- guardian.co.uk, Monday July 3 2000 01.27 BST
Clerics collaborated with the secret service of Hitler's SS while their flock was rebelling against the retreating German army. Cardinal Ildebrando Schuster, Archbishop of Milan, agreed to transfer money to pay an SS agent, according to a message intercepted by allied code-breakers in October 1943.
The documents, part of a collection of 400,000 second world war British and US intelligence reports declassified last week, raise fresh questions about the Vatican's relationship with the Nazis.
In a dispatch to Berlin from the Rome headquarters of the SS, a Captain Peisner wrote that an agent called Basilus had contacted the cardinal. "And [Basilus] explained to me today how he intended to transfer 300,000 lire through Cardinal Schuster."
The transcript is damaging because the cardinal was not previously thought to have been one of the church's Nazi sympathisers, said James Walston, a historian at the American University of Rome.
"If true it is terrible. Schuster's behaviour was part of a wider pattern of church cooperation, motivated partly by a strong anti-communist ideology."
Another document has cast doubt on the record of Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, representative of the American Red Cross at the Vatican. Fr O'Flaherty, who was Irish, was hailed for helping Jews. But according to an SS report dated October 19 1943, he told one of their informants that two US divisions in Sardinia were preparing to land near Civitavecchia, a port north of Rome.
The information was correct, though the allies later changed their plan and landed south of Rome at Anzio. Prof Walston said the evidence that Fr O'Flaherty was a spy was weak, however.
"He may not have known he was talking to an informer. Everybody in Rome at that time would have been speculating about the invasion and Civitavecchia was an obvious guess. The SS agent would have known that quoting a Vatican official would make his report look more impressive to his bosses."
The documents, decrypted by the British Enigma code-breaking operation, were held by the CIA in Maryland, Virginia and released under the auspices of the Nazi war criminal records inter-agency working group, set up in 1998.
They bolstered claims that southern Italians aggressively resisted their allies-turned occupiers as British and US troops approached.
The Germans rounded up 8,000 Jews in Rome in October 1943 but did not swoop south. "Because of the attitude in the town and uncertain conditions, action could not be carried through in Naples," a report sent to SS General Karl Wolff said.
A new book by Aldo De Jaco, 1943: The Resistance of the South, claims that German atrocities galvanised the population into an uprising.
In reality, only a handful of Jews were there, but Naples was one of the few European cities to successfully block the round-ups of Jews.
