Volume
21, Number 4 (December 2015)
Review
of Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Vatican’s Secret War against Hitler
(New York: Basic Books, 2015), 375 Pp. ISBN 9780465022298.
By
Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University
That
Pope Pius XII was involved in several failed plots to kill Hitler has been
publicly known since the 1960s, if not since the close of the Second World War.
But there have been few investigations into the actual cloak and dagger. Mark
Riebling’s methodically-researched detective story, cast in the genre of a
thriller, deserves widespread attention for the light that it sheds on this
clandestine world of intrigue and terror in which the pontiff played a central
role.
In
the detail given to the spy rings operating out of the Vatican, Riebling’s
account goes far beyond earlier accounts like those of the American scholar,
Harold Deutsch. It adduces evidence from published documentary collections,
state, church and intelligence archives in Britain, Germany, Poland and the
United States as well as the extensive interview transcripts found in Harold
Deutsch’s papers in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In light of the fragmentary nature
of the evidence and the sheer volumes of conspirators, adversaries and agendas,
this research is one that only a historian of intelligence could have pulled off
so compellingly. Shaping the contours of this book is Riebling’s broad range of
experiences as an editor for Random House, security expert and terrorist
analysis. This is simply the finest work on the subject in print.
At
the heart of Riebling’s sleuthing are three plots in which Pius XII served as
an intermediary between German plotters and British diplomats with whom he held
midnight meetings. The Vatican, he makes clear, was one of the world’s oldest
spy services. He tells how Pius XII had Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the
radio, secretly install a secret audio recording system. Such technical
expertise notwithstanding, all three plots were unsuccessful or aborted. In
late 1939 and 1940, German generals were supposed to assassinate Hitler, but both
they and the British got cold feet. In 1943, two bottles of cognac filled with
explosives failed to detonate on board Hitler’s airplane. In 1944,
Stauffenberg’s bombs only wounded Hitler. Riebling describes the unraveling of
these plots and their aftermath, a gruesome litany of interrogation, torture
and execution.
In
many ways, however, the star of the show is not the pontiff but a Bavarian
lawyer and future co-founder of the CSU, Josef Müller. Pius himself features in
less than half of the chapters; it is the world of the plotters, and most
notably Müller, that takes center stage. From his home in Munich, Müller was
one of the masterminds, a courier bringing reports of Nazi persecution of the
churches to Robert Leiber, SJ and Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, an influential German
Jesuit and the former Center Party leader residing in the Vatican. At the same
time, Müller, though his base in the Abwehr, the military intelligence branch
of the Wehrmacht, developed strong ties to well-known plotters like Wilhelm
Canaris, Alfred Delp, SJ and Hans Oster, all of whom perished following the
failure of the assassination plot of July 20, 1944. True to its genre as a
historical thriller, this book closes with a final revelation, how Müller,
languishing in concentration camps, was given a last-minute reprieve from the
gallows.
Riebling
makes it clear that this is largely a Catholic story, the Protestant
theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer serving as the lone exception. The Catholic
plotters quickly discovered that they could not persuade Lutherans in the
highest ranks of the army and church to go against centuries-old traditions of
obedience to state authority, those anchored in Romans 13 and Luther’s doctrine
of the two kingdoms. Riebling somewhat mistakenly attributes these same understandings
to Calvinists, claiming that Calvin too deferred to state authority. In
reality, Calvinists had historically proven to be far more inclined to resist
unjust political authority under the maxim from Acts 5:29 that “we ought to
obey God rather than man.” But even so, the resistance front was gradually
become ecumenical, a part of cooperation that would infuse the founding of the
interconfessional CDU in 1945.
What
is missing from Riebling’s account is a discussion of how credible his sources
are. What might the motives of the postwar storytellers have been in recounting
their role in these conspiracies and their failures? Almost by definition,
writing the history of such conspiracies runs up against two fundamental
problems. For obvious reasons, clandestine plotters tend not to leave behind
written records such as letters and diaries. They destroy them or better yet,
never commit their plans to paper. Interrogation transcripts produced by their
captors are typically unreliable, frequently the product of torture and
deprivation. Even worse: ex-intelligence agents are often notoriously prone to
exaggeration. Some seek to bolster their accomplishments post facto or
settle scores with one-time rivals and adversaries. Nearly all are influenced
by the political and ideological climate in which they recount their stories.
Josef
Müller provides the perfect illustration of these problems. Riebling relies on
his postwar memoirs published in 1975 and a series of interviews carried out by
Harold Deutsch at points in the 1950s and 1960s. But how reliable this
testimony compiled twenty to forty years after the events in question had taken
place was remains open to question. Müller’s account has to be read through the
lens of his own postwar political career, one punctuated by both triumph and
defeat. After co-founding the CSU, Müller found himself under fire from the
conservative integralist wing of the party led by Alois Hundhammer. His
political opponents, in the grossest of ironies, denounced him as a former Nazi,
forcing Müller to undergo a humiliating ordeal of denazification before a
tribunal in late 1946. Müller was also forced to step down from his position as
Bavarian Minister of Justice in 1952, having been accused of illegally
receiving 20,000 DM from a Jewish rabbi, Philipp Auerbach. He also lost a race
in 1960 to become the mayor of Munich. The extent to which these subsequent
events colored his recollections is unclear. He was obviously driven by the
need to exonerate Pope Pius XII from the allegations raised by Rolf Hochhuth,
Saul Friedländer and others that the pontiff had refused to actively resist
National Socialism. He was also influenced by prevailing currents that as late
as the 1970s continued to see the men of the resistance movements as traitors.
Most perplexing is that one of his handlers and co-conspirators until his
arrest in early 1941, the Bavarian cathedral canon, Johnannes Neuhäusler,
maintained a public silence about these plots until his death. To be sure,
Riebling’s account, intended in so small measure for a popular audience, cannot
delve into these puzzles in all of their complexity. Nonetheless, weaving the
story of the ambiguous sources into the larger narrative would have lent the
author’s larger conclusions even greater credibility.
For
Riebling ultimately shows that under the guise of silence, Pope Pius XII was
working to undermine National Socialism. The silence, for which he has been
excoriated by many since the premiere of Hochhuth’s play in February, 1963, was
in fact necessary for his covert activities. Riebling quotes what Müller told
Harold Tittmann, an American diplomat to the Vatican, on June 3, 1945. “His
anti-Nazi organization had always been very insistent that the Pope should
refrain from making any public statement singling out the Nazis and
specifically condemning them and had recommended that the Pope`s remarks should
be confined to generalities only” (248). Müller added that “if the Pope had
been specific, Germans would have accused him of yielding to the promptings of
foreign powers and this would have made the German Catholics even more
suspected than they were and would have greatly restricted their freedom of
action in their work of resistance to the Nazis.”
Yet
Riebling does not let Pius off the hook completely. “Judging Pius by what he
did not say,” he writes, “one can only damn him.” (28). He had the duty to
speak out – and on the whole did not. “During the world’s greatest moral
crisis,” he notes, “its greatest moral leaders seemed at a loss for words”
(28). Nor does he exonerate German Catholics. That it was the pontiff who would
have to become involved in such plots speaks volumes about the fact that too
few Catholics lower in the hierarchy chose a course of opposition.
Riebling’s masterful account will long remain the
definitive account of the papal involvement in the conspiracies to topple
Hitler. Yet it cannot remain the final work, the Vatican not yet having made
fully available the papers from the wartime pontificate of Pius XII.
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