Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Stangl struggled to locate Bishop Hudal in Rome until he encountered a friend who also fled Germany and knew where to find him. Bishop Hudal accommodated Stangl in Rome while he waited for a Red Cross passport, called a laisser passer. Stangl slept on the floor of a convent that accommodated German civilians. Stangl and the other Germans were only allowed to sleep there; he spent his days in Rome on the streets trying to avoid the police, who sent all Germans and Austrians they found to the Frascatti concentration camp.

Hudal arranged for Stangl to emigrate to Damascus and work in a textile mill. He gave him a ticket and money for the trip. In Damascus, Stangl met several Nazis who had also fled prosecution.

Breaking with the tradition of keeping papal documents private for 100 years, the Vatican released a carefully edited trove of papal documents from World War II in 1966, called Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatif à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. They did this in an attempt to spin the unfavorable narrative about Pope Pius XII’s silence during the Holocaust. Sereny discusses the papers in Rome with one of the Jesuit historians who assembled them, Father Burkhart Schneider.