RADIO BERLIN BROADCAST HITLER’S RASPY VOICE AT 1:00 A.M. on 21 July. “My German comrades,” he said,
If I speak to you today it is first in order that you should hear my voice and should know that I am unhurt and well, and secondly, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history. A very small clique of ambitious, irresponsible and, at the same time, senseless and stupid officers have concocted a plot to eliminate me and, with me, the staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. The bomb, planted by Colonel Count Stauffenberg, exploded two meters to the right of me. It seriously wounded a number of my true and loyal collaborators, one of whom has died. I myself was entirely unhurt, aside from some very minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard this as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence. The circle of these usurpers is very small and has nothing in common with the spirit of the German Wehrmacht and, above all, none with the German people. It is a gang of criminal elements, which will be destroyed without mercy. Every German, whoever he may be, has quite the same duty to ruthlessly confront these elements, and either arrest them immediately or—if they should somehow resist arrest—to wipe them out without further thought. The command has gone out to all our troops. You are to carry out [this command] blindly, in accordance with the obedience to which the German army is accustomed.1
WHEN FATHER KÖNIG HEARD HITLER’S SPEECH, A WITNESS SAID, HE went pale. König knew that Father Delp had met with Stauffenberg a few weeks before. Both priests knew the Catholic colonel’s plans. König asked a fellow Jesuit, Father Franz von Tattenbach, to warn Delp to hide.2
Tattenbach bicycled in the dark to the rectory in Bogenhosen. He leaned his bike against a tree and threw pebbles at Delp’s window. Delp appeared at the window in a track suit. Tattenbach climbed up a ladder and briefed him. Father Delp said spontaneously: “Damn it all.”3
To avoid the appearance of guilt, he would remain at St. George’s and say Mass. If Delp needed to escape, he assured Tattenbach, he could use a secret door in the rectory wall. It opened into Herzog Park, where Delp could meet contacts. They would smuggle him to a farmer’s house.4
SS GUARDS STRUTTED THROUGH THE LEHRTERSTRASSE PRISON. ALL through the predawn hours of 21 July, they hooted and taunted the prisoners, shouting that the Führer lived. An imprisoned private, whose cell flanked Müller’s, blurted out that he wished Hitler had died. An SS guard heard and dragged him out of the cell, screaming that the private would pay for his words.5
Müller and other jailed plotters wondered what had gone wrong. They knew that communications between the plotters in East Prussia and Berlin had failed. No one knew why. But when Stauffenberg reached Berlin, still believing he had killed Hitler, almost four critical hours had passed. When the conspirators finally got their troops moving, some Nazi leaders had recovered and alerted loyal commanders. The coup collapsed before it began.
Handcuffed generals streamed into the Lehrterstrasse. Trading glances with the monocled General Stieff, Müller held up his own shackles in solidarity, as if to say that they must stand together, to the last consequence.6
FATHER DELP’S FELLOW PRIESTS URGED HIM TO RUN FOR IT. BY LATE July, SS detectives had probed the perimeters of the Jesuit’s secret circle. But Delp said he didn’t want to leave his parishioners during “these difficult times of night air raids.” He also didn’t want to jeopardize his final profession of vows, scheduled for mid-August. But Delp’s deepest concern probably remained averting the suspicion that would fall on him or others if he fled, as he had told Father Tattenbach the night the coup failed. So he remained at St. George’s, visibly tense. Father Braun, who visited Delp and Rösch “immediately after” 20 July, remembered: “Something like a foreboding anticipation weighed on us all. No one knew how great or how close the danger was. But we didn’t speak of it. Only several times, when we clearly weren’t being watched, did he [Delp] wink at me. His look summarized everything: The question: what’s going to happen?” On 26 July Delp’s friend Georg Smolka urged him to hide in a Bavarian farmhouse. The priest, smiling, pulled open a drawer and revealed a revolver, “for defense.” Berlin contacts would warn him in code, through trusted cutouts, if danger loomed.7
On 28 July the warning came. Dr. Ernst Kessler, head of the legal department at the Bavarian Motor Works, received a telex for Delp from “our friends in the resistance in Berlin.” The prearranged danger message stated, as Kessler recalled, that “the secret discussion between Father Delp and his Social Democratic friends had been cancelled for security reasons.” Kessler got into his car and sped to the early Mass at St. George’s to deliver the message.8
When Kessler arrived, the service had already begun. Delp read the day’s gospel: “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death.”9
Kessler left the church and entered the sacristy through the side door. In the most urgent terms, he asked the Vincentian nun assisting at the Mass to give Delp a slip of paper at the altar. As Delp said the Suscipe Pater prayer, the sacristy door opened a crack and then softly closed. The sacristan could not bear to interrupt the Offertory, as Delp held up the paten and bread, saying: “Receive, O Lord, all my liberty. Take my memory, my understanding, and my entire will.” Kessler later posited that a “guardian angel . . . impressed by this sacred action,” caused the sacristan to retreat, likely sparing Kessler and the nun the noose. For though no one yet knew it, two plainclothes Gestapo agents had already entered the church.10
