When he walked back to toss the ring shoes at Kurt’s feet, he was wearing the regiment’s PT “minimum”: a pair of triangular black briefs. His deep chested muscular body seemed to ripple with bridled power as he adjusted a mechanical round-timer and propped it on his chair. Kurt thought of Sophie, and the hatred chased out the fear.
He stayed silent as Voegler fastened the laces, first of Kurt’s glove and then, deftly employing his teeth, of his own. They climbed up into the ring, went to opposite corners and waited for the clock’s starting bell.
Voegler came in arrogantly erect, left arm dangling as he experimented with a series of lightning feints and hooks. A couple of blows connected, not damagingly, and it quickly occurred to Kurt that he might, after all, have one advantage over his opponent: his own right arm and feet, the general balance of his body as he blocked and weaved, were better coordinated than Voegler’s. He tried circling counterclockwise as he parried the SS man’s flashing glove, forcing his opponent into continuous left-foot corrections of balance; and it was working, until Voegler, scowling hard, telegraphed a swing to Kurt’s face, and the younger man stepped into the trap. He had bobbed to counterhook under the swing and sensed, a fraction of a second too late, the swing’s contraction into a lightning chop that exploded against his cheekbone and sent him down on one knee. Voegler stood back, grinning, as Kurt mentally ticked off the seconds. He was up at eight, using his feet, the ropes, his strong right arm to keep Voegler at bay while the pink mist cleared from his head and his eyes were able to focus again.
They were about halfway through the round when Voegler changed his stance, went into a loose crouch and came weaving and boring in for the kill. His arm was a piston, tirelessly feinting, double-feinting and jabbing viciously through every opening to Kurt’s head and solar plexus. The end came when Kurt found himself pinned in his own corner, riding or blocking most of Voegler’s punches with one eye closing fast and blood dribbling from a split lower lip.
“Had enough, Captain?” Voegler’s voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. The pummeling had stopped. Gasping, Kurt opened his guard to blink in the direction of the voice. He had no memory, afterward, of the vicious uppercut that sent him to the floor.
On the evening of Sunday, June 4, 1944, Adolf Hitler and Giovanni Donati descended from the Eagle’s Nest and retired immediately to the Fuehrer’s private rooms upstairs in the Berghof. Half an hour later, to the Reich leaders hurriedly assembled in the downstairs salon, Martin Bormann announced that the Chief was sleeping—an unheard of thing at that time of the evening—but would meet them next day at noon. Also in attendance at this meeting would be the Chief’s literary assistant, Captain Kurt Armbrecht.
What Bormann omitted to mention was that Hitler would be accompanied by the new special papal legate. And when he entered the salon the next day, side by side with Donati, the individual reactions of the Nazi bosses gave Kurt—standing unobtrusively apart—something of a quick insight into their characters. Bormann needed no introduction to the prelate, and whatever private anguish he was suffering was well concealed behind his usual expression of flinty attentiveness to the Fuehrer’s every word and gesture. Goering and Ribbentrop, who had responded so frigidly to Donati’s greetings at the Retiro reception in Madrid, were the first to step forward, beaming and with outstretched hands, as Hitler began the introductions.
“You’ve already met the Reichsmarschall and Reichsleiter Ribbentrop, Monsignor.”
“I had that pleasure,” Donati murmured in his soft accented German, And his smile as he greeted the two men in turn absolved them of past sins of hostility and present hypocrisy.
Doctor Goebbels, when his turn came, was formally polite. Heinrich Himmler clicked his jackboots loudly and delivered the German salute, his prim features giving nothing away. Hitler took no one’s hand and silenced Goering with a gesture when the fat Luftwaffe chief tried to speak to him. He looked pale, but more composed than Kurt had ever seen him, and as he ushered Donati to a comfortable armchair by the fireside and then turned to address his old comrades, the famed hypnotic quality of his light-blue eyes blazed out from under an uncharacteristically smooth and serene brow.
