ON 13 JANUARY, THE GESTAPO TRANSFERRED FATHER RÖSCH from Munich to Berlin. The Jesuit Provincial now found himself in the same Lehrterstrasse prison where Josef Müller had spent the first year and a half of his internment. The guards confiscated his breviary, rosary, and military medals. For the next six weeks he was bound day and night and during most of the interrogations. His cell remained lit all night, except during air raids. Countless red crosses adorned the walls, drawn with the blood of smashed bedbugs.1
Denied mail privileges, Rösch availed himself of the secret Catholic prison post, run by two lay laundresses, both named Marianne. In clandestine letters, he coordinated his story with Fathers Delp and Braun, listing some of the “tactical lies” he told his interrogators. Rösch said, for instance, that he knew “nothing at all about an assassination planned for 20 July.” But since the SS clearly knew about his contacts with Moltke, Rösch admitted conferring with him about plans for a reconstruction, “in case the war had an inauspicious ending.” Asked “where he stood” with respect to National Socialism, he said he took the same view toward Nazism that Nazism took toward the Church: “I reject it 100 percent.” Would he say that to Judge Freisler? “Absolutely, as often as bells ring.” The guards didn’t beat him after that, concluding that they lacked leverage over a priest who, by his own account, had prayed for the “honor of a bloody martyrdom” every day since his First Communion.2
Rösch took up what he termed his “catacomb pastoral duties.” In one case, a Jew and a Jehovah’s Witness staged a power failure, allowing him to perform last rites in the cells of the sick. But in the main, Rösch found his chance during exercise hour. “Sometimes, if we were led on a walk around the yard, Father Rösch would overtake us in our ranks with hasty steps, and speak to his parishioners in a whisper, asking who wanted to receive the Sacrament,” recalled Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s protégé Eberhard Bethge. “Then, he asked us to arrange for clandestine written confession. And in mornings, if he said his Mass unobserved, we carried the consecrated wafer to the designated cells. His community grew.”3
THE SS INTERROGATORS PLANNED THEIR INTERROGATION OF FATHER Rösch carefully. At 6:00 p.m. on 1 February, their questions fell like darts around the pope’s role in the plots. The Jesuit later wrote down the line of inquiry from memory. “We still have to deal with the following complex issues with you: Your relationship with the pope and the Vatican; with the curia of your order; with Fr. Leiber.” Rösch felt “secretly pleased at this.” So long as the SS still sought answers to those questions, they might keep Father Delp alive. They had not given any reason for delaying Delp’s execution; perhaps they wanted to interrogate the two Jesuits together and confront them with contradictions in their stories.4
Father Braun managed to speak with Rösch during a walk in the prison yard. “Father, they hate the Catholics here,” Rösch recalled the Dominican saying. “But against you Jesuits there prevails an excruciating hate, a gruesome hate.” The guards told Rösch more than once: “We can’t wait to hang you alongside König and Siemer—that will be a beautiful day.” Rösch thought Father Siemer’s escape, which embarrassed the Nazis and removed a key suspect and witness, “had a lot to do with the [show] trial being postponed.”5
ON 2 FEBRUARY GESTAPO GUARDS LED DELP INTO THE INTERROGATION room at Plötzensee. Beneath his orange-and-gray striped pajamas, stamped with the number 1442, he seemed just a rack of bones. The prison had scheduled his death for noon.6
SS officer Karl Neuhaus would supervise the Jesuit’s final hours. A Plötzensee colleague recalled Neuhaus, a former Protestant theologian, as “a gaunt man with a face like a bird of prey.” It fell to Neuhaus to interrogate Catholic clergymen suspected of conspiring to kill Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944.7
“I wanted to know what Father Delp had to say about the attempted assassination,” Neuhaus said later, “and how he reconciled this violence with his convictions as a Catholic priest and Jesuit Father. I knew that he had some contacts with Stauffenberg. A witness had incriminated Father Delp. All of that was known and was already in the files when I interrogated him.” Yet Neuhaus did not know—and his SS superiors had ordered him to learn—just how closely Delp and his Catholic confederates had conspired with the pope. Having already grilled Father Rösch about his Vatican links, Neuhaus now subjected Delp to the same line of inquiry.8
He placed Delp’s fingers in a clamp lined with spikes. While Neuhaus shouted questions, his assistant, SS Hauptsturmführer Rolf Günther, turned a screw, driving the spikes into Delp’s fingertips. When that procedure produced no answers, Günther began to beat Delp from behind with an oak club larded with nail heads. With each blow, Delp fell forward on his face, but he refused to speak. Günther then enclosed Delp’s legs in tubes lined with steel needles and slowly drew the tubes tighter, so that the spikes gradually pierced the flesh. At the same time, to muffle the screams, he pushed the priest’s head into a metal hood and covered it with a blanket. When the screams penetrated even the hood, Günther put on a phonograph record of children’s songs and turned up the volume as high as it would go.9
