by Peter Eisner
Paris, May 12, 1938
From England, LaFarge took the ferry across the channel and spent a week in Paris with the Jesuit community there. In Paris and all along his journey, he was surprised that people knew who he was. Months earlier he had written an article for the Catholic Student’s Mission Crusade bulletin, which called for Catholic missionaries to become more involved helping impoverished American blacks. The article was translated into a number of European languages. People would approach him: “You must be Father LaFarge. We saw your picture in the SMC Bulletin for June.” His opinion was so sought after in Paris that he gave a prominently advertised speech on May 17 to several hundred people, discussing “American Democracy: Its Successes and Its Problems.”
“What is President Roosevelt likely to do?” “How will he protect France and Britain against Hitler?” “Will the Americans fight?” people asked him. The questions LaFarge heard were unanswerable that spring of 1938, as Hitler traveled southward to Italy and the crowds bowed down before him as he prepared to supplant the shadow of Imperial Rome and the church itself.
LaFarge compared his impressions with an article written by the prominent New York Times columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick. He wrote to his friends in New York, loath though he was to have his mail intercepted, and recommended they read her commentary about Hitler and his trip to Rome.
McCormick wrote: “It is hard to explain why the spectacle of Hitler riding in triumph down the Imperial Way in Rome is more suggestive than his appearance in the Ringstrasse as the conqueror of Vienna.” Perhaps, she said, because he had his own imperial designs.
“He believes he is the ordained leader of the German race. In his own eyes he is a savior, the prophet of a new national religion which will unify all Germans and make them prevail . . .
“Meantime, the best brains of the world are not getting very far in anticipating or stopping the march of today’s Little Corporal. Either that untrained and nebulous intellect works well or else we see in Hitler the true figure of the crazy time in which we live.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Imposition of the Reich
May 19, 1938, French/German Border
BLEIBEN SIE HIER, bitte,” a Nazi border guard told John LaFarge. “Please wait here.”
The suspicious Nazi official seemed to think that LaFarge could be a Roman Catholic agent because he was dressed as a priest, was an American, and had maps of Italy and Czechoslovakia. LaFarge was led to an empty room where he waited as told.
He had boarded the late-afternoon train from Paris for the five- or six-hour journey to the German border. LaFarge was apprehensive along the way and unable to focus on reading. Central Europe had been experiencing a drought, so the rain that fell may have been an irritation for a sole traveler with more than he could carry by himself, but the foul weather was a godsend for the parched fields. He spent much of the trip in the dining car, where the international cuisine was served with care, and LaFarge relished the unlimited supply of french fries. The train was full when it left Paris, but more and more passengers left the train at each local stop. By the time they reached the German border, only two passengers remained, LaFarge and a sad-eyed Polish lady in a black dress who said she was transiting Germany to return home.
LaFarge could not avoid the boldly proclaimed glory of the new Germany as the train had pulled into the German border station. “One glance out the window was enough,” LaFarge wrote in his notes on the trip. “EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FÜHRER [One People, One Reich, One Führer] greeted you in enormous letters. The Latin alphabet changed abruptly to German Gothic. Swastikas and Heils blossomed out as if by magic. We were in Hitler land. I was in Hitler land, along with 60 million Germans.”
A fat, old Prussian customs officer called for him after a while and apparently had decided he needed backup. Two menacing plainclothes agents inspected LaFarge’s books and reading material, concerned that he was carrying an Italian grammar phrasebook. What was this man up to?
“So,” said one of the agents, “you have been in Rome.”
“No, I am going to Rome,” LaFarge replied.
“You were in Rome when Hitler was there?”
“No, I have not been in Rome,” LaFarge told the official. “I am going to Rome after I go to Koblenz and Budapest.”
One of the officials then asked why LaFarge was going to Koblenz.
He replied that he was visiting an old friend there.
The agents continued to question him until they were satisfied if not convinced that LaFarge posed no imminent threat. They could see that his passport did not have an Italian stamp. Unless he had entered and left clandestinely, that was proof he hadn’t been there yet. Passing on to another subject, the Germans furrowed their brows and conferred once more when they pulled out a book about Spain he had received as a gift.
“Does the gentleman realize that this might be a forbidden book?” one asked him with an air of triumph.
No, LaFarge answered, he hadn’t even opened the book, pointing out that the pages where still bound together.
The inspectors sullenly examined every document, letter, note, article of clothing, clean or dirty, before deciding the “forbidden book” would be confiscated, perhaps mailed to him later.
Finally, LaFarge was free to wait for the next train to Koblenz; the old Prussian border guard, freed of the two inspectors, became suddenly friendly, almost making up for the way he had treated LaFarge. He even helped the priest board the train when it arrived.
As it pulled out of the station, LaFarge felt nervous but relieved and foolish for not having thought about what he packed nor having taken care for what he said. The guards had not addressed him in the proper manner as hochwerden, the German equivalent of “father” or “reverend.” They referred to him as “sir.” They might have thought he wasn’t really a priest, even though he was dressed as one. He spoke excellent German and they thought he had been to Rome; they said that he was also carrying a controversial book, although the book wasn’t controversial at all.