“When I left here for Madrid, three short weeks ago, it was as a soldier and world statesman, concerned to safeguard my military and diplomatic successes in the West. I returned, gentlemen, as a visionary and a revolutionary destined to make a more profound and enduring impact on the history of mankind than any military victory or political treaty has ever achieved. If I am asked, How came this transformation? I can only turn and point to the man who sits there behind me, Giovanni Donati.” He neither turned nor pointed, but as all other eyes focused on the squat little priest, Donati lowered his hooded lids and moved his lips in what might have been a soft disclaimer of the Fuehrer’s tribute.
“The reverend Monsignor will deny this. He will protest that it was nothing but a geographical accident that made him the instrument, in Madrid, of a higher will. But you will come to realize, the more you know him, that in Donati we have found a teacher whose personal humility is exceeded only by his saintliness. I myself have no doubt whatsoever that his whole life up to our meeting in Spain was a divine preparation for that moment, just as I now come to accept that everything I have done in life has been a divinely directed footstep toward the Retiro Gardens.
“Bormann will confirm that I have often in the past expressed an inner conviction that I was chosen by Providence for a unique mission on this earth. How else can one explain, without reference to a higher will, my otherwise incredible diplomatic and military triumphs over a hostile world welded against me by the satanic forces of Judaism, Bolshevism and Freemasonry? How explain my truly miraculous escapes from so many determined attempts on my life?
“Giovanni Donati had meditated on these phenomena long before our paths crossed in Madrid. For a while—as he quite frankly confessed to me—he could not, as a good Catholic, reconcile divine protection of my person with certain measures I have had to take as Fuehrer of the Greater Reich to achieve the ends of National Socialism throughout Europe and our eastern empire. Revelation, as he put it, was slow in coming. But it came, when it did, with a shattering and blinding force, precisely comparable to Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus. At once, Giovanni Donati was able to grasp the apparent paradox of a National Socialist salvation of Christianity. He saw how the Church of Rome was in danger of becoming the greatest anachronism of the twentieth century, how its worst enemy was its own thoroughly decadent and preposterous philosophy. Why ‘love thy neighbor,’ if he is about to debauch your wife and children? How can all men be regarded as equal in the sight of God to anyone who contrasts one of our pure Nordic specimens with a sniveling Jewish moneylender or a Neanderthaloid subhuman from the Pripet marshes? Such a God would have to be totally blind, apart from being stupid!
“The truth, as it came to Giovanni Donati, is that Christianity over the years has gradually abandoned the revolutionary sustenance of its founder, the militancy of its medieval princes, for a milk-and-water diet designed for the slothful, the weak and the feeble minded. With its outmoded doctrines and inept mumbo jumbo it is digging its own grave. But to Donati, as a man of great piety and unshakable trust in his Creator, has been revealed a truth still withheld from his own spiritual leader, Pope Pius the Twelfth. The faith of five hundred million Catholics throughout the world is too valuable an asset of Western culture to be squandered by the palsied old men of the Curia. ‘A man will come . . .’ A man has come!
“My old comrades—” For the first time, Hitler lowered his gaze from the mountain peaks visible through the great window and spoke directly to the tableau vivant of silent, immobile Reich leaders. “You have been asking yourselves what was the purpose of my retreat to the Eagle’s Nest with Giovanni Donati. The answer is simple. With Donati at my side, I have been pleading for further guidance from the Almighty. It was given to me the very first evening we knelt down in prayer. Since t
hen we have been engaged, the Monsignor and I, in the task of translating this guidance into a new theology which synthesizes the doctrines of Catholicism with the philosophy of National Socialism. I shall not take up your time this morning by talking to you about this aspect of our labors. A paper presenting a broad outline of the new doctrine will be prepared by the Monsignor, in collaboration with Captain Armbrecht, and will then be circulated among you—for your own eyes only, at this stage. What I will say is that this new theology, if accepted by Rome, will not only ensure the Church’s survival for the next thousand years but will give it a positive and vital role to play in the New Order. But I am under no illusion, my friends, that the Vatican will embrace my teachings with gratitude, and neither is Giovanni Donati. The hard and bitter struggle that lies ahead will exact all my energies and will-power, all your individual loyalties and collective authority. We shall know what an awe-inspiring task I have set myself—or to be more precise, has been entrusted to me—when Giovanni Donati returns from his first mission to the Holy See.”