Five hours later, when Father Delp had still not implicated the pope, Neuhaus helped him across the courtyard to the death hut. Sunlight slashed through two arched windows. Six meat hooks hung from a ceiling girder. Atop a tripod sat a 16-mm sound camera, crowned with lamps and loaded with color film. On a table stood a bottle of cognac, two glasses, and a coil of piano wire.10
The executioner and his assistant fortified themselves with cognac. The assistant, Johan Reichart, worked the wire into a noose. The executioner, Hans Hoffmann, looped it around Delp’s neck and drew it tight. They lifted the priest onto a hook and let him fall. The wire noose did not break his neck, but merely sliced into his windpipe. They left him there, twitching and twisting, for twenty-five minutes. Later, scrawled on a prison laundry form, an orderly found Father Delp’s last known words: “Thank you.”11
DELP’S DEATH SHOOK FATHER RÖSCH, LAY WORKER MARIANNE Hapig recalled. For the next months, the Jesuit provincial cut a “miserable figure.” Having recruited Delp into the plots, Rösch blamed himself for Delp’s death. As a Jesuit Provincial, charged with protecting and guiding his young priests, Rösch found the guilt hard to bear.12
In this demoralized state, Rösch endured more Gestapo questioning. A dark pressure suffuses one secret letter he wrote during these days, relating the line he had taken with his interrogators. “Those in question can come to grave harm. A whole complex of questions is yet to come about the role of the Papal Curia. . . . The hatred against us is very great.”13
Cagey as ever, Rösch bent the situation to his benefit. His frail health gave him the chance to work in the prison office, where he found his own file card. It recorded an order to kill him without trial. “So, it was possible for him, in conspiracy with some of the guards, to save himself and many others besides, by manipulation of the files,” a fellow priest recalled. A sympathetic prison official had Rösch “transferred to the list of those who had already been executed.”14
ON 3 FEBRUARY BERLIN ENDURED ITS WORST AIR RAID OF THE WAR. Josef Müller jostled with other prisoners in the basement on Prinz Albrecht Strasse. He looked at the ceiling, worried it would collapse. Water spouted from broken pipes, the lights went out, and soon Müller felt the February cold.15
Three days later, guards told him to pack up. In the rubbled courtyard, prisoners massed by transport trucks. With the Gestapo prison ruined, they were going to a concentration camp. No one expected to return. SS officer Walter Huppenkothen ordered Müller and Bonhoeffer kept handcuffed. As the truck rattled out of Berlin, they promised each other: let us go calmly to the gallows, as Christians.16
MARIA MÜLLER TRIED TO BRING HER HUSBAND A BIRTHDAY PACKAGE. She went to 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, but could hardly breathe because of the ash and smoke. People stumbled around like sleepwalkers. In the air hung the sickly sweet smell of bodies under wet stone. At Gestapo headquarters, the grand entry steps led up to empty space. The secret police had set up an alternate headquarters, in the crypt of the ruined Dreifaltigkeit Church on the Mausterstrasse. There Maria learned that the prisoners had been taken south to a concentration camp, ostensibly to protect them from air raids. Gestapo officials claimed not to know which camp. Maria went to see Franz Sonderegger. He said Müller had gone to Buchenwald, Dachau, or Flossenbürg. She wrote and telephoned all three. Clerks checked the prisoner lists, or at least went through the motions. They could find no record of Josef Müller.17
MÜLLER’S MAKESHIFT CALENDAR READ 26 MARCH. HE KNEW THAT since he would turn forty-seven the next day, his wife might try to visit him. He hoped not. He did not want Maria near Buchenwald, did not want her dirtied by it.18
Buchenwald overflowed with the dead and the living dead. The SS had run out of crematorium coke and had begun dumping bodies into a pit. Others lay in the streets where they had died. Blood had congealed in the coarse black scabs where starving prisoners had torn out the guts of the corpses for food. Müller was locked in a basement, which stank from its makeshift toilet, a vase sprinkled with lime.19
In that basement, Müller made a friend. Vassili Kokorin, a nephew of Soviet foreign minister V. M. Molotov, had tried to escape from Sachsenhausen by crawling through a tunnel, along with Stalin’s son, but SS German shepherds had tracked them down. Kokorin began teaching Müller Russian, and Müller taught Kokorin Christianity. Since the Soviets had raised Kokorin to regard religion as a tool of capitalism, Müller “tried to make it clear to him that Christ had always taken the side of the oppressed; true Christianity had always tried to help the weaker social classes.” On 13 February, they found themselves debating the Gospels as the sky darkened with hundreds of Allied bombers. Only later did they realize that the planes had firebombed Dresden, burning perhaps 25,000 civilians alive.20
