In the decade that followed, a succession of owners had tried – and failed – to resurrect the spa.4 Then, shortly before the First World War, it was sold to Siegmund Weiss, a wealthy Jewish businessman from Vienna, who leased it to the Viennese Anthroposophy Society, founded by the Austrian mystic and self-proclaimed clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy was a spiritual movement which sought to promote physical and mental well-being using natural means and, by the 1930s, the Wiesenhof had become one of the most fashionable resorts in Europe. Run by Steiner’s disciples, it offered a range of alternative medical treatments and therapies, and was visited by international celebrities, aristocrats and prominent members of the Nazi Party.
But the ‘curse’ of the Wiesenhof had struck again in 1938 after Germany invaded Austria. In the months following the Anschluss, thousands of Jews were rounded up in Vienna, where the Weiss family was living. On the night of 10 November alone, 8,000 were arrested.5 That same night, 680 others committed suicide or were murdered. Walther Eidlitz, the grandson of Siegmund Weiss, remembered how ‘the mobs came rolling in over all the bridges of the Danube, and how the men held up their clenched fists threateningly towards the dark walls of the houses and rhythmically shouted in chorus: “Death to Judah! Death to Judah!”’ Soon after, he fled the country.6 But his mother, whose childhood had been spent at the Wiesenhof, was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, where she died in 1941.7
In the absence of the spa’s Jewish owners, high-ranking Nazis and wealthy guests from all over Europe continued to enjoy its sybaritic routine. Yet, as the manager, Rudolf Hauschka, recalled, the annexation of Austria placed the resort in ‘serious danger’: ‘one was continually aware of living in an oasis which could at any moment be covered over with a sand storm.’ He would turn out to be right.8
An event which Hitler would come to regard as one of the worst personal blows of his life, and which his investigators linked back to the Wiesenhof, led to its transformation from a luxury spa to a Nazi-run orphanage.
It began with the controversy surrounding the Anthroposophists’ tenancy after the Germans seized Austria.
Three years earlier, the anti-occult faction within the Sicherheitsdienst – the Nazi security service – had banned the Anthroposophy Society.9 Its opponents included Joseph Goebbels, Reich minister of propaganda; Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich; and Martin Bormann, the Führer’s private secretary. Branding the society a menacing, Jewish-controlled sect which, through its links to Communists and Freemasons, belonged to a shadowy international conspiracy that threatened the German people, they wanted to eliminate the movement entirely. But the Anthroposophy Society had equally powerful supporters within the Nazi Party – among them Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, and SS General Otto Ohlendorf.
Throughout the 1930s, both Hess and Ohlendorf – who would later stand trial at Nuremberg for the murder of 90,000 Jews – were regular guests at the Wiesenhof.10 Without formally endorsing Rudolf Steiner’s doctrines, both men considered aspects of anthroposophy to be compatible with National Socialist principles, particularly Steiner’s ideas on biodynamic farming.11 In the gardens and fields around the Wiesenhof, the land was cultivated using these methods. Sowing and harvesting were determined according to astrological principles and, as an alternative to fertilizers and pesticides, a variety of homeopathic treatments were used.
To Heydrich and Goebbels, this was ‘occultist quackery’.12 But as long as the Anthroposophy Society enjoyed Hess’s protection, they were unable to eliminate it. While continuing to peddle rumours of the ‘prominence of the Israelite element’, and ‘covert saboteurs and antagonists’, they instructed their agents to move cautiously.13 No action was to be taken against the Wiesenhof; instead, it was to be kept under close surveillance.14
In keeping watch, the Gestapo relied on locals employed at the house. A large number of the gardeners, maids and other staff necessary to maintain the luxurious standards at the spa came from Absam, the nearby village rewarded by the Gauleiter of the Tyrol for its loyalty to the Nazi Party. Based on the villagers’ reports, the Gestapo placed its own agents inside the clinic. ‘Despite the fact that we cultivated the best of relations with the neighbourhood, gossip continued,’ Rudolf Hauschka recalled.15 ‘We felt mistrust come crawling out of every corner, and we later heard that informers, passing themselves off as patients, were watching what we did.’
