidence”, he recounts in his Memorial, “he explained to me that both had been sent to Monte Cassino as patrol officers, since numerous important paintings from the Galleries of Naples and precious objects from the excavations of Ercolano and Pompei of the Museum of Antiquities, to protect them from air strikes, had been deposited in the monastery. There were more than two hundred crates (210, if I remember correctly), thirty of which contained ancient excavated objects”.22

How did they get there, all those crates? It was Amedeo Maiuri, a famous archaeologist and director of the National Museum of Naples, who had a first load of 60 crates transported and accompanied to Monte Cassino on 15 June 1943 - with twelve men escorting five military trucks - with the most valuable pieces: gold, silver, ivory, cameos, white and coloured glass, enamelled terracottas, weapons, small and large bronzes. On 6 (with Maiuri) and 8 September (with Bruno Molajoli, Superintendent of the Galleries of Naples) two more convoys arrived, with more archeological finds and hundreds of famous paintings.23

In short, in the summer of 1943 the abbey of Monte Cassino had become a "Noah's ark" of the historical-artistic-cultural heritage of Southern Italy, with masterpieces of exceptional value, such as Titian's Danae, The Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and others of other provenance, loaned to Naples for the First Triennial Exhibition of Italian Overseas Lands (1940). Everyone considered it a safe oasis, which would never have been touched by bombs. Instead, a few months later, it was itself threatened with all its Treasures: those of its own, of its millenary history, and those received in custody.

Becker himself was explicit. To don Tommaso Leccisotti, whom he met in the corridor immediately after the two Neapolitan custodians, he announced: “As Santa Chiara [church and monastery, A/N] in Naples, as the churches of Rome (meaning to mention St. Lawrence), so will your monastery be destroyed. Mais c'est la guerre! The order is not to let them pass. Rome, ils ne l'auront jamais!”.24 The monk, dismayed, immediately reported to the abbot, who at that point abandoned all hesitation and begged don Tommaso to go to Rome with the first trucks, to directly inform the Vatican of what was happening in Monte Cassino and prepare the arrival of the other convoys.

Now that the decision to transfer the Treasures had been made, a new conversation between the two German officers and Monsignor Diamare - accompanied by Father Emmanuel Munding, who acted as interpreter, and the Prior, don Gaetano Fornari - took place in a relatively more relaxed atmosphere. Becker reports in the Memorial that he had made him understand that by then he knew of the collections of Naples housed in the abbey. The abbot was forced to admit it, but added that those boxes, being owned by the Italian State, had to remain in Monte Cassino to be delivered personally to Marshal Badoglio. But Becker and Schlegel icyly replied that “no authorization [of the abbot] was necessary for the removal of all the objects of the monastery that were the property of the Italian State”.25

However, they gave him the word of honor that, under their responsibility, those works would be transported and provisionally secured in the warehouse of the reserves of the Göring Division, in a place north of Rome – for military security, they did not reveal the name - or in Assisi, or in caves safe from air strikes on Lake Garda. The return to the competent Italian offices would take place later, as soon as the situation in Italy was clarified.

In the end, after Monsignor Diamare had reiterated that he would never leave the monastery (“then you must be prepared to die here with your monks”, Schlegel warned, “I will stay here”, replied the abbot) an inspection was made to schedule the clearing work. And the German colonel also suggested the area, in the enormous basements, where the abbot and the monks could remain safer in the event of bombing.

The next day, Sunday, 17 October, the first German military trucks arrived at the abbey, with tools, nails and large quantities of tablets taken from a beverage factory near the Volturno river. Many soldiers of the Göring Division and even some of the civilians who had fled to Monte Cassino after the first bombardment of the city were involved in the construction of the packing crates, and were paid with a ration of food and twenty cigarettes.

The evacuation plan provided for the removal first of all of the goods that - formerly owned by the abbey - after the unification of Italy, with the Siccardi law of 1866 and the suppression of the monastic institutions, had been confiscated by the Italian State and then entrusted “in custody” to the abbot. They were, therefore, about 14,000 parchments in addition to thousands of paper documents and the 1,200 codexes of the Archive, as well as the almost 100,000 printed books of the Library, divided into Monumental, Pauline (or for consultation), and Private.

On the same day, the first three trucks left - even with part of the works of the museums of Naples, but without monks on board - with an “unknown destination”.26 And the packaging work continued for the whole night and the following day. The whole monastery was busy and the monks, even if with great upheaval, began to participate actively in the organization and cataloging, which was made more difficult by the absence of the archivist. Don Mauro Inguanez, in fact, had gone away, to Terelle (a small village on Mount Cairo, overlooking Monte Cassino) both to avoid the “plundering” of the monastery and because, being Maltese, he was suspicious, also for personal security, of the Germans. The nuns and girls of the orphanage, on the other hand, prepared to leave for Rome.