During those weeks, Müller found solace in a letter from his daughter. An SS officer had handed it to him just before they left Berlin. Christa had gone to stay with relatives in Röttingen. The medieval town, surrounded by fortifications and towers, hid a ghastly secret: Röttingeners had killed twenty-one Jews in 1298. This infamous pogrom had happened on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday; Röttingen’s Jews had died for allegedly profaning the Communion host. Now Christa’s letter announced that she would take her First Communion there. On 8 April, in a special dress her grandmother had made, Christa would walk down the aisle, kneel in the nave, and receive the body and blood of Christ. Müller carried Christa’s letter with him, knowing it might remain, as he reflected, “the last sign of life of his loved ones.”21
AS HITLER MADE HIS LAST STAND IN BERLIN, NEW ARMY STAFFS sheltered in Zossen. The die-hards included infantry general Walter Buhle, who moved into the former Abwehr premises and looked around for more office space. Surveying the storage rooms on 4 April, he came across a safe containing five black, cloth-covered binders. Each held between eighty and two hundred pages, handwritten and dated. Buhle had found a chronicle of Nazi crimes and attempts to stop them, prepared by Hans Dohnanyi and other Abwehr officers, officially covered as the “diaries” of Admiral Canaris.22
Buhle felt no qualms about denouncing a disloyal officer. Standing near Hitler on 20 July, he had been injured when Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded. Buhle gave the diaries to Hans Rattenhuber, who passed them to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s deputy.23
ON 4 APRIL, THE GUARDS AT BUCHENWALD LOADED JOSEF MÜLLER and fourteen other prisoners into a wood-fueled van. Vassili Kokorin wedged in next to Müller. Pastor Bonhoeffer sat in back. They chugged southward, stopping every hour to fill the firebox.24
Müller wormed his way back toward Bonhoeffer. Knowing the SS had “worked on” Bonhoeffer at Buchenwald, Müller wanted to know what they had asked—and, especially, what he had answered. Bonhoeffer said, defensively, that he lacked Müller’s nerves. Well, Müller pressed, what had Bonhoeffer told them? “They put me under duress,” Bonhoeffer said. “They threatened that something would happen to my fiancée. I said that I’d been classified uk [military service exempt] so that I could organize a domestic intelligence service for Oster.” Müller’s heart sank. That was exactly what Bonhoeffer should not have said, because it broke the “ten commandments,” the SS-Abwehr pact banning military spying at home. The Gestapo had Bonhoeffer on a technicality—but they had him. “Dietrich, why didn’t you hide behind me?” Müller asked. The Abwehr would have covered for them. “They blackmailed me,” Bonhoeffer repeated. “My fiancée.”25
As the van rattled south in the dark, Müller recalled their trip to Rome. During their dialogues in the crypt, Bonhoeffer had ventured that Catholic priests, as celibates, made better fighters against Hitler, because their deaths would disadvantage no dependents.26
KALTENBRUNNER STAYED UP LATE THAT NIGHT, READING THE CANARIS chronicles. He found the contents so sensational that he brought the notebooks to Hitler’s war conference the next day at noon.27
Hitler immersed himself in the revelations. Reading the SS-marked passages in the notebooks, he became convinced that his great mission—now under threat from all sides—had not failed of its own accord. Instead, traitors in his own ranks had betrayed him by intrigue, lies, and sabotage. His anger exploded in a volcanic outburst: “Destroy the plotters at once.”28
AT DAWN THE VAN PASSED THROUGH HOF, NEAR MÜLLER’S HOMETOWN. He weighed an escape attempt. In the Franconian forest, he could perhaps hide with a woodsman. But the transport guards had a dog, which stood behind the prisoners with bared teeth whenever they got out to urinate. About noon they reached Neustadt, where the road forked for Flossenbürg. Knowing Flossenbürg’s reputation as a death camp, Müller prayed they would not make the turn toward it. The van stopped and the guards went into what looked like a police hut. They returned and said that Flossenbürg did not have room for new arrivals. Müller thanked God as the van drove on. Suddenly, two SS officers on motorcycles pulled alongside. The van eased over to a ditch and stopped. A rough voice called out for Müller. An urgent telex from Berlin had ordered him diverted to Flossenbürg.29
He got out of the truck. Vassili Kokorin bounded down and ran after him. Sensing that the Nazis had marked his friend for death, Kokorin wanted to say farewell. He hugged Müller and kissed his cheeks in the Russian way.30
The guards herded Müller into a green van. It reeked of lime and chlorine, with an odor of corpses. They drove up an incline, past clustered houses and a chapel. The camp spread across the spine of the hill: towers, barracks, barbed wire. A ravine gashed the ridge like a moat.31
