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    Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler
    Unavailable
    Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler
    Unavailable
    Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler
    Audiobook10 hours

    Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

    Written by Mark Riebling

    Narrated by Fred Sanders

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The Vatican's silence in the face of Nazi atrocities remains one of the great controversies of our time. History has accused wartime pontiff Pius the Twelfth of complicity in the Holocaust and dubbed him "Hitler's Pope." But a key part of the story has remained untold.

    Pius ran the world's largest church, smallest state, and oldest spy service. Saintly but secretive, he skimmed from church charities to pay covert couriers, and surreptitiously tape-recorded his meetings with top Nazis. When he learned of the Holocaust, Pius played his cards close to his chest. He sent birthday cards to Hitler-while secretly plotting to kill him.

    Church of Spies documents this cloak and dagger intrigue in shocking detail. Gun-toting Jesuits stole blueprints to Hitler's homes. A Catholic book publisher flew a sports plane over the Alps with secrets filched from the head of Hitler's bodyguard. The keeper of the Vatican crypt ran a spy ring that betrayed German war plans and wounded Hitler in a briefcase bombing.

    The plotters made history in ways they hardly expected. They inspired European unification, forged a U.S.-Vatican alliance that spanned the Cold War, and challenged Church teachings on Jews. Yet Pius' secret war muted his public response to Nazi crimes. Fearing that overt protest would impede his covert actions, he never spoke the "fiery words" he wanted.

    Told with heart-pounding suspense, based on secret transcripts and unsealed files, Church of Spies throws open the Vatican's doors to reveal some of the most astonishing events in the history of the papacy. The result is an unprecedented audiobook that will change perceptions of how the world's greatest moral institution met the greatest moral crisis in history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 29, 2015
    ISBN9780147525291
    Unavailable
    Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

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    Reviews for Church of Spies

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    • 5/5
      We are all familiar with the cliché that a given book was so riveting that I couldn't put it down. Mark Riebling has authored a book that was so riveting I forced myself to put it down. I didn't want to come to the end too quickly. Church of Spies is an outstanding contribution to the literature on the German resistance to Hitler as well as the resistance by elements of the Catholic Church at the center of which was Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, a much maligned figure in the eyes of many historians. Riebling's work should put to rest conclusively any allegations that the Pope was sympathetic to, indifferent to, or so fearful of National Socialism that he holed up for the duration in the Vatican and tried to stay above the fray.As Riebling relates the story, in fact, not only was Pius XII an advocate of resistance, he was an active participant at the heart of plans and schemes to assassinate Hitler. His would be executioners were members of the German military, particularly members of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. A lay German Catholic lawyer, Joseph Muller was the main link between the German plotters and the Papacy. A Jesuit priest, Robert Leiber who resided in the Vatican, although he had no title or official position, would be briefed by Muller and in turn brief the Pope. The Pope authorized the German Church to participate actively in this attempted tyrannicide. He also employed one Monsignor Ludwig Kass to act as his cutout to the Allies leveraging their various diplomatic missions in the Vatican up until the entry of Italy in the war after which the Vatican gave sanctuary to the diplomats of Allied countries.The point at issue in the ongoing efforts to engage the Allies was the desire on the part of the internal German plotters to secure a reasonable peace terms from the Allies that would not be based on unconditional surrender, dismemeberment of Germany or a punitive treaty that would put the rebels in a position similar to the leaders of the Weimar republic who signed the armistice and the Treaty of Versailles thereby becoming leads in the legend that Germany was stabbed in the back and not defeated in 1918.In the meantime the military plotters planned mutiple attempts which obviously failed to take out the Fuhrer. The first attempt occured in Munich On Novemebr 8th, 1939 on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler was scheduled to deliver a speech as he had done every year on the anniversary date at the Burgerbraukeller. Another attempt was designed to blow Hiler's plane on a return fight from Smolensk in 1943 with explosives packaged in such a way to appear to be two bottles of cognac. Finally there was the failed assaiassination and coup on the part of Claus von Stauffenberg, Operation Valykyrie.In the aftermath of the last failure the SS rolled up the resistance in the Abwehr and discovered a cache of documents that the Germna military failed to destroy that implicated the Vatican, Jospeh Muller, Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, and his subordinates Hans Oster and Helmuth James von Moltke. All of the above paid with their lives excpet for Muller who narrowly escaped the hangman when the SS evacuated their remaining political prisoners from Dachau and was subsequently liberated first by the Wehrmacht and finally by the American Army,There are too many heroes to recognize in this brief essay but I would like to single out one of the villians of the piece, one Alfred Hartl, a defrocked priest who had offered his services to the SS to conduct surveillance operations against anti-Nazi German Catholics; In fact he identifeid Muller early on in the history of the conspiracy to kill Hitler but was thwarted by the Abwehr who proviced the necessary cover for Muller's frequent trips to the Vatican before and during the war. He was arrested by American troops in Austria on May 26, 1945 and became a witness agains his erstwhile colleagues in the SS who were being investigated for their crimes. He produced a report on the Vatican Intelligence Service documenting the contacts among the Pope, Admiral Canaris and Joseph Muller. He then offered his services to the Americans to spy on the Vatican. All he required was staff, a budget and a mutli-year contract. He was neither hired not prosecuted. Riebling reports that he "soon became an apostle of yoga, environmentalism, and whole foods".