CONVERSATIONS IN THE CRYPTCONVERSATIONS IN THE CRYPT
IN JULY 1942, JOSEF MÜLLER BROUGHT DIETRICH BONHOEFFER TO Rome for talks with the pope’s deputies. The dialogue aimed at bridging interfaith gaps, so that Christians could coordinate their fight against Hitler. Müller introduced Bonhoeffer to Father Leiber and Monsignor Kaas, who subtly proselytized by initiating the Protestant into the quest for Peter’s Tomb.1
The crypt talks conjured the prospect of a reunited Christendom. Bonhoeffer savored Catholic teaching—on the church in the world, on Christ taking form in current events, on the place of the Church in the valley of death. Taking up where the Kreisau talks left off, the conferees agreed that the Protestant-Catholic split had gone “way beyond what the reformers had actually been striving for.” Father Leiber conceded that the Catholic Church had “lost some balance when it lost northern Europe, because it then came under the influence of Italian novels about mother-child love, which created the whole cult of the Madonna.” Bonhoeffer, for his part, granted that Protestant princes had exploited the Reformation to seize Church assets. He ventured further that Catholic priests, as celibates, made better fighters against Hitler, for they lacked dependents on whom the Nazis could take revenge.2
Müller’s report on the crypt dialogues influenced Church resistance in Germany. A revised Committee mission statement stressed that Catholics must “intercede not only for the Christian churches in purely denominational, canonical, or spiritual matters, but above all in the defense of people as human beings.” Father Delp took those words as a call to save non-Aryan lives. He wrote into the Vatican-approved agenda for a second Kreisau conference, in October 1942: “Restoration of basic human rights (especially the Jews).” His Munich rectory became a station in an underground escape-route to Switzerland.3
Müller and others in the Canaris group were also helping Jews. During the war’s first months, his Abwehr circle had spirited the leading orthodox rabbi, Chabad Lubavitcher Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, from Warsaw to Brooklyn; and by 1942 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was exfiltrating Jews to Switzerland under a special Abwehr operation, code-named U-7. Anxious to save some Jewish acquaintances, Canaris had given Hans von Dohnanyi the task of supervising their escape, on the pretext that the Abwehr could use them as agents, ostensibly for infiltration into America. Müller and Munich Abwehr agent Wilhelm Schmidhuber arranged a “ratline” for the refugees—lubricated by American dollars that Schmidhuber smuggled for the Jews’ temporary support, and using a network of monasteries stretching from Slovakia to Italy.4
But that ratline could become a noose. At Pentecost 1942, German customs began to uncover the rescue scheme when they arrested a black-marketer for illegal currency exchanges at a railway station in Prague. Searching the man’s briefcase, police found precious stones. The suspect confessed that Schmidhuber had asked him to fence the gems and currency to wind up some financial dealings with Jews. The chief customs investigator phoned a colleague and asked him to arrest Schmidhuber in Munich. But the colleague, who sympathized with the resistance, instead placed calls to Schmidhuber and Müller. They warned Canaris than an avalanche was bearing down on them.5
Schmidhuber had laundered cash to rescue Jews. Dohnanyi had asked him to smuggle $100,000 to twelve elderly Berlin U-7s, for whom Bonhoeffer had secured sanctuary in Switzerland. Schmidhuber, however, had seen the chance to make some money on the side, thereby jeopardizing the wider circle. Although Schmidhuber did not know about the pope’s role in the assassination plots, he had helped Pius leak Hitler’s war plans—taking Müller’s calls at the Hotel Flora, and passing Leiber the updated attack dates. If Schmidhuber talked, Hans Oster warned Canaris, he “could bring us all to the gallows with ease.”6
THE JEWS’ PLIGHT MEANWHILE PUSHED PIUS TO THE VERGE OF PROTEST. On 20 January 1942, SS spy chief Reinhard Heydrich chaired a meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, to plan the liquidation of European Jewry. Five weeks later, Father Pirro Scavizzi reported that the Germans had begun exterminating whole populations. As a military chaplain of the Maltese Order, Scavizzi had accompanied an Italian military hospital train through occupied Poland and Russia, where conscience-stricken officers told him of “the deportations into concentration camps from which, they say, few return alive. . . . In these camps thousands and thousands . . . are exterminated, without any judicial process.” Near Auschwitz, the chaplain’s informants said, they could smell crematoria smoke in nauseating whiffs. Scavizzi made a report for the archbishop of Krakow, who ordered him to destroy it, lest the Germans discover the text and “shoot all bishops and maybe others.” The priest obliged, but first made a secret copy by hand, for the pope’s eyes only. When he shared the report in a 12 May audience, Scavizzi later claimed, Pius broke down, raised his hands to heaven, and “wept like a child.”7
