FORGING THE IRONFORGING THE IRON
FRANCE SEEMED “STRUCK AT INTERVALS BY A FIST,” ABWEHR OFFICER Helmuth James von Moltke thought. Touring the occupied West in August 1940, surveying the Maginot Line, Moltke lamented “the waste of money and the waste of land” used for guard posts, barricades, tank traps, blockhouses, and barracks, stretching from Belgium to Switzerland. “In this entire region,” he wrote his wife, Freya, “nothing grows but thistles and other weeds, and the wind just blowing across it was carrying whole consignments of mature thistle seed, to spread like a plague.” After watching the wind blow thorns, Moltke reflected: “Such a defense system is inorganic and diseased. If we cannot manage without such things, in Europe, I mean, then we deserve no better.”1
Moltke’s melancholy deepened as he mixed with the French. He found them “sickeningly friendly.” Relying on their physical fortifications, they had failed to cultivate the spiritual qualities required to fight. Describing the “moral debacle,” Moltke lamented that French women “were positively queuing up to get a German soldier into bed, evidently from a feeling that he was the stronger and that it was more fun with the stronger man.” The French soldiers, meanwhile, had become “simply refugees in uniform; when a plane was heard approaching, they jumped yelling from their vehicles, pushed aside women, children, old people, and took cover in the fields.”2
Moltke drew the lesson that “totalitarian war destroys spiritual values. One feels that everywhere. If it destroyed material values, the people, whose thinking is mostly limited by their perceptions, would know how and against what to defend themselves. As it is, the inner destruction has no correlative in the perceived world of things, of matter. So they fail to grasp the process and the possible means of countering it or renewing themselves.”3
Returning to Berlin, Moltke began to work for regime change. On 14 August, he met for the first time with Abwehr archivist Hans von Dohnanyi, who was then preparing a text on the right to disobey immoral orders. Proceeding reflectively at first, recruiting trusted friends one at a time, Moltke built a circle that by late 1941 transformed the German opposition. For to Moltke the fight against Hitler was not mainly military or political, but meta-ethical: his French sojourn had convinced him that resistance to tyranny hinged on “how the image of man can be replanted in the breasts of our countrymen.”4
The quest for a new image of man led the Protestant Moltke to the Catholic Church. He knew and liked Josef Müller, had lost sleep over his friend’s Vatican mission, and saw a “silver lining” when Hitler’s enemies befriended the pope. Seeking a spiritual basis for a post-Hitler government, Moltke found that papal social encyclicals not only offered a coherent program but filled him with a deep, inner calm. Yet as he looked around for partners in his project, he found that leading non-Catholic ministers still resisted resistance. “Whereas [Muenster Bishop Clemens von] Galen and the Bishop of Trier [Franz Rudolf Bornewasser] have preached bravely in opposition,” one of Moltke’s Protestant contacts recorded, “there is no leadership on the Evangelical side.” At a 28 September 1941 dinner with General Beck, Moltke therefore urged—and Beck approved—a “forging of the iron” along Catholic lines.5
ON 13 OCTOBER 1941, A JESUIT PRIEST ENTERED ABWEHR HEADQUARTERS in Berlin. Short and stocky, the son of a locomotive driver, Father Augustinus Rösch had fought in the First World War. An artillery barrage had temporarily buried him alive, and sometimes his limbs involuntarily trembled and twitched, as if still trying to claw him out. Restless, turbulently busy, always in motion, Father Rösch had a flair for spinning webs and making alliances. Father Leiber would hail him as “Catholicism’s strongest man in Germany.” On his shoulders rested the burden of leading the Bavarian Jesuits in a time of persecution.6
Father Rösch had come to see a good friend from Munich. Ludwig von und zu Guttenberg, former editor of the banned Catholic-monarchist Weisse Blätter, had joined Military Intelligence, where, like his good friend Josef Müller, he carried out missions for Oster’s resistance group. Now, while Father Rösch visited military offices in Berlin, ostensibly to discuss the status of army chaplains, Guttenberg offered to introduce him to yet another member of the resistance.7
Guttenberg imposed elaborate security precautions. He would go on ahead to the Treffpunkt, the meeting point, with Rösch following about fifty meters behind. When Guttenberg stopped at a garden gate and lit a cigarette, the priest should go through the next garden gate. He should wend through a large garage, loop behind the building, and climb a stairway on the rear wall. A hidden apartment was located above the garage, Guttenberg said. “Ring, and my name is the password.” Rösch followed those directions, recalling that he “had to look around a little to find the stairway.” He rushed upstairs and rang.8
Helmuth von Moltke opened the door. “I would never forget that first meeting,” Rösch wrote. He remembered Moltke as “a gaunt man with a finely-chiseled head,” so tall that he had to bend down to get through the door. Moltke led Rösch amiably into a big room, simply furnished but with “a splendid library.” On one wall hung a well-known Wehrmacht propaganda poster, captioned: “The Enemy Is Listening.”9
Guttenberg joined them. Moltke sat his guests at a polished wood table and disappeared. He returned with cups and plates, coffee, rolls, an alcohol stove, and batter in a bowl. As Moltke fried up apple pancakes, Guttenberg predicted that harassment of the Church would soon intensify, for the war seemed all but won. Moltke interrupted to disagree. “It’s going terribly for Germany, indeed the war is already lost for us . . . if leadership is not taken from the hands of Hitler.”10
Moltke then sketched his own coup plans. “Our officers could declare a cease-fire and make peace in the west; then there can be an acceptable peace and Europe will be saved,” Rösch recalled him saying. “We must be ready to take the military leadership from Hitler. . . . The man is really sick. . . . And if our officers should fail us—I still don’t believe it—then Germany is lost.”11