They might have concluded that he was an American spy. In his own heightened state of paranoia, one thing had been fortunate. The inspectors hadn’t found his map of Poland—the last thing a spy would want to be found carrying in Hitler’s Germany. The tension of being in Germany would never leave him, even if he knew he was simply an agent of the Lord.
The rain was spattering hard against the windows when the train pulled into Koblenz Station. A taxi took him to the parish house of the venerable old Liebfrauenkirche—Church of Our Lady—where he was greeted by his old friend, the Reverend Heinrich Chardon, pastor of the twelfth-century church. LaFarge and Chardon had studied together at seminary in Innsbruck thirty-five years earlier. The parish priest quickly produced a dusty old bottle of Rhine wine. “On the label were a pilgrim’s scrip and staff, and the image of the Apostle Saint James, patron of pilgrims,” Chardon said. “Twenty years old and reserved for this visit.”
They stayed up talking until 2 A.M., and LaFarge had many questions. “I soon found the Hitler atmosphere was nothing imaginary, but thick enough to cut with a knife.” Censorship was total, informants were everywhere, and there was no news. “You could not write. Obviously you could not telephone, and it was dangerous to send messages. As for the papers, they were devoid of information.”
Chardon told LaFarge that he and his staff were required to report their whereabouts at all times. Beyond the lovely fields and farmhouses and beautiful old buildings, Germany was being transformed into a soiled, isolated land where all who set foot were required to pay attention or pay the price.
LaFarge slept well that night and woke up to see a glorious sky and no remnants of the rain. He soon met with church parishioners who had as many questions as the border guards. As they gathered around the foreigner—a rare American visitor—one parishioner asked where LaFarge had been traveling. He told them he’d just been to London and Paris.
“But how fortunate . . . to escape,
” said another. “We understand that in Paris the streets are running with blood; there is a terrible revolution and people are being murdered by the Jews and Bolsheviks.”
Few would accept his assurances that France was not experiencing any danger or violence. He also told them he was not escaping; he was on a brief trip and would book passage on a ship back home to the United States.
“America!” another lady declared. “And you are going back to America? You are safe here and America is so terrible. In New York, I understand, the people are hung from every lamppost; it is filled with gangsters and lynchers and your life is in danger every moment.”
Hitler’s propaganda machine had consumed and twisted the German populace. It was time for LaFarge to use his prearranged code to send a message to his editor Francis Talbot. Oremus pro invecem, he wrote—“Let us pray for one another.” The meaning was simply this: “Things are very bad, worse than you can imagine.” Propaganda, isolation, and frenzy were transforming the continent. The people of Koblenz were believing crazed rumors with no chance to hear from the outside world.
Later that day, LaFarge looked down on the city from the heights of Ehrenbreitstein, where he could view the series of fortresses that had guarded the Rhine region for a millennium. Koblenz, the two-thousand-year-old city at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, was a focal point of Hitler’s hatred of the Western powers after the European armistice of 1918. The city had been headquarters for the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, created by the victorious Allies after the Great War. Germany, as the vanquished nation, had been monitored for more than a decade from the headquarters offices here.
LaFarge saw marches of the Hitler youth, SS soldiers on guard at every corner. He saw that the effects of Nazism summed up Chardon’s fatalistic lament—“We are all going to be in Dachau sooner or later, so what’s the use of bothering?” Dachau was the first German concentration camp and had served as a detention center for mostly political prisoners since 1933.
Chardon shared the same fear felt in Rome and throughout Europe; he and other clerics in Germany faced intensifying attacks and were being driven underground. LaFarge wondered whether Catholicism could even survive the onslaught of Nazism. Chardon, who could hardly leave his church, asked LaFarge to celebrate a clandestine Mass at the chapel of the Franciscan Brothers of the Sick in Koblenz. The Franciscans had been targeted the previous year in an extension of Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church that stepped up after the pope issued his anti-Nazi encyclical the year before.
One hundred seventy members of the order had been arrested on trumped-up charges of “corrupting young people.” The government had already shuttered the chapel, and the diocese was largely doing its work in secret, whether it was running a recreation program in a ramshackle building too dingy for the Nazis to bother appropriating, or at the chapel itself. That Saturday, Chardon gave LaFarge “the massive key with which I was to let myself in the back door.” LaFarge said, “I was to speak to nobody, merely celebrate Mass and depart. They came to Mass, he said, in order to pray for liberation from Hitler. The following morning, therefore, I unlocked the sacristy door, found the altar boy waiting, went out on the altar and found the chapel filled with a silent congregation. Not a sound was uttered except the murmured responses of the server. I never felt so close to any congregation in my life.”
Everyone present received Communion. When the Mass was completed, LaFarge left silently, went through the back onto the street, and locked the door. He returned to the parish house, said good-bye to Chardon and headed back to the train station where he purchased a ticket for his next destination, Prague. He would discover over the weekend that Czechoslovakia and Germany were on the brink of war.
