Hitler Has Won

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Hitler Has Won Page 26

by Frederic Mullally


  Bormann hesitated, chewing his lip. This was something new —locking up the head of the Church in Catholic Bavaria on such a minor charge. There had to be such a reason for the Fuehrerbefehl and it didn’t take much insight to see the scheming hand of Giovanni Donati behind it. Bormann felt his blood rising. Ever since the arrival on the scene of this ambitious Rasputin, his own sense of closeness to the Fuehrer, of being able to read his thoughts—as Hitler himself had often good-humoredly admitted—before he expressed them, had been steadily weakening. Three and a half months ago, it would have been inconceivable that the Fuehrer would have cut himself off from daily contact with his faithful secretary, as he was now proposing to do. And now this airy command to arrest Faulhaber without a word of explanation.

  “My Fuehrer, there will be strong protests from Rome. In your absence on the Kehlstein, I shall have to deal with them.”

  “Then deal with them, Bormann! Tell the Vatican its protest has been noted—period. And increase the SS guard on His Eminence’s palace!”

  Five days later, when the news of Japan’s massive assault on the Philippines came hard on some bad news from Rome, Bormann was tempted, in malice, to leave the Fuehrer undisturbed with his new friend and confederate. The Japanese adventure, he could argue, was no “urgent” concern of Germany’s. It called for a declaration of moral support and a new Wehrmacht offensive in the East—both of which could await the Fuehrer’s convenience. As for the Italian situation, that was Mussolini’s plate of spaghetti. But curiosity as to what was happening up there on the Kehlstein easily triumphed over Bormann’s pique, and so at 9:35 a.m. on Sunday, September 17, 1944, he set out in his car on the nine-mile drive into the heart of the mountain below Hitler’s eyrie.

  Two hundred yards short of the entrance to the tunnel, he found the road blocked by a Leibstandarte half-track, mounted with heavy machine guns. The young SS Rottenfuehrer in charge of the platoon leaped from the truck and saluted smartly.

  “Herr Reichsleiter!”

  “Get that thing out of the way at once!”

  “My orders are to—”

  “—prevent me reaching the Fuehrer?” Bormann yelled. “Who’s in command here?”

  “Obersturmbannfuehrer Voegler, Herr Reichsleiter.” The officer jerked his head toward the tunnel.

  “Well, get in, man, get in!” Bormann gestured to the passenger seat. “Maybe you can put in a good word for me with your commander!”

  Voegler, summoned to the bronze portal inside the mountain, was coldly cooperative.

  “Reichsleiter Bormann may of course proceed,” he snapped to the SS troopers guarding the great gate. And to the shaken young Rottenfuehrer: “Get back to your post at once!”

  Bormann brusquely declined the duty orderly’s offer to take him up in the elevator. He had installed the damn thing, probably to his lasting regret; he knew how it worked. The well-oiled brass gates closed silently behind him, and he remained standing during the 165-foot ascent to the summit.

  As the elevator stopped, the gates opened automatically. A year or so back, in the hope of encouraging the Fuehrer to make more use of this extravagant folly, Bormann had ordered the construction of a two-room apartment, with bathroom en suite, on the east side of the Eagle’s Nest. Now, as he advanced into the pavilion, there was a murmur of voices from the direction of these rooms. He paused, straining his ears, and a look of almost comical astonishment spread over his face as he identified the separate voices of Hitler and Donati.

  “Dominus vobiscum.”

  “Et cum spiritu tuo.”

  Bormann took another few steps forward until he had a clear view, between two of the concrete columns that girdled the main chamber, through the wide-open door of the built-in sitting room. And then he froze.

  A small altar had been set up against the far wall, and Hitler was standing in front of it, his back to Bormann, his hands busily but invisibly occupied. He was dressed in the long white alb under the Gothic chasuble worn by Catholic priests when celebrating Mass. Standing behind and slightly to the right of him was the corpulent figure of Giovanni Donati, wearing the black cassock and white, broderie-hemmed surplice of an altar server.

