He was further grilled by the SS, who, as the hours and days passed, tried to get him to contradict himself. Mallaby held firm and he was not tortured or drugged.16
A female SS collaborator from Merano was in charge of accompanying Mallaby to the shelter and bringing him back during each air raid, while the captain joined them when they went to the mess, which was located in another building.
As reported in his secet diary, Mallaby optimistically thought ‘that by now they trusted me fully, for no guards ever accompanied us or were placed over my room’. But at the end of his final interrogation, Mallaby was informed that he would be taken to a German general.
Once again, just when appearances suggested a terrifying, or at least very uncertain outcome, something unexpected happened.
On the evening of 26 February, Dick Mallaby was taken to a splendid villa in Fasano, near Lake Garda.
Left alone in one of its very luxuriously furnished rooms, Mallaby first saw a woman appear in evening dress, and then none other than Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, head of the police and military plenipotentiary of the German armed forces in Italy. In practical terms, Wolff was in charge of all the areas not directly involved in the fighting (the latter being under Albert Kesselring’s control) and thus headed the brutal anti-partisan war.
The surprises continued as Wolff, via the elegantly dressed lady, who was officially present as an interpreter, began to engage with Mallaby in an unexpected way.
In his sober uniform which bore only a single decoration, Wolff paternally and lightly pointed out to Mallaby how lucky he had been not to have been shot as a spy yet. Mallaby as usual pretended not to understand German.
After the cordialities were over, Wolff categorically told Mallaby that Marshal Graziani could not adhere to his request, as Italy’s destiny in the war was inextricably linked with that of Germany, in accordance with the latter’s principles of chivalry and honour.
What actually happened in the weeks that followed showed just how diverse German behaviour was in that decisive and difficult moment from what was pompously declared by Wolff.
Wolff, who also claimed that the stories relating to SS atrocities were ‘quite untrue’, continued to inform Mallaby rather erratically that he had provided ample guarantees to Cardinal Schuster that, in the case of a German surrender, it would be in accordance with the German tradition of chivalrous loyalty. He continued arguing about the military and political situation, boasting of his personal friendship with Hitler, Göring and all the German leaders.
After this general, conciliatory preamble, Wolff indicated that what Mallaby had said was considered false by the Germans. The Polizeiführer then contradicted himself, stating that the moment would come soon when the Wehrmacht’s leadership would need to make contact with their British counterparts. Wolff put himself forward as official or unofficial liaison official, by virtue of his self-proclaimed ability to negotiate with ease.The following dialogue developed, recorded by Dick Mallaby in his private memoirs:
WOLFF: To considerably simplify the approach ... Tell me, Captain Tucker: are you in a position to send a message to your headquarters?
MALLABY: If I had my transmitter, yes.
WOLFF: And where is it?
MALLABY: In Switzerland.
WOLFF: There are no problems. We have agents in Switzerland and can bring it here.
MALLABY: I’m sorry, but that’s practically impossible.
WOLFF: Why?
MALLABY: The apparatus is in the possession of my comrade in Bern and only I know how to find it.
WOLFF: You can give me a letter addressed to him. So he can hand over the transmitter to our agent.
MALLABY: I am sorry, sir, I cannot do that.
WOLFF: Your way of doing things is ruining your story, Captain Tucker.
MALLABY: But I certainly cannot give you the addresses of British secret agents in Switzerland! You can understand that. I suggest an alternative: I will go to Bern myself and bring the transmitter here. I give you my word. If I can go back, I will do it.
WOLFF: Hmm. I have to think about that.
Mallaby inferred from the tone of Wolff’s statements and from the non-negative response to his bold proposal that Wolff was fully aware of imminent defeat and was attempting to curry favour, putting himself forward as an intermediary between the Germans and the Allies.
