An extraordinary plot forged by Adolf Hitler to kidnap the wartime Pope and bring him to Germany has been revealed by the Vatican.

The Nazi leader planned for an elite SS commando squad to seize Pius XII, only for him to be moved to an impregnable tower to keep him safe, according to a previously secret report.

Following decades of rumours, details of the fantastic plot have now been revealed in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

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Major Deile, Adolf Hitler, General Jodl, Admiral Raeder; extreme left, facing table, is Walther von Brauchitsch looking over war maps

Antonio Nogara, son of Bartolomeo Nogara, the former director of the Vatican museums, wrote an account of how a priest, Giovanni Battista Montini - later Pope Paul VI - visited his father on a winter night in late January or early February 1944.

Montini told him information from US and British military intelligence had revealed an ‘advanced plan’ by the Nazis for the ‘arrest and removal of the Holy Father’.

The Nazis were going to pretend that they were taking Pius in order to ‘protect’ him, he added. According to the report, the two men opted for the Tower of the Winds which rises above a wing of the Vatican Library as a suitable hiding place.

According to Montini, the Pope would have to be hidden for ‘two to three days’ until the arrival of a special Allied commando squad who would parachute into the countryside near Rome to come and rescue him.

In the event, the kidnap plot was never put into operation.

The Vatican has published the details of a plot forged by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (left) to kidnap the wartime Pope Pius XII and bring him to Germany

Antonio Nogara died in 2014.

His text about the papal kidnap plot divulged to his father was discovered only after his death and has only now been published.

The publication confirms several post-war rumours about the intended kidnapping of the controversial Pontiff who was often called 'Hitler's Pope' because of his seeming reluctance to speak out about the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.

Critics allege that the time he spent in pre-war Germany made him sympathetic to the Nazi cause.

But his supporters say he walked a fine line between caring for his flock and trying not to make their lives untenable in those countries under Nazi occupation.

In the 1970s, General Karl Wolff – supreme commander for the SS in Italy after the Nazi occupation which following the toppling of Mussolini – testified that he had been ordered to kidnap the Pope in 1944.

He claimed Hitler told him: ‘I have a special mission for you, Wolff.

'It will be your duty not to discuss it with anyone before I give you permission to do so. Only Reichsfuhrer (Himmler) knows about it. Do you understand?

‘I want you and your troops to occupy Vatican City as soon as possible, secure its files and art treasures, and take the Pope and Curia to the north.

‘I do not want him to fall into the hands of the Allies or to be under their political pressure and influence. The Vatican is already a nest of spies and a centre of anti-National Socialist propaganda.’

The plan was never put into operation.

After the war, pro-Nazi priests in the Vatican helped many war criminals escape from Europe using either Red Cross or Vatican passports.

They included Franz Stangl, commander of both the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps where more than one million people were murdered, and Adolf Eichmann, the logistical organizer of the Holocaust which claimed six million lives.