Honorary Citizen

THE MAN WHO SAVED FLORENCE by David Tutaev. 303 pages. Coward-McCann. $5.95.

This is a book about a "good" Nazi. Dr. Gerhard Wolf saved many lives at the risk of his own, and he failed to invoke the regime's machinery of terror although his duty demanded it.

Wolf was a career diplomat who routinely joined the Nazi Party and, in 1940, was posted as consul to Florence. At the time, the city seemed a diplomatic backwater, ideal for a man whom one of his later beneficiaries described as "reserved, even lackadaisical." It was only when Italy began to fall apart militarily and the Germans came in to hold the country that the mild, art-loving consul began to show his true fiber.

Florentine Jews who had managed to survive under Mussolini were suddenly in mortal danger. And to Hermann Goring and other shrewd predators, the wealth of Florentine art was irresistible. Long before the Allies approached the city, Wolf had assigned himself three dangerous tasks: to save lives, to prevent the plunder of the city's art, and to keep Florence from assault by having it declared an open city.

To save people from capture, Wolf falsified travel papers, appealed to the German ambassador over the heads of the SS and the Gestapo. He even met the great art expert Bernard Berenson, a Jew and a U.S. citizen, at the villa where friends hid the old man for 13 months. For keeping that one secret alone, Wolf could have wound up in a concentration camp. But he went much further. He collaborated with the Florentines in hiding paintings and sculpture, and worked desperately through the church and the German ambassador to keep the city from becoming a military objective, although the battle eventually did reach the city, and much Florentine art and architecture was needlessly destroyed.

Technically, the title is wrong. Neither Wolf nor any one individual can be called "the man who saved Florence." But the consul's efforts were quietly heroic in limiting the damage. Aiming at something like Is Paris Burning?, a more exciting account of a threatened city, Author Tutaev, who is a specialist in Russian affairs living in England, sets down what he has unearthed with workaday, amateurish zeal. But the facts are eloquent enough. In 1955, Gerhard Wolf, Nazi, was made an honorary citizen of Florence and cited for "acts of incalculable courage, humanity, sense of brotherhood and Christian feeling."

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