He earned his Doctor of Sacred Scripture degree with a dissertation on Die religiösen und sittlichen Ideen des Spruchbuches ("The Religious and Moral Ideas of the Book of Proverbs"), published in 1914.
[1] In 1923, he was named rector of the Collegio Teutonico di Santa Maria dell'Anima (known simply as "Anima") in Rome, a theological seminary for German and Austrian priests.
[12] His invective against Jews became more frequent, linking the so-called "Semitic race" – which "sought to set itself apart and dominate" – with the nefarious movements of democracy and internationalism and alleged a Jewish bankers' conspiracy to become "the financial masters of the Eternal City".
This protection involved a pre-emptive attack on communism, Hudal believed, and so he felt an urgent need for a Christian army from Central Europe to invade Russia and eliminate the Bolshevist threat to Rome".
In Vienna in 1937, Hudal published a book entitled The Foundations of National Socialism, with an imprimatur from Archbishop Theodor Innitzer, in which he enthusiastically endorsed Hitler.
"All I could obtain was permission to print 2,000 copies, which Hitler wanted to distribute among leading Party members for a study of the problem", von Papen claimed.
[19] Hudal criticized the works of several Nazi ideologues, like Alfred Rosenberg and Ernst Bergmann, who despised Christianity and considered it "alien to Germanic genius".
[20] The condemnation by the Holy Office of Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century in 1934 and, shortly thereafter, of Bergmann's The German National Church had been based on Hudal's assessment of those works.
[22] Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, was never put on the Index by Rome, as censors continually postponed and eventually terminated its examination, balking at taking him on directly.
[24] Three years later, in June 1938, Pius ordered the American Jesuit John LaFarge to prepare an encyclical condemning antisemitism, racism and the persecution of Jews.
[citation needed] Hudal was particularly close to von Papen, who as the Reich's ambassador in Vienna prepared the German-Austrian agreement of 11 July 1936, which some claim paved the way for the Anschluss.
He continued as pastoral head of the Anima Church and College but had no position in the Vatican and no access to Pope Pius XII or his senior staff.
[36] Ambassador Ernst von Weizsäcker, it was argued, had chosen this ruse because Hitler might have reacted against the Vatican and the Pope if it had been the German embassy conveying the warning, instead of the Nazi-friendly bishop.
[38] This draft, which is much longer than the excerpt from it sent to Berlin, contains Hudal's handwritten corrections, introductory greetings to Stahel recalling their mutual acquaintance Captain Diemert, and a final paragraph noting that, as had previously been discussed last March, Germany might need the good offices of the Vatican in the near future.
And this leaves little doubt that the letter was written by Bishop Hudal himself and by no one else, and that it was initiated by a visit from Pius XII's nephew Carlo Pacelli on the morning of 16 October 1943.
[40] According to several sources, Hudal may have been a Vatican-based informer to German intelligence under the Nazi regime, either the Abwehr of Wilhelm Canaris or the Reich Security Main Office.
After the war Rauff escaped from a prisoner camp in Rimini and "hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudal".
"[46] He used the services of the Austrian Office (Österreichisches Bureau) in Rome, which had the necessary identity cards (carta di riconoscimento), for migration mainly to Arab and South American countries.
[48] It is unclear whether he was an official appointee of the papal refugee organization Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza ("Pontifical Commission of Assistance" – PCA) or whether he acted as de facto head of the Catholic Austrian community in Rome.
[50] Other prominent Nazi war criminals allegedly helped by the Hudal network were SS Captain Eduard Roschmann, Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz; Gustav Wagner, SS sergeant at Sobibor; Alois Brunner, organizer of deportations from France and Slovakia to German concentration camps; and Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of running the murder of European Jewry.
[51][52] In 1994, Erich Priebke, a former SS captain, told Italian journalist Emanuela Audisio of la Repubblica, that Hudal helped him reach Buenos Aires, verified by Church historian Robert A. Graham, a Jesuit priest from the United States.
In 1999, Italian researcher Matteo Sanfilippo revealed a letter drafted on 31 August 1948 by Bishop Hudal to Argentinian President Juan Perón, requesting 5,000 visas, 3,000 for German and 2,000 for Austrian "soldiers".
[61] After the war, Hudal was one of the main Catholic organizers of the ratline nets, along with Monsignor Karlo Petranović [de], himself an Ustasha war criminal who fled to Austria and then to Italy after 1945,[62][Note 1] Father Edward Dömöter, a Franciscan of Hungarian origin who forged the identity of Eichmann's passport, issued by the Red Cross in the name of Ricardo Klement,[64] and Father Krunoslav Draganović, a Croatian professor of theology.
Interviewed in the 1970s by Gitta Sereny, Bayer recalled how he and Hudal had helped Nazis to South America with the Vatican's support: "The Pope [Pius XII] did provide money for this; in driblets sometimes, but it did come".
[50] Hudal's ratline was supposedly financed by his friend Walter Rauff, with some funds allegedly coming from Giuseppe Siri, the recently appointed auxiliary bishop (1944) and archbishop (1946) of Genoa.
[68] Since the works of Graham and Blet were published, historian Michael Phayer, a professor at Marquette University, has alleged the close collaboration between the Vatican (Pope Pius XII and Giovanni Battista Montini, then "substitute" of the Secretariat of State, and later Paul VI) on the one side and Draganović and Hudal on the other, and has claimed that Pius XII himself was directly engaged in ratline activity.
[69] In his posthumously published memoirs, Hudal instead recalls with bitterness the lack of support he found from the Holy See to give to Nazi Germany's battle against "godless Bolshevism" at the Eastern Front.
Hudal claims several times in this work to have received criticism of the Nazi system rather than support for it from the Vatican diplomats under Pius XII.
In June, Hudal announced to the cardinal protector of Santa Maria dell'Anima that he had decided to leave the college, disapproving of what he viewed as the Church's governance by the Allies.
[59] He resided afterwards in Grottaferrata, near Rome, where in 1962 he wrote his embittered memoirs called Römische Tagebücher, Lebensbeichte eines alten Bischofs ("Roman Diaries, Confessions of an Old Bishop"), published posthumously in 1976.