Foiling Hitler's Plot To Kidnap Pope Pius XII
Colonel Wessel von Freytag-Loringhoven's son Niki, testifying in Munich in 1972 and in recent revelations, reports that Canaris was involved in the foiling of Hitler's plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII. Colonel Freytag-Loringhoven was a subordinate of Canaris, and his son, Niki von Freytag-Loringhoven, reported that within days of the arrest of Benito Mussolini as ordered by King Victor Emmanuel III, the Führer commanded the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (the Third Reich’s Security Headquarters) to retaliate against the Italians via the kidnapping or murder of Pius XII and King Victor Emmanuel.
In 2009 the colonel’s son, Niki Freytag Loringhoven, then 72, came forward to reveal new details about the plan, reporting that on 29 and 30 July 1943 his father and Erwin von Lahousen, who were employed in the section of German intelligence dealing mainly with sabotage, attended a meeting in Venice where Canaris informed the Italian General, Cesare Amè, of the plot. General Amè relayed the news which allowed the plot to be foiled. The Italian paper, Avvenire, maintains that the younger Freytag von Loringhoven’s accounts comport with the Von Lahousen’s Nuremberg war crimes trials deposition.
Read more about this topic: Wilhelm Canaris
Famous quotes containing the words pius xii, hitler, plot, pope and/or pius:
“The Church welcomes technological progress and receives it with love, for it is an indubitable fact that technological progress comes from God and, therefore, can and must lead to Him.”
—Pius XII [Eugenio Pacelli] (1876–1958)
“I hate Science. It denies a man’s responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God’s fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock- scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.”
—Basil Bunting (1900–1985)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Let Sporus tremble—‘What? That thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk?
Satire or sense, alas, can Sporus feel,
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne’er tastes, and beauty ne’er enjoys:”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“It is an error to believe that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and contemporary civilization.”
—Pope Pius IX (1792–1878)