ASPADE PUSHED THROUGH A VAULT IN THE VATICAN CRYPT. THE pope’s excavators had discovered a grave. Coins from medieval Christendom glinted on the floor. At one end of the vault lay some bones. Monsignor Kaas summoned Pius the Twelfth, who sat on a stool beside the cavity. Jesuit Father Engelbert Kirschbaum handed out a breastbone, then half a shoulder blade. He could not find the feet or skull.1
Paradoxically, the missing bones convinced Kaas that he had found what he sought. A Dark Age legend said that the Church had removed Peter’s skull from its original grave, to adorn the nearby basilica of Saint John Lateran. The missing feet, too, conformed to an old tale. If the Romans had crucified Peter upside down, they would likely have hacked the body off his cross by severing the legs at the ankles.2
The tomb tiles dated from Vespasian’s reign, a generation after Peter’s death. Pius’s personal physician decided that the remains had belonged to a “robust” man. Among the bones, Kirschbaum discovered traces of a distinctive purple garment, interwoven with fine threads of gold. The Vatican later announced that the relics were the remains of Saint Peter.3
ON 12 APRIL 1945, PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DIED OF A CEREBRAL hemhorrage in Warm Springs, Georgia. The news gave Hitler a few hours of ecstasy. Goebbels telephoned, screeching with joy. “My Führer, I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead! It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. It is the turning point!”4
But his government had begun to flee the city. A hope of fighting from the Alps formed in his mind. He ordered his staff to study the possibility of moving munitions factories to the Tyrol, along with the special prisoners he was saving for postwar show trials. Despite the Black Chapel hangings, General Halder and other suspected plotters still remained alive; they must go south, first to Dachau and then into the Alps. Before the Allies found the camps, the SS should have all other political prisoners “done away with.”5
THE CHIEF AMERICAN SPYCATCHER IN ROME, JAMES JESUS ANGLETON, sent an agent into the Vatican on the day Roosevelt died. James S. Plaut, formerly of the Fogg Museum at Harvard, served in the Office of Strategic Services as director of the Orion Project, trying to recover art looted by the Nazis. At Angleton’s request, Plaut visited Albrecht von Kessel, still nominally the first secretary in the German embassy at the Holy See. Kessel had written a manuscript detailing his role as Stauffenberg’s Vatican agent, and he gave Plaut a copy.6
The loss of his comrades in the 20 July coup haunted Kessel. But he saw their sacrifice as a “secret seed,” from which something good might grow. “My friends loved their people,” Kessel reflected. “They were committed to Western civilization and wanted to reawaken it in us and our neighbors; they bowed down before God and fought against the evil ones with a holy fury. . . . They are now at rest, who knows where, under the Mother Earth. But the seed they sowed will rise, and of their efforts and desires people will say, in the years or decades ahead: the stone which the builders rejected, has become the cornerstone.”7
PIUS ENTERED HIS STUDY JUST BEFORE 9 A.M. ON 15 APRIL, IN KEEPING with his routine. He pressed a button to summon his undersecretary for extraordinary affairs. Monsignor Tardini reported that the new American president, Harry S. Truman, would extend the tenure of Myron Taylor, Roosevelt’s personal representative to Pius. Taylor had hailed the pope’s support for Roosevelt’s crowning legacy, a postwar United Nations, which would convene for the first time in San Francisco.8
Pius then signed a new encyclical, Interpreter of Universal Anguish. “Too many tears have been shed, too much blood has been spilled,” he had written. “It is hardly enough to pour out many prayers to heaven; we must use Christian morals to renew both public and private life. Change the heart and the work will be changed.”9
THE RED ARMY UNLEASHED A MASSIVE ARTILLERY BARRAGE ON BERLIN. On 16 April thousands of shells boomed down. Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder asked him whether they should leave.
“No,” he sullenly said. “Calm down—Berlin will always be German!”
Schroeder insisted that she did not fear death and regarded her own life as done. But the door was closing for the Führer to continue the war from the Alps. American forces had reached Elbe River, just sixty miles to the west. With the Americans on one side and the Russians on the other, the western and eastern fronts would soon be separated by a subway.
“Time!” Hitler raved. “We’ve just got to gain time!”10
AT LEHRTERSTRASSE PRISON, A GUARD UNBOLTED FATHER RÖSCH’S door. The Jesuit fled into the basement bomb shelter as the Soviet barrage began. Two minutes later, an artillery round destroyed his cell. “Because of the pending conquest of Berlin, which grew ever closer, a great uneasiness naturally arose among us,” Rösch remembered. As the prison came under artillery fire, the guards seemed disoriented. They tightened the prisoners’ shackles, but returned their possessions, including their now worthless Reichsmarks.11
During the barrage, Rösch ran into Karl Ludwig Baron von Guttenberg. The Catholic Abwehr officer had introduced him to Count Moltke in 1941. “I gave him Holy Communion, which became his viaticum, on the day of his death, in a community mass, forbidden, of course, and celebrated in a hidden cellar room,” Rösch recorded. “I last saw him on the night of 23 April 1945. A detachment of SS came to take him away.” The guards led Guttenberg and thirty-six other inmates into the rubble of ruined buildings. About a hundred yards from the prison, the SS shot the prisoners in the backs of their heads.12
ON 23 APRIL, THE US ARMY ENTERED FLOSSENBÜRG. A JEWISH survivor in his early teens led the troops around.
“He showed us the path from the main buildings where the prisoners had to remove their clothes before walking down a number of steps into a small open area where they had placed the gallows,” recalled Leslie A. Thompson, Protestant chaplain of the 97th Infantry Division. “Near this were buildings in which they stacked the bodies until they had time to burn them. There was a stack of many bodies here. Near this I observed a large cistern-like area. . . . Looking down, I saw that it was almost full of small bones.”13
MÜLLER’S WIFE, MARIA, HAD STOPPED RECEIVING LETTERS. ON HER behalf, a local security official telephoned Kaltenbrunner in Berlin. “We have deleted the name of Josef Müller,” the answer came back. “One may no longer mention that name. Müller is a dead man.”14
Maria now hoped only to learn her husband’s last words. His former secretary, Anni Haaser, lived near Dachau, and she visited the camp seeking news from transferees. Prisoners transferred between camps often carried news of executions, final messages or letters from the dead. From the reports of recent arrivals from Flossenbürg, Müller’s Soviet friend Vassili Kokorin concluded that the SS had hanged him.15
In the third week of April, Kokorin heard that a new prisoner had arrived from Flossenbürg. Seeking Müller’s last words, Kokorin went to the transferee’s cell and tapped the grille. Someone stirred on the bunk and came over. The blue eyes that looked out through the bars belonged to Joey Ox.16