HITLER & THE JESUITS
Coady, Mary Frances
HITLER & THE JESUITS Three resisters & the price they paid Mary Frances Coady One day in August 1944, a German priest named Lothar Konig slipped away from the Jesuit house of studies near Munich...
...Delp was executed on February 2, leaving a legacy of profoundly moving meditations and letters that had been smuggled out of prison, and passing into history as a twentieth-century martyr...
...Now, in September 1944, both Jesuits were on the run...
...Some people who witnessed atrocities have said that the psyche does not easily adjust to the realization that what had previously seemed to be cruel aberrations can become What did the Kreisau Circle achieve...
...For the next five months, Rosch hid at the Meier farm...
...He died exactly one year after liberation, at age forty...
...Names surfaced...
...All the others who had been arrested in the wake of the Jesuits' disappearance were liberated, with the exception of Wolfgang Meier Sr...
...He produced a list of the dead from the nearby Dachau concentration camp (some said he had coaxed a cleaning woman into letting him into the room where the camp's records were kept), as well as a text describing conditions at the camp...
...But this criticism fails to take into account the terror of the times and the fact that civilization was collapsing around them...
...Within months, he was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx...
...Most members, people of deep conviction and human decency, were executed...
...Rosch corresponded regularly with them, giving details of the plight of harassed and imprisoned Jesuits, the mass deportation of Jews, and the inhumane treatment of Russian prisoners of war...
...In subsequent years, their meetings and plans have sometimes been mocked as exercises in misguided, Utopian rhetoric...
...Although they had taken no part in the plot on Hitler's life, their fellow Jesuit, thirty-seven-year-old Alfred Delp, had already been imprisoned and was awaiting trial...
...The Jesuit, Meier Sr., his sons Wolfgang Jr...
...In a letter to the Jesuit assistant general in Rome in April 1942, Rosch had referred to the "deportation and slaughter" of Jews (the Nazis were threatening a similar fate for Jesuits), but then asked pardon for using strong language-as if his correspondent might think he were exaggerating, and as if he could hardly believe the reality himself...
...In subsequent years, their meetings and plans have sometimes been mocked as exercises in misguided, Utopian rhetoric...
...One of the groups that came to light was the Kreisau Circle, named for an estate in Silesia belonging to Helmuth von Moltke, the group's aristocratic founder...
...In a letter to a niece, he wrote that he was furtively offering Mass each day, and praying for peace to come quickly...
...court's verdict: death by hanging...
...In the mid-1930s, Rosch had been catapulted from his position as rector of a boys school in Austria to superior of the Jesuits' South German province...
...He brought with him Konig and Delp...
...The world is apt to judge according to success or failure," he said, but he predicted that history would speak kindly of the action of July 1944...
...Sonig's general destination that August morning was south toward Starnberger Lake, but exactly where he found refuge remains unknown...
...Nor did any other actions, including the strategies of generals and the behind-the-scenes efforts of the Kreisau Circle...
...Meanwhile, Delp was preparing for trial...
...What did the Kreisau Circle achieve...
...They were charged with treason...
...Then, on July 20, 1944, the most spectacular failure of all occurred: a bomb planted under a table near Hitler exploded, but left him with only minor injuries when the table absorbed most of the force of the blast...
...Does one lash out fearlessly only to be struck down, as were the brash and courageous students of the White Rose, who strewed anti-Nazi leaflets from the balcony of Munich's university in 1943 and were beheaded...
...Konig remained hidden in the coal shed at Berchmanskolleg for nearly four months, his presence known only to Manall, until the arrival normal behavior, even a state's law...
...The Kreisau Circle was a loose association of aristocrats, civil servants, clergy, and Social Democrats who gathered in small, secret meetings to plan a post-Nazi constitutional government, one based on Christian social-justice principles...
...Rosch, as Jesuit provincial, had been invited to help link the group with the Catholic bishops...
...Meier and his wife had ten grown children, four of whom had been recruited into the German army...
...Most members, people of deep conviction and human decency, were executed...
...It took place early the next year, and on January 11,1945, he received the of the American army in early May...
