In the early years of
World War II, O'Flaherty toured
prisoner-of-war (POW) camps in Italy and tried to find out about prisoners who had been reported
missing in action. If he found them alive, he tried to reassure their families through
Radio Vatican. When
Mussolini was removed from power by King
Victor Emmanuel III in 1943, thousands of Allied prisoners-of-war were either released or escaped after being deliberately left unguarded by their
Italian Royal Army guards, but when
Germany imposed an occupation over Italy, they were in danger of recapture. Some of them, remembering visits by O'Flaherty, reached Rome and asked him for help. Others went to the
Irish embassy to the Holy See, the only
English-speaking embassy to remain open in Rome during the war.
Delia Murphy, who was the wife of Thomas J. Kiernan, the Irish ambassador (and in her day, she was a well-known
traditional singer of Irish ballads), was one of those who helped O'Flaherty. O'Flaherty did not wait for permission from his superiors. He recruited the help of other priests (including two young
New Zealanders, Fathers
Owen Snedden and John Flanagan), two agents working for the
Free French, François de Vial and Yves Debroise, communists and a Swiss
count. One of his aides was British Major Sam Derry, an escapee. Derry along with the British officers and escaped POWs Lieutenants Furman and Simpson, and Captain Byrnes, a Canadian, were responsible for the security and operational organisation. O'Flaherty also kept contact with
Sir D'Arcy Osborne,
British Ambassador to the Holy See, and his butler, John May, whom O'Flaherty described as "a genius... the most magnificent scrounger". O'Flaherty and his allies concealed 4,000 escapees, mainly Allied soldiers and Jews, in flats, farms and convents. Among those sheltered was one Ines Gistron and a Jewish friend whom O'Flaherty placed in a
pensione run by Canadian nuns at
Monteverde (Rome), where they were given false identification. One of the first hideouts was beside the local
SS headquarters. O'Flaherty and Derry co-ordinated all of that from his room at the
Collegio Teutonico. When outside the Vatican, O'Flaherty wore various disguises. The Gestapo eventually found out first that the leader of the network was a priest and then learned his identity; but could not arrest him inside the Vatican. When the secretly anti-Nazi German ambassador to the Holy See, Baron
Ernst von Weizsäcker, violated
German Foreign Office orders and revealed that to O'Flaherty, he began to meet his contacts on the stairs of
St. Peter's Basilica. Multiple SS conspiracies to kidnap or assassinate O'Flaherty, even on Vatican soil, failed.
Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, the head of the
SS Sicherheitsdienst and
Gestapo in Rome, learned of O'Flaherty's actions and ordered a white line painted on the pavement at the opening of
St. Peter's Square, which signified the border between
Vatican City and Occupied Italy, and vowed that the priest would be killed if he crossed it. Italian Fascist
Pietro Koch, the head of the Banda Koch, a special task force charged with hunting down partisans and rounding up deportees for the Gestapo, often boasted of his plans to personally torture and execute O'Flaherty if he were ever captured by Koch's unit. Adding to the dangers O'Flaherty faced was a
mole inside the Curia: former
Russicum seminarian Alexander Kurtna, a convert to the
Russian Greek Catholic Church from
Estonian Orthodoxy. Following his expulsion by the Russicum's rector in 1940, Kurtna served, with only one interruption between 1940 and 1944, as a translator for the Vatican's
Congregation for the Eastern Churches. At the same time, he spied for the Soviet
NKVD, with devastating results for many underground priests and faithful on Soviet soil. Kurtna, who was always loyal to the USSR, only started also spying for
Nazi Germany in 1943 because his
handler,
Herbert Kappler, threatened to send Kurtna and his wife to a
concentration camp otherwise. Kurtna, however, betrayed Kappler by recruiting the latter's female secretary into stealing the
codebooks from Kappler's office shortly before the
liberation of Rome and passing them to the Soviets. Following the liberation of the city, Kurtna found the NKVD to be ungrateful masters and ended up as a
political prisoner in the
Norillag region of the Soviet
Gulag. Several others, including priests, nuns and laypeople, worked in secret with O'Flaherty and even hid refugees in their own homes around Rome. Among them were the
Augustinian Maltese Fathers
Egidio Galea, Aurelio Borg and Ugolino Gatt, the Dutch Augustinian Father Anselmus Musters and Brother Robert Pace of the
Brothers of Christian Schools. Another person who contributed significantly to the operation was Maltese national
Chetta Chevalier, who hid refugees in her house with her children and escaped detection. Jewish religious services were conducted on the
Jewish Sabbath and the
High Holy Days in the
Basilica di San Clemente, which was under the
diplomatic protection of the
Irish Foreign Office, beneath a painting of
Tobias. When the Allies arrived in Rome in June 1944, 6,425 of the escapees were still alive. O'Flaherty demanded that German POWs be treated properly as well. He took a plane to
South Africa to inspect the conditions for Italian POWs and to
Jerusalem to visit Jewish refugees. Of the 9,700 Jews in Rome, only 1,007 had been captured and shipped to
Auschwitz. The rest were hidden, over 5,000 of them by the Church, 300 in
Castel Gandolfo, 200 or 400 (estimates vary) as "members" of the
Palatine Guard and some 1,500 in monasteries, convents and colleges. The remaining 3,700 were hidden in private homes. During the
liberation of Rome, O'Flaherty and Derry's organisation was caring for 3,925 escapees and men who had evaded arrest. Of them, 1,695 were British, 896 South African, 429 Soviet, 425 Greek and 185 American. The remainder were from a further 20 nations. That does not include Jews and sundry other men and women who were in O'Flaherty's personal care. O´Flaherty later flew to Palestine and aided in the resettlement of Jewish
Holocaust survivors. O'Flaherty located in
Killarney, Ireland ==Postwar==