THE BROWN BIRDSTHE BROWN BIRDS
AN SS OFFICER CALLED IT “THE WAR’S MOST IMPORTANT CASE OF high treason.” Josef Müller learned of it on 17 May 1940, when he got an alarming telephone call over the Abwehr’s special secure network in Munich. A Canaris confidant told Müller to come at once to Berlin. He must travel by car, avoiding train and plane to prevent later tracing of his movements.1
Müller called Monsignor Johannes Neuhäusler, and they arranged a meeting in Munich’s Englischer Garten. “Giovanni,” Müller said, using his friend’s Italian nickname, “I think I’m lost.” He asked the priest to look after his family, especially his daughter. He worried that life would be tough for the child of a condemned traitor.2
In Berlin, Müller went to Hans Oster’s home. The chief of Abwehr Section Z looked at him mournfully. Müller recalled him asking, “Do you remember what we promised ourselves? If one of us screws up, he goes to the gallows alone.” When Müller said that of course he remembered, Oster said, “Well, now, we’re both in deep shit.” He wouldn’t go into more detail. “But keep your chin up,” Oster said, “and may God help us.”3
Müller went over to the Abwehr headquarters, where he ran into Canaris. The admiral was just then going into the daily meeting of the department heads. Müller noticed at once that Canaris was agitated. He whispered and used the familiar Du. “The Brown Birds!” he hissed. “Read the Brown Birds.” Müller’s confusion deepened when Canaris asked him with narrowed eyes, “Are you the one?” Müller said. “Who am I supposed to be?” But Canaris turned away without answering the question.4
Finally, in the office of Oster’s deputy, Müller learned the truth. Years before, Hans von Dohnanyi explained, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring had created the Research Office of the Reich Air Ministry to read foreign communications. The office intercepted and decoded messages and sent the results to interested departments. Because the decrypts circulated on brown paper, imprinted with a Reich eagle, Abwehr officials called them “Brown Birds.”
The office had decoded two cables sent by the Vatican’s Belgian envoy. Transmitted by Adrien Nieuwenhuys on 2 and 4 May, the messages detailed Hitler’s war plans. One text sourced the warning to a Belgian “compatriot,” tipped by a “personage” who “left Berlin 29 April, arrived in Rome 1 May.”5
“Is that you?” Canaris asked when he returned. Müller replied evenly: “Maybe.” Canaris said, “Come on, you would have to know that!” Then he smiled, put a hand on Müller’s shoulder, and praised his composure amid the chaos. The admiral asked: “Are you prepared to receive an order from me?” Müller said that depended on the order. “I order you to go to Rome on special assignment and investigate this leak there,” Canaris said.
Müller must go at once. As soon as the plane took off, Canaris would launch a manhunt for the “personage” and impose frontier controls for all travel to Italy: “I must take charge of that before Heydrich gets his hands on it.” In Rome Müller should call at Abwehr headquarters, where the colonel in charge would have orders to help him. The whole probe would lie in Müller’s lap. It only remained for Canaris to assure Hitler, when he demanded a leak inquiry, that he had the right man on it—one Josef Müller, with peerless Vatican connections. As Müller later said, “The admiral had turned me into the leader of the investigation against me.”6
Once more Müller flew to Rome. He called first on Father Leiber and briefed him. They agreed that the telegrams’ author, Belgian ambassador Nieuwenhuys, must vanish for a time in the thousand-roomed Apostolic Palace. Then Müller and Leiber must find some way to divert attention from Abbot-General Noots, who had relayed Müller’s warning to Nieuwenhuys. Müller would slip into the abbot-general’s home after dark.
Next Müller called at the Abwehr office. There he asked Colonel Otto Helferich for the file summarizing the leak probe to date. To Müller’s relief, it contained nothing of urgent concern. He then asked for and received a list of Abwehr and SS agents spying on the Vatican. Finally, knowing that his friends would worry about him, and needing to impress Helferich with the importance of his mission, Müller phoned Canaris, in the colonel’s presence, saying that Helferich had the inquiry well launched and that they had a very “satisfactory conversation.” Helferich, a relaxed type, seemed glad that Müller had taken on the extra work. Müller thus commandeered the local Abwehr apparatus to advance his purpose—the investigation of himself.7
Things fell into place. Müller called on Noots and warned him to keep a low profile. That night Müller saw Leiber and gave him the windfall list of Nazi spies. It included Keller’s Benedictine friend, Damasus Zähringer; Gabriel Ascher, the Jewish convert to Catholicism; and Father Joachim Birkner, Hartl’s mole in the Vatican Secret Archives.8
The next morning Müller met the beaming Leiber. “I have had an inspiration,” the Jesuit said with elfin mischief. “One of our fathers, a Belgian, has left for the Congo and is well beyond reach. Why not shove everything onto him as the ‘compatriot’ referred to by Nieuwenhuys? That should serve to draw attention away from Noots.”9
Müller now had a plausible story to tell Berlin. He had framed someone else for Noots’s role as the Belgian “compatriot.” Müller returned to Colonel Helferich, glowing with unfeigned satisfaction. He had learned through his Vatican connections that a Belgian Jesuit, Theodor Monnens, had fled Rome and gone into hiding. Here, clearly, was the Belgian “compatriot” mentioned in the intercepts.