Müller passed through an arched gate to a dusty yard. Several gallows stood under a canopy, screening them from general view. The guards forced him onto a cobbled road and led him to a low brick building that resembled a motor lodge. In one of the cells, the guards chained Müller to the wall and locked the door. The spartan space contained just a plank bed and a stool. Only a stray clanking of chains broke the silence.32
One of his neighbors told him Flossenbürg’s secrets. General Hans Lunding, the former Danish military intelligence chief, had been in the camp almost a year. Through a crack in his cell door, he had seen hundreds of prisoners led to their deaths in the execution yard. Lunding could also see the narrow footpath inmates used to cart the corpses to the crematorium in a valley outside the camp. He had seen seven or eight thousand borne off, two per stretcher. In winter, the bearers would sometimes slip on the frozen trail, and the corpses would fall off the stretchers and roll down the mountain. Over the last month, the rate of executions had overtaken the capacity of the crematorium, so the SS had started stacking the bodies in piles, drenching them with gasoline, and setting them on fire. Other inmates died by deliberate starvation, or, when the famished showed a stubborn will to live, the SS held their heads underwater.33
ON 8 APRIL, SS COLONEL WALTER HUPPENKOTHEN ARRIVED AT Flossenbürg. In what normally served as the camp’s laundry, he set up a court to try the Canaris plotters. Black shades blocked the windows. Naked bulbs glared above two tables. Huppenkothen sat by Otto Thorbeck, a fat man in a judge’s robe. Storm Leader Kurt Stavitzki stood behind them. The court did not provide any counsel for the defense.34
Huppenkothen proceeded first against Hans Oster. After mock formalities, Judge Thorbeck asked Stavitzki to read the charges—high treason and treason in the field during wartime. The prosecution confronted Oster with Admiral Canaris’s diary. Did Oster admit to having participated in this plot? Oster saw no point in lying now. Yes, he said, he did it for Germany.35
The court dismissed him and called Canaris. The admiral insisted that he had only played along with the plotters to learn their plans. He had intended to roll up the group before it could act. Military intelligence had to insinuate itself into any plot directed against the public safety. The SS could hang him for doing his duty, but if given the chance, he would do it again.36
Judge Thorbeck interrupted the proceedings and recalled Oster. When Thorbeck told Oster what Canaris had pleaded in his defense, Oster indignantly protested. His signature move—hiding in plain sight, pretending to be a pretender—had finally failed him. With a desperate look he insisted that he did it all for the Fatherland. He had not committed treason. Surely, Oster must have known that the admiral only pretended complicity. He did it for show, he cried desperately. Didn’t Oster understand that?37
No, Oster snapped, that’s wasn’t true. They should not pretend anymore. The SS would kill them in any case. They should stand up for what they did. Canaris should confess it proudly, as Oster had done. When Thorbeck asked whether Oster had falsely accused him, Canaris quietly replied, “No.”38
STORM LEADER STAVITZKI UNLOCKED MÜLLER’S CELL. “YOU WILL be hanged right after Canaris and Oster,” he taunted. As the guards let Müller out, Stavitzki called after him, “Good luck, gallows-bird!”39
Müller prepared for death. He sank to his knees in his striped orange and gray pajamas, whispering the Our Father. Then he motioned to one of his fellow prisoners, Russian General Pyotr Privalov, and asked him to memorize a message. Knowing that the last words of the condemned sometimes reached the outside world, he told Privalov he would shout to the hangman: “I die for peace!”40
Müller then spoke about his daughter’s First Communion. He had fought to keep the German Church intact, so that she could live to see this day. Now she would grow up without a father. But he clung to one consoling thought. On the same day he walked to the gallows—perhaps, even at the same hour—she would walk toward the altar to receive the bread of life.41
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER AWAKENED TO THE BARKING OF DOGS. A KEY turned in the lock and two men stood in the doorway. It was time. The guards followed him down the hall to the guardroom, where Oster and Canaris waited. They followed orders to undress. A door opened, chill air blew in, and the guards took Canaris. The barking intensified. A shadow ran. The door closed. After a long, long time, the door opened. The guards took Oster. The door closed. After a short time, the door opened again. The guards took Bonhoeffer.42
Arc lights glared. To Bonhoeffer’s left stood Huppenkothen, Stavitzki, and a man with a stethoscope. To the right, guards restrained dogs. The executioner bound Bonhoeffer’s hands behind his back, and then beckoned to him. Bonhoeffer mounted the three steps and turned. Someone put a noose around his neck. The executioner kicked the steps aside.43