After Mass, the sacristan handed Kessler’s note to Delp in the sacristy. Delp read the note and then swallowed it. He left the church by the sacristy door, went into the garden, and lit the stub of a cigar. The sun slanted through oak leaves and lit up the smoke. Delp decided to carry on normally. Two men in hats and trench coats approached him.11
In front of the church, parish regulars cleared bomb rubble. “It was a steel-blue, cheerful day, and everything seemed so unreal, that is if one would have even been able to comprehend it,” parish secretary Luise Oestreicher remembered. Delp emerged from the rectory with the two men, wearing an overcoat in the summer heat. His complexion had turned gray and he looked ill. “I’m under arrest,” he said in a low, strained voice. “God be with you. Goodbye.”12
ON 24 JULY, A MILITARY JEEP PULLED INTO ST. PETER’S SQUARE. Raymond G. Rocca, an X-2 (counterintelligence) officer with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), entered the offices of the Vatican secretariat of state. He had an appointment with an American Jesuit, Father Vincent McCormick. Rocca had won McCormick’s cooperation by sharing with him a dossier on Gestapo penetration of the Gregorian, the Jesuit university where McCormick served as rector. McCormick led Rocca down a back passage, through the basilica, and down some stairs into the crypt. There Rocca met Monsignor Kaas, who seemed preoccupied with excavations. Rocca knew that the bespectacled German émigré had once chaired the Catholic Center Party, and that he still advised Pius on German affairs.13
Rocca explained his business. Briefly, X-2 wanted to confirm the bona fides of some interned Germans who represented themselves as anti-Nazis. Rocca sought especially to verify claims by Albrecht von Kessel, deputy Reich ambassador to the Holy See, that the entire embassy had been in on the plot against Hitler. If deported to Germany, they would be “as good as dead as soon as they re-entered the territory of the Reich.”14
Kaas backed Kessel—and then said something that floored Rocca. The monsignor knew about two earlier coup plots. Rocca could not grasp how a senior churchman could have mixed in such dangerous matters. When Rocca tried to learn more, Kaas referred him to another German émigré—Father Leiber.15
In OSS offices on the Via Sicilia, Rocca traded cables with X-2/London. Needing anti-Nazis to rebuild Germany after her defeat, Rocca’s bosses asked him to pursue the leads from Kaas. But when Rocca tried to see Father Leiber, intermediaries told him to wait. Father McCormick suggested that someone at a higher level, perhaps even the pope personally, had to approve the interface. In the meantime, Rocca cabled the OSS Research and Analysis Division in Washington for background traces on the Catholic resistance.16
The trace netted some surprising reports. To Rocca the most surprising came from German émigré Willy Brandt, who later became chancellor of West Germany. Though staunchly Protestant and socialist, Brandt wrote flatly: “The Catholic Church is the most widespread and best organized opposition in Germany.” Because clerics interacted with all levels of society, they could maintain contacts, even in military circles, without arousing Gestapo suspicion. The Church resisted most fiercely in Catholic Bavaria, where the Munich Jesuits oversaw “a well-built organizational apparatus.” The outlawed Catholic Center Party’s trade unions had also “for years been engaged in underground activities.”17
But because the Catholic resistance worked in great secrecy, the OSS knew little about specific operations and still less about coordination and control. “The German Church opposition has some representatives abroad,” Brandt observed, “but they work very cautiously.” Father Leiber’s reluctance to meet with OSS agents seemed to underscore that caution. Rocca therefore felt honored and grateful when on 18 August Leiber agreed to see him.18
Leiber admitted to links with the plotters. They had “almost invariably kept him informed of their activities,” Rocca recorded. The Jesuit detailed three plots predating 20 July. Among the conspirators, Leiber named General Franz Halder, the former Wehrmacht chief of staff, known to OSS as “a strong figure in Catholic circles.” Leiber implied, but did not state outright, that he had shared his knowledge of the conspiracies with the pope.19
Rocca suspected that Leiber knew far more than he would tell. How, Rocca wondered, had Leiber kept abreast of the plots? Did the Vatican have a special courier or intermediary with the German resistance? If so, could OSS get to him? Most fundamentally: Why should the plotters have gone to such extreme lengths to keep the pope’s closest aide informed of their designs?20
IN AUGUST THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT LAUNCHED OPERATION Thunderstorm, a broad attack on suspected traitors. The Wehrmacht ejected the surviving coup leaders, so that instead of receiving courts-martial, they stood before Judge Roland Freisler in the People’s Court. Hitler’s wrath also fell on the Church conspirators.21
The SS tortured Delp, and issued warrants for König and Rösch.
König hid in a coal bin at Pullach. Rösch hid in a grain silo in rural Bavaria, and then on the farm of a family whose Jesuit son had died on the eastern front.
