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

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