  Hitler leaned forward over the altar toward the ornamented box immediately facing him. As he straightened up, he turned to the missal lying open on his right, and began to intone another passage of Latin. Rooted where he stood, Bormann could only gape in horror when the Fuehrer turned slowly around and declared:

  “Ite, missa est.”

  He had shaved off his mustache!

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I

  THEY CAME unhurriedly to meet him, Hitler smiling as he bent an ear to Donati’s murmured words of approval. The shock of the missing mustache, shattering as this had been in its first impact, was amazingly short lived. True, the naked upper lip gave new emphasis to the Fuehrer’s large beaked nose and took a few years off his apparent age. But his eyes remained, as ever, the dominant feature.

  “Well, Bormann, I trust there’s a good reason for this intrusion.” The tone was good-humored and there was a complete absence of self-consciousness.

  “My Fuehrer—” Bormann stammered. “Those clothes! Your—” His hand went to his mouth.

  “Ah, yes—it’s right that you should be the first to know. You must congratulate me, Bormann. I’ve been ordained a priest of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, by Archbishop Giovanni Donati.”

  “But, that’s—I mean, it surely can’t be—” Bormann was staring at Donati, who had fallen back a few paces and was calmly studying one of the fingernails of his left hand.

  “ ‘Valid,’ you were going to say? Come now, Bormann, you are well aware that Cardinal Faulhaber is at present unable to carry out his diocesan duties. In such circumstances it is perfectly in order for a papal legate of the Monsignor’s rank to ordain a properly instructed aspirant to the priesthood. If we have had to dispense with certain formalities—well, as you yourself are so fond of reminding everyone, there is a war on!”

  “But, my Fuehrer—” Bormann swallowed hard before blurting it out—“why?”

  Hitler’s scowl dissolved almost as quickly as it had formed. He said, “You must use that brain of yours more flexibly, Bormann. Have you ever known me launch a military campaign without being absolutely mentally and physically attuned to victory?”

  “Never, my Fuehrer.”

  “Very well, then apply the comparison. I have set my mind on reforming and revitalizing the Church of Rome. I look to a spiritual victory, a victory of the new theology. How should I arm myself for this struggle—in the gray-green of the Wehrmacht or the white robes of Divine grace?”

  Bormann could only gape, speechless, from Hitler to Donati and back again.

  “The Monsignor and I are going to break our fast. You had better join us, Bormann, and tell me what’s going on down there.”

  They sat around a table at one of the eyrie’s windows. They drank tea from a vacuum flask and munched digestive biscuits, but not before Hitler, at a nod from Donati, bowed his head and said grace:

  “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from your bounty, through Christ our Lord.” Bormann’s hasty “Amen” came a fraction of a second after Donati’s.

  “Well, get on with it, man! Is the Vatican beginning to make conciliatory noises?”

  “There has been no word from them, my Fuehrer. But the Duce is in serious trouble. His proposal to abrogate the 1929 Concordat has split the Fascist Grand Council right down the middle. The King sent for him yesterday and demanded his resignation.”

  “What impertinence!” Hitler chuckled. “I assume the Duce has clapped him in prison?”

  “The Duce appears to be paralyzed. Foreign Minister Ciano has flown to join Marshal Badoglio in Cairo, and there’s a rumor that they’re preparing an ultimatum to Mussolini, backed by the commanders of Italy’s imperial forces in North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. For the past twenty-four hours St.
Peter’s Square has been jam-packed with a vast crowd of Roman civilians, all down on their knees, praying in silence.”

  “Get Keitel. He is to inform Kesselring that Operation Damp-Down may be imminent. Forces sufficient to take care of any revolt by the Italian army are to be moved to the Italian frontier. Get Himmler. Tell him to fly to Rome and do what is necessary —with or without the Duce’s consent—to clear the sniveling rabble from St. Peter’s Square. Who is our Gestapo man in Rome?”

  “Standartenfuehrer Herbert Kappler, my Fuehrer.”

  “Of course. Have him arrest all the fainthearted Fascists of the Grand Council and fly them to the camp at Mauthausen. Keep the Duce informed. Tell him not to worry, and send him my warmest regards. Does that take care of your problems?”