It was the villagers’ prejudice against the clinic’s Jewish owners, and their mistrust of the new-fangled ideas practised by the Anthroposophists, which led them to inform the Gestapo of the goings-on at the Wiesenhof.16 ‘Everything is wrong there,’ they muttered. ‘It does not belong to us.’ A community of devout Catholics, whose families had worked in the salt mines since the fifteenth century, the anti-Semitism embedded in their culture was reinforced by the Nazis’ propaganda. Every Sunday, at Mass, they were told that Jews had murdered their God. Across the valley, in the village of Rinn, the church was named after Anderl, a three-year-old boy ‘murdered’ by Jews in medieval times.17 His death, depicted in a gruesome painting that hung inside the church, was part of the folklore of the Tyrol. In the backward, inward-looking villages, many still believed the myth that the Jews had used the boy’s blood to make matzohs for Passover.
With the connivance of the villagers, the Gestapo’s final move against the Anthroposophy Society came in the spring of 1941.
On 18 April, Rudolph Hess arrived to spend the weekend at the Wiesenhof.18 In an attempt to evade the Gestapo, he had booked into the clinic under an assumed name. One night during his stay, Hess, who surrounded himself with astrologers and was interested in mysticism and the occult, convened a seance in his room. Conducted in the strictest secrecy, it was in direct contravention of Hitler’s ban on occult practices. ‘Mystically inclined occult investigators of the hereafter must not be tolerated,’ the Führer had pronounced in the autumn of 1938.19 ‘They are not National Socialists: they have nothing to do with us.’ Via their informants, the Gestapo learned what had occurred during the seance. According to their files, the participants had summoned the ghost of Bismarck – the Prussian statesman who had unified Germany and built a powerful empire in the last decades of the nineteenth century.20 They had asked his ghost how the war would end. His reply, ‘rapped out on the seance board’, was that Hitler would lose the war and go to ground, and that Germany would be plunged into dire misfortune.
Three weeks later, on 9 May, Hess flew alone and unannounced to Scotland on a quixotic mission to negotiate peace with Britain. His flight – just weeks in advance of Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union – came at a sensitive time for the regime and, as soon as it became known, the search for a plausible and face-saving explanation began.21
The story, fuelled by the Gestapo’s reports of the seance at the Wiesenhof and Hitler’s shock at such a personal betrayal by one of his closest friends, centred on Hess’s susceptibility to occult doctrines and practices. Reich minister Hans Frank was present at the meeting convened on 13 May to discuss the crisis. ‘Hitler was evidently in torment.22 I had not seen him for some time and I was deeply shaken by his utter depression. In a very low voice, and hesitantly, he spoke to us … He described the flight as pure insanity, and believed an astrologer had put Hess up to it. “It is high time to destroy all this star-gazing nonsense,” he said.’
The following day, Hitler’s private secretary sent a telegram to Heydrich, the chief of the Gestapo: ‘The Führer wishes that the strongest measures be directed against occultists, astrologists, medical quacks, and the like, who lead the people astray into stupidity and superstition.’23 The result was Aktion Hess, a purge of so-called ‘practitioners of the occult’.24 Hundreds were arrested and interrogated – including faith healers, fortune-tellers, graphologists and Christian Scientists – and a ban placed on all ‘occult’ organizations, with special emphasis on the Anthroposophy Society.
On 9 June 1941, the Gestapo raided the
Wiesenhof. ‘Suddenly, police cars appeared and, in no time at all, the sanatorium was surrounded by Gestapo officials,’ Rudolf Hauschka recalled.25 ‘A thorough search of the house began, with the contents of the library, office and book-keeping room being carried off in lorry loads. My scientific library, which included ordinary scientific works on chemistry, botany and anatomy, was also seized. When I asked why books that were not prohibited were being taken away from me, I received the answer: “Everything you read is suspect as far as we are concerned.”’
Later that day, Hauschka and his colleagues were arrested and taken to the Gestapo prison at Innsbruck.
