TWO BOTTLES OF COGNACTWO BOTTLES OF COGNAC
“COME ON! LET’S GO! WAKE UP!” JESUIT FATHER ALFRED DELP spoke those words in his 1942 Advent sermons, and spoke them so often in daily life that they might have been his motto. He yearned for a “shaking that goes to the heart, right down to the bones,” a parishioner recalled. “A sudden awakening. Something that would force people to wake up and come to their senses.”1
For most of 1942, Germans sleepwalked with Hitler. As the Wehrmacht slashed into the Caucasus, as Rommel rolled toward Cairo, Hitler seemed invincible. Then, at year’s end, everything changed.2
Russian tanks encircled the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. By Christmas, the SS reported mutterings of domestic discontent. The average German now sensed that a retreat had begun which would not stop at Germany’s borders.3
The plotters saw their chance. Major-General Tresckow planned to lure Hitler to Army Group Center at Smolensk. There the plotters controlled the terrain, and could better elude Rattenhuber’s bodyguard. Tresckow’s deputy, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, visited Berlin to link with Oster and Müller and—through them—with the Allies, via the Vatican. An American spy who met Schlabrendorff during the war found him “highly intelligent,” noting that whenever he talked about something that interested him, his eyes “flickered like a snake’s.” A lawyer in civilian life, he earned the resistance code name Der Schlager, meaning “the hit man.”4
Oster summoned resistance members to his office and drew a circle around Stalingrad on his military map. He sent an emissary to Tresckow, who spoke of “arresting” Hitler, a euphemism for killing him, when he next visited Smolensk. Shortly thereafter Tresckow arrived in Berlin, with the result that General Friedrich Olbricht, head of the Home Army General Office, pledged to build up a secret military shadow organization capable of seizing power as soon as Hitler died.5
The civilian plotters huddled to freshen their plans. In December, Josef Müller and Helmuth Moltke met every few days with the Munich Jesuits. Committee priests saw the need for a political coalition to augment the coalescing military plot. But the civilian resistance, Father Delp argued, had one main problem.6
His name was Carl Goerdeler. Admittedly, he did not lack courage or charisma. Wearing a soft gray hat and billowing overcoat, carrying a gnarled cane, Goerdeler looked like an itinerant preacher and exuded a missionary zeal. In 1937 he had resigned as mayor of Leipzig when the Nazis destroyed a statue of Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn. Goerdeler had even written Pacelli in 1939, asking him to help overthrow both Hitler and Mussolini.7
Yet as putative chancellor of the Decent Germany, Goerdeler was a jinx. Former leaders of banned unions and political parties found him reactionary. Many also considered him a security risk. Introducing himself to Berlin Bishop Konrad Preysing, Goerdeler said, as they shook hands: “The Nazi regime will of course have to be eradicated.” Munich Cardinal Michael Faulhaber and Vienna Cardinal Theodor Innitzer reported similar encounters. Müller doubted whether Goerdeler would prove discreet enough to achieve their shared goals. Moltke and Delp had therefore tried to keep labor barons out of Goerdeler’s camp.8
But Delp thought Goerdeler could still prove useful—even vital. The Kreisauers needed to light a spark with a united political leadership the generals trusted. Since the generals trusted older conservatives like Goerdeler, everyone else had to accept him. Delp had worked too hard to ignite the coup and effect Hitler’s death to let this chance slip away.9
So he urged and won a fresh approach. In one move, the younger faction both reached out to Goerdeler’s group and united the forces against him. Dominican Father Laurentius Siemer became a liaison to Goerdeler, coordinating Catholic labor elements with his coup plans. Delp meanwhile negotiated a pact between Catholic and socialist labor bosses, so that Goerdeler found himself aligned with forces that outweighed him. Ultimately they would lead the leader.10
But where would they lead him? Delp answered that question in his Declaration of German Peace Ideals. It hewed to the doctrines set forth by Churchill and Roosevelt in their 1941 Atlantic Charter. The “boldness of an inner twist in Germany” would bring peace only if the Allies did not fear that “reactionary militarist elements” still pulled strings. To defuse that distrust, Germans must accept “an equal union of all European States” and restore “basic human rights, especially [for] the Jews.”11
