In the City of God
Tony David

In the intelligence wars of World War II, the most dangerous man in Himmler’s inner circle was a five-foot-three Benedictine monk with a bad heart and a line to the Vatican.

Most historians took Father Hermann Keller to be a psychotic Nazi, an SS spymaster who hunted Catholics and betrayed a Vatican-backed plot to kill Hitler. For forty years, Sister Luitgardis Hecker, a nun who trained under him, told a different story: Keller, she claimed, was the Vatican’s mole inside the Nazi regime, a saboteur who plucked Jews from cattle cars, lied to Hitler’s face about Allied troop movements, and built an underground network of Catholic agents inside the very SS academies designed to breed the master race.  Most importantly for her, Keller worked with senior opponents of Hitler inside the German military, men whose plans, if they'd succeeded, could have ended the mass killings two years early and kept half of Europe out of Stalin's hands.

Now, eight decades after the war, State Department cables, OSS and MI6 files, and the diaries of survivors bring Keller’s story to light. From the Jerusalem apartment where the author first received a cryptic email reading “IMPORTANT!” to the Madrid embassy where Keller offered Roosevelt’s men the plan by the German military to overthrow Hitler and end the war, only to have it rejected, In the City of God makes us rethink who the true heroes, and the villains, of World War II were. It also shows us that the oldest espionage network in Europe, the Catholic Church, was also its most daring.