The problem remained only half-solved, however. Müller still had to frame someone else for his own role as the “personage” who warned the “compatriot.” Here Abbott Noots helped craft a legend that leveraged Nazi preconceptions. SS chief Heinrich Himmler hated German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and also disliked Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano. Reportedly, Ciano ran a social espionage ring in Rome’s cocktail and dining circuits. Müller would credit Ciano’s spies with ferreting the war plans from Ribbentrop’s thirty-five-person travel entourage, which included legal and economic experts, two hairdressers, a masseur, a doctor, and a gymnastics coach. From Ciano the tip could have flowed to Belgian Crown Princess Marie José, who moved in his social circuit; and from the Belgian princess, it could have reached the Belgian Jesuit Monnens.10
Still, the danger had not passed. An Abwehr counterespionage officer, Colonel Joachim Rohleder, had learned of the intercepted messages. He did not belong to the Canaris cabal. Rohleder studied the roster of three dozen persons who crossed the frontier toward Italy at the time in question. He saw Josef Müller’s name.11
Rohleder decided to put an agent on Müller’s trail. He learned that Gabriel Ascher had earlier helped Hermann Keller gather intelligence on Müller. Since Ascher still had friends in high papal places, Rohleder gave him money and sent him to Rome.12
Two weeks later, Ascher returned with a damning report. It contained what Rohleder called “logically convincing” evidence against Müller. Ascher cited an impressive list of supposed agents, including priests in Milan and Genoa, and a Vatican personality who knew Father Leiber. Armed with these data, Rohleder visited Oster, who dismissed Ascher’s claims as petty gossip from a rival clerical group, jealous of Müller’s access. Rohleder then appealed to Canaris, who called the case “inconclusive.”13
The plotters again called Müller to Berlin. In a discreet nook near the main railway station, Müller had a confidential talk with Hans Dohnanyi, who showed him Ascher’s report and Rohleder’s resulting accusation. For the record, Müller must sign and swear a counterstatement. Müller went to the office of a lawyer friend, Max Dorn, who owed him a favor. While Dorn typed, Müller dictated a rebuttal for delivery to Canaris.14
The admiral called in Rohleder. Having considered all angles, he thought it advisable to drop the whole business and dump Ascher. The colonel protested, especially against Oster’s continued use of Müller. When Canaris insisted, Rohleder saw no choice but to obey.
The near-disaster chastened Pius. Through Müller, he implored the conspirators to destroy any papers implicating the Church in their plans. But retired general Ludwig Beck balked at burning any resistance documents, which his protégé Oster kept in a safe at Zossen. Beck wanted to preserve proof for posterity that a Decent Germany had existed. Müller protested, through Oster, that this would imperil the plotters both in Rome and in Germany. He asked Oster to promise, on his word of honor, to destroy the Leiber papers. In Müller’s presence, Oster asked an underling to do so. Only later did Müller realize that Oster hadn’t actually given his word of honor.15
HITLER’S WIN IN THE WEST DEMORALIZED BOTH HIS FOREIGN AND his internal enemies. The plotters saved their honor but lost their moment. Instead of attacking Hitler, the Wehrmacht had attacked the Allies—first in the north and then in the West. The British cabinet, now under Winston Churchill, would not parley further until the Germans removed Hitler. The German masses, drunk with victory, did not want Hitler removed. The Battle of Britain further soured Churchill on the very idea of a “Decent Germany.” Toward the German resistance, he ordered: “Our attitude . . . should be absolute silence.”16
Still, Pius kept the channel open. Although he could not extend British commitments, he kept in touch with the German plotters. Müller continued his Vatican mission, positioning the resistance for some lucky turn of fortune’s wheel. Perhaps as early as September 1940, Müller briefed Roosevelt’s personal representative to Pius, Myron Taylor, on the basics of the plot.17
With Leiber under SS suspicion, Müller met more with Kaas. As the danger of surveillance increased after the fall of France, they began to convene in the Vatican crypt, where the excavations for Peter’s tomb continued. Müller descended the stairs and slipped through a narrow passageway in the foundations of the church—a few seconds’ journey returned him to the Rome of the second and third centuries. In the mosaics on the walls, he could not avoid seeing allusions to his own life and mission. In one pastoral scene, two oxen awaited their master, yoked to a grape-laden wagon. A red, white, and blue emblem, worked into the design of a cross-vault, evoked the British Union Jack. Beneath it, the freedman Flavius Agricola had inscribed: “When death comes, earth and fire devour everything.” Nearby, Jonah fell from a ship into the mouth of the whale. In the depths of the vault, directly beneath the high altar of the basilica, someone had written: Petr[os] en[i], “Peter is here within.”18
IN THE SUMMER OF 1940, JOSEF MÜLLER LEARNED MORE ABOUT THE plotters’ leadership. He began meeting with retired General Beck. These meetings brought the pope’s most trusted political agent in direct contact with the designated regent of the Decent Germany’s post-Hitler regime. In long talks, Müller won Beck over to the idea of “a European Economic Union as a fundamental step toward a united Europe, which would make exaggerated nationalism and war between the separate states impossible.” This idea became integral to resistance plans for post-Hitler Europe.19
A second idea developed with Beck was the need to make the resistance more ecumenical. Because Lutheran generals kept more strictly to their loyalty oaths, potential allies in Germany saw the coup plan as a Catholic Center Party scheme; and because the pope had fronted for the plot, prospective foreign friends viewed it as a Vatican project. As Müller recounted, Beck wanted to “modulate” that predominantly Catholic “resonance.”