Soon after, a notice was posted around the Wiesenhof estate: In Dem Deutschen Reich Einverleibt – ‘Incorporated into the German Reich’.26 Within months, the estate became an SS stronghold; a barrack was built in the forest below the house to accommodate thousands of SS mountain troops and, for the purposes of rewarding party cronies, a number of properties were seized.27 One farmhouse, with spectacular views over the Inn Valley, was given to Franziska Kinz, a film actress much admired by Hitler and Goebbels.
After lying vacant for eight months, the Wiesenhof itself was used to house senior SS officers serving at the new barrack until, in the autumn of 1942, it was transferred to the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (NSV) – the state organization for the people’s welfare.28
It was then that it became an orphanage for children aged between two and twelve.
Very little is known about the time when the Wiesenhof was a Nazi-run home for children. The suggestion is that there were upwards of sixty children, a significant proportion of whom the SS had stolen and given false identities.29 The local families, whose loyalty the Gestapo had counted on during the years when the house and its estate was leased to the Anthroposophy Society, had continued to work there.30 When the war ended, the fear of punishment led these same families to kick over the traces of all that had occurred. They destroyed the records relating to the orphanage.
For the rest of their lives, the villagers employed at the Wiesenhof remained tight-lipped about how they treated the children and what conditions were like there.31 They never spoke about it. Nor did the inhabitants of the nearby villages, who, at the very least, would have known of its existence, ever speak about it. It is as if the place never existed. In the 1960s, the building was taken over by the Austrian state and turned into a police academy. Today, in this tiny hamlet, there are people – residents of thirty years or more – living just yards from the academy who know nothing of its former history. As one woman said, ‘No one ever told us it was an SS orphanage.32 We never knew it was there.’
But there is no doubt that many did know of its existence. In a number of the pretty, chalet-style houses dotted along the plateau beneath Mount Bettelwurf, and in the village of Absam, evidence of their knowledge can still be found. When the orphanage was closed down at the end of the war, the locals looted it. Some of their descendants still have the towels that were used to dry the children after their baths.33 Pale blue and pink in colour, they are inscribed with the initials ‘NKWD’ – the Nazi ministry that ran the Wiesenhof.
Just one glimpse of the interior remains. A local woman, who visited the house after the war, remembers seeing the beds the children had slept on.34 They were decorated with paintings of forests and flowers and arranged, dormitory-style, in the former dining salon at the back of the building. A large high-ceilinged room, with five bays of windows, it was here that the Wiesenhof’s infamous guests, Hess and SS General Ohlendorf – the murderer of 90,000 Jews – had dined before the Gestapo closed the spa.
The names of the children who slept, night after night, in the rows of painted beds are lost. Their captors destroyed the files that contained their details – their ages, their SS aliases and their individual characteristics – because they wanted their stories to be forgotten.
The ‘Vorhof’ brothers are the one exception. In the face of the deliberate, collective amnesia that descended over this remote part of the Tyrol after the war ended, a fragment of memory survives. It comes from Frau Buri, who was the head nurse at the orphanage when the Gestapo delivered the boys.
In the weeks after their arrival, Frau Buri kept a close eye on the ‘Vorhof’ brothers.35
Conrad, the four-year-old, she noted, was shy and rather nervous and always cried when he was put to bed.36 Whereas Robert, the two-year-old, seemed to adjust to the home with much less difficulty and after a while began to play happily with the other children. She and the other staff were impressed at how Conrad protected and looked after his little brother. In the mornings, he would help Robert dress, even tying his shoelaces for him.
Their angelic looks and impeccable manners marked them out from the other children.37 They always said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. As the weeks passed, Frau Buri grew more and more curious. She wondered who the boys could be. The entry in the register, filled in the night they arrived, simply said ‘Vorhof brothers, Conrad and Robert: mother arrested’. She knew that ‘Vorhof’ was an alias; the SS always changed the smaller children’s names and never gave any information about who they were or why they were being held. But she and the other staff found it hard to believe the mother was an ordinary criminal, since the boys had told them they lived in a ‘big house’ and had horses.
