SOMEONE TO KILL HIMSOMEONE TO KILL HIM
BY 17 OCTOBER JOSEF MÜLLER HAD RECEIVED THE POPE’S REPLY. The Vatican crypt-keeper, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, brought Müller up to date, probably in a tavern near Pius’s villa. The next day, as Müller flew to Berlin with the pope’s answer, he felt the agonized jubilation of the successful secret agent, carrying good news he could tell almost no one.1
Müller presumed his handlers would proceed with due discretion. He was a civilian, and they were professionals. It would have shocked him to learn that on Friday, 20 October, an Abwehr officer privy to the secret wrote it down.
Major Helmuth Groscurth opened his safe, removed his diary, and spread it on his desk. He linked the Canaris-Oster cell with anti-Nazi generals; he had procured explosives for assassination plans; and he transcribed the results of Müller’s mission, not from any Teutonic record-keeping compulsion, but for two considered reasons. First, military intelligence officers were trained to write down information from contacts and store it safely for reference, because otherwise one’s memory could play tricks. Second, some of the plotters wished to prove for posterity that a Decent Germany existed, so that if they failed to kill Hitler, they would still have shown the possibility of fighting tyranny. Thus, in their very losing, they would have found a way to win.2
“The Pope is very interested and holds an honorable peace to be possible,” Groscurth wrote. “Personally guarantees that Germany will not be swindled as in the forest of Compiègne [where an armistice ended World War One]. In these peace feelers one encounters the categorical demand for the removal of Hitler.”3
ON THAT SAME FRIDAY, AT HIS VILLA, PIUS SIGNED HIS FIRST ENCYCLICAL. Although he had reportedly finished it by 8 October, the New York Times announced on 18 October that its publication had been delayed. The Times gave no explanation, but its correspondent filed the story on 17 October—just as Pius pledged to help the German resistance. A wartime remark by Josef Müller suggests that Pius’s covert actions delayed, changed, and finally muted his public stance on Nazi crimes.
The plotters asked the pope not to protest. According to a document found among President Franklin Roosevelt’s papers, the coup planners urged Pius to “refrain from making any public statement singling out the Nazis,” as Müller told an American diplomat, since “this would have made the German Catholics even more suspected than they were and would have greatly restricted their freedom of action in their work of resistance.”4
During the encyclical’s delay, Pius did weaken its words. He diluted or deleted phrases criticizing “unrestrained expansionism,” the conception of “relations between peoples as a struggle,” and the “rule of force.” Pius did keep the admonition that, for human-rights purposes, “there is neither Gentile nor Jew.” But that was the last time he publicly said “Jew” during the war.5
AT ABWEHR HEADQUARTERS, MÜLLER’S MENTORS BEGAN PLANNING his Vatican “show.” In spy jargon a show meant the whole composed of two halves—a secret operation and its cover. Canaris would cover Müller’s Vatican contacts as an Abwehr project. Despite Hitler’s looming attack in the West—by now postponed to November—the aim was not quick results, but a standing capacity under a protective guise. The plotters would not plan on luck; or rather, they would plan only on bad luck. Nazism was a problem that might take years to solve, and for as long as that took, the show must have some plausible cause to go on.
The cover would build on Nazi preconceptions. Hitler saw the Italians as wobbly allies, and the plotters played on his fears. The Abwehr would send Müller to Rome to monitor Italian pacifism. He would pose as the agent of disgruntled Germans seeking peace through Italian channels. This would ostensibly let him sound out gossipy Italians through plugged-in Vatican officials. The Abwehr would tell the Gestapo in advance that Müller was posing as a conspirator. Canaris could even send the resulting reports on feckless Italians to Hitler. To all bureaucratic appearances, Müller would advance the war effort by pretending to talk peace.
But he would only be pretending to be pretending. He would actually be the plotter he was pretending to be. He would be a plotter, covered as a spy, covered as a plotter. He would do a kind of triple backflip without moving a muscle.
This was classic Canaris. It was his signature move, this hiding in plain sight. He would use it repeatedly, though never in the same way, to extract the plotters from difficulties. The results until the war’s last month could only be described as death-defying. How well the cover worked in Müller’s case seems clear from a later CIA assessment, estimating that he visited the Vatican at least 150 times for the would-be assassins during the war’s first three years, always with the consent of the government he sought to overthrow.6
Before returning to Rome in late October, Müller met Canaris. As soon as he entered the admiral’s office he felt at home. He saw an old Persian carpet, and, in one corner, a dachshund sleeping on a cot. On an ink-stained nineteenth-century desk sat a model of the light cruiser Dresden. Canaris held out his hand, as though to an old friend, and asked Müller to have a seat.7
They spoke about Hitler. Though the Führer had awarded himself the title Greatest Warlord of all time, to Canaris he seemed “the greatest criminal of all time.” Canaris had expressly warned Hitler that the Western powers would stand by Poland, but Hitler had started the war anyway.8
Worse yet, he was planning a blitzkrieg against the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Hitler’s disregard of international law, Canaris said, amounted to criminal negligence.9
But all that paled, the admiral said, compared to what went on in Poland. Whole provinces faced devastation by a rabble resembling the ravens that followed the march of any army. Like a band of pirates, the SS acted under no authority known to the law. Yet clearly, the party, and above all Hitler, encouraged and sponsored them.10
Canaris knew so from his own spies in the party security apparatus. The Gestapo’s conscience-stricken chief criminal investigator, Arthur Nebe, had turned over many secret reports.11
Canaris thus knew about actions planned against the Church—not just in Germany, but in Rome as well. Four separate organizations competed to spy on the pope, on his inner circle of advisers, and on the Vatican secretariat of state. The Reich government had broken the papal diplomatic codes, and Rome’s religious institutions swarmed with informants. Canaris promised to provide supporting evidence, to show his willingness to help the pope.12
