military and Jews, whom he lodged in Vatican extraterritorial residences and religious institutes during the Nazi occupation of Rome in the Second World War. It was as a result of that activity, carried out while evading repeated traps by Herbert Kappler and Pietro Koch, that he was given the name of "The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican". World War II 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 the King in 1943, thousands of Allied POWs were released; however, 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, a well-known ballad singer), 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, a POW escapee. Derry along with 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 IDs. One of the first hideouts was beside the local SS headquarters. O'Flaherty and Derry coordinated all this from his room at the Collegio Teutonico. When outside the Vatican, O'Flaherty wore various disguises. The German occupiers tried to stop him and eventually