Himmler’s hunt for Committee priests broadened to the Dominicans. On the night of 16/17 September, Provincial Laurentius Siemer was awakened about 1 a.m. by a phone call from the gatekeeper of the Schwichteler convent. Two men wanted to talk to him. Siemer replied that they should come back in the morning and went back to sleep. As the two men then tried to climb through the window, the gatekeeper again awakened Siemer, who now realized that the visitors were Gestapo. He consulted Dominican Father Otmar Decker, and they conceived a diversion. While Siemer left the convent by the garden gate, Decker approached the secret policemen and they pounced on him, as expected. Decker led them to the Provincial’s room on the second floor, so that Siemer gained time and reached the forest. Siemer sneaked into the village of Schwichteler and hid at first in a woodshed, and later in a pigsty.
The Gestapo tried to get to Siemer through his aide, Father Odlio Braun. On 7 October a female Gestapo agent, Dagmar Imgart, better known as “Babbs” or “Babsy,” appeared on the doorstep of Braun’s Berlin office. A few days earlier, she had asked him to intercede for a jailed pacifist Catholic priest, Max Josef Metzger. Braun found the request suspicious, because the Nazis had beheaded Metzger six months before. On the other side of the street stood a man observing everything. Braun told his secretary to stall the woman at the door. He then rushed upstairs, went out a gable hatch, and escaped to the adjoining Dominican cloister by jumping across the rooftops.22
ON 22 SEPTEMBER, THE SS SEARCHED AN ABWEHR ANNEX AT ZOSSEN. They drilled into a safe and found evidence of the Vatican’s role in the plots. The trove included a note on papal stationery, describing British conditions for an armistice with Germany—listing the sine qua non as “elimination of Hitler.”23
Four days later, the guards withdrew from the hall by Müller’s cell. Commandant Maas approached Müller for a private talk. The SS had uncovered incriminating material at Zossen, Maas whispered. They would not stop until they tore Müller to pieces. But one of the guards, Milkau, could lead Müller out to a proletarian section of the city. Former members of the Social Democratic Party would hide Müller there. The SS might think to hunt for him in a Bavarian monastery, but not in a Red sector of Berlin.24
Müller thanked Maas but declined the offer. It would put his wife behind bars and his friends under suspicion. Maas nodded, as if he had expected that answer. He said he would leave his own Luger on Müller’s bed. But Müller again protested. As a devout Catholic, he deemed suicide a mortal sin.25
ON THE MORNING OF 27 SEPTEMBER, HITLER REFUSED TO GET OUT of bed. He spurned food and showed no interest in the war. His alarmed adjutants had never seen him so listless. “It seemed to me,” recalled his secretary, Traudl Junge, “that he had just laid down and said, ‘I will not do anything anymore.’”26
For six days, Hitler stayed in bed, sometimes crying out in agony. Dr. Morrell examined him and concluded that nothing physical caused his pain. The Führer just seemed depressed.27
Morrell asked the inner circle what might have shattered Hitler’s spirits. They let him in on a secret. The Gestapo had recently discovered the assassination plotters’ secret archives in a safe at Zossen. Since learning about the contents of the files on 26 September, Hitler had changed. Whatever the documents contained (no one told Morrell), Hitler had barred from the People’s Court. He himself would decide the outcome of the affair.28
While Hitler brooded in bed, Allied armies neared the Rhine. His senior staff needed to rejuvenate him. Morrell summoned Dr. Erwin Giesing, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, to examine Hitler.29
Giesing saw a broken man lying on his bed in a nightgown. Hitler raised his head in greeting and then dropped back to the pillow. His eyes looked empty and he complained of pressure in his head. He spoke of “the continuous nervous strain of the last month.” After all, at some time the twentieth of July was bound to affect him. “Up to now I’d had the will to keep all this inside me—but now it’s broken out.”30
Giesing removed a glass vial from his case. The vial contained a 10 percent cocaine solution, which Giesing had administered to Hitler since August. Giesing swabbed a cotton dipper into the vial and then brushed around the edges of Hitler’s nose. The Führer soon felt better. He got out of bed, paced the room, and launched into a monologue. He’d read the last letters the hanged plotters sent their wives. General Stieff wrote that he had converted to Catholicism. With a hearty laugh Hitler said he was “happy to give the pope this devil’s black soul but only once he’d been hanged.”31
After half an hour of euphoric ranting, Hitler’s words began to fade. His eyes fluttered. He took Giesing’s hands, pressed them tightly, and requested more of “that cocaine stuff.” Giesing grasped Hitler’s pulse and found it rapid but weak. The Führer had fallen back onto the bed, unconscious. Giesing let him sleep. He packed his kit and returned to Berlin, leaving Morrell to wonder what so upset Hitler in the Zossen documents. Only after the war would survivors of the inner circle learn what the files showed. Since the war’s first month, according to an SS final summary of the Zossen papers, Hitler’s prospective killers “had maintained connections with the pope.”32