ON 26 SEPTEMBER, THE GESTAPO CAME FOR JOSEF MÜLLER. Warned by Maas, he had prepared. He had set all his affairs in order, as far as possible. He kept a few possessions with him—Maria’s letters, a snapshot of Christa in her school uniform. As he packed his things, he saw Sergeant Milkau’s anxious face outside the door. Müller looked for a long moment into the faithful guard’s eyes, trying to convey his thanks. Milkau had already promised that whatever happened, he would get word to Müller’s daughter and wife.1
The drive through Berlin revealed more ruin than Müller had imagined. Some streets evoked the photographs of contested Stalingrad. The houses in the West End, once the center of the city’s intellectual and social life, were burned out and stared menacingly with empty windows. Water stood in bomb craters, with bubbles of gas rising from shattered pipes, as the car circled the Kaiserhof Hotel and entered the gate of SS headquarters at 8 Prinz-Albrecht Strasse.2
Inside, two SS men put machine-pistols at Müller’s back. They herded him down the steps to a small room and told him to strip. When he asked why, one of them punched him in the face. At the touch of their searching hands, Müller focused on the door beyond. Perhaps they wanted to make sure he had not concealed a vial of poison in his anus. They ordered him to dress and took him to the basement lined with the infamous former sculptors’ studios. At Cell 7, they removed the cuffs and pushed him in.3
A bare ceiling bulb lit the windowless room. It contained a stool, a folding bed, and a tiny table. If not for his shackled wrists, Müller could have stood in the middle and touched each wall.4
An air-raid siren wailed. Doors flew open, and voices ordered him out. In the gloom, Müller saw Canaris and Oster.5
On 27 September, Müller met Oster in the toilets. They could not talk there because a guard paced in front of them. But they managed to whisper in the cold showers, their words covered by the spray. Müller asked about Zossen. Yes, Oster said, someone led the SS straight there. The Gestapo had the whole trove and would just try to wring out whatever they could, especially names, before killing them. They must string the SS along—false leads—anything to drag it out until the Allies reached Berlin.6
Heading back to Cell 7, Müller heard screams. When he thought they had ended, the screams grew louder again. They continued for a long time, each more terrible than the last, then changed into whimpers and moans.7
In the hall he passed Canaris. The admiral, always slight, now looked emaciated. His eyes glowed like embers in an ash pit. He whispered: “Herr Doktor, this place is Hell.”8
IN LATE NOVEMBER 1944, AN SS MAN LED MÜLLER TO AN ELEVATOR. Far up the shaft the cables rattled. At the third floor, they got off and walked down a long hall to an anteroom, where a guard with a machine gun stood by the door. From the double doors, a guard’s voice summoned him. In an adjoining room, Müller found himself standing before Franz Xavier Sonderegger.9
Müller had played a clever game until now, Sonderegger said. But the SS had known all along that Canaris protected a traitors’ nest. Now they could prove it. They knew what Müller had hatched with his friends in the Vatican—yes, even the pope. Sonderegger took a bulging folder from a drawer and laid it on a table. Müller should read this before making any more denials.10
He looked at the dossier. Proclamations Dohnanyi had written for Beck and Goerdeler, Oster’s handwritten study for the coup d’état, Müller’s Vatican reports. Yes, Müller said, feigning relief: This all seemed to be material his superiors had used to entrap the Allies and collect intelligence on their willingness to fight. Müller had played a role in that. As he had been saying for a year and a half now, he had come to the Abwehr in the first place because his Vatican contacts could supply helpful intelligence for the Wehrmacht.11
Sonderegger said that Müller could no longer hide behind that story. He should not thwart the SS once too often before things went to the next level. Life would no longer prove so pleasant for Müller, Sonderegger said. The SS now had custody of him, and it would take a tougher approach than the army. They had found many compromising documents in the army safe at Zossen. Müller might as well consider himself a dead man.12
Müller said evenly that he could accept that. Death meant “just a passage from this life to the next,” Sonderegger later quoted him as saying. Sonderegger asked Müller whether he prayed. Müller said he did. Did he pray for the SS, too? Sonderegger asked. Müller said yes, he prayed for his enemies most of all.
