Never-seen-before Nazi war crime files tell story of Pope Pius XII’s Vatican spy and the plot to kill Hitler
Josef Müller was a lawyer, First World War veteran and a member of the German resistance who passed information to Britain via the pope
NEWLY released files have told the story of the Vatican’s top spy in Nazi Germany who found himself at the heart of a plot to overthrow Hitler.
Josef Müller was a lawyer, First World War veteran and German resistance member.
In Nazi Germany he became a spy for the Vatican, working as a middle man between the anti-Nazi underground and the Pope.
Muller collected and verified information using a network of informants with access to Nazi officials, according to a new book entitled Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler.
The book, by Mark Riebling, says Muller used this “community of the well-informed, who worked in newspapers, banks, and even…the SS itself” to gather information before smuggling it back to Rome.
According to the book, a Jesuit priest later said of Müller: “He was a brave man. He needed to have a firm character.
“He was flying this tiny little sports plane from Germany into Italy, bringing over these documents to Merano, and there he gave them to somebody who would take them to … the Vatican.”
Pope Pius XII would then review and pass on the information to the British intelligence services.
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The information Muller passed on in 1939 and 1940 included messages from the underground, which was trying to strike a deal with Britain to overthrow the Fuhrer and call a truce.
High-ranking members of the armed forces and intelligence services wanted to take down the dictator and set up a new government.
The negotiations came to nothing after Hitler’s rapid success in invading France, Belgium and the Netherlands destroyed any hope of the coup organisers gaining the necessary support in Germany.
But the plot did highlight the central role the Catholic Church took in trying to bring down the Third Reich using espionage.
In the Vatican, Muller was reportedly considered to be a representative of Colonel-General Ludwig Beck – one of the main men behind a later plot to assassinate Hitler with a bomb hidden in a briefcase in 1944.
The plan was the subject of 2008 Hollywood film Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise and Bill Nighy.
The plot ultimately failed, with Hitler surviving and Beck and most of the other conspirators either killing themselves or being executed.
By this point, Muller was already locked away in a concentration camp, having been arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.
But the devout Catholic managed to survive the war and played a key role in post-war politics in Germany.
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