On the evening of 18 October, Abbot Diamare gathered by candlelight the entire community in the Crypt, a small underground church built in 1544 digging into the rock, under the main altar that contained the bodies of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica: “He gave, with words that were edifying and at the same time moving”, as reads the Grossetti-Matronola Diary, “his spiritual testament to his sons before the dispersion”, and he expressed “his desire that one day his body be brought back near the Tomb of St. Benedict and gave his paternal blessing”.27 The abbot also handed over to each of the monks, “for every eventuality”, a part of the shares in the possession of the abbey, as donations or investments.

On the morning of the 19th, at the insistence of Monsignor Diamare, the transport - with some monks on board - of the Treasures belonging directly to the monastery began. And with the first truck don Tommaso Leccisotti also left for Rome. In tears, and handing him a sheet of paper with his directives, the abbot told him “to warn the Holy See and the authorities of everything, to my proposal to ask the Pope for help”, don Tommaso wrote in his Diary, “he advises us to act with prudence, given the uncertainties of the circumstances”.28

Don Tommaso was also entrusted with the gold seal of Lothair III, the only one left, and also with a suitcase containing the great relic of the Holy Wood of the Cross and some relics of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica. With emotion, after the kiss of the abbot, the suitcase was put on the truck, while propaganda German soldiers were filming. On the same truck were also placed the three cases of the Treasure of San Gennaro, which stealthily passed as private objects of the monastery, and a large zinc case with the most precious codexes manuscripts and parchments29.

Among these, there was the oldest document preserved in Monte Cassino, the codex Ambrosiaster (Cod. Casin. 150) of the sixth century in semi-ioncial script, a known commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul long attributed to St. Ambrose. And also the famous Placito Cassinese, a parchment from the year 960 that contains the first sentence written in the “vulgar” language, the Latin spoken by the people and which was a prelude to Italian: Sao ko kelle terre per kelle fini que ki contene trenta anni le possette parte Sancti Benedicti [“I know that those lands, within those borders that here are indicated, were owned for thirty years by [the monastery of] St. Benedict”].30 And there was also the Cassinese Codex of the Divine Comedy: a manuscript that can be dated between the first and second half of the 14th century, therefore shortly after Dante's death (1321), and contains notes attributed to one of his sons, Pietro Alighieri.

After four hours of travel on the Casilina road, around 5:30 in the afternoon, the truck with don Tommaso Leccisotti on board arrived in Rome, at the Benedictine Abbey of Sant'Anselmo, on the Aventine hill. The monk immediately informed the most direct religious authorities about the situation: Father Abbot Primate of the Benedictines, Fidelis de Stotzingen, and the Abbot President, Ildebrando Vannucci. And he read the instructions received from Monsignor Diamare:

Make the Father Abbot Primate and the Father Abbot President understand our sad condition. We were forced to leave the monastery. We entrust ourselves to their charity so that they help us. The Community is formed of about eighty professed monks, novices, converts and aspiring monks who cannot go to their families because they are in areas where they are not allowed to go. There are also three students in the same situation. The Abbot would like to remain in a town of the Diocese but they do not want to allow it. Inform the Holy See of everything [...]. Ask them the charity of guarding, without any responsibility, the things we send [...].31

In the following days, the transports continued to transfer many books - but most of them remained in Monte Cassino - from the Private Library. It was made up of the volumes that the abbey had continued to acquire on its own after 1866, distinct from those of the Monumental Library that had become the property of the Italian State. And they also brought to Rome: paintings, relics of Saints, urns with the remains of St. Victor III, St. Charlemagne and St. Bertarius, sacred vestments, tapestries, an enormous and precious 17th century globe (the work of the Franciscan monk Vincenzo Coronelli, a Venetian cartographer and encyclopaedist), the two weights of the bread of St. Benedict, a gigantic and ancient crucifix, gold and silver chalices set with precious stones, goldsmith’s masterpieces, and the seals of the Norman princes Richard I, Jordan I, Roger of Sicily, and of many popes and sovereigns.