Delp then urged a sit-down to unite civilian forces. On 8 January 1943, Moltke’s younger group met Beck’s older faction in Berlin. Delp helped organize the meeting at Kreisau plotter Peter Yorck’s house, but did not attend.12
Beck chaired the gathering and let the older faction speak first. Ulrich von Hassell, Germany’s former ambassador to Rome, lamented that they had already waited too long, and any new regime would become “a liquidation commission.” Goerdeler offered optimism and pieties and tried to avoid drilling too deeply into contentious issues that might complicate consensus. Refusing to characterize their plans as an assassination or coup, Goerdeler suggested that they operate under the assumption that he, Goerdeler, could persuade Hitler to resign.13
Moltke and his younger group found Goerdeler evasive and naive. They wanted a critical airing of realistic ideas—on church and state, capitalism and socialism, dictatorship and democracy. Protestant Pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier responded sharply to what he later called Goerdeler’s “pedagogic obscuration of the issues.” Moltke offended the elders by muttering “Kerensky,” implicitly comparing Goerdeler to the figurehead whom V. I. Lenin had exploited and then discarded during the Russian Revolution. As Moltke confessed the next day to his wife, “I shot off a poisoned arrow that I’d kept in my quiver for a long time.”14
The younger faction’s unity made it dauntless. Adam von Trott zu Solz, a Foreign Office hand, articulated Delp’s plea for a united Europe. Moltke urged cooperation between the churches and unions along the lines Delp had drawn. The younger group got its way. As Moltke recorded, “The affair ended dramatically, and luckily not flat[ly].” Those attending ratified Delp’s declaration of ideals for a unified civilian front. The Kreisau Circle and Beck-Goerdeler group would work as one with the military plotters. Over yellow pea soup with slices of bread, Beck said portentously that they must assess the operational strength of their forces. All agreed that a coup must occur soon.15
WHILE THE JESUITS FORGED CONSENSUS, THEIR MILITARY CONFEDERATES built bombs. Tresckow commissioned intelligence officer Freiherr von Gersdorff to obtain explosives on the eastern front. Gersdorff visited the Abwehr’s depots and asked for a demonstration of plastic explosive “clams,” captured from British commandos. The clams used silent acid fuses no bigger than pocket Bibles. In one test, a clam blew off the turret of a Russian tank and hurled it twenty yards.16
Gersdorff took four clams and Tresckow prepared to hide them in Hitler’s Mercedes. If that did not work, he would smuggle a package onto Hitler’s plane. The plotters just had to get Hitler to Smolensk.17
Tresckow intrigued to make it happen. “Hitler was to be persuaded to leave his headquarters in East Prussia,” Tresckow’s deputy recalled, and visit Army Group Center. “Tresckow wanted to have Hitler in a place familiar to us but unknown to him, thus creating an atmosphere favorable to the planned initial spark.”18
IN FEBRUARY, MÜLLER DROVE OUT TO BECK’S VILLA IN BERLIN-LICHTERFELDE. As they talked, Hans von Dohnanyi joined them. But Beck sent Dohnanyi into the garden, saying he wanted to speak privately with Müller.19
They spoke for three hours. Beck thought the Allied demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender, issued at Casablanca on 23 January, changed everything. As Müller remembered their talk, “The question then was, could we use Casablanca to our advantage, to forestall an invasion by a coup? . . . The overthrow would have to take place before any invasion. That was also one of the main reasons why the Tresckow assassination attempt had rushed along.” Beck had approved Tresckow’s plan. “The generals on ethical grounds feel themselves obliged to act. Count on it,” Beck said. “I now have my finger on the button [ich habe jetzt den Finger auf dem Knopf]; it will finally happen.”20
They discussed how to again contact London through the Vatican. Müller stressed that the chances of success had fallen since 1939–1940. Yet Beck decided that they must try to get London aboard. He gave Müller the mission of informing Pius about the imminent coup—and of asking the Holy Father to serve, again, as their secret foreign agent.21
MÜLLER SPENT THE NEXT TWO WEEKS IN ROME. EXTRINSIC EVIDENCE suggests that he flew out of Berlin just after 9 February and did not return before the 22nd—perhaps his longest Roman sojourn during the war. In addition to briefing Pius on the coup plans, Müller carried out two other important assignments.22
