Ambassador to the Vatican
After the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 and the changing German war fortunes, and following his own request, Weizsäcker resigned as State Secretary and was appointed German Ambassador to the Holy See from 1943 to 1945.
When received by the Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione on 6 January 1944, Weizsäcker stated, "If Germany as a bulwark against communism should fall, all of Europe will become communist". To this, Maglione replied, "What a misfortune, that Germany with its antireligious policies has stirred up such concerns". Similar representations were repeated by Weizsäcker to Monsignore Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI.
Weizsäcker's record at the Vatican was mixed. In Berlin, he had refused to accept a papal note protesting against the treatment of occupied Poland. During the German occupation of Rome, Weizsäcker did almost nothing to stop the deportation of Jews, albeit he helped individuals to avoid persecution, and helped to free Rome from all German military bases in an effort to discourage Allied bombing of the city. He also advised the Foreign Office that drafting Jews for labour camps inside Italy would be less likely to draw a papal protest than deporting them. According to Richard J. Evans, Weizsäcker shared the opinion of Ulrich von Hassell that the Final Solution was a "devilish campaign".
"His messages and documents to Berlin were nothing but lies," his coworker Albrecht von Kessel later said. In those messages to Berlin, Weizsäcker purposely painted Pope Pius XII as mild, diplomatic, indecisive and pro-German to help the Pope and to avoid anti-German sentiment in Italy. Like the commanding Waffen SS General Karl Wolff, Weizsäcker was clearly opposed to Hitler's plan to occupy the Vatican during which Weizsäcker feared the Pope being shot "fleeing while avoiding arrest".
Weizsäcker continued to present the Vatican with anticommunist slogans, and he both threatened a separate Soviet-German peace and requested from Monsignore Domenico Tardini the immediate mounting of a papal peace initiative to end the war in the West so that Germany could finish communism in the East. Tardini saw that as a transparent effort to obtain a military solution.
Like several other German officials, Weizsäcker attempted to negotiate the survival of some segment of the government and to avoid the unconditional surrender of Germany, but his efforts failed in bringing up the subject of "a German transition government, and the likelihood of his being a member of it".
