AS THE ALLIES TOOK ROME, HITLER’S FEARS FIXED ON FRANCE. He doubted that an invasion loomed, but the waiting annoyed him. In April, the Abwehr had obtained a proof copy of Eisenhower’s still secret proclamation to the French people, announcing the landing of Allied troops. Yet reconnaissance of southeastern England showed few landing craft facing the Dunkirk coast, where Field Marshall Erwin Rommel thought the Allies would strike. Luftwaffe meteorologists forecast several days of bad weather. The field marshal of the Fifteenth Army, charged with guarding the English Channel, was on a hunting party. Rommel returned to Berlin to celebrate his wife's birthday. As Hitler went to bed, after midnight on 5/6 June, he did not suspect that five thousand enemy ships had already sailed for Normandy.1
News of parachute and glider landings in Normandy spread that night. Troops on Rommel’s West Wall heard ships’ engines offshore. No one dared to awaken the Führer; the first reports in war often proved wrong. The situation would not clear up, Hitler’s adjutants told themselves, until daybreak.2
By then the Allies had won a beachhead. It took the invaders only twelve bloody hours to secure a strip of Europe two miles deep and fifteen miles wide. Allied air supremacy kept German reserves from moving by daylight. When Hitler’s noon conference began on 6 June, he had already lost France.3
THAT AFTERNOON, FATHER DELP TRAVELED BY TRAIN FROM MUNICH to Bamberg. A youth pastor had invited him to address a Catholic youth group. Five months of caution since Moltke’s arrest had left Delp restless; he relished the chance to speak. Yet he had more urgent and secret reasons to visit Bamberg. While Delp reviewed his notes on the northbound express, a lay co-conspirator, Bavarian monarchist Franz Sperr, had already begun the advance work.4
At 3:00 p.m., Sperr called at one of Bamberg’s best homes. Claus von Stauffenberg showed Sperr in. The colonel had taken a few days’ leave from Berlin, as he did not know when he might see his family again. He gave Sperr a bleak picture of the war. The lack of manpower reserves put Germany in straits. By Sperr’s account, Stauffenberg said: “Peace requires an internal political change—the elimination of the Führer.” Sperr had left Stauffenberg’s long before 9:00 p.m., when Father Delp finished a lecture at the Kleberstrasse rectory.5
The youth pastor, Jupp Schneider, then led Delp into an office. He introduced Delp to a longtime coworker, Toni Müller. Schneider described her as a trusted person who would lead Delp to a certain address.6
Müller rode a bicycle, weaving slowly as Delp followed on foot. After 2.1 kilometers, she dropped a handkerchief in front of a home on the Schützenstrasse. Delp knocked on the door. Stauffenberg’s wife, Nina, opened it. Her husband seemed to be expecting Delp and received him graciously. Some later accounts portrayed Stauffenberg as furious that the Jesuit had come to his home, since visits by the plotters endangered his family. Yet Sperr’s visit that day had prompted no such concerns. Delp and Stauffenberg spoke for two hours, until half-past eleven, when Delp caught the last train back to Munich.7
The available evidence gives clues to the contents of their talk. Later, in an intentionally misleading account, Delp wrote that they spoke “in general terms about the state of Germany, the concerns of the bishops, and the relationship between the Church and the government.” This version, written for Gestapo investigators, omitted Delp’s talk to the Bamberg underground, and the dropped-handkerchief spycraft that led him to Stauffenberg’s home. Delp instead claimed that he made a “chance” visit to the north—impelled to travel two hours by train because he felt “personally curious” to learn about the Normandy invasion. Why he expected Stauffenberg to receive him he did not say. During that visit, Delp went on, he decided to ask Stauffenberg whether the Jesuits, excluded from military service, could become members of Organization Todt, the construction corps that built the Führer’s bunkers.8
