Catherine Bailey
* * *
THE LOST BOYS
A Family Ripped Apart by War
Contents
List of Illustrations
Prologue
PART ONE Chapter 1
Chapter 2
PART TWO Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART THREE Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART FOUR Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART FIVE Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
PART SIX Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About the Author
Catherine Bailey is the author of two bestselling works of twentieth-century history: Black Diamonds and The Secret Rooms. She lives in London.
By the same author
Black Diamonds
The Secret Rooms
In memory of my father Martin, with love
List of Illustrations
1 Innsbruck, 1939
2 The Wiesenhof orphanage
3 The villa at Brazzà
4 A view of Brazzà showing the castle and the farm
5 Robert Foster, Air Officer Commanding, Desert Air Force
6 Nonino at Brazzà
7 Ulrich von Hassell with Hitler and Mussolini in Venice, 1934
8 Ulrich von Hassell with Mussolini in Rome, 1936
9 Fey, aged sixteen, with her father
10 The Hassell family, c. 1936: (from left to right) Wolf Ulli, Hans Dieter, Ulrich, Almuth, Fey and Ilse
11 SS chief Heinrich Himmler with Hassell (to his right) on National Police Day, Villa Glori, 1937. Auturo Bocchini, Italian chief of police, and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo, are standing to the left of Himmler
12 General Ludwig Beck
13 Major General Henning von Tresckow
14 Fey in 1942
15 Fey and Detalmo celebrate their wedding at Ebenhausen, January 1940
16 Fey and Detalmo with Corrado, November 1940
17 Nonino and the farmhands at Brazzà harness Mirko for an outing. Fey and Detalmo are seated in the trap.
18 Ulrich von Hassell with his grandsons, Corrado and Roberto, at Ebenhausen, June 1943
19 Fey with her mother, Ilse, and Detalmo at Ebenhausen, June 1943
20 Detalmo and Corrado in the garden at Brazzà. The photograph was taken shortly before Detalmo was posted to the POW camp at Mortara
21 The Campo Imperatore Hotel, where Mussolini was imprisoned before being rescued by the SS on 12 September 1943
22 Cora di Brazzà Slocomb, c. 1890
23 Lieutenant Hans Kretschmann with Corrado at Brazzà, 1942
24 Corrado with the airmen at Brazzà, 1943
25 The ‘Thirteen Martyrs of Feletto Umberto’, Premariacco, 29 May 1944
26 The wreckage of the map room at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, 20 July 1944
27 Ulrich von Hassell’s trial, September 1944
28 Claus von Stauffenberg
29 Captain Sigismund Payne Best
30 Bomb damage in Munich
31 Litta von Stauffenberg
32 Alex von Stauffenberg
33 The liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945
34 The Hotel Pragser Wildsee
35 The view from one of the hotel rooms
36 ‘We are searching for these children!’ One of the posters circulated by Fey and Detalmo in the summer of 1945
37 Ewald Foth (second from the right) at the Stutthof trials in Gdańsk, January 1947
38 Himmler’s corpse, photographed by a British Army official, minutes after his death from cyanide poisoning
On page 405
39 Fey with Corrado and Roberto in the summer of 1949
40 Fey at Brazzà, c.1995
The majority of the photographs have been produced by kind permission of the Brazzà family archive. The author and publisher are also grateful to the following for permission to reproduce photographs: H. Huber for 1; The Gemeinde Museum, Absam for 2; Mike Foster for 5; Ullstein bild/Getty Images for 7, 11, 12 and 13; Toni Schneiders/Bundesarchiv for 21; ANPI Udine Photo Archive for 25; The German Federal Archives for 27 and 28; The Nationaal Archief for 29; Hulton Archive/Getty Images for 30; Dr Gudula Knerr-Stauffenberg for 31 and 32; Popperfoto/Getty Images for 33; Zeitgeschichtsarchiv Pragser Wildsee for 34; Dea/S. Vannini/Getty Images for 35; Stutthof Museum for 37; Army Film and Photographic Unit for 38.
Prologue
Innsbruck, Austria, 16 December 1944
‘Monika calling steamboat.’1
This cryptic announcement, broadcast to Austria over the Voice of America, was received with relief by the handful of people able to decipher it. The coded message signalled that the Allies were still trying to infiltrate agents into Innsbruck to make contact with members of the Austrian Resistance.
It was seven o’clock on a winter’s morning, the grey old city walled in by snow-covered mountains. A roof of dense cloud hung over the domes and spires, cutting out the sky and the summit of the Nordkette. Towering 7,000 feet above the city, the sheer face of the mountain rose like a wall, blocking the north end of the fine baroque streets. The illusion of being confined in a small space was maintained in the alleys and passageways in the medieval quarter. On a chill, gloomy day such as this, passing the tall, narrow-fronted Gothic houses, the sensation was of walking along the bottom of a ravine.