Koblenz to the Czech Border, May 21, 1938
LaFarge saw something was wrong when the conductors on the night train from Koblenz to Prague dropped the curtains in the dining car. When he returned to his seat in the coach, he noticed that they had also dimmed the lighting, allowing only low-level, blue light in the corridors. None of the crew told LaFarge what was happening, not wanting to alarm the passengers. People were panicked about the possibility that Germany would attack Czechoslovakia and the train crew didn’t want the train to be seen from the air and then become a potential bombing target. At that moment Germany was moving troops close to the Czech border, very close to the route the Prague night train was taking. Czechoslovakia had summoned hundreds of thousands of reserves to duty and sent them to the disputed Sudetenland border. War appeared imminent.
Just as World War I was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Europeans knew that provocations, real or imagined, could move Hitler’s Wehrmacht into Czechoslovakia. They were also aware that provocation could be manufactured, as it appears to have been.
Before dawn that Saturday morning, two Czechs of German heritage on a motorcycle attempted to run a roadblock at the Czech entry crossing at Eger. They evaded one guard and then drove straight toward a second policeman, who said he had tried to shoot out their tires but ended up wounding both men as they escaped uphill. Czech Sudeten police were familiar with the men, George Hoffman Fonsau and Nicholas Boehm Oberlohna, pro-Nazi provocateurs who had previous run-ins with authorities and had served time in prison. Fonsau and Oberlohna died at the local police barracks.
News of the incident spread quickly, and the German army marched to within miles of the border. Czech president Edvard Beneš swiftly deployed four hundred thousand army reservists to the Sudetenland border zone. Beneš broadcast an appeal for calm, but the fact he had gone on national radio to do that produced the opposite effect; his words intensified the fear of an impending war. “We are living through the gravest moment since the end of [World War I],” he said. “This calls for calmness [and] cool nerves . . . It means that we must know no fear in the days that are coming. That we must in fact banish fear and stand for everything.”
When Sir Neville Henderson, the British ambassador to Germany, asked German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop about the troop movements, he was told “to mind his own business . . . that Germany did not want to make trouble, but could not stand by while German blood was shed in Czechoslovakia.”
All this was going on during LaFarge’s long train ride. Since there was no radio on the train and the train conductors said nothing, he had no idea of what was happening. All he could do was sense the strained, tense atmosphere all the way to the Czech border. Worse still, the border post was Eger, exactly where the two men had been killed hours earlier. The train reached the border midevening; customs inspection on both sides was unusually quick and perfunctory, silent and tense. On the Czech side, people finally told him about what was happening. There was “general fear of an immediate German invasion,” and Czechoslovakia was preparing to defend itself against an anticipated Nazi attack.
The train traveled on into Czech territory for another three hours eastward to Prague. The train lights didn’t come on until after they had arrived at Prague’s main station. On the platform, people shouted for porters in a cacophony of German and Czech and French among other languages. A porter half dragged and carried LaFarge’s cases outside to search for a taxi in the driving rain; the weather added to the gloom and desperation.
But the porter abruptly abandoned LaFarge when an imposing German military officer demanded service first. “Half paralyzed with fear, the porter dropped my things on the sidewalk and lugged the big valises inside under an ever-pointing finger,” LaFarge remembered. It felt like an allegory for what was happening between the two countries. “Behind that threatening voice was the voice of Hitler, and that voice spoke not Czech but imperious German.”
LaFarge found a taxi but by then was soaked by the rain. He tried to make his way swiftly to the Jesuit seminary house where he was staying for the night. The roads and highways were clogged with military vehicles and soldiers heading west toward Sudetenland. Saturday had been a workday, and President Beneš’
s call to battle was so pressing that men were reporting to their military posts without even going home first. The atmosphere was turbulent.
The Jesuit center was overcrowded and chaotic like everywhere else in Prague that night. LaFarge’s host, Father Jaroslav Ovecka, set up a makeshift bed for him in the seminary’s geography museum. LaFarge “slept amid maps, globes and charts. Czechoslovakia was still upon the map that night.”
The rain stopped on Sunday, and though news reports said there was less danger of an attack, the constant drone of military traffic suggested otherwise. Appeals came in from Britain, from France, and from around the world for calm and restraint. But the Nazi newspaper Angriff kept the propaganda machine running by proclaiming that the Czechs would be held responsible for any violence against “members of the Greater German nation . . . The German Reich, which as the only big power in Central Europe bears the supreme responsibility for peace in this part of the world.”
The German claims were of course twisting the truth. Hitler and the Nazis were responsible for peace because the führer was the one who would decide whether to start the war. With Czechoslovakia, he was waiting even though the incident at the Czech border had been a promising opportunity. His generals told him the Wehrmacht had not completed preparations yet. All in good time. It was not the moment to launch an invasion, especially when Czechoslovakia was mobilized and waiting. The Nazi army would go in when Czechoslovakia was least ready and least able to defend itself. As Joseph Goebbels pushed the propaganda campaign, he noted the fact in his diary. “The Führer . . . knows what he wants. So far he has always hit upon the right moment to act.”