The Pope's Last Crusade by Peter Eisner Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œAmerica!” 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,