Encouraged by Wolff’s increasingly persuasive and cordial tone, Mallaby also realized that if he managed to return to Switzerland, it would open up the possibility of him playing a decisive role in this matter, thanks to this unexpected opportunity. Thus he reiterated the proposed plane journey already presented to Colonel De Leo: either an Allied aircraft could take Wolff to a part of Allied-occupied Italy, or Wolff could travel there on board a German aircraft.
After their two-hour meeting, Wolff revealed that he was convinced of Mallaby’s good faith and made a rather naive (or rather, naively sly) offer that was really uninviting: if Field Marshal Alexander agreed to interrupt the supplies of matériel to communist partisan groups in northern Italy, he would allow all the other Italian patriot formations who wanted to, to cross the front line and enter the south.
Mallaby, for his part, gave his word of honour as a British officer that he would return with a radio within a week to relay Alexander’s reply. Furthermore, he promised not to reveal the locations of the various strategic sites which he had been escorted to.
Mallaby was in good spirits as he planned his trip to and back from Switzerland. While for the second time he had unexpectedly saved his skin, without endangering his two companions still in prison, and without having revealed any secrets, he understood that the opportunity presented to him was highly favourable for obtaining results that were both hard to imagine and very important.17
As Mallaby noted in his private memoirs: ‘I realized that at this stage little or no harm could come to me or to my friends in prison. It was in fact the chance of a lifetime, and if it had been successful it might have meant a great shortening of the war in Europe and the saving of many lives… it was with great difficulty that I masked the emotion I felt at the success of my series of bluffs’.
The end of the meeting was accompanied by a significant change in the atmosphere: in fact, Wolff, appointing Mallaby as his go-between, told him that he would be allowed to return to Switzerland, and wished him luck.
Mallaby was then taken back to Verona.
The next morning, Mallaby learned that Obergruppenführer Wolff had indeed ordered his release, but his departure was delayed for several hours due to further air raids.
In his private memoirs, Dick Mallaby also recalled that, despite the obvious danger to his life, the sound of the bombs dropped by his fellow countrymen and the Americans always helped to keep him in high spirits, giving him the irrational feeling that ‘our boys are coming’. This intimate detail alone suggests something of his emotional state and the tension under which he was forced to live, beyond any formal detachment that he maintained.
On 28 February, Mallaby, after another air-raid delay, left Verona and was first escorted by the Germans to a villa in the western part of Lake Como. Having reached Cernobbio, about a kilometre from the Swiss border, he agreed with Wolff’s men the precise location at which he would return to Italy and the stock phrase that would be sent via standard BBC transmission (used for those who were not able to receive encrypted ones): ‘Per Giovanni’ (‘For Giovanni’), to advise the Germans of his arrival and later to give indications of the date and time of his return to Italy and any other necessary details.
Mallaby reiterated his promise to return with the radio within a week. This commitment was not carried through, however, and for the third time out of three in Mallaby’s military service, his mission did not develop in the foreseen manner. On 1 March 1945, at 7.00am, Mallaby, who ought to have been able to return to Switzerland without issue, arrived confidently at the Swiss border in Chiasso under the guise of Bernardo Francini, a member of t
he Swiss secret intelligence services – a false identity that had been previously agreed with the Swiss services through Edgardo Sogno’s partisan group Organizzazione Franchi.
However, once again Mallaby discovered that those who should have put him in a position to act without hindrance had not been up to the task. The right hand did not know what the left was doing on this occasion either, and the Swiss border police had not been informed of the arrival of Bernardo Francini. The border officials got wind of the fact that this person was not just a mere illicit presence, and diligently contacted the relevant office, the head of which, Guido Bustelli, was unavailable, while the official specifically sent to Chiasso knew nothing about Bernardo Francini, and refused to identify him.
Mallaby had managed to escape any consequences of arrest by the Brigate Nere, and had managed to establish a dialogue with the leaders of the RSI and the SS, but had not taken into account the state apparatus of neutral Switzerland, and, above all, the slovenliness of those who had organized and run his mission.