By that summer, the world had still heard only rumors of the genocide, but Pius had a stack of reports. Nuncio Giuseppe Burzio cabled from Slovakia that 80,000 Jews vanished in Poland. Angelo Rotta, the nuncio in Budapest, wrote that the Slovakian Jews had “gone to a certain death.” Gerhard Riegner, the representative of the Jewish World Congress in Geneva, told the nuncio in Bern of Jews massacred by “gas and lethal injection.” Even Orsenigo, the pro-Axis papal agent in Berlin, credited “macabre suppositions” about the deportees’ fates, adding: “All well-meant intentions to intervene on behalf of the Jews are impossible.” Holland’s bishops, however, issued a public condemnation; the Nazis, however, responded by deporting 40,000 Dutch Jews.8
The Dutch debacle put Pius under pressure. One evening—probably in late July or early August 1942—Father Leiber walked into the kitchen of the papal apartment and saw two sheets of paper bearing the pope’s distinctive cursive script. The pages contained the Vatican’s strongest protest yet against the persecution of Jewry. The pope planned to publish it in L’Osservatore that very evening. But Leiber urged His Holiness to remember the Dutch bishops’ pastoral letter. If it had cost the lives of 40,000 Jews, an even stronger protest, from even more prominent lips, could cost the lives of many times more. The pope would do better to keep a public silence and do whatever he could in secret. Pius handed the pages to Leiber, who threw them into the kitchen fireplace and watched them burn.9
But a few months later, Pius did protest the genocide. In his annual Christmas message, he denounced “the many hundreds of thousands of innocents put to death, or doomed to slow extinction, sometimes merely because of their ethnicity.” Although he did not say “Jew,” he used a word for “ethnicity”—stirpe—which Italians used as a euphemism for Jewry. Though Allied diplomats felt that Pius not gone far enough, they did not object—or even seem to notice—that he failed to use the word “Jew.” They complained rather, as Vatican documents noted, that he had not “mentioned the Nazis” by name.10
The Nazis responded as if they had been named. German foreign minister Ribbentrop had phoned Ambassador Diego Von Bergen in Rome. An SS intelligence analysis of the pope’s text pronounced it “one long attack on everything we stand for. . . . God, he says, regards all people and races as worthy of the same consideration. Here he is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews. . . . He is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.” Protestant pastor Francois de Beaulieu, a sergeant radio operator in Zossen, was arrested for dispersing clandestine copies of Pius’s Christmas message instead of destroying it. A military tribunal accused Beaulieu of disseminating a “subversive and demoralizing document,” and of being “spiritually attracted to Jewish environments and sympathetic toward Jews.” Spared a death sentence through the intervention of his superiors, Beaulieu later disagreed with those who said Pius should have made a bolder gesture. “Of what use would it have been for the Pope to set himself on fire in front of the Vatican? What was needed was the revolt of all priests and Protestant pastors in Germany.”11
BY LATE 1942, PLANS FOR A CHRISTIAN REVOLT WERE GATHERING force. Interfaith unity became an operational axiom as the pope’s secret policy crept forward in Munich, Cologne, and Berlin. The crypt talks continued to buoy Committee outreach. “The Church is obliged to regain contact with her ever-widening alienated circles through the use of our ideologically driven and integrated personnel,” Father Delp wrote. Marking the new ecumenism that inspired him to broker an alliance between underground Catholic and socialist labor leaders, he stressed: “We should try to coordinate the efforts of extra-ecclesiastical groups for the removal of the system by sufficiently powerful forces.”12
But while Delp coordinated those forces, Canaris faced a moral dilemma. Willy Schmidhuber’s unraveling ratline endangered an enterprise that might save the lives of millions. By some accounts, Oster urged Canaris to liquidate the not-very-virtuous Schmidhuber before he betrayed them. But Canaris refused, haunted by his post-facto complicity in the 1919 murder of revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Panicking, Schmidhuber fled to a hotel in Merano; Italian police returned him to Munich in handcuffs.13
The sand now began to run in the hourglass. “The 8 weeks ahead of us will be filled with tension as seldom, perhaps never before in our lives,” Moltke wrote his wife on 25 October, as his meetings with Müller and the Jesuits became especially frequent. “Strange how infinitely many things suddenly depend on a single decision. Those are the few moments when one man can suddenly really count in the history of the world.”14