Thick wreaths of smoke spiralled beneath the clouds. The day before, American planes had bombed the city, killing 259 people.2 In Herzog-Friedrich-Strasse, a protective shroud covered the famous golden roof of the balcony, designed for Emperor Maximilian in 1500. Beneath the bombed-out buildings, parties of children, drafted in from the villages along the valley, worked to clear the rubble. They were watched by small groups of SS soldiers who stood on the street corners, guarding the defusing crews. Forcibly recruited from the nearby concentration camp at Reichenau, it was their job to deactivate the bombs that had failed to explode.
The Allies were now convinced that Innsbruck, rather than the Reich capital of Berlin, was where the war was likely to culminate. Recent intelligence reports indicated that Hitler was building an Alpenfestung – an Alpine fortress – in the mountains that encircled the city.3 Blueprints obtained by OSS operatives pointed to a chain of underground factories and armouries.fn1 It was to this remote, impregnable fortress that Hitler, and a coterie of his most fanatical supporters, intended to retreat when the Wehrmacht was beaten.fn2 From here, they would carry on the fight, defended by elite SS troops and sustained by huge stores of supplies that had been carefully stockpiled in bombproof caves.
With Hitler holding the high ground, Allied military commanders were predicting that the battle to take the fortress could extend the war by up to two years and exact more casualties than all the previous fighting on the Western Front.4
In these circum
stances, intelligence from Innsbruck, the capital of the Alpenfestung, was suddenly at a premium.5 Allen Dulles, the OSS station chief in Switzerland, hoped to recruit a network of agents from within the city. Their job would be to supply hard military intelligence and assist the passage of US and British forces when they reached the western borders of Austria. But, as Dulles recognized, Innsbruck was not fertile ground. That autumn, the Gestapo had arrested all known anti-Nazis. Moving from house to house, the mopping-up operation signalled their determination to suppress all resistance operations in an area they looked upon as their last bastion.
Soon after midday on 16 December, the US Air Force returned to bomb the city for the fourth time that month.6 ‘A sharp left rally was executed immediately after bombs away and a course flown around Innsbruck,’ the pilot reported. ‘Due to undercast, no visual observations of results were possible.’
Some hours later, Frau Mutschlechner, a resident of forty-seven years, sat down to write her diary. ‘It is a black day for Innsbruck,’ she began.7 ‘The old city centre has been hit as well as the graveyard. Everyone feared there would be another raid and sure enough the enemy bombers came and wreaked their evil.’
There was no gas or water in the city and the cemetery was now closed for burials. In the flat, dingy light, the only colour was from the fires that had yet to be put out. ‘Fräulein Kummer’s photo studio is on fire,’ Frau Mutschlechner reported.8 ‘Warger’s paper warehouse, the stained-glass factory in Müllerstrasse, Café Paul in Maximilianstrasse and Hellenstainer’s Gasthaus are all burning … Showers of sparks and burning paper are falling from the warehouse. One would marvel at the eerie beauty of it were it not such a sad occasion.’
The raid marked a change of tactic.9 In addition to dropping 200 tons of bombs, the US planes had dropped thousands of propaganda leaflets. In the coming weeks, they would drop thousands more. These, and the messages broadcast on the BBC’s Austrian Service, urged the city’s inhabitants to rise up and prevent Hitler from making a last stand in the Tyrol: ‘Tyroleans, we know that you will not permit it.10 You will see to it that none of the Nazi leaders can hide. We know that already Tyroleans are fighting the Nazis everywhere … Even if the Nazis still feel secure in your country, we know better; you are on our side.’
But the vast majority of Tyroleans were not on the Allies’ side. In Innsbruck, the citizens were actively pro-Nazi. It was they who had informed on the burgeoning resistance networks. Protected as they were by the mountains, they did not fear the US raids. After the attack on 15 December, at the sound of four short blasts of a siren, they fled to the bombproof caves, deep beneath the Nordkette.
PART ONE
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1.
One night that December, in the bitterest of weather, a car inched its way along Herrengasse, past the burnt-out shells of houses that belonged to Innsbruck’s wealthiest inhabitants.1 Sleek and black, with a long, low-slung bonnet, the number plate, and the blue glare from its headlamps, identified it as belonging to the Gestapo. At the corner with Rennweg, beneath a low arch, the car turned right, its wheels sliding on the snow.
At what hour precisely – even on which day – it is impossible to say. The official documents relating to the terrible purpose of its journey would be destroyed within months of its having taken place.
The car was heading east. Approaching the outskirts of the city, the driver, wearing the grey field uniform of the Waffen SS, took the Reichsstrasse 31, the main road up through the Inn Valley to the German border. So secret was his assignment, he had waited for darkness to fall before leaving the Gestapo’s headquarters. With a blackout in force, there was no danger of other drivers, or people he passed, seeing two of his passengers. They were so small, not even the tops of their heads were visible through the window.