There were no alternatives: faced with a return to Italy, Mallaby opted to be taken into custody by the Swiss, hoping that his presence would be reported or make someone curious to know more about him. He was immediately imprisoned along with a group of smugglers, after a stopover at the decontamination center, with no way of communicating with the outside world. Once again Mallaby found himself enduring a terribly frustrating wait, especially considering that time was of the essence.
Despite his protests, his imprisonment continued, and he was moved from one detention camp to another. Only on the 8th was Mallaby able to secretly send a message from Bellinzona Camp through Giorgio Casagrande, a member of the Red Cross. Casagrande’s father was in contact with McCaffery, who had heard about the immediate failure of the mission, but had received no information on Mallaby’s fate.
Despite the conciseness of his communication, Mallaby took care to summarize everything, and, above all, requested transmission of the message ‘Per Giovanni: detained, continue to listening’; the message was broadcasted immediately in the evening.
Neither Mallaby nor McCaffery knew that, as a result of the tumultuous developments of previous days, Karl Wolff in that precise moment was secretly in Switzerland, busy in a meeting that led to crucial events. And above all they did not know that Dick Mallaby’s instructions should not have been followed.
In early 1945, Christine Northcote-Marks and her group of FANYs had been transferred from Monopoli to Siena in Tuscany. In her office within the Istituto Tolomei, after a few days, she noticed the name and photo of Dick among the lists of former pupils, but after having waited days and days for the latest news on Dick’s fate, she was unofficially informed that he had been captured once again.
Mallaby’s fiancée could not bring herself to report the bad news to Mallaby senior (who, however, received it by other means). More than that, after a few days, she was forced to return to Britain for a period of convalescence, where she received official notification that Dick Mallaby had ‘disappeared during active service’.18
Mallaby’s ruse following his capture helped the positive conclusion of Operation Sunrise (or Crossword, as it was known to the British), a series of covert activities and secret negotiations between the Germans and the Allies which sought to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy and avoid further deaths and the destruction of Italy’s infrastructure.
Thus in Lugano on 3 March, in a discreet room of Restaurant Biaggi, a meeting took place between Eugen Dollmann, Guido Zimmer (a leading figure in the German intelligence services) and the OSS agent Paul Blum. The American representative, while not making concessions or demonstrating willingness, asked the Germans, as a clear demonstration of the effectiveness of their intentions and of their good faith, to free the most important resistance member held in Italy, Ferruccio Parri, and another key Allied agent, Toni Usmiani. To their surprise, Allied intelligence learnt a few days later that Parri and Usmiani had been released and were in Switzerland.
The next key move in Sunrise saw Karl Wolff himself secretly, and perilously, leave Italy for Zurich, Switzerland, on 8 March 1945, without the official consent of Hitler or Himmler, and without the Italians knowing, meet Allen Dulles, head of OSS in Switzerland.19
Wolff began the meeting with a brief personal résumé, which included, rather incongruously, letters of recognition from an ecclesiastical source, and personal references from the Pope and the Führer’s former deputy Rudolf Hess, who, in his words, was ‘currently in Canada’ (sic). The initial atmosphere of embarrassment and suspicion, with Dulles wondering whether or not to shake hands with Wolff, became more collaborative. Wolff, taking responsibility for the initiative and stressing that he was not seeking any personal post-war benefit, managed to prove, if not his own good faith, to be at least minimally trustworthy. He also repeated his insistence that he was determined to avoid ruining Italy and its artistic heritage.20 Wolff, however, presumed a greater bargaining power than he actually possessed at that time.21
In return, Wolff sought the unmolested withdrawal of Army Group C’s forces back into Germany as the Allied forces in southern Italy advanced northwards to take their place.22
Dulles appears to have made a secret agreement with Wolff which allowed the latter to avoid prosecutions in future war crimes trials, even though Wolff had been clearly implicated in various criminal acts.23
While Churchill and Roosevelt were kept closely informed of the Sunrise/Crossword negotiations between Wolff and Dulles, Stalin was merely informed on 12 March that discussions were taking place. Soviet negotiators were excluded from the meetings, which led to tensions between Roosevelt and Stalin that foreshadowed the Cold War.