Sonderegger fell quiet for a moment. Then, saying he would return “in three minutes,” he put a sheet of paper on the table.13
There lay Father Leiber’s note. On papal stationery, watermarked with the sign of the fisherman, Leiber had scrawled the sine qua non for ending the war. Pius guaranteed a just peace in return for the “elimination of Hitler.”14
Müller tore the paper into pieces and shoved them in his mouth. When Sonderegger returned, Müller had choked the whole note down.15
“I DEFINITELY DON’T WANT TO DIE, THERE’S NO DOUBT ABOUT that,” Moltke wrote. “Flesh and blood rebel against it wildly.” For a long time, he had felt, as had his Prussian forebears, that “one must not make a fuss about dying by execution.” But back in October, the Gestapo had formally accused him of conspiring to overthrow the regime, a charge that carried the death penalty. Since then, the work on his defense had given “a mighty stimulus to my will to get round this thing.”16
The Catholic network helped Moltke cover his tracks. Orders Committee Bishop Johannes Dietz smuggled in messages, helping him synch his story with what other suspects said. Still, Moltke faced “grave danger,” as his wife gleaned.17
She went to Gestapo headquarters to plead for clemency. But an interview with SS General Heinrich Müller left no doubt that they wanted to kill her husband. After the First World War, Germany’s internal enemies had survived and taken over, the Gestapo chief said. The party would not let that happen again.18
IN THE FIRST WEEK OF 1945, FATHER DELP TRIED TO DECODE HIS own fate. “This is a moment in which the whole of existence is focused at one point and with it the sum total of reality,” Delp reflected on 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany. Finding himself “in the very shadow of the scaffold,” he learned that the presiding judge, the red-robed Roland Freisler, hated Catholics and priests.19
“Things seem clearer and at the same time more profound,” Delp wrote. “One sees all sorts of unexpected angles.” In his New Year’s stock taking, the war became both an expression and indictment of modernity. “Far more than a civilization or a rich heritage was lost when the universal order went the way of medieval and ancient civilizations.” Yet few saw “the connection between the corpse-strewn battlefields, the heaps of rubble we live in, and the collapse of the spiritual cosmos of our views.” Europe now faced the ultimate expression of modern nihilism, the prospect of life under Stalin’s boot. Communism, however, would serve as “a donkey for an imperialism of limitless proportions. . . . The Slavs have not yet been absorbed by the west and are like a foreign body in the working of the machine. They can destroy and annihilate and carry away enormous quantities of booty, but they cannot yet lead or build up.”20
Could the Church then rebuild Europe after the war? “So far as concrete and visible influence goes, the attitude of the Vatican is not what it was,” Delp regretfully wrote. He worried that the papacy had lost its moment, despite going through the moral motions.
Of course it will be shown eventually that the pope did his duty and more, that he offered peace, that he explored all possibilities to bring about peace negotiations, that he proclaimed the spiritual conditions on which a just peace could be based, that he dispensed alms and was tireless in his work on behalf of prisoners of war, displaced persons, tracing missing relatives and so on—all this we know and posterity will have documentary evidence in plenty to show the full extent of the papal effort. But to a large extent, all this good work . . . leads nowhere and has no real hope of achieving anything. That is the real root of the trouble—among all the protagonists in the tragic drama of the modern world there is not one who fundamentally cares in the least what the Church says or does. We overrated the Church’s political machine and let it run on long after its essential driving power had ceased to function. It makes absolutely no difference so far [as] the beneficial influence of the Church is concerned whether a state maintains diplomatic relations with the Vatican or not. The only thing that really matters is the inherent power of the Church as a religious force in the countries concerned. This is where the mistake started; religion died, from various diseases, and humanity died with it.21
ON 9 JANUARY DELP AND MOLTKE STOOD TRIAL IN A COMMANDEERED kindergarten. Watching “average” Germans pack the room in their Sunday suits reminded Delp of “a prize giving in a small school that hadn’t even the proper room for it.”22
Judge Freisler entered wearing a red robe. Since 20 July, he had courted Hitler’s favor by modeling the People’s Court on Stalin’s show trials. “Leaning far back in his chair, with a majestic gesture of his right arm he swore to the world . . . that National Socialism and its Reich would remain eternal—or would go down fighting to the last man, woman, and child,” recalled Protestant pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier, who stood trial with Moltke and Delp. When Freisler worked himself up, the blood rose to his face and blushed his bald head; he shrieked so loudly that a sound engineer warned him he would blow out the microphones.23
