New stamp commemorates Irish priest who saved thousands from the Nazis

I recall being very moved by the 1980s Gregory Peck / Christopher Plummer made-for-TV movie “The Scarlet and the Black,” which dramatized this story.

From the late summer of 1943, O’Flaherty worked with “The Organisation”, a massive partisan network, to save more than 6,000 Allied prisoners of war, anti-Fascists, and Jews from Nazi concentration and prisoner-of-war camps.

Initially, many people dismissed accounts of Nazi atrocities as Allied propaganda, but O’Flaherty saw how Italian Jews were being treated during WWII. It’s noted that he realised Europe was witnessing and participating in a genocide.

From there, he worked to keep war refugees hidden and safe, and following the war, he was the only person to visit Gestapo chief Herbert Kappler – the head of Hitler’s secret police and a sworn adversary of O’Flaherty’s – in prison in Rome.

Kappler had repeatedly plotted to kidnap, torture, and execute O’Flaherty for his work in aiding those escaping Nazi persecution. O’Flaherty’s visit to Kappler was noted as a sign of his capacity for compassion, despite this. — The Journal (Ireland)