Further Sunrise/Crossword meetings also took place with the American General Lyman Lemnitzer and British General Terence Airey. The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April 1945 brought an end to the Sunrise/Crossword negotiations: the new US President, Harry S. Truman, halted the talks in Switzerland, and Truman would ensure that a Soviet representative was involved in the final negotiations for the German surrender in Italy. But at that point things were nearly at an end.24
Mallaby was finally released from his detention and managed to return to Bern on 11 March. There, he learned on one hand that the stone he had rolled had turned into an avalanche, and on the other that the negotiations with Wolff were now in the hands of the Americans.
Despite his arrest, what Mallaby had helped start had begun to take concrete form, even if the events were shaped by complex, top-secret political and diplomatic decisions. His spur of the moment ruse led to the decisive development of events, or, at least, accelerated them.
Interestingly, Giovanni Barbareschi was also released quickly. He always believed Dick Mallaby was responsible for this, and remained grateful.
But why did Mallaby find such a receptive subject in Wolff? Mallaby’s appearance on the scene occurred at the lowest point in Italian–German relations, based as it then was on continuous fictions and mutual suspicions, which served to clarify the Germans’ general lack of loyalty. Karl Wolff, despite having been mildly disgraced in 1943 for having divorced his wife, was a prominent figure in Nazi Germany and, as such, had intimate knowledge of the internal mechanisms of the German leadership and the character nuances of all its leading figures. Wolff, above all, had a very relevant personal goal: currying favour to avoid the consequences of his involvement in criminal acts.
But the unexpected developments that spun out of Mallaby’s mission generated concerns, leaving the very few who were able to know of them puzzled and even suspicious.
In his official recordings, Cecil Roseberry appeared very pleased with how his agent had behaved: ‘Dick appears to have put up a good show. The last time he got free it was one chance in a million and this time it was one in a thousand. He will think these things are easy!’. In private, however, as will be shown, he expressed different opinions on Mallaby.
The secret do
cumentation of the time, in fact, reveals far less enthusiastic evaluations. The British leadership immediately considered what Mallaby had done to be impracticable – and perhaps far from commendable – and did not want it disclosed even within SOE.
From the highly confidential reports of early March 1945, it transpires, in fact, that inside SOE, a ‘Mallaby case’ had arisen, so much so that in order to try to reassure the London leadership, an urgent communication was sent, stating that the agent had been carefully interrogated in Switzerland over his impromptu operational liaison with Wolff.
The attitude of the highest authorities involved had as its basic premise, at the political–military level, the disagreement between what was instigated by Mallaby and the British guidelines on the matter, and more generally, the institutional phobia of being double-crossed.
It is hard to believe that the unjust treatment suffered by Dick Mallaby could have been the result of a very critical report produced a few months earlier regarding his father. This report, which made use of confidential information gathered by the Italians over the previous years and now available to the Allies, was triggered by Cecil Mallaby’s protests addressed directly in a long letter sent in December 1944 to Commodore Ellery Stone (Chief Commissioner of the Allied Control Commission), deriving from the enduring confiscation of the family’s assets, and the political and economic situation around Siena after the front line had moved on.
Lieutenant-Colonel E. H. J. Nicholls, provincial commissioner of the Siena Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT), replied to these criticisms very aggressively, pointing out that Mallaby senior had not been interned during the war thanks to the contribution of ‘all the political and Fascist authorities’ and concluding that ‘I understand he is a rich man who wants to take advantages of the times and become richer’. The acrimonious and personalized content of this document may have resulted from the aforementioned confidential reports, which underlined Mallaby senior’s initial financial support to Fascism in the 1930s, but more than that to malicious local rumours.25
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