Fr. Anselmus vs. the Gestapo

When the chips are down, our best intentions often disintegrate before a fierce grasping for self-preservation.  It is a regrettable, though a very familiar, result of the Fall.  On the other hand, some ordinary-seeming human beings manage to persevere in integrity in the throes of nearly intolerable strain.  Their courage astounds us and inflames our hearts.   Lately, I have found myself pondering the mysterious life of a servant of the Church and a keeper of deadly secrets, who was subjected to intense physical and mental suffering by some of history’s most repugnant butchers.  He has been forgotten by many in the eighty years since the end of World War II, but his story deserves a wider audience.

I have long been intrigued by the history of the Rome Escape Line, a daring project which came to full fruition during the Nazi occupation of the Eternal City from September 1943 to June 1944, funneling 6,500 war refugees to safety through a secret network headquartered in the Vatican.  The authentic history of this scrappy venture is so riveting that it has been captured on stage, in radio theatre, and most notably in the 1983 TV movie The Scarlet and the Black, starring Gregory Peck as the wily Hugh O’Flaherty and Christopher Plummer as the despicable Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler.

Recently I stumbled upon Joseph O’Connor’s 2023 page-turner My Father’s House, a linguistically rich and suspenseful treatment of the subject.  While the novel is generally well-crafted, O’Connor admits to taking considerable liberties with the historical record (he reinvents the principal cast a little too freely for my liking, including rechristening Kappler as “Paul Hauptmann” because of his understandable personal repulsion for the Nazi overlord).   In an effort to obtain more unvarnished facts, I turned to Fiorella De Maria’s excellent young adult biography Hugh O’Flaherty: The Irish Priest Who Resisted the Nazis, and I found it surprisingly thorough. 

As I pursued my literary digging, one member of the escape ring kept capturing my attention—a young priest from the Netherlands, code-named “Dutchpa” by O’Flaherty’s right-hand man, escaped English POW Sam Derry.  Dutchpa was born to devout Dutch Catholic parents temporarily living in Germany at the beginning of World War I.  His family had moved there from the Netherlands during a lull in work opportunities on the Dutch waterways, or “polders.” The boy’s name was Antoon Musters.  While he would leave Germany as an infant, as World War I was intensifying, Antoon’s connection to Germany would become more significant later in his life.

In common with his two brothers, the young boy was drawn to the priesthood, and he displayed a keen intelligence that would take him far from his rural roots to the hub of the Catholic Church.  Joining the Augustinians and taking the religious name of Anselmus, the young man was ordained in 1940.  A theological student at the Pontifical University in Rome, Anselmus graduated summa cum laude two years later, completing his doctoral dissertation on the Blessed Mother.

There could not have been a stranger time to live in the Eternal City.  Pope Pius XII, trapped in the bottleneck of Axis vs. Allies, struggled to maintain the shaky neutrality of the Vatican while striving to mitigate the human suffering caused by Hitler’s Final Solution.  During the early years of the war, the conflict impacted the scholarly Anselmus only marginally.  However, this situation would change dramatically when the young priest took a summer holiday at Montereale, about 80 miles from Rome.  He soon became aware of British POWs confined in a nearby village and felt impelled to assist them with gifts of food and escape arrangements.

Serendipitously, Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty, a massive Irishman living in Vatican City, had already launched his own campaign for rescuing the bedraggled Allied servicemen who stumbled into Rome.  On September 10, 1943, things became even more dire when Rome capitulated to German forces.  When Nazi columns marched into the city, the Jewish population came under imminent threat of extermination; they, too, fled to O’Flaherty in desperation.  By the end of the war, the Rome Escape Line had aided approximately 6,500 refugees.   With his newfound zeal for the cause, it was very natural for Fr. Anselmus Musters to become a dedicated collaborator in O’Flaherty’s mission of mercy.

By all accounts, the escape line was something of an open secret in Rome.  Those in flight from the SS men would wend their way to St. Peter’s Square in quest of one of the monsignor’s helpers, hoping for guidance to a safe location.   Once they had made it across the white line of demarcation painted across the square, they had slipped through Nazi clutches and could breathe more easily in neutral Vatican territory—at least for the time being.  As O’Flaherty carried out his clandestine maneuvers under the very noses of the enemy, Herbert Kappler developed something of a personal vendetta against the Irish monsignor, but he could not lay hands on him without strong proof of his escape activities.

In 1944, Msgr. O’Flaherty noticed that the Gestapo had begun to take special interest in Fr. Anselmus, and the Dutch priest promptly took greater precautions, particularly making sure never to visit the safe houses with incriminating papers in his pockets.  Fortunately, Fr. Anselmus was blessed with a photographic memory, so he was able to carry on much as usual.

On the first day of May, however, the Nazis pounced.  After taking the tram through the city to check on several people in hiding, Anselmus disembarked in the busy plaza of St. Mary Maggiore and became aware that he was being followed by SS men.  Soon, one of these soldiers stopped him and demanded his papers.  Trying to maintain his composure, the priest suggested that they go toward the church, out of the busy throng.  While outside the Vatican walls, this ancient basilica was still legally part of the neutral Vatican.  Once inside, Anselmus felt that he would be safe.    However, it was not to be.