From Sperr the Gestapo would get a version that seemed more credible. Delp knew that Stauffenberg planned an assassination, Sperr attested, because Stauffenberg told Delp his plan. Canvassing what Sperr called “questions of resistance,” Stauffenberg and Delp discussed how Catholic bishops could help the military plotters. Delp shared “everything he knew about bishops and church organizations in certain cities,” Sperr said. Delp further reviewed the political ideas he had developed with Moltke, building on papal social encyclicals. Stauffenberg agreed with Moltke’s program, at least as the Jesuit framed it. Workers in post-Hitler Germany would share in decisions about wages and hours, and retain strong welfare protections. Yet Delp, like Stauffenberg, also upheld aristocratic principles. Where Delp rejected Nazi “leveling” and urged rule by a “creative elite,” Stauffenberg had written a conspirator’s oath that declared: “We scorn the lie of equality and we bow before the hierarchies established by nature.”9
Stauffenberg would likely have told Delp little about how Hitler would die. Yet to help the plot, the bishops had to know not only that the coup would happen, but when. In fact, after Delp met Stauffenberg, the Munich Jesuits knew the planned and revised coup dates. Delp himself apparently encouraged the project; he told a friend, business professor Georg Smolka, that he had stressed to Stauffenberg “the desire of many for action as soon as possible.”10
Before returning to Munich, Delp had stopped in Jupp Schneider’s rectory. Schneider recalled an excited Delp saying: “I believe that today I have done more for my fatherland and all of you than in my whole previous life. Pray that everything goes well.”11
The next day, Delp spoke even more suggestively. In the rectory of the Church of the Precious Blood in Bogenhosen, he talked “twice in half a night directly about the rights to resistance,” his friend Hans Hutter recalled. “Father Delp was convinced that Christians must have a right to resist for reasons of conscience, if various conditions were met. In particular, there had to be a guarantee that the ones who wielded this right to resistance were in a position to break the power of the dictator and to take over the government. During our conversations, and I still recall this very exactly, he emphasized that a resistance was absolutely necessary politically in order to prove to the world that forces were still alive in Germany which could overcome a dictatorship from within.” In the context of those remarks, Hutter attached a specific meaning to Delp’s parting words—“It must happen”—and to what Delp inscribed in a gift copy of his book Man and History: “Whoever doesn’t have the courage to make history becomes its poor subject. Let’s do it.”12
IN EARLY JULY, DIETRICH BONHOEFFER’S UNCLE VISITED JOSEF Müller in jail. Paul von Hase, military commandant of Berlin, had joined the plotters. In the event of a coup, Hase said, he would seal off the government buildings. The Home Army would supply the troops. It would happen soon.13
A few days later, Stauffenberg’s circle passed Müller a message. It came through the Lehrterstrasse prison commandant, Major Maass, who had likewise joined the plot. In the event of an overthrow, Maass would release Müller. Stauffenberg would have a plane fueled and waiting to fly Müller to Rome. There Müller would partner with Pius to initiate peace talks with the Allies. To speed matters, as in the March 1943 plot, Pius had again granted a formal agrément stating his willingness to receive a proposed envoy before the actual coup. Müller’s “friends in Rome” had preappointed him special emissary of the new government to the Holy See, with the title and status of ambassador-in-waiting. Where some had seen the Vatican as the first foreign power to recognize Hitler’s rule, now the Vatican would be the first foreign power to legitimize its downfall.14
ON THE NIGHT OF 19 JULY, STAUFFENBERG ENTERED A CHURCH IN Berlin. He dipped his good hand in holy water and made the Sign of the Cross. Werner von Haeften sat in a rear pew while Stauffenberg moved through the candlelit nave to a confessional. By some accounts, he knelt at the grille of secrecy and asked for Saint Leo’s Absolution, granted to Catholics in danger of imminent death. After a few minutes, he emerged from the church and stepped into a waiting car.15
Getting out at home, he told his driver to return at 6:30 the next morning. Then, safely inside, Stauffenberg drew the bedroom curtains and packed his briefcase with two 975-gram lumps of plastic explosive.16