It was a gigantic operation. “The porticoes, even those in front of the Church, were full of boxes up to the vaults”, recalled don Germano Savelli, canonical of penitence of the cathedral basilica of Monte Cassino, who was then 13 years old and a monastic pupil.32 And, don Gregorio De Francesco, who was sixteen and also a monastic student at the time, relived – still after many years, as a librarian - the tension of those days: “The trucks came to load at the entrance cloister. One day, a driver was unable to take the exit in reverse. Schlegel got angry. He got at the steering wheel and succeeded in the manoeuvre”.33

Don Martino Matronola, who recorded the number and crates, counted a total of 35 truck departures, the last one on November 3. Schlegel wrote in his Memorial: “With more than a hundred trucks all the treasures of the Monastery had been secured”. And, so, fundamental transcriptions of ancient works have also been saved for humanity, carried out for centuries in the scriptorium of Monte Cassino by patient scribes. At the end of their fatigue - during which they commented, for example, “three fingers write... the whole body works” or “only those who do not know how to write believe that there is no fatigue” - exhausted but satisfied, in the last sheet they often inserted eloquent expressions, like: “The landing place is no more pleasing to the sailor than the last line of the manuscript to the weary scribe”.34

For example, the following had been saved: the “Atlantic” Bible, in Carolina script, of showy dimensions (mm. 512x340), the Cassinese Codex (n. 132) which contains the De rerum naturis by Rabano Mauro,35 the Historia Francorum by Gregory of Tours, the Arithmetic by Boethius, the De Aquaeductu urbis Romae by Frontinus (Cod. 361, from the 12th century). Also saved: one of the Exultet, a liturgical chant (XII-XIII century) with large images on very long rolls of parchment that the deacon-songer made slide down from the pulpit, allowing even the uneducated faithful to follow the story by observing the illustrations, the Lactantius, the first book printed in Italy, on 29 October 1465, in Subiaco, the great sixteenth-century Chorales for the liturgical prayer of the monks, the autograph manuscripts of musicians, including those of the Neapolitan school (Pergolesi, Iommelli, Scarlatti).

Among other things, the ashes, hair strands and manuscripts of the English romantic poets Percy Shelley and John Keats were secretly brought back to Rome, personally by the Maltese archivist don Mauro Inguanez, with the car of Becker who, with his English mother, had dual nationality and managed to overcome the initial distrust of the Benedictine monk. From the Keats-Shelley House in Rome they had been taken to Monte Cassino on 16 December 1942 by Duke Filippo Caffarelli, a member of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Committee, and hidden in an archive closet. Don Mauro had then put them in his cell to prevent them from ending up in the hands of the Germans.36

The morning after his arrival in Rome, that is Wednesday 20 October (the day on which Hitler ordered the front to stop right on the Gustav Line), don Leccisotti also informed Ermenegildo Scaccia-Scarafoni, Director General of the Ministry of National Education, of the events in Monte Cassino, and then went to the Vatican. With the deputy Secretary of State, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini 37 and with Cardinal Luigi Maglione himself, Secretary of State, discussions were held on how to “avoid impetuous bombing” of Monte Cassino, how to ask “the Pope to be able to receive in the Vatican also the Treasure of San Gennaro” and how to ask “the German military authority to hand over the Archive and the Library, as pertinent to ecclesiastical bodies”.

The next day, 21 October, don Leccisotti attended a meeting at the Ministry of National Education and received the task of pleading in the Vatican for the shelter of works of sacred art and the recovery of the Archive and Library, since it was impossible to know - not even from the German soldiers who gradually arrived with trucks from Monte Cassino carrying monks and treasures - where they had sent the other trucks, those with the Archive, the Monumental Library and the Treasures of the museums of Naples.38

But by then the monastery itself was in danger. And don Leccisotti and the Abbot President of the Benedictines, Monsignor Vannucci, asked the Vatican Secretariat of State for a direct, official diplomatic step, given the approach to Cassino of the war operations and the fear - expressed by some monks who arrived in Rome on the evening of the 21st - that the Germans had “the intention of fortifying the monastery militarily”.39

General Albert Kesselring, commander of the German forces in Italy. (Wikipedia, from Bundesarchiv)

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1That mountain on whose slope Cassino stands / Was frequented of old upon its summit / By a deluded folk and ill-disposed, / And I am he who first up thither bore / The name of Him who brought upon the earth / The truth that so much sublimateth us./ And such abundant grace upon me shone / That all the neighboring towns I drew away / From the impious worship that seduced the world. Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Paradiso, canto 22, vv. 37-43. See: The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated and commented by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Text, Elsa Edition, 2021, published in digital form at www.academia.edu, p. 1431.

2 Mariano Dell'Omo, Montecassino, un’abbazia nella storia, Montecassino, 1999, p. 53. [NOTE: in Italian, Montecassino refers to the abbey and the mountain on which it stands. In English it is often written Monte Cassino. Except for the quotations, here English usage is adopted].

3 There is a little hollow on this boulder (now protected by an iron grid) which, according to tradition, was believed to have been imprinted by the Saint's knee. Benedict was said to have knelt there at the end of his journey from Subiaco (almost 40 kilometres southeast of Rome) to pray - at the sight of the pagan temples - before his mission of bringing the Christian faith to those places.

4