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summoned the cardinals residing in Rome “to review the political situation in Italy and discuss the threat to the Vatican.” During that meeting, Maglione “warned his audience that official Italian circles feared that German troops were moving to seize Rome, invade the Vatican, and carry the Pope to Munich.” In the tense days that followed, key Vatican staff members were instructed to have their suitcases ready, prepared to travel on a moment’s notice. Sensitive documents were hidden, including those of the Holy Father, placed beneath the marble floors of the Papal Palace.
    Nineteen days later, Harold Tittmann, special assistant to Myron Taylor, President Roosevelt’s personal representative to the pope, spoke with his colleague, British Minister Francis Osborne. Tittmann had vacated the U.S. Embassy in Rome upon Italy’s declaration of war on the United States and, like other members of the diplomatic corps, moved into the Vatican. Osborne informed Tittmann that, “according to reliable sources, the Germans were most likely to take over Rome and possibly the Vatican City within the next few days. At Osborne’s request, my sons used the fireplace in our living room, the only one available to diplomats in the Vatican, to burn the British Legation’s confidential documents.”
    As Lahousen later explained, Hitler did not just intend to kidnap the pope. He “wanted to kill him.”
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    * Ordinary Affairs generally referred to internal affairs. Monsignor Domenico Tardini, Deputy Secretary of State for Extraordinary Affairs, handled foreign relations. Both men were deputies to Vatican Secretary of State Luigi Maglione. As Owen Chadwick pointed out (p. 54) in Britain and the Vatican during the Second World Wa r, “the distinction had never been clear. Often the Pope simply decided whether he preferred Tardini or Montini to deal with the question.” Montini would become Pope Paul VI in 1963.
    * About $267,400 in 2012.
    * The Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Research Unit) was founded by Himmler in 1935 as “a cultural branch of the SS devoted to archaeological, historical and racial investigations that ‘proved’ the connection between the modern German people and the ancient Germanic tribes.”

2
    A NEW TYPE OF SOLDIER
    LATE JULY–AUGUST 1943
    I n a classroom at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, some forty-two hundred miles from Rome, Professor Deane Keller began another in his series of lectures to soldiers bound for the Mediterranean theater, all part of the university’s Education for War and Reconstruction program. The observations on his subject—“American Impressions of Italians and Italian Customs”—derived from Keller’s experience as a student and artist living in Rome from 1926 to 1929. There he had learned firsthand how to deal with Italians, something he shared with his students: “The via del cuore (way to the heart) and success will be found through tolerance and understanding of a high-minded sort. And I might add, with infinite patience on your part.”
    Nearing his forty-second birthday, Keller was already a man of achievement. A school publication described him as a “short, stocky blond chap with wide shoulders developed by his constant swinging of the paint brush . . . teaches at the Yale Art School and has a studio up in the tower there. He puts in long hours on his compositions, makes lots of sketches and studies of the model before a brush touches the canvas. Once he is ready to march, the work proceeds like any well-planned project.” Hardly an imposing figure at five feet seven and 170 pounds, Keller’s round, wire-rimmed glasses and brushed, light-colored hair gave him a resemblance to Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States, who had led the country through World War I. But Wilson had been a Princeton man; Keller was Yale to the core.
    As Keller’s students prepared to depart for war in 1943, they took some comfort in knowing that momentum had