SHOOTOUT IN THE CATHEDRALSHOOTOUT IN THE CATHEDRAL
IT WAS JUST AFTER PENTECOST, AND PRAGUE WAS QUIET, SO QUIET that one could almost hear the coach-and-fours of a lost age rattling over the cobbled roads. Admiral Canaris had come to the city the week before. He had walked its walled and winding streets, admiring the ornate churches; even the spires had spires. His agents showed him the secret city, the basement restaurants only locals knew. After carafes of Tokaj wine, Prague was both more sinister and more beautiful, as one of Canaris’s Jesuit contacts remembered, “with its shadows and specters,” with its “memories of something sunken,” and with only the blurred outlines of towers gleaming through the moonlit mist. “It was a magical sight, because one could not see the supporting walls of the shiny golden domes which seemed to hover there all by themselves, shrouded in holy mystery.”1
Canaris had made Prague a cay in his covert archipelago. He spent nearly two years building up this reef of resistance; the SS needed only a month to destroy it. Yet in the Czech Protectorate, Hitler’s secret enemies would find, just before their downfall, a stunning triumph, in which Hitler would claim to see the secret hand of the Catholic Church. Like the floating domes of Prague itself, the events seemed more marvelous because their supporting apparata remained unseen, and the facts seemed to hover on their own, their foundations hidden in hallowed secrecy.2
SS spy chief Reinhard Heydrich lived in Prague. From Hradschin Castle, he managed both the party’s campaign against the Catholic Church, and the murder of Europe’s Jews. On 18 May, Canaris called Heydrich to discuss a division of secret labor between military and party spies, known informally as the “ten commandments.” During the meeting, Heydrich adverted darkly to “the leakages through the Vatican in 1940.” He had not closed his dossier on the Black Chapel.3
Five days later, Czech resistance agents learned Heydrich’s travel schedule. They decided to kill him as he rode to his castle, at a hairpin bend where his driver would have to brake for the turn.4
At 9:30 a.m. on 27 May, two Czech guerillas stood by the road. Under their raincoats, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík hid submachine guns and grenades. A third man crouched behind a hedge, to signal with a mirror as Heydrich’s car approached.5
The mirror flashed at 10:31. As Heydrich’s dark-green Mercedes came into view, Gabčík stepped forward to shoot. But his gun jammed. Kubiš then threw a grenade at the car. A wounded Heydrich staggered out of the wreck, drew his pistol, and then collapsed. A week later he died.6
The Czech agents fled into the crypt of Prague’s cathedral. They slept in the niches in the stone walls built to hold the corpses of monks. Members of the underground planned to escape into the Moravian mountains, whence they could exfiltrate to England. They would stage a memorial at the cathedral, honoring victims of the Gestapo purge that Heydrich’s killing provoked. No one would suspect that the agents would be spirited away in caskets.7
But someone betrayed them. As SS detective Heniz Pannwitz recalled, Atta Moravec, an agent in the assassins’ support network, broke down when interrogators “showed him his mother’s head floating in a fish tank.” Moravec confessed that he had been told to hide in the cathedral if he ever got in trouble.8
Pannwitz ringed the church with SS troops. He posted guards by every manhole cover and roof in the area. Hoping to learn the full scope of the conspiracy, Pannwitz ordered the assault teams to capture the suspects alive.