The admiral then got down to discussing Müller’s future missions. He stressed three points. First, he did not wish Müller’s secret work to burden his conscience. Müller would receive no commands unless he volunteered for a task.13
Second, Müller would ask the pope to make contact only with the British. To avoid all suspicion that they played the Allies against each other, the plotters should not negotiate with more than one government at a time. If they could have only one link, it must be with London. The English were more dependable diplomats. Though tenacious negotiators, they kept their word.14
Finally, Canaris asked Müller to include, in each of his reports from Rome, a section headed “Current Possibilities for Peace.” Müller would make coded reference to the removal of Hitler only in this section. Canaris would detach everything written under that heading and deliver it secretly to others. That would provide a certain protection if a report ever fell into the wrong hands.15
Canaris then spoke reverently of Pius. The reverence surprised but pleased Müller. He sensed that Canaris and Oster, though Protestants, considered the pope the world’s most important Christian, and placed in him an almost childlike trust. They sought out the Holy Father not only for clandestine support, but for solace and hope. Canaris quoted the pope’s veiled warning to Hitler, issued a week before the war: “Empires not based on peace are not blessed by God. Politics divorced from justice betrays those who wish this to be so.” The admiral punctuated this papal wisdom by pouring schnapps into shot glasses and proposing a toast: “Wir gedenken des Führers, uns zu entledigen!” (We are thinking of the Führer, that we may be rid of him!”)16
THE POPE’S PARTICIPATION IN THEIR COUP PLANS ENERGIZED THE plotters. Especially in the cell of civilian plotters led by former Leipzig mayor Carl Goerdeler, the news produced euphoria. Goerdeler had prepared a radio speech to the German people and had begun to fill cabinet seats in a shadow government. Müller thought the excitement misplaced. When Oster passed him a list of ministers and secretaries, he returned it unread. “Keep it, Hans,” he sighed. “If we succeed, we have more ministers and secretaries of state than we could ever want. What we need now is someone to kill him.”17
Not just who but also how to kill Hitler remained an issue. Arguments swirled about the ethics of assassinating him, imprisoning him, putting him on trial, or having him declared insane. Some Protestant plotters opposed killing on religious grounds. Even generals and ex-generals, who had made violence their profession, objected to the use of force. “In particular, the Lutheran Christians within the military opposition refused to support an assassination for religious reasons,” Müller recalled. “They referred to a sentence by St. Paul, according to which ‘all authority comes from God,’ so he [Hitler] could therefore demand obedience.” Resting their case largely on Romans 13, Martin Luther and John Calvin had argued against all resistance to rulers. “I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a people doing right,” Luther had written. As he put it, “Disobedience is a greater sin than murder.”18
Catholics drew on a different tradition. Following Aquinas, Jesuit theologians considered political violence not only sometimes allowable, but even necessary. “One thing alone is forbidden to the people,” wrote the French Jesuit Jean Boucher in 1594, “namely, to accept a heretic king.” In such cases, argued the Spanish Jesuit Martin Anton Delrio, the Christian must “make the blood of a king a libation to God.” With some logic, then, the plotters looked to Rome for moral sanction, and found in lay Catholics their triggermen. Catholics would go where Protestants feared to tread. An Abwehr contact therefore asked Müller to seek the pope’s formal blessing for tyrannicide.19
Müller knew the Vatican did not work that way. He disabused his Protestant collaborators of their hopes that the pope would directly endorse violence. Worried, as he later said, about “misuse of the papal authority and position,” he called tyrannicide “a matter for the individual conscience.” Pressed whether he would raise the problem with his own confessor, Müller said he favored shooting Hitler like a deranged dog, and let the matter rest there.20
A key Catholic general meanwhile seemed poised to join the plotters. Knowing that the army’s commander in chief and chief of staff opposed Hitler’s planned attack in the West, Colonel-General Ritter von Leeb assured them: “I am prepared in the coming days to stand behind you fully with my person and to draw every necessary and desired conclusion.” Yet because the devout Leeb had once publicly snubbed Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi apostle of anti-Christianity, Himmler had put Leeb under SS watch. That surveillance prevented the plotters from bringing Leeb into their plans.21
By late October, momentum nevertheless gathered for a coup. German Catholic clergymen who knew Müller began to whisper about Hitler’s imminent demise. After an extended call at Müller’s home on 24 October, Benedictine Abbott Corbinian Hofmeister told a fellow priest that the war would end by Christmas, since a powerful military plot would by then have rid the country of Hitler. By the end of the month, a Catholic plotter in the Foreign Ministry, Dr. Erich Kordt, had decided to take Hitler’s life.22
Kordt’s conscientious decision stemmed from an offhand remark. “If only [the generals] had not sworn an oath that bound them to the living Hitler,” Oster said as they left a secret meeting. It occurred to Kordt that Hitler’s death would release the generals from their oath. He did not share his Protestant friends’ perplexities about tyrannicide. A phrase from Aquinas became his motto: “When there is no recourse, one who liberates his country from a tyrant deserves the highest praise.”23
On 1 November, Kordt followed up with Oster. “We have no one who will throw a bomb in order to liberate our generals from their scruples,” Oster groused. Kordt said that he had come to ask Oster for the bomb. As an aide to Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop, Kordt had access to Hitler’s anteroom. He knew Hitler’s habit of stepping out to greet visitors or give orders.24
Oster promised him the explosive by 11 November. Hitler had scheduled his attack in the West for the twelfth. Kordt began to visit the chancellery on pretexts, to accustom the guards to his presence.25