To that end, the resistance recruited Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His sister, Christel, had married Hans von Dohnanyi, and Bonhoeffer had learned contours of the plot from his brother-in-law. Bonhoeffer joined the Abwehr’s Munich office, and Müller became his handler. By October 1940, he had ensconced Bonhoeffer beyond the Gestapo’s reach, in the Benedictine monastery at Ettal, around which the winds of the Alps broke.20
Mountains blocked the sun, which only touched the abbey at noon. Father Johannes Albrecht—a master beer-brewer in a hooded black tunic—gave Bonhoeffer a key to the library. There he spent most of each morning writing his Ethics, which fused between Catholic and Protestant precepts.21
Around this time, Bonhoeffer adopted the Catholic view on tyrannicide. Jesuit Father Rupert Mayer, then lodged at Ettal, may have encouraged Bonhoeffer to abandon the Protestant doctrine of nonresistance; from Bonhoeffer’s Ettal stay, in any case, comes the earliest clear proof that he abandoned it. Müller’s Church intelligence contacts, Abbott Hofmeister and Monsignor Neuhäusler, became the pastor’s closest new companions; he began adverting to Catholic themes, such as the “Unity of Christendom”; and in letters to his trusted associates, he began to speak elliptically, using new-testament Greek terms to urge “boldness joined with prudence.” Echoing Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, he wrote of “Christ [as] the destroyer,” who saw his enemies as “ripe for burning.” In “grave situations,” Bonhoeffer now argued with Jesuitical casuistry, treason became “true patriotism,” and what normally passed for patriotism had become treason.22
At Christmas 1940, Christian resistance agents convened at Ettal to plan their next move. They met in the abbot’s private dining room, and sat up half the night around the fireplace: Müller, Dohnanyi, Father Mayer, Father Albrecht, and Pastor Bonhoeffer, along with Schmidhuber and Captain Heinrich Ickhardt from the Munich Abwehr. By some accounts, the Vatican sent three prelates to the meeting, including Leiber, and possibly Jesuit Father Ivo Zeiger, rector of the German college in Rome.23
Over sweet Franconian ice-wine, their talk took a sober turn. They wondered whether the pope could renew contacts with the British. The Jesuit hoped so. But Müller warned his friends not to expect too much. The whole environment had now changed. With Italy in the war on the Nazi side, and the British in a real shooting war against Germany, the time for talk had passed. The Decent Germans must act. If they did, the pope would help them. If they did not, then no help from the pope would matter. With Hitler everywhere triumphant, Europe was becoming a pagan empire. Deputy Führer Martin Bormann had just launched the Klostersturm (Cloister Storm), confiscating religious properties, removing crucifixes from schools, and melting down Church bells for bullets. Father Albrecht shared the deepening concern of the pope, who feared “the equivalent of a death sentence for the Catholic Church in Germany.”24
When the priests retired for the night, the spies weighed their options. They would have to keep trying to make contact with the Allies. But the real push, all agreed, must come in Germany. Müller had already discussed with Bonhoeffer how to build on small communities of committed Christians. Dohnanyi would then seek a way to link these Christian cells with labor and military circles in a militant popular front.25
In rural Bavaria, there were already flickers of revolt. When party bosses removed crucifixes from rural schools, pious women launched a wave of civil disobedience. Often they marched together to replace a crucifix after a Mass for a fallen soldier. In the village of Velburg, five hundred women pushed into the mayor’s house, pinned him down as he reached for his pistol, and forced his wife to hand over the classroom keys. Women rallied their husbands in other villages, where the public squares filled with peasants brandishing pitchforks. Perceiving “a front of psychological resistance” and “almost a revolutionary mood,” the Bavarian government restored the crosses.26
Unarmed women had faced down the world-conquering Nazis. The episode inspired and shamed the Ettal plotters. They now felt compelled to spearhead direct action within Germany itself.
But guerilla warfare was no game for old men. “Old people would rather let everything go on just the way it has been, and like to avoid unpleasantness at all costs,” a young priest from Passau wrote that month to the eighty-one-year-old chairman of the German bishops, expressing the newly militant mood. “How very necessary and important it is, in such offices of far-reaching responsibility, to have the decisiveness and energy to make vigorous and intrepid interventions, and the courage even to be prepared to die.” In just that spirit, as the onus of Catholic action shifted from the Vatican to the German Church, the Ettal conspirators would align with a corps of younger, more daring priests in a new round of plots against Hitler.27