...He also wrote to his sister Ingeborg, unaware that in retaliation for his disappearance, she had been arrested and was being held in solitary confinement...
...He sent these documents to Rome...
...One can imagine the shock of a Jesuit brother, Max Manall, on opening the college's coal shed and discovering the filthy, exhausted Konig...
...The day before, the Gestapo had come looking for him and had searched his room...
...One wonders what passed through Lothar Konig's mind as he breathed in the coal dust during his final weeks of hiding...
...Still: What does one do...
...Still in hiding, Konig heard of the arrest of Rosch and the Meier family, and also that of two other Jesuits who had been taken into custody following his disappearance...
...Until that summer, Germany's small anti-Nazi resistance network had gone nearly undetected...
...Among its members were three Jesuits: Konig, Rosch, and Alfred Delp...
...Rosch had contacts in Rome at the highest levels, including the Jesuit superior general and Robert Leiber, a German Jesuit who served as secretary to Pope Pius XII...
...Perhaps that is why the quiet heroism of people like Konig, Meier, and Rosch remains unheralded...
...All four had died in combat...
...The army's special communications system proved useful, and working quietly in the background, Konig was able to keep the country's bishops informed about events elsewhere...
...Placed in charge of the house of studies known as Berchmanskolleg, he had managed to wrest the building from the SS, which had requisitioned it, by offering it to the Wehrmacht as a military base and hospital...
...and Martin, and his daughter Maria were all arrested...
...That prediction has not come to pass completely, perhaps because the resisters' motives were not always unified or clear...
...Maria was taken to a women's prison (from which she was released a week later...
...Unlike Rosch, whose leadership position and combative personality had led to frequent run-ins with the Gestapo, Konig pursued his underground work behind an imperturbable facade...
...In an article written a year after the war, the Catholic re-sister Paulus van Husen, one of the few Kreisau members who survived, challenged those who later criticized the July 20 assassination attempt...
...The following month, a police alert was issued for his arrest and that of his Jesuit provincial, Augustin Rosch...
...In one letter he described Germany's situation as "the apocalypse of the twentieth century...
...HITLER & THE JESUITS Three resisters & the price they paid Mary Frances Coady One day in August 1944, a German priest named Lothar Konig slipped away from the Jesuit house of studies near Munich and pedaled south on his bicycle...
...They have been hailed as shining models of German resistance, yet from a strategic point of view, their action accomplished nothing...
...After capture, the two were to be transferred to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where trials were taking place and defendants executed with dispatch...
...Enraged, he ordered the arrest of all those associated with the plotters, however remotely...
...He died of typhus in Dachau, six weeks after his arrest...
...Rosch, fifty-one, with sparse blond hair and stocky build, a hunched posture, and the appearance of a modest businessman...
...The men were sent to the Dachau concentration camp, after which Rosch was taken to a Gestapo prison in Berlin, to be interrogated and beaten...
...He would move about in cloak-and-dagger fashion, sometimes appearing from nowhere on a bishop's doorstep, bringing the latest news, and encouraging the hierarchy in its struggles with the Nazis...
...Rosch, on the other hand, having been warned that the Gestapo was looking for him at the Munich railway station, had driven northeast during the night to a town in the Bavarian countryside, Dorfen...
...The same day, Rosch and the Meier family awoke to find the farmhouse surrounded by the Gestapo...
...He lived another sixteen years...
...There he was offered sanctuary in the home of a farmer, Wolfgang Meier...
...Anguish ran deep in Nazi Germany, not least in the hearts of those who felt conscience-bound to act against barbarity...
...A group of military officers had been plotting since the late 1930s to stage a coup, but one attempt after another had failed...
...They should have spoken out, taken a public stand, made a louder protest...
...The police bulletin gave their descriptions: Konig, thirty-eight years old, lanky, with a thin, pale face...
...Before Rosch could be brought to trial, the war ended, and he was released from prison by Russian soldiers...
...He immediately distinguished himself as an outstanding administrator, and soon gained the confidence of the German bishops...
...Sick at heart over their fate, he decided to head back to Berch-manskolleg at night...
Vol. 131 • October 2004 • No. 18
