In A Special Mission, Mr. Kurzman argues that, late in World War II, faced with mounting desolation at home and military failures abroad, Adolf Hitler ordered the supreme commander of the SS in occupied Italy to kidnap and confine Pope Pius XII. Even if this plot did happen -- the author hinges much of his claim's authenticity on the testimony of the aforementioned SS commander --, he failed to convince me of the relevance of his investigation. Is a failed plot from a war fought decades ago worthy of a 320 page book published 62 years after the incident allegedly took place? Seems unlikely. And yet Mr. Kurzman, an author of military non-fiction, provides such glittering portraits of the participants in this drama that he makes the read worthwhile.
Of the various actors in our drama, no two figures play larger roles than Pope Pius XII, and Gen. Karl Wolff. According to Mr. Kurzman, Pius strived, throughout the war, to keep the Catholic Church neutral. So intent on silence was he that he failed to condemn the Holocaust, fearing that it might make him seem, to the German leadership, too sympathetic with the Allies. Furthermore, Mr. Kurzman argues that Pius had his sites set on a peace plan that would bring the war to an end and restore the church to its rightful place of prominence as a powerful, Western institution while, simultaneously, sparing his beloved Rome a thorough sacking by the ruthless Nazis. But regardless of Pius' motivations, his ambitions unraveled when Hitler, heedless of the Pope's neutrality, ordered Wolff's SS into Rome and then to the Vatican, to dethrone a pope. Which brings us to the flamboyant Karl Wolff, a loyal general who, as Himmler's eyes and ears earlier on in the war, surely knew of the Holocaust. But when, fearing that he might be on the wrong side of history, Wolff surrendered an entire German army, in Italy, to the Americans, and in refusing to follow Hitler's order to kidnap the pope, the Allies may have looked the other way on Wolff's earlier crimes, deeming him too useful to execute.
Mr. Kurzman draws in some secondary characters to flesh out life in Rome during the 1940s, but his tale, such as it is, revolves around the ambitions of two men, Wolff and Pius, the former fearing ill treatment at the hands of the ascendant Allies and the history books, the latter fearing his own life and that of his city. Mr. Kurzman succeeds in portraying both men in all their pride and their want of glory. He succeeds in laying out an admirably clear case for why such men can bring themselves to ignore the Holocaust for the sake of their own goals. But that he cannot successfully sell the importance of a failed plot over a non-kidnapping prevents his piece from doing more than educating us on some of history's more interesting and ambitious figures. (2/5 Stars)
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