The Germans entered the church at 4:15 a.m. on 18 June. “We summoned the priests,” Pannwitz remembered, “but they denied knowing anything about secret agents.” Chaplain Vladimír Petřek could not explain, however, why one of the iron bars on his windows was missing. The raiders took Petřek along as they probed the half-dark cathedral. They had just crossed the nave when they came under fire from the choir loft.9
The barrage hit one of the detectives in the hand. Waffen SS infantry returned fire from the sanctuary with machine-pistols. The Czechs were pinned down and could not take any aimed shots. They threw out a grenade, setting the sanctuary drapes on fire. The Germans tried to storm the loft, but could only reach it by a narrow spiral staircase, putting them in the sights of the gunmen above. So they lobbed up grenades, as Pannwitz recalled, until the defenders “slowly fell silent.” An SS team in steel helmets warily circled up the stairs.10
In the loft they found three men. Two were dead and the other was dying. The dying man was Kubiš, who had thrown the grenade that killed Heydrich. Attempts to him keep him alive failed after twenty minutes. “The state’s main witness was dead,” as Pannwitz put it, and he found it “a heavy loss.”11
The roadside shooter, Gabčík, remained at large. But the Germans had not yet searched the catacombs. Chaplain Petřek now admitted that he had sheltered seven men in the church. Four were down in the crypt. By removing some skeletal remains, they turned the caskets into sleeping compartments. The other three only went up to the loft because they became claustrophobic in the coffin niches. Petřek sketched the layout of the tombs and said there was only one way in and out of them. He lifted a flagstone and showed the Germans a trap door.12
Pannwitz called Petřek to the hatch, hoping he could talk the men out. The Czechs said they would never surrender. “They were well armed down there,” Pannwitz remembered. “Anyone who put as much as a leg through the hatch would immediately be shot.”13
Pannwitz called in a fire brigade to flood the crypt with water. The Czechs tossed out the hoses and fired pistols ferociously at the SS. Tear gas proved problematic because it seeped through floor joints and overcame the Gestapo detectives. Finally, a three-man assault squad tried to force its way down. The Czechs shot up the team, and a backup force had to rescue them. Standing knee-deep in water, the SS troops shot into the coffin holes. Gabčík and his friends fired back until they ran low on ammunition. Down to their last cartridges, they shot each other, in turn, until the last man shot himself.14
The clergy’s role in hiding the killers enraged Hitler. That the priests in question were Eastern Orthodox rather than Roman Catholic mattered little to him. The denominational difference seemed just an ingenious Vatican disguise. The pope had in fact issued a secret Motu proprio, allowing Orthodox priests to keep their conversions to Catholicism secret. The SS Vatican expert, Hartl, claimed that the pope coordinated operations with the Czech Orthodox Church through a monastery in the Dukla pass of eastern Slovakia. According to Hartl, Pacelli had since the 1920s supervised a major project to penetrate Central and Russian Europe, using Jesuits disguised as Orthodox priests. One of these priests, Hartl suspected, was Matěj Pavlík, who converted from Catholicism in 1921 to found a Czech national church. Pavlík remained friendly with Rome, and the grounds for his separation from the Church seemed superficial: he wanted to minister to Czech Legionnaires who returned from the Great War with Russian wives. He became Bishop of Prague, and it was in his cathedral that Heydrich’s assassins hid.15
Pavlík admitted that he helped the plotters. He was executed later that year, with his chaplain, Petřek. Liquidated also for supporting the assassins was Robert Johannes Albrecht, a German military translator in Prague who confessed to being secretly a Jesuit. Though an SS probe failed to link the plotters to Pius, Hitler cited the episode to explain why he intended to “settle accounts” with the pope.16
“One need only recall the close cooperation between the Church and the murderers of Heydrich,” Hitler told Martin Bormann. “Catholic priests not only allowed them to hide . . . but even allowed them to entrench themselves in the sanctuary of the altar.”17
Priestly assassins flitted through Hitler’s paranoid daydreams. He told three officers on 16 November that “there were designs against his life; so far, he had managed to make life miserable for those who were out to get him.” One of the officers recalled Hitler saying: “What was particularly sad about it all was that they were by no means fanatical communists, but in the first place members of the intelligentsia, so-called priests.”18
IN NOVEMBER 1942 DR. MANFRED ROEDER, A LUFTWAFFE JUDGE-ADVOCATE, began interrogating Abwehr agent Willy Schmidhuber. “He claimed to have traveled to Rome on orders from the Munich military intelligence office, to establish contacts with influential members of the German clergy in the Vatican,” SS officer Walter Huppenkothen testified after the war.