They discussed the Nazi war on religion. Moltke granted Hitler’s “satanic hatred of the churches, above all the Catholic,” the fury against the Jesuits, against everything Christian. He lamented that, whereas the Catholic Church had forbidden Nazi Party membership, following then-Cardinal Pacelli’s 1930 guidance from Rome, many Protestant ministers had affiliated themselves with Nazism. Because of the Catholic Church’s more disciplined stance, which it maintained precisely because of its hierarchical structure and the supremacy of the pope, Moltke believed that the Church must lead the Christian resistance to Hitler. According to Rösch, Moltke underlined that idea by saying: “I want to tell you the conclusion I have come to as a Protestant Christian. Christianity in Germany can only be saved by the German bishops and the pope.”12
Moltke had ambitious ideas along those lines. He wanted Rösch to bring the Catholic Church into the planning for a post-Nazi order. Assuming that the military could depose Hitler, public safety would require a provisional government, which should build on Christian social views. “We must think like Christians and must plan and prepare to rebuild again. . . . We must fight, and do everything to save what can be saved,” Moltke reportedly said. The words made a great impression on Rösch, who often later repeated them. “And now I ask you, Father Provincial: You are ready for it? Are you willing to cooperate in this way? Will you cooperate?”13
Rösch asked for time to think about it. He could not simply agree on the spot, for Moltke clearly “expected a great deal of direct help from the Catholic Church.” The hierarchical structure that Moltke hailed would oblige the Jesuit provincial to consult Rome. Moltke traveled often to Munich; they agreed to continue their talks there. As Moltke showed his guests out, he said, “Guten Tag,” and Rösch answered “Grüss Gott” (go with God). According to Rösch, that pleased Moltke so much that he said, “From now on, I will also always say ‘Grüss Gott.”’ Those words, sealing the partnership between Count Moltke and Father Rösch, marked the formal beginning of Catholic involvement in the second round of wartime plots against Hitler.14
THE SECOND SET OF CONSPIRACIES HAD CRYSTALLIZED EVEN BEFORE 22 June 1941, when 3 million Axis troops attacked Stalin’s empire. Canaris had already tipped the Vatican to what Hitler called Operation Barbarossa. Father Leiber remembered this warning with great clarity; he had received several updates as plans developed, dating to late 1940. The Jesuit assured the Pope in each case that the intelligence came from Canaris.15
An alarming notice came in late April 1941. Josef Müller called at Abwehr headquarters and Oster handed him an order from the Führer, for issuance two months hence. A key sentence in the instructions ran: “In the struggle against bolshevism, we must not assume that the enemy’s conduct will be based on principles of humanity or of international law.” Two other lines jumped out at Müller: “Political commissars have initiated barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare. Consequently they will be dealt with immediately and with maximum severity. As a matter of principle they will be shot at once, whether captured during operations or otherwise showing resistance.” Guerrillas and suspected civilian supporters, which in party parlance meant mainly Jews, must die on the spot.16
The army must now do in Russia what the SS had done in Poland. Brauchitsch, though outraged, would neither confront Hitler nor resign. Like Halder, he would stay in his post to prevent something worse from happening. They might save a few thousand lives by special order, Müller and Oster agreed. Yet even the appearance of acquiescence stained the army’s honor.17
Oster took Müller to see Canaris. The old man’s dogs barked at them, and Canaris came in from the terrace above the Tiergarten, where he had been feeding birds. He waved Müller to a seat and sank into a worn armchair. Worried that the new commissar order would blight them forever, Canaris asked Müller to seek, through Pius, “the old formulations” for peace. He meant the British terms of March 1940. As Canaris patted his dachshunds, he predicted: “Contrary to the fantasies of the dreamers,” who thought Russia would be defeated in six weeks, Hitler would meet his doom there just like Napoleon.18
HITLER HID IN HIS BUNKER. ONCE THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN BEGAN, he rarely left the Wolf’s Lair, his command post near Rastenburg, East Prussia. A triple perimeter in a dark wood cut him off from the world. Only his travel offered a chance to get at him.19
Oster had planned to have Hitler shot during an earlier victory parade in Paris. But when Hitler arrived, on 23 June 1940, he saw the Louvre and skipped the parade. During another march of German divisions down the Champs-Elysées in May 1941, two officers at the saluting base planned to shoot Hitler, while a third would toss a bomb from a hotel balcony. But as the parade date neared, Hitler canceled the trip. He stayed on his Bavarian mountain to plan his Russian war. Only later in 1941, as the enormities of the Russian campaign emerged, would a new group of younger military staffers decide to resist Hitler.20
An operations officer in the east, Major General Henning von Tresckow, led the cabal. Seeing the Wehrmacht as “a mere puff of wind on the vast Russian steppes,” Tresckow regarded German defeat “as certain as the Amen in church.” Yet he also believed, he told a deputy, that Hitler’s crimes would weigh on Germans for a hundred years—“not just on Hitler alone, but on you and me, your wife and mine, your children and my children, the woman crossing the road now, and the boy playing with a ball over there.” In September 1941, just after the Nazis started making Jews wear yellow stars, Tresckow sent an emissary to the Canaris group.21
Canaris aligned with Tresckow, but feared civil war. They must make provisions to fill the power vacuum, Tresckow agreed, “like one navigates a whirlpool.” Before removing Hitler, they must fuse military, civilian, and religious “nuclei,” creating the political preconditions for a coup.22
At just that time, and to just that end, Moltke linked hands with Father Rösch. As Moltke’s letters show, he rightly believed the Jesuit provincial “very in with the Vatican.” Less clear is whether Moltke knew that Rösch would bring more than the Catholic viewpoint on church and state. In any case, Rösch furnished a turnkey ecclesiastical espionage service, readily adaptable to the cause of Hitler’s death.