Delp stood trial first. “You miserable wretch, you sanctimonious little sausage,” Freisler began. “You rat—one should flush out and step on someone like you.” Freisler went on to abuse the Church more generally: “Scandals, bishops who are said to have had children, etc.; the Latin language, Jesuits’ corrupt dealings, etc.—this kind of thing came up in every other sentence.” Finally, Freisler demanded to know why Delp had become “one of Helmuth Graf von Moltke’s most active traitorous assistants. . . . Come on, answer!”24
The Jesuit said, “As long as people must live in inhuman and undignified conditions, we must work to change those conditions.” Freisler asked: “Do you mean that the state has to be changed?” Delp said, “Yes, that’s what I mean.”25
Decrying those words as “high treason,” Freisler proceeded to the charges. He cited the priest’s dealings with Stauffenberg, this “subsequently treacherous assassin.” Delp had, furthermore, arranged for the coup plotters to meet on Church properties, acting “with the authorization of the Jesuit Provincial of Southern Germany, Father Rösch.” Even Delp’s absence from resistance meetings at his rectory, Freisler turned against him. In a “typically Jesuitical” way, Delp had “temporarily disappeared like a [cathouse] madam, so that he could then wash his hands of the matter,” Freisler charged. “By that very absence you show that you yourself knew exactly that high treason was afoot and that you would have liked to keep your tonsured little head out of it. Meanwhile you may have gone to church to pray that the conspiracy should succeed in a way pleasing to God.”26
The trial continued the next day, with Moltke in the dock. Accusing him of “consorting with Jesuits and with bishops,” Freisler banged on the table and roared:
A Jesuit Father! Of all people, a Jesuit Father! And not a single National Socialist [at the Kreisau meetings]! Not one! Well, all I can say is: now the fig leaf is off! A Jesuit Provincial, one of the highest officials of Germany’s most dangerous enemies, he visits Count Moltke in Kreisau! And you’re not ashamed of it! No German would touch a Jesuit with a bargepole! These people who are excluded from military service because of their attitude! If I know there is a Jesuit Provincial in a town, it is almost a reason for me not to go to that town! . . . And you visit bishops! What is your business with a bishop, with any bishop?
FREISLER CAPPED HIS TIRADE WITH WHAT MOLTKE CONSIDERED A profound truth: “Only in one respect are we and Christianity alike: we demand the whole man!”27
ON 11 JANUARY, FATHER RÖSCH SAID MASS AT A FARMHOUSE. HE had just finished when the door burst open and three SS officers strode in. Untersturmführer Heinz Steffens put a pistol to Rösch and placed him under arrest. Steffens “immediately began to pump me for names, and accused me of about fourteen allegations in under two minutes,” Rösch recalled. “I explained that as a Catholic priest, naming names was out of the question for me on principle. So he hit me with all his strength.”28
Around 5:00 p.m. Steffens loaded Rösch into the open bed of a truck. With the Catholic family that sheltered him, Rösch rode in a snowfall to Dachau. The Munich police registry tersely reported the “arrest of the Jesuit Provincial August Rösch . . . for his participation in the events of 20 July 1944.” The camp barber shaved off Father Rösch’s hair, and Steffens bound his hands, saying, “We will never let you out of these shackles until we have hanged you.”29
AT FOUR O’CLOCK THAT AFTERNOON, FREISLER SENTENCED MOLTKE and Delp to death. Delp showed no emotion as he heard the verdict, but in the police van afterward, his composure broke. He fell into a frenzy of laughter, sputtering one-liners between manic gasps. The others sat subdued and still. To Gerstenmaier, whom Freisler had spared but branded a “blockhead,” Delp said, “Better a blockhead than no head at all.”30
The condemned were locked up and left alone, as if nothing had happened. During these lonely hours, Delp scrawled on scraps of newspaper and toilet tissue a final testament. “To be quite honest I don’t want to die, particularly now that I feel I could do more important work and deliver a new message about values I have only just discovered and understood,” he reflected. “I am internally free and far more genuine than I realized before. . . . When I compare my icy calm during the court proceedings with the fear I felt, for instance, during the bombing of Munich, I realize how much I have changed.”31
The January cold seeped through Delp’s barred window. Days passed and tedium returned: bound hands, harsh lights, the indecipherable noises. He wondered why his tormentors didn’t hang him right away and free up the cell for a fresh victim. Had Hitler decided to save him for some Neronian circus of persecution? If so, with Russian troops nearing Berlin, perhaps the Reich would collapse before these festival killings could occur. Thus Delp dared, once more, to hope.32
“Things always turn out differently from what one thinks and expects,” he wrote on 14 January. “I’m sitting on my cliff, focused totally on God and his freedom. . . . Waiting for the thrust that will send me over. . . . I believe that a lot depends on August [Rösch] not losing his nerve and remaining silent.”33