The intent had not only been the exploitation of such relationships for the acquisition of intelligence of military and general political content, but also of establishing contact, via the Vatican, with opposition circles to explore the possibilities for peace. Schmidhuber said further that the Munich lawyer and reserve first lieutenant, Dr. Josef Müller, who had particularly good access in the Vatican, conducted similar missions in Rome. He knew that there was a “clique of generals” behind that activity, but he did not know who their members were. The officer in charge of these matters was the Reich Justice von Dohnanyi in Oster’s office, who had also made many trips to Rome himself, where Müller put him in contact with influential Vatican personalities. Schmidhuber provided all this on his own, without prompting. . . . Nevertheless, we evaluated this information cautiously at first. Due to Schmidhuber’s insecure and unconvincing personality, we had to consider that he might be manipulating us to win leniency in criminal proceedings, by putting pressure on higher-placed personalities, including Canaris, who might also come under investigation.19
Because of Canaris’s position, his enemies had to move carefully. Himmler would require high-command General Wilhelm Keitel’s permission to break the seal of secrecy over the Abwehr offices, which Canaris so jealously guarded. A mere charge of currency irregularities would not suffice. But if the case involved more than that, Roeder vowed, he would uncover it. He had a reputation as a bloodhound: his recent prosecution of the Rote Kapelle, a communist resistance group, had brought death sentences to its leaders.20
On 27 November, Dohnanyi flew to Rome. There, in his continuing talks at the Vatican, he had hoped to get Allied backing for a post-Hitler government. Specifically, he sought approval for a list of Landesverweser, or regional commissioners, who would assume interim responsibility after Hitler’s removal. But now Dohnanyi had to warn the pope’s advisers that Schmidhuber’s arrest had placed Oster’s group, and its links to Pius, under new scrutiny. Father Leiber again demanded that the military plotters burn all papers implicating Pius, especially the papal note stating British peace terms. “The documents are destroyed,” Dohnanyi reportedly said. He lied. The military had merely moved its main documents deep underground, into a cellar in army headquarters in Zossen.21
While Dohnanyi was in Rome, Müller faced questions in Munich. Fortunately for him, Luftwaffe judge-advocate Karl Sauermann seemed skeptical about the Schmidhuber case. It emerged that Müller had borrowed money from Schmidhuber to buy Slovakian postage stamps, but Müller could show that his stamp-collecting hobby covered meetings with Abwehr sources. When Sauermann suggested that some officers around Canaris might be disloyal, Müller feigned outrage: “Do you think [the Führer] would have allowed the admiral to remain in his position if there had been even a grain of truth to that? Do you consider the Führer to be that naive?”22
After the interrogation, Canaris sought out Müller in Munich. In the lobby of the Hotel Regina, at the foot of the curving grand stairs, Müller peered through an archway into the restaurant and saw a table reserved for the admiral and his entourage. Three SS men sat at an adjoining table, watching the door. Müller recognized one of them as Heydrich’s successor, SS spy chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner—taller than the rest, with a long scar down his cheek.23
Müller went upstairs to Canaris’s room. Canaris did not seem quite himself, and the report of Kaltenbrunner’s presence seemed to unhinge him. He started knocking on the walls, looking for microphones. He took the pictures down and scrutinized the areas behind them, then ran his hands under the edges of the tables and the chairs. Apparently satisfied, Canaris put his coat over the telephone and asked about the interrogation. Müller said that they had asked about his Vatican missions, but he had purged all his files before Sauermann arrived. They found nothing. But Canaris worried about the money Dohnanyi had given Schmidhuber for U-7. They seemed trapped. The admiral sank into a chair and muttered, half to himself, “This constant strain.” His nerves seemed shot.24
Müller saw only one way out. Canaris should reconsider Keitel’s offer to let military intelligence set up its own internal policing unit, so that Canaris could investigate crimes within his own service. In their current straits, that certainly would help them control the probe.25
Canaris would not consider that. The Rosa Luxemburg case haunted him. After Luxemburg’s assassination by a paramilitary Freikorps in 1919, Canaris had served as a junior officer at the court-martial, which imposed a strangely lenient judgment on the perpetrators. Some suspected him of complicity in Luxemburg’s death. He wanted nothing to do with “manhunts,” he told Müller. He already had enough emotional burdens from “the old days.” Rising abruptly, he suggested that they go downstairs to eat.26
Müller suggested they eat elsewhere, given the SS stakeout. Canaris disagreed. They should always do the unexpected. When a sniper had someone in his sights, he said, the target must break cover to confuse him. As they descended the stairs, however, Canaris grabbed Müller to steady himself. “That criminal,” he said in a loud voice, “is still sacrificing millions of people just to prolong his miserable life.” Startled, Müller pulled him back into the room to recompose. When they stepped out into the hall again, Canaris slung an arm around him and said, “My nerves, my nerves! I can’t stand it anymore.” No one knew what he had endured since 1933. He murmured about a tightening noose and then forced his face into a mask of normality. Together they descended to the restaurant to meet the enemy over a four-course meal.27
Canaris sat down and nodded to Kaltenbrunner. Müller sat by Canaris. They all talked like old friends. The surreal dinner had the feel of a parlay between the Greeks and Trojans. When it ended, the war resumed. Over the next months, Müller would return to the Vatican, and the pope would again become an active conspirator—as the plotters accelerated their plans to destroy Hitler before he could destroy them.28