Fey returned to Brazzà on 17 December. The situation in the neighbourhood was calm and she was thrilled to be back at home in time for Christmas with the boys: ‘It was the first Corradino and Robertino were old enough to appreciate. The day after my arrival, to their great excitement, we began to make the decorations. On Christmas Eve I set up a large tree in our living room. When Nonino lit the candles, I threw the doors open, and in came the little boys, beaming with delight, followed by the maids, Mila and Ernesta, and finally the German officers. I felt sorry for them as they were so far away from home and I thought it would cheer them up to be included in our family circle. One of them even came dressed as Father Christmas, carrying the traditional bulging sack over his shoulder.’
From now on, contact with Detalmo would be intermittent. The Allies were bombing the trains in and out of Rome, making it difficult for couriers to deliver letters and messages. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. No word from you for a long time,’ he wrote a month after Fey left. ‘It is v upsetting, as I long to know how you and the children are. Without news I feel so isolated … I had the negatives you gave me printed, which is a great consolation. The children’s coats, made out of Grandfather Tirpitz’s uniform, are still a bit big! Corradino shows a certain serenity, a self-confidence, while Robertino looks cross and unhappy about being photographed. It’s very funny! A hug and kiss with all my heart.’
Fey was now resolved to remain at Brazzà for the duration of the war. All her fears were about the man she loved and the risks that came through her association with him. But, as the events of the coming year would prove, these fears were misplaced. The real danger lay in the one place in which she thought she and the boys would be safe.
12.
The winter passed without incident. ‘We never heard a gun or the whistle of a falling bomb whereas, for most of