Craning his neck, the driver could see the children in his rear mirror. The boys were seated next to an SS nurse, their escort for the journey. Aged two and four, they had blue eyes and fair hair, which fell in tumbles of long blond curls. Both boys were dressed in home-made woollen overcoats that were many sizes too big, as if someone was expecting them to grow into them.2
Leaving the city, on the long, straight road that ran through the centre of the valley, the car picked up speed. All around, the frozen landscape was visible, lit by the light from the moon on the snow. On either side, wide, flat fields stretched to the base of the mountains that rose thousands of feet above the valley. The road itself, a thin black stripe in the expanse of white, was clear of snow.3 After heavy falls, tractors and snowploughs were deployed to keep it open. Staff officers attached to the Wehrmacht’s High Command frequently used it. It was the quickest route from northern Italy, where the German Army had suffered a series of defeats, to Adolf Hitler’s headquarters at Berchtesgaden.
The two boys huddled in the back were brothers. Officially, they belonged to no one. Three months earlier, after forcibly wrenching them from their mother, the SS had altered their identities. On the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, the Ministry of the Interior had supplied the necessary documents. New birth certificates, with false names, and invented dates and places of birth, had been issued, enabling the SS to act as the stolen children’s legal guardian. They were the ‘Vorhof’ brothers now. The ministry had named the elder boy ‘Conrad’; the baby was ‘Robert’.
Up ahead, strange snow-shrouded shapes loomed in the fields, caught in the blue glare of the car’s headlights. The railway line running parallel to the road was the main supply route to the German Army in Italy and the Americans had been bombing it for weeks. Wreckage from the raids was strewn across the fields. There were upturned train carriages, spilling their snow-covered contents; the wrecks of downed aircraft, identifiable by the tips of their propellers; and, in this thinly populated area, the sudden, stark interiors of houses that had lost a wall through shelling.
Earlier in the day, the order to pick up the children had been flashed through to the Gestapo. Marked top secret, it had come from the Reich Main Security Office, Himmler’s headquarters in Berlin. The boys were to be taken to a Nazi-run orphanage at Wiesenhof, a tiny hamlet high in the Alps above Innsbruck.
It was not far to go. Turning off the valley road at Hall, a prosperous medieval town some 8 miles from Innsbruck, the car headed up into the mountains. From here, it was a five-minute drive to the orphanage.
The road climbed steeply out of the town. On the right, behind a long wall, was a former monastery, now used as a psychiatric hospital. Within the grounds lay the recently dug graves of upwards of 200 victims of the Nazis’ euthanasia programme.4 Men, women and children aged from fourteen to ninety, they had been murdered by the Gestapo because they were mentally or physically disabled.
Higher up the mountain, clusters of farmhouses stood on either side of the road. This was the outskirts of Absam, a village of some 1,200 inhabitants, 98 per cent of whom belonged to the Nazi Party.5 The houses were prettily decorated in the Alpine style. Wooden carvings, a centuries-old tradition in the Tyrol, hung beneath the gables, and murals of religious scenes were painted on the walls. Some were of the patron saint Maria Schutz, protector of families; she was shown with her arms around the children who were sheltered under her long cloak. In the centre of the village, two lime trees had recently been planted outside the school.6 They were a reward from Franz Hofer, the Nazi Gauleiter of the Tyrol, for the community’s loyalty to the party.fn1 In the pagan mythology the Nazis embraced, the lime was a hallowed tree and a symbol of justice.7 Traditionally, judicial courts were held beneath its branches. It was believed that the tree would help unearth the truth.
Above Absam, the road wound up through a forest. Then, reaching a plateau of upland, where cattle were put out to grass in the summer, it narrowed to a single track. Here, the snow lay undisturbed in thick, undulating drifts formed by the wind blowing down the valley. On one side, sheer rock rose hundreds of feet to the summit of Mount Bettelwurf. The track twisted, following the contours
of the rock until, rounding a bend – on which, in this isolated spot, someone had placed a shrine to the Virgin Mary – the orphanage lay directly ahead.
In the half-light of the moon, its silhouette was familiar to the Gestapo driver; he frequently delivered children after dark.8
2.
The house was in darkness, the windows blacked out; standing four storeys high, its Gothic turret could be glimpsed at the back.
Despite its pretensions to grandeur, it sat uneasily in its surroundings. Hemmed by the mountain that towered above it, and the forest that enclosed it on three sides, its long, narrow shape was unappealing. Large black crosses, made from timber, were stamped in a pattern along the white-painted exterior, and the roof, which was gabled, hung low over the upper floors, obscuring the windows and lending the house an air of menace. The front door, made of thick dark oak, was small in proportion to the rest of it. Stencilled in large Gothic script above the door was the name of the orphanage. Wiesenhof. Meadow Court.
To the locals living in the isolated villages and farmhouses along the plateau, it was a ‘cursed’ and ‘haunted house’, one that brought misfortune to anyone associated with it.1 Formerly a hunting lodge, it was built in the early 1800s by a wealthy aristocrat whose fortune came from the nearby salt mines.2 In 1878, his family sold it to a property developer, who wanted to create a luxury spa resort. After laying a pipe from the mines to provide salt-spring baths, he extended the Wiesenhof and built a second hotel in the grounds. But he ran out of money before he could complete the work and in 1899, when the bank called in his debts, he committed suicide.3
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