In a desperate attempt to stop his victim from entering the sanctuary, the Nazi soldier felled Anselmus with a strike to the neck; fortunately, a member of the Palatine Guard witnessed this brutality and dragged the dazed priest through the massive doors.   Advised by a cardinal inside St. Mary Maggiore not to leave the building, Anselmus prepared to spend the night in the church, but only a few minutes later, a posse of heavily-armed Nazis swarmed into the building and dragged him out in flagrant violation of international law.

The arrest of one of the key members of the escape line must have sent waves of panic through the ranks of O’Flaherty’s ragtag organization.  Dutchpa was in possession of countless names; he knew the addresses of hiding places; in fact, he was in a position to betray the entire leadership of the organization, even O’Flaherty himself.  And he would spend the next several weeks confined in the Gestapo headquarters at 145 Via Tasso, the notorious prison and torture chamber.

Remarkably, Anselmus remained clearheaded enough to record an accurate recollection of his brutal interrogation at Via Tasso.  In his book The Rome Escape Line: A True Tale of Wartime Adventure, Sam Derry included an account of the priest’s arrest and prison experience, based on Fr. Anselmus’s own notes.  When the priest arrived at the prison, he endured an hour-long strip search and was secured in chains, bleeding from open wounds.  Throughout the next several weeks, he was whipped, beaten, and subjected to psychological manipulation.  The Germans repeatedly accused Anselmus of concealing his true identity; they believed he was actually Sam Derry, O’Flaherty’s British second-in-command.  At night, the embattled Anselmus longed to rest, but the intensity of the pain drove sleep from his eyes.

Against all odds, however, the priest protected the secrets of the Escape Line.  Stubbornly insisting that he was no Englishman, only a Vatican priest, he refused to gratify the Gestapo’s demands for further information.  In one interrogation session, Anselmus deflected questions by asserting simply that Christians were bound to assist those in grave need of material assistance, regardless of the circumstances.  “And I am sure,” he added, “that the day you find yourself in the same situation, you will be glad to meet a priest willing to help you.”  It is unlikely that this remark won him better treatment from his Nazi torturers.

Another day, his captors feigned gentler treatment; before leaving his cell, they presented him with a sketch of several individuals.  He was to write down everything he knew about these supposed criminals.  Two hours later, when the officials returned to find the paper still blank, Anselmus endured another excruciating beating.

Much to their disgust, the Gestapo were unable to break the supposed English officer.  On the third of June, they thrust him aboard a train bound for a German concentration camp.  Anselmus’s friends gave him up for lost, observing an immediate funeral service for him.

They must have been utterly flabbergasted when the Dutch priest turned up alive some time later, weakened by his sufferings but in one piece.  Astonishingly, Dutchpa had climbed out of a window during an overnight confinement in Florence and reappeared in the city, having preserved the secrets of the Rome Escape Line in the face of almost certain death.  He rejoined his comrades in a liberated Rome—the Fifth American Army had arrived on June 4, the day after Anselmus had been packed off for a German concentration camp.

In later years, he was honored by both England and Italy, even being named a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.  However, Anselmus turned his back on a life of glory, choosing instead to devote himself quietly to teaching and parish life in the shattered country of Germany.  He wrote extensively, including a number of poems to be gathered into a volume for which he chose the name Young Bloom—a title which may have indicated his determination to embrace a life of Christian hope and joy, rather than burying himself in the bleak darkness of his wartime memories.

Surprisingly, the story of Fr. Anselmus remains somewhat obscure, even among many who have some familiarity with the Rome Escape Line and Msgr. O’Flaherty, the “Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican.”  A filmmaker who produced a video about Anselmus’s childhood home admitted that Fr. Anselmus was “a still-unknown Ossendrecht hero.”  However, the true heroism of this Augustinian priest is gradually beginning to be unveiled. In 2019, Fr. Anselmus’s nephews, Louis and Jac Raaijmakers, developed a 15-minute Dutch TV documentary (helpfully provided with English subtitles), on the life of their clerical uncle. It can be found here: ((96) Anselmus Musters Subtitled – YouTube).  Following the 2020 opening of the Vatican archives on the pontificate of Pius XII, the tale of Anselmus at the Via Tasso appeared in The Bureau: The Jews of Pius XII, by Vatican archivist Dr. Johan Ickx.  Today, visitors to Rome can tour the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, housed inside the former Gestapo headquarters, and reflect on both the moments of agony and the acts of courage that transpired within its cramped cells.

Today, when we turn on the TV or scroll through our news feed, we may get the sense that we are living in terrible times—in one sense, the most terrible that the world has ever seen, driven by postmodern attempts to destroy the Christian moral compass.  Yet, when violence and the stranglehold of fear threaten to undo us, how good it is to remember the courageous witnesses who have stood firm in the face of even greater trials than ours.  May the nobility of Fr. Anselmus Muster remind us that Christ gives us the grace to face even our most desperate hours with fortitude and hope.