The first was to convey an urgent situation report from Father Rösch. Addressed to Father Leiber in care of the deputy Jesuit general, it alluded to Committee plans against the regime. During the “grave [and] impending events [in] coming weeks,” Rösch reported, his Jesuits would not only coordinate “labor forces,” but would function as the “pope’s storm troopers.” If they failed, Rösch expected that they would be “deported like Jews.” He would keep Father Leiber abreast, and, if the plans seemed too risky, “let him reverse me.” If anything, Rösch candidly confessed, he could use more rather than less guidance from Rome, especially since “well-connected circles” had remained “silent about the fate of the Jews.”23
A second Müller mission in Rome related to atomic weapons. “I got a detailed report from someone who was employed by the Vatican and the U.S., on the state of the atomic research,” he said later. “I had also discussed that with Canaris. The two of us talked about the circumstance of Hitler’s having caused the emigration to America of Jewish researchers and chemical engineers, and how they would revenge themselves against Hitler.” Müller may have received the “detailed report” from one of the five American physicists who advised the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, where on 21 February Pius himself described how a nuclear explosion might occur—going into such detail that his prescience attracted the astonished notice of both Hartl’s SS Church unit and the British Secret Service.24
But Müller’s main business in the Holy See was the imminent overthrow. He approached the pope through Leiber and probably also through Kaas. “General Beck gave me the order to notify the Holy Father of the imminent revolution in Germany and of asking him again to strive for an acceptable peace,” Müller recalled telling Leiber. “The generals feel obliged to eliminate this criminal gang which has plunged the whole world into misfortune.” The Decent Germany wanted Pius to know its new postwar plans, which Müller summarized as follows:
It will be necessary to establish a military dictatorship in Germany for one year after Hitler’s downfall, until democratic groups can be established, which will no longer resemble political parties in the old sense. German troops will remain temporarily in the occupied countries, until they can make contact with resistance movements that will form the new governing forces. This will not be a pretext for continued occupation of the conquered lands. Rather, Admiral Canaris has accurate intelligence (for example from the Prefect of Police in Paris) that an uncontrollable anarchist movement will develop after any abrupt withdrawal of German troops.
Müller shared not only the plotters’ after-plans, but their preparations. As Leiber told a US spy the next year, the plot “resulted directly from the Stalingrad disaster,” and, compared to previous efforts, it was
far more serious and extensive in the support it obtained. Its leader was General Ludwig Beck, and its civilian adherents included . . . all political elements under the Weimar Republic except the extreme Right and the extreme Left. [Conrad] Adenauer, former Centrist mayor of Cologne, refused to join the movement, since he believed that the Nazi regime should bear the onus of losing the war before the opposition should attempt its overthrow. The key figures in the conspiracy were to have been the generals on the Eastern Front, under the leadership of [Field] Marshal [Erich] von Manstein. Immediately after the Stalingrad defeat, these generals had despaired of holding the front together.
Leiber doubted the generals would do anything. But he thanked Müller “in old friendship” for the message and promised to pass it to on.25
Pius responded promptly on three fronts. First, he gave his moral sanction, agreeing that the plotters faced “diabolical powers”—underscoring even, as Müller recalled, that they would be morally justified in blowing up Hitler’s plane, “since we had to wage our war against the powers of evil.” Müller could therefore reassure General Beck that assassination was allowed “in a moral emergency, to help preserve the free will of the people, which had been given them by their Creator.”
Second, Pius made practical plans to recognize the Post-Hitler regime. He suggested speeding matters by seeking the customary formal agrément—the statement of willingness to receive a proposed envoy—before an actual coup. He proposed that, in the event of an overthrow, Müller should be recognized as the Vatican’s special emissary to the post-Hitler government, with the title and status of ambassador-designate. That would show the world that Germany had made a fresh start. The new regime should then send Müller to petition Pius to mediate peace.