One day, she overheard the brothers chatting to each other.38 To her amazement, they seemed to switch effortlessly between three different languages – German, English and Italian. She had assumed German was their mother tongue; the boys spoke it fluently with no trace of an accent. It was possible, of course, that one of their parents was English or Italian, but to hear them speaking in three different languages was puzzling. There was one other thing: the boys’ overcoats, which had obviously been remade from an adult’s coat, struck her as most unusual. The fabric, which was a distinctive, deep Prussian blue, was of the same colour and texture as the greatcoats worn by officers in the German Navy.
She tried questioning the boys.39 What were their names? she asked. ‘Robert’ told her his name was Robertino; but Conrad said he had forgotten his. She did not believe him. Any four-year-old boy would know his name. ‘Conrad’, she concluded, was concealing the brothers’ true identity. It was not that he had forgotten. He simply was not prepared to say.
PART TWO
* * *
3.
‘Secret. AHQ DAF proceed Castello di Brazzà 15:00 hrs. 5 miles NNE Udine. Ref C.3427.’1
Above the noise of the engine, and the bangs and creaks of the jeep’s suspension as it moved at speed along the unmetalled road, came the crackle of static, punctuated by bursts of voices, mostly unintelligible.
Robert Foster, Air Officer Commanding, Desert Air Force (DAF), was travelling in the lead vehicle. Following behind was a convoy of some fifteen lorries, escorted by motorcycle outriders.
They were heading north, towards the Alps. The road stretched ahead, white and straight, bordered on either side by low mulberry trees clipped in a fan shape. On the near horizon, the ridge of mountains, their peaks still covered in snow, stood up into the sky, rising out of the flat country like a great wave about to break.
It was 12 May 1945. Five days previously, when the Germans capitulated and the ceasefire was signalled, Foster’s Advanced HQ had been halfway up the main road from Venice to Treviso side by side with General Army HQ.2 Now they were on their way to Udine, a medieval city in the province of Friuli, close to Italy’s border with Yugoslavia.
The day had been still and warm and the heat rose off the dusty road. With the cooling evening air came the scent of wild thyme growing in the fields and of condensation forming on the dry earth.
Foster leaned back and breathed it in. This was the fourth time his Advanced HQ had moved in a month.3 But this time, the war in Europe was over.
His war had ended on a high. Six weeks earlier, he had overseen Operation Bowler, one of the most sensitive bombing missions of the Italian campaign. The target was
a convoy of German shipping lying at anchor in the Venice lagoon. He himself had come up with the codename for the operation.4 Resigned to the high probability of failure, and prompted by a dark sense of humour, he had called it Bowler because he knew that if any part of Venice was damaged other than the harbour where the ships were docked, he would be ‘given his bowler hat’ – a popular euphemism for an ignominious return to civilian life.
At forty-seven, his career in the RAF had been long and distinguished.5 He had joined as a fighter pilot in the First World War, winning a DFC at the age of twenty after destroying five enemy aircraft. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he had been appointed station commander at RAF Wyton, where he had served during the Battle of Britain. Senior posts in the Mediterranean Command had followed, culminating in his appointment as AOC, Desert Air Force. His return to Italy had been something of a homecoming; though he had been educated at Winchester and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, he had grown up in San Remo on the north-west coast of Italy, where his father, a doctor, had treated expatriates living in the fashionable resort.
Foster had spent weeks planning Operation Bowler. The question was, how to bomb Venice. While the Allies balked at such a drastic solution, the harbour had become a focal point for enemy traffic.6 The destruction of the road and rail network in the north of Italy meant that the Germans had resorted to transporting desperately needed supplies by ship to Venice. These were then transferred to barges for onward distribution via the canal and river network. The major difficulty was that the docks were located in the south-west corner of the island, 300 yards from the Grand Canal.7 Residential districts, and myriad important historic buildings and cultural monuments, lay close by. Somehow – if they were to be spared – a plan had to be devised whereby the bombs would land directly on the harbour, an area that was just 650 by 950 yards.
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