  “There is one other small matter,” Bormann said, with a sour glance at the tea-sipping papal legate. “Japan has invaded the Philippines. President Roosevelt has ordered full war mobilization.”

  Hitler’s cup stopped, halfway to his lips. He put it down, stood up and walked to the window. “So be it,” they heard him murmur after a long silence. “Not my will, but Thine be done.” He turned around. “The word has come to me,” he said, addressing Donati.

  The priest nodded gravely.

  “The Japanese will have overrun the southwest Pacific by the end of this year and will engage and defeat an American expeditionary force in Australia early next year. After consolidating their new empire they will turn their attention to South America, with its rich resources of oil and other raw materials. It is of no concern to me whether the Latin-American republics are in the hands of our Asiatic friends or the present disreputable assortment of Indians and mestizos. By then we shall have conquered the whole of Russia and will have all the living space and natural wealth we can absorb. But the North Americans will, of course, either have to sue for peace or commit themselves to a ruinous and protracted war with the Japanese south of the Caribbean Sea. In either case, I shall have established, in God’s name, an impregnable Christian-Aryan civilization from the North Cape to the Cape of Good Hope and from Iceland to the Sea of Okhotsk. Against such a civilization, the gates of hell itself shall not prevail.” Hitler had been addressing himself mainly to Donati. Now, with an expression of pious resignation, he slipped the stole from his shoulders, kissed it and folded it up reverently. “Bear with me, Father,” he said, “while I turn from things that are God’s to the things that are Caesar’s. They will not occupy me for long.”

  In actual fact, they occupied him for three days, during which he made a formal declaration of war on the United States of America—“ending at last,” as he declared in a recorded radio speech put out through Deutschlandsender, “the hypocritical farce of American ‘neutrality’ ”—and laid down the strategy of a new offensive in the East aimed at encircling and destroying the Red Army west of the Ural Mountains. As soon as the High Command of the Operations Staff had left for their base headquarters, Hitler summoned Heinrich Himmler, who had been cooling his heels in the Berghof for two days, and gave him his orders. He was to leave at once for Rome and present Mussolini with a list of emergency measures for dealing with the threat to his authority. These included the arrest of King Victor Emmanuel and the dissident members of the Fascist Grand Council, the recall to Rome of Marshal Badoglio and Count Ciano, under pain of being charged with treason, and the imposition of a civilian curfew throughout Italy. Gestapo Mueller was to take over internal security from the Italian Ministry of the Interior. The panzer division of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was to entrain at once from its base at Lichterfelde to barracks north of Rome, which would be provided by Mussolini. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop was to advise Pope Pius that the Fuehrer would be seeking a further audience in ten days’ time.

  The news that the Fuehrer was to pay another visit to Rome, this time “of indefinite duration,” threw Feldmarschall Keitel into a panic, for he had assumed that Hitler would be personally directing the new campaign in the East from field headquarters in Russia.

  “You’ll have to learn to fight some of Germany’s wars without me,” Hitler snapped. “I shan’t always be around to hold my Wehrmacht generals’ hands. I’ve laid down the plan for a victorious campaign. All that you, Halder and Jodl have to do is to see that it’s effectively carried out. Am I asking too much?”

  “Certainly not, my Fuehrer! But the most brilliant plans can run into difficulties. Without your genius, your superb military instincts—”

  “You’ll have to use your own judgment, for a change. Have you no idea, Keitel, of the enormity of the task I have set myself in Rome?”

  “As a mere soldier, my Fuehrer, such matters are beyond my—”

  “So be a soldier!” Hitler snorted. “Fight my wars for me, while I’m down there in Rome fighting for the soul of Europe! I may be omniscient, Keitel, but I’ve never claimed to be omnipresent.”

  II

  GENERAL HANS GRAF VON KLAGES, commander of an infantry corps of the Replacement Army stationed in the Rhineland, received Kurt in the library of a requisitioned mansion eleven miles west of Cologne, and a ten-minute car ride from his staff headquarters. He was the fourth Catholic army commander Kurt had met so far on his whirlwind tour and the first to have invited the young major from Hitler’s headquarters to a meeting at his private residence.