Thinking back over it, as he waited for Donati in the private office set aside for them in Bormann’s secretariat, Kurt found it hard to believe he hadn’t been dreaming. The fact that Hitler had convinced himself he was divinely inspired was neither here nor there; Lenin apart, and possibly Stalin, Kurt could think of no great national leader in history who hadn’t suffered from a similar delusion. But it was one thing to believe that God was on one’s side, quite another to don the cloak of a radical religious reformer, supernaturally inspired to rewrite the dogma and doctrines of the oldest and most powerful Christian faith. The fact that Hitler seriously believed he could either blackmail or browbeat the Church of Rome into accepting his “new theology” was positive proof that he had become completely mentally deranged.
More astonishing even than this was the way Hitler’s chief lieutenants had received his lunatic “revelations.” Had they all become as mad as he? There was little evidence of this. Were they all so intent on weighing personal advantage and disadvantage in this sensational development as to have temporarily blinded themselves to its folly? Or was it simply that they were scared stiff of incurring the Fuehrer’s disfavor or of giving Bormann ammunition for his ceaseless intrigues inside the Nazi power structure? Whatever the individual motives, this group of the most ruthless and powerful men in Europe had crowded forward when Hitler finished his address to reaffirm their loyalty and devotion and, as he left his armchair to join them, to pledge to Giovanni Donati their unstinted support.
Donati . . . Unless he was engaged in some obscure and sinister papal conspiracy to undermine Hitler as Fuehrer— which certainly couldn’t be ruled out—the only conclusion was that he was a charlatan,who had traded his faith for some glittering future reward. But he obviously had Hitler’s ear as no one had ever had it before, arid in this, if Kurt played it properly, might lie the salvation of Walter Armbrecht. Kurt had been introduced to the archbishop after the party chiefs had finished playing up to him, and Donati had drawn him aside to make arrangements for the next day’s rendezvous in the secretariat building. The conversation had been brief, but in those few minutes, as Kurt gazed into the priest’s dark-brown eyes, he was able to understand something of the man’s power to disarm and deceive. Here were the eyes of a child, steeped in innocence, but all-seeing, unpracticed in guile but as seductive as a Turkish odalisque’s.
He had decided upon his ploy as he waited for Donati to join him, but his resolution faltered as he came again under the spell of the legate’s soft smile and unclouded gaze, He wasn’t a good enough actor to get away with it. He would end up by losing Donati’s good will and, with it, maybe his last hope of getting his father out of Dachau. But courage returned to him, gradually, as he sat making notes while the tubby little archbishop outlined the major tenets of Hitler’s “new theology.”
An hour or so later, when the subject of Confession was broached, Kurt said, “Could we take a break here, Monsignor, while I ask a personal favor?”
“By all means.” Donati, who had been showing signs of flagging, looked positively relieved.
“It’s—well—I’m afraid I’ve been harboring sinful thoughts, and I should like to take Holy Communion tomorrow.”
“I shall be celebrating Mass in the Fuehrer’s study. I’m sure you would be welcome. You wish me to hear your Confession?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Come and kneel here, beside me.” Donati groped inside his soutane, took out a neatly rolled silken stole, kissed it and draped it around his neck.
Kurt said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was about ten years ago.”
Donati gave a disapproving grunt.
“I have sinned in thought, word and deed, Father, but the worst of these sins has been my intention, these last few days, to break the Fifth Commandment.”
“Go on, my son.”
“I have been planning to kill a certain officer in the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. I might even still do it.”
“If you want absolution and to take Communion tomorrow you must make a full and contrite confession. Why do you want to kill this man?”
Kurt then told him the whole story omitting Voegler’s name but mentioning the fruitless approaches he had made to Bormann, Mueller and Goebbels on his father’s behalf. When he had finished, the priest, who had been listening in silence, his eyes closed, murmured, “Go on with the rest of your confession, my son.”