Third, Pius would seek a separate peace with the Western Allies. Although the Casablanca declaration made papal mediation unwelcome, Pius opposed the Allied unconditional surrender policy: “No nation would accept that,” Leiber recalled him saying. “To threaten Germany with it will only lengthen the war.” Pius sought a quick peace for many reasons, including to prevent a Soviet advance into Europe. He assured Müller that chances for peace were good if they ousted Hitler before an Allied invasion. Perhaps based on that assurance, General Tresckow soon spoke of agreements with the Western Powers for a separate surrender in the West.26
The British made no such agreement with Pius. Monsignor Kaas approached Ambassador Osborne, but the X-Report terms of 1940 were no longer on offer. Churchill, who felt hemmed in by Roosevelt’s unilateral declaration at Casablanca, might nevertheless have winked at what Müller proposed. But Churchill never got the chance, because a Soviet spy in British intelligence, Kim Philby, shared the proposal with his handlers in Moscow instead of his superiors in London.27
Washington received the overtures more warmly—or at least received them. By 11 February, Leiber had begun passing Müller’s messages to an American Jesuit in Rome, Father Vincent McCormick, who relayed them to US Vatican diplomat Harold Tittmann. Through a separate chain series of intermediaries, including exiled German-Jesuit Father Friedrich Muckermann, Müller reported to the European chief of the US Office of Strategic Services, Allen Dulles, in Berne. A postwar OSS report on Müller stated flatly: “he was our agent and informant during the war with Germany.” Despite Roosevelt’s refusal to negotiate, Dulles and OSS chief William Donovan not only pursued contacts with Müller, but hinted broadly that Hitler’s death would nullify the Casablanca declaration overnight.28
That was just what the German generals wanted to hear. “It was intended that a British-American invasion in the West should not be opposed; German troops were to be withdrawn to the interior of the Reich and to reinforce the Eastern front,” recalled Major General Alexander von Pfuhlstein. During the coup, while Pfuhlstein’s elite Brandenburg Division liquidated the SS in Berlin, the conspirators would “establish contact with America and England through the Vatican, with the purpose of negotiating for an armistice,” Pfuhlstein said in 1944, adding: “I think that the Vatican was chosen as the neutral meeting place for the diplomats concerned.” That Pius asked, in the bargain, for a free hand in naming German bishops for fifteen years gave the counterfactual scenario a texture of reality. Although Müller tried not to overpromise, he thought that Rome’s readiness to mediate inspired his friends “in Germany’s darkest hour.”29
Müller also brought from Rome the guidance Rösch requested. As if expecting to be out of contact for some time, perhaps during the chaos following a coup, Pius sent a flurry of letters to the German bishops in February, and then none at all for the next six weeks. Before that hush of a great held breath, on 24 February, Pius had endorsed what Father Odlio Braun called the Committee’s plans for “manly intercession.” At that time, Father Delp mischievously remarked to lay aides that “no tyrant has ever died in his bed. That’s no trouble to us.” Delp added: “Watch out, the whistle will be blown by the workers.”30
The pope’s role in the plotting created some problems, however. Chief among them was the need to hide his role. “We could not portray the pope as a direct accessory to an assassination,” Müller recalled.
Consequently, in the statement formulated by Beck and me—we had discussed exactly how I should draft it—everything had already been prepared so that in the event of an overthrow, the pope would seem ignorant about everything. . . . But we had to consider what we would do if such a thing was aborted. The pope couldn’t just immediately be standing by, visibly ready for a regime change—he’d look like a guilty schoolboy. . . . At that moment, much would depend on the demeanor of the pope.”31
Needing someone to front for Pius, Müller called on the Bishop of Berlin. Would Preysing, in the event of an overthrow, agree to become a papal legate? Preysing promised to conscientiously discharge whatever mission Pius entrusted to him, but could not conceal his skepticism. “The generals will hesitate until the Russians are in Berlin,” he told Müller, “and then maybe they will try to do something.”32
Even as Preysing spoke, however, events were in train that would prove him wrong.