  Tall and spare, his aquiline features accentuated by the black patch over one eye, Klages looked exactly what he was: a professional soldier and aristocrat cast in the mold that had personified German militarism since Bismarck. What was not so immediately evident about the fifty-two-year-old general was the fact that he was a deeply religious person who believed in God and Germany, in that order, and regarded Nazism as a distasteful though historically expedient aberration.

  He acknowledged Kurt’s smart military salute and gestured him to one of the two leather armchairs angled toward the open fireplace.

  “You will be staying for lunch, Herr Armbrecht?”

  “With great pleasure, Herr General.” Kurt remained at attention until Klages was seated. At a nod from the general, he went into one of his now routine opening gambits.

  “It’s on Colonel Schmund’s advice that I’ve taken the liberty of seeking a personal interview with you, Herr General, instead of talking to your staff. As the Fuehrer’s chief military adjutant, the colonel takes the view that the future peacetime role of the Wehrmacht has not been given adequate attention by myself, as researcher for the Fuehrer’s new book. And since this is an area in which national philosophy—if I may put it that way—has perhaps as much bearing as military administration, the colonel and I agree that the individual views of the field commanders themselves might prove most useful and instructive.”

  The general’s one uncovered eye, which had been focused expressionlessly on Kurt as he spoke, now crinkled slightly at the corner. “I am a soldier, Herr Armbrecht, not a philosopher. The future of the Wehrmacht will be to safeguard the frontiers of the Reich against our enemies. In that connection I would commend a study of the Military Works of Moltke rather than Kant’s Perpetual Peace.”

  “I’ve read them both, Herr General. I take it you agree with Moltke, that war develops the noblest virtues of man, rather than with Kant’s view that it spawns more evil than it removes?”

  “Moltke was a field marshal and Kant a philosopher. Shall we leave it at that?”

  It was a sidestep, but in the right direction. Mentally crossing his fingers, Kurt carried on.

  “I believe we share the same religious faith, Herr General. I myself have had trouble from time to time, as I’m sure many loyal German Catholics have, in reconciling the gospel of Christ with certain aspects of National Socialist ideology. Happily, in my case all these doctrinal doubts have been put to rest by Archbishop Donati. There remain certain—well—reservations about some of Reichsleiter Bormann’s proposals. For example, he insists young men with a vocation for the priesthood must do two years’ military service before going in
to a seminary. I was wondering how you felt about that.”

  He had hooked Klages with the Donati bait. Bormann and the priesthood were dangling irrelevancies.

  “This Monsignor Donati,” the general said, bringing the fingertips of both hands together, “must be a remarkable person to have won the Fuehrer’s esteem so swiftly. What’s his secret, Armbrecht?”

  “It’s hardly a secret, Herr General—at least not at our headquarters. Donati is a realist. He believes the Church not only can find common ground with National Socialism, but must do so if it is to survive in Europe. He also sees with absolute clarity something the Church still stubbornly refuses to recognize—that it is the Fuehrer alone who today represents God’s will on earth.”

  During the silence that followed, Klages’s cold blue eye stayed on Kurt without blinking. To the younger man, battling to retain his expression of imbecile fervor, the seconds passed like minutes. Then:

  “And the Holy Father is being asked to accept this—proposition?”

  “Donati is a diplomat, Herr General, as well as a man of great piety. He sees his first task as the moral integration of the Church with the New Order. Once that is achieved, the question of divine authority will be the more easily resolved.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A new theology will have emerged. Its inspiration will have been the Fuehrer’s, its preservation the sacred mission of successive popes.”

  Another silence, shorter this time. Klages uncrossed his legs, drew his heels back as if to spring up but remained seated, hands clamped to the leather armrests of his chair. He said, and the words came out like splinters of ice, “And if the Holy Father rejects this new theology?”

  “He will have proved himself unworthy to guide the destiny of the Holy Roman Church. A suitable successor will be found.”

 

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