He rattled out a routine list of mortal and venial sins, including his fornications with Helga in Berlin. And he came back, at the end, to his murderous intentions toward Voegler.
“Tell me, Father—under the new theology will a Christian like myself be expected to feel only love for a man who has degraded his sister and thrown his father into a concentration camp?”
“You heard yesterday what the Fuehrer thinks about that. For the present, however, the old laws of our religion still apply, and if you are seeking absolution you must first put aside all thoughts of revenge.”
“Help me, Father! A few words from you to the Fuehrer—”
“My son, my son!” Donati’s hand came up from his lap to rest on Kurt’s shoulder. “I shall do my best for you. But don’t ask me to intervene yet—not until I have returned from Rome. And do nothing rash in the meantime, I beg of you . . . Do you remember the Act of Contrition?”
He stumbled at the beginning but, prompted by the priest, managed to complete the prayer. Donati’s hand made the sign of the cross over Kurt’s bent head. “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. For penance, you will recite one decade of the rosary.”
II
NEW YORK’S Archbishop Francis J. Spellman was resting after a good Roman lunch in the North American College on Janiculum Hill when his secretary brought him a message from Luigi Cardinal Maglione. It was the day following Giovanni Donati’s departure from the Italian capital, and Francis Spellman had kept his day clear in anticipation of this summons by the Secretary of State to Pope Pius XII.
After an hour closeted with Maglione in the Cardinal’s office, the American prelate was escorted to the Pope’s private apartments on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, overlooking St. Peter’s Square, and there spent ten minutes in conversation with his old friend and onetime colleague in the Vatican secretariat, Eugenio Pacelli. They spoke in English, a language Pa-celli had acquired back in 1911, with much help from the young Spellman. From this audience, Spellman returned at once to the North American College, where he instructed his valet to pack his bags for the journey back to New York.
Two days after his return, he was received by President Roosevelt in the Oval Room of the White House. The only other person present was Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who arrived, breathing hard, a few seconds after the archbishop was ushered in.
As the grim-faced prelate gave his account of what he had learned from Maglione, the President of the United Stat
es had some difficulty in controlling his feelings, which were of unalloyed delight. It emerged that Giovanni Donati had been the bearer of an outrageous ultimatum—thinly disguised as an “exploratory approach”—from the Fuehrer of the Greater Reich. The Pope was invited to go in person to Berlin, where Hitler was now back in residence, to discuss with the German leader certain contradictions between the dogma and doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church and the political and racial ideology of the New Order. In return for “substantial revisions” (unspecified) of the Church’s teachings, the ruler of the Reich was prepared to negotiate a new concordat with the Holy See, which would in effect guarantee the Catholic Church’s permanent religious ascendancy throughout Europe.
As Archbishop Spellman drew breath, the President said, “Did no one ask Donati what kind of revisions Hitler has in mind?”
“Certainly not!” Spellman retorted with asperity. “In fact it was only his long record of faithful service to the Vatican that saved Donati from being severely disciplined for letting Hitler believe there would be any point in the mission. He was instructed to inform Hitler that His Holiness would in no circumstances make a journey to Berlin and that the dogma and doctrines of the Church could never be bargaining counters at a conference table. Revision was possible only by divine authority, expressed through the Holy Father as the successor to Saint Peter.”
“Did you get any impression,” Roosevelt asked, keeping his face straight, “that the Pope might be prepared to consult divine authority, if Hitler really puts the pressure on?”
“His Holiness is of course praying for divine guidance. Both he and Cardinal Maglione regard this as potentially the gravest crisis in the history of the Church. The Pope agreed to my informing you, in the strictest confidence, of this ultimatum by Hitler and of his response. But unless and until Hitler himself brings this out in the open, His Holiness asks us to keep it under wraps. He’s most concerned that nothing should be said or done to provoke Hitler into any further acts of hostility against the Church. Incidentally, he sends you his blessing.”
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