His ability to evade the traps set by the German Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Chief Herbert Kappler earned him the nickname "The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican".

Prior to being incapacitated by a stroke in that same year, O'Flaherty was about to be removed from all his Curia positions and "promoted" by Pope John XXIII to Papal Nuncio to Tanzania.

Despite O'Flaherty and Delia Murphy's joint role in helping to save more than 5,000 Jewish lives through their Rome Escape Line network during the Holocaust in Italy,[2] Anglo-Irish and Protestant nurse Mary Elmes still remains the only Irish person honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

O'Flaherty's sponsor was the Bishop of Cape Town, Bernard Cornelius O'Riley, in whose diocese he expected to be posted after ordination,[9] a major step for a young man who had never set foot outside of Munster.

He was originally ascribed to the Sacred Congregation De Propaganda Fide through which, in collaboration with the Cardinal Prefect, Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, and the Pro-Rector of the Pontifical Urban College De Propaganda Fide, Saverio Maria Paventi di San Bonaventura,[11] he began to establish a network of assistants with whom he managed to save approximately 6,500 people such as civilians, military personnel and Jews, whom he lodged in Vatican extraterritorial residences and religious institutes during the German occupation of Rome in the Second World War.

That activity, which was carried out while he evaded repeated traps by Herbert Kappler and Pietro Koch, resulted in O'Flaherty being nicknamed "The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican".

In the early years of World War II, O'Flaherty toured prisoner-of-war (POW) camps in Italy and tried to find out about prisoners who had been reported missing in action.

[12] When Mussolini was removed from power by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943, thousands of Allied prisoners-of-war were either released or escaped after being deliberately left unguarded by their Italian Royal Army guards, but when Germany imposed an occupation over Italy, they were in danger of recapture.

He recruited the help of other priests (including two young New Zealanders, Fathers Owen Snedden and John Flanagan), two agents working for the Free French, François de Vial and Yves Debroise, communists and a Swiss count.

Derry along with the British officers and escaped POWs Lieutenants Furman and Simpson, and Captain Byrnes, a Canadian, were responsible for the security and operational organisation.

Among those sheltered was one Ines Gistron and a Jewish friend whom O'Flaherty placed in a pensione run by Canadian nuns at Monteverde (Rome), where they were given false identification.

[citation needed] Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, the head of the SS Sicherheitsdienst and Gestapo in Rome, learned of O'Flaherty's actions and ordered a white line painted on the pavement at the opening of St. Peter's Square, which signified the border between Vatican City and Occupied Italy, and vowed that the priest would be killed if he crossed it.

[16] Adding to the dangers O'Flaherty faced was a mole inside the Curia: former Russicum seminarian Alexander Kurtna, a convert to the Russian Greek Catholic Church from Estonian Orthodoxy.

Following the liberation of the city, Kurtna found the NKVD to be ungrateful masters and ended up as a political prisoner in the Norillag region of the Soviet Gulag.

[22] After the war, O'Flaherty received a number of awards, including appointment as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) "for services to the Forces in Italy" and the American Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm.

In the 1950s, the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy, in the form proposed by Mary Faustina Kowalska, who was later canonised by John Paul II, was under a ban from the Vatican.

[25] Killarney-born actor and playwright Donal Courtney penned a new one-man play entitled God Has No Country, which he premièred in Killarney as part of the Hugh O'Flaherty memorial celebrations for three nights in October 2013.