ON 18 FEBRUARY, THE SS ARRESTED TWO COLLEGE STUDENTS IN Munich. Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie led a resistance cell that became known as the White Rose. Working at night in the woodshed behind their apartment, the Scholls printed leaflets—“white roses”—denouncing Hitler. They rode trains to other cities, carrying the leaflets in suitcases, and mailed them in post boxes, or scattered them on streets and in railroad stations. Once, the police opened Sophie’s luggage, but they did not find the leaflets hidden in her underwear.33
The Scholls became careless, however. In exuberant defiance, Sophie scattered handbills over the University of Munich quadrangle from a balcony. As the leaflets floated down, a janitor saw the Scholls flee. The Gestapo brought them to their headquarters in the former Wittelsbach palace. To compel Hans to betray those who supported them, they interrogated Sophie in front of him. An SS man shoved a leaflet into his face and demanded to know who wrote it. Hans confessed that he wrote it and begged them to leave his sister alone.34
Four days later, People’s Court Judge Roland Freisler arrived from Berlin to try the Scholls. Sophie testified that they had only written what many believed but dared not say. Freisler knew as well as they did that Germany could not win the war, she said. Why didn’t he have the courage to admit it? Freisler erupted, declaring that the SS must have treated her too leniently. They should have broken every bone in her body. But he would not fail to dispense justice. Sophie declared that God’s justice transcended the state’s; Freisler responded by reading out the state’s sentence: death. The Scholls’ mother screamed and collapsed in the gallery. That day the Gestapo beheaded her children.35
They died without revealing their links to the Catholic resistance. The Scholls had begun their underground work distributing a sermon by Bishop Clemens von Galen, denouncing Hitler’s gassing of the infirm and insane. Sophie Scholl had obtained episcopal permission to reprint the text and distribute it at the University of Munich. Father Delp had kept in touch with the Scholls through a friend. Moltke received the final, fatal handbill, probably through Josef Müller, who knew its author, Professor Kurt Huber. “A White Rose [pamphlet] was brought to my residence upstairs and presented to me by Prof. Huber,” Müller recalled. “I had then taken the White Rose [pamphlet] to Rome along with other things, and from there it had gone to England and arrived back here via Radio London.” Its ties to Müller and Delp made the White Rose almost a student chapter of the Black Chapel.36
The Scholls’ case shook the coup plotters. Some thought the Nazis had meant the trial as a warning. Why else would a Supreme Court judge have come out from Berlin?37
TWO WEEKS LATER, IN EARLY MARCH, HITLER FELL INTO THE PLOTTERS’ trap. Hitler agreed to visit Smolensk. Cavalry officers there volunteered to shoot him as he sat down to lunch or ambush him while he drove through the woods. Tresckow decided instead to sabotage Hitler’s flight home. On 7 March, ostensibly to hold an intelligence conference, Canaris and Oster flew to Smolensk with a pack of explosives. Tresckow’s aide, Schlabrendorff, locked the bomb in a case for which he had the only key.38
“A simple pressure on the head of the igniter broke a very small bottle releasing a corrosive substance,” Schlabrendorff recalled. The acid would eat a wire, and a firing pin would snap forward to ignite the bomb. “In order to be sure of the effect, we took not one but two packages of explosives and wrapped them into one package which looked like a package containing two bottles of cognac.”39
Hitler would arrive on 13 March, in the morning. The plan seemed all set. Father Rösch’s Committee had prepared the political grounds in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. General Olbricht told Schlabrendorff: “We are ready; it is time for the spark.”40
IN THE SISTINE CHAPEL, ON FRIDAY, 12 MARCH, PIUS CELEBRATED the fourth anniversary of his coronation. The Roman diplomatic corps attended en masse. A US chargé d’affaires, Harold Tittmann, recalled that the British and American representatives to the Holy See, D’Arcy Osborne and Myron Taylor, exchanged meaningful grins. Tittmann attributed the smiles to the tonic effect of Mussolini’s daughter. Edda Ciano caught attention with her flashing eyes, sable cape, and “curls like small horns arising from her forehead.” Only later would there seem another plausible cause for his colleagues’ knowing glee. Both had received indications—Osborne through Kaas, and Taylor through Müller—that action against Hitler was imminent.41
ON THE NEXT DAY, 13 MARCH, HITLER FLEW TO SMOLENSK. HANS Rattenhuber’s bodyguards, in field-gray SS uniforms, leveled their submachine guns as Hitler’s Focke-Wulf Condor landed. The stairs were lowered, the door opened, and Hitler descended, bent and tired. After a tense meeting with his generals, he got back on the plane. As Lieutenant-Colonel Heinz Brandt followed Hitler aboard, Schlabrendorff stopped him on the stairs.42
The propeller wash swirled snow around them and they had to shout to hear each other. Schlabrendorff asked whether Brandt would carry along a bottle of cognac for General Helmuth Stieff. Brandt said he would do so gladly.43
Schlabrendorff handed him a package and wished him a safe trip. As the plane took off, Schlabrendorff stood back and watched until it vanished in the falling snow.44