Vatican City

Vatican City, the independent neutral Catholic state in Rome, whose sovereign ruler is the pope. It was established under the terms of the Lateran treaty concluded in February 1929 between Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. His wartime successor Pius XII adopted a policy of keeping open diplomatic channels with all the belligerents, maintaining a strictly non-partisan stance that infuriated the envoys of both sides. Inevitably, the Vatican was the centre of much diplomatic lobbying and intrigue: it was used by members of the German resistance against Hitler to channel some of their messages to the Allies (see X-report). After the fall of Mussolini, the independence of the Vatican itself was at risk: in July 1943 Hitler seriously considered occupying it and was only dissuaded by Ribbentrop and Goebbels. Vatican property provided refuge for numbers of Jews, refugees, and Allied prisoners-of-war after Italy's surrender in September 1943. In 1944 right-wing priests in the Vatican began, unofficially, to establish escape lines, or ratlines as they were called, for Nazis and their collaborators. This organization, obsessively anti-communist, was itself deeply penetrated by Soviet intelligence. See also diplomacy.

Bibliography

Aarons, M., and and Loftus, J. , Ratlines (London, 1991).
Chadwick, O. , Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War (Cambridge, 1986).