ADSS 1.221 Bernardini to Maglione: military plot against Hitler

ADSS 1.221 Filippo Bernardini, Switzerland, to Luigi Maglione, Sec State

Reference:  Telegram 52, (AES 8790/39)

Location and date: Berne, 22.11.1939; received Rome 23.22.1939

Summary statement: Information about a military plot against Hitler.

Language: Italian

Text:

With great circumspection I pass on the following information to Your Eminence:

Person named in Your Eminence’s message Number 5152 of 18 August last (1) begs me insistently (phrase incomplete) to inform you that a serious military plot is being organised in Germany to overthrow Hitler and National Socialism and to conclude peace with Britain and France.

For prudence sake I am not putting paper the names and details given to me.

Notes: 

(1) Not published in ADSS.  The person in question was the Benedictine monk, Dom Odo (Carl Alexander Herzog von Württemberg) (1896-1964) who, after the First World War entered the Benedictine Abbey of Beuron and in 1934 was expelled from Germany by the Gestapo.  He was in charge of aid to Catholics and Jews expelled from Germany. Between 1934 and 1939 he was  based in Switzerland but left for the USA in 1940 after the Swiss government could no longer guarantee his safety.

Dom Odo OSB