Roman Curia

The Roman Curia is part of the clandestine political and financial world that Dr B describes from his former legal practice. His firm handled negotiations and transactions connected with Church property after Hitler’s government began targeting monasteries; its discretion helped keep those dealings concealed, but also made Dr B a target when the Gestapo sought information and assets.

Role in Dr B’s Professional Network

Dr B says that his family’s practice, first run with his father and later by Dr B alone, had ceased to function as an ordinary law office. It advised and managed the assets of large monasteries and had also been entrusted with funds belonging to members of the imperial family. The family’s connections to the court and clergy reached back two generations. Dr B describes the work as a quiet inherited trust, dependent on discretion and reliability rather than public cases or new clients. When Hitler began taking property from the Church and monasteries, cross-border negotiations and transactions intended to preserve movable assets passed through the firm. Through this work, Dr B and his father knew more about secret political dealings of the Roman Curia and the imperial house than the public was likely to learn. The Curia thus enters the narrative not as a visible institution conducting business in public, but through the confidential financial arrangements and political knowledge entrusted to intermediaries.

Secrecy and Surveillance

The practice’s inconspicuousness served as protection. It had no plaque on its fourth-floor office door and outwardly avoided monarchist circles; Dr B says that even Austrian ministries did not suspect that imperial couriers used the office to collect or deliver important messages. The firm’s clerk, hired on a priest’s recommendation to make the business appear ordinary, was kept away from its sensitive work: he handled telephone calls and harmless documents, while Dr B opened no important correspondence to him, typed significant letters without copies, took essential files home, and moved secret discussions elsewhere. These safeguards limited what the clerk could learn, but did not prevent him from placing the office under surveillance. Dr B later recalled that the clerk’s work changed from lax to unusually eager, including repeated offers to take correspondence to the post. The account leaves uncertain how the clerk discovered the firm’s real activity, but identifies his surveillance as the breach that exposed a network carrying the interests of the monasteries, the imperial family, and the Curia to political scrutiny.

Nazi Seizure and the Search for Information

Dr B was arrested by the SS on the evening Schuschnigg announced his resignation, a day before Hitler entered Vienna. Before his arrest, he burned the most important papers and sent indispensable documents concerning monastery assets and two archdukes’ funds held abroad to his uncle, using a laundry basket carried by his housekeeper. The account presents these steps as a last effort to protect entrusted property and records from seizure. The Gestapo treated Dr B as a person from whom it might extract money or significant information, rather than sending him to a concentration camp. It suspected that funds handled by his practice remained beyond its reach and wanted evidence against monasteries accused of moving assets fraudulently, as well as against the imperial family and its supporters. Because Dr B and his father knew secret dealings involving the Roman Curia, the same institutional relationships that had required careful confidentiality now formed part of the information the regime had reason to pursue.

Interrogation and the Cost of Uncertainty

After fourteen days in isolation at the Hotel Metropole, Dr B was interrogated about financial and professional connections, including which bonds he had bought for which monastery and which banks he had contacted. He could not tell what the Gestapo already knew from surveillance, intercepted correspondence, or information obtained from others. That uncertainty made each answer consequential: confirming information might expose someone unnecessarily, while denying too much could place him in greater danger. The pressure continued after each interrogation. Returned to his room, Dr B repeatedly reconsidered his answers and tried to anticipate what the interrogators might ask next, without knowing what they had recorded or learned. The Curia’s secret dealings therefore remain largely undisclosed in his account; their narrative significance lies in the political danger attached to confidential knowledge, and in the way the regime’s control of information forced a custodian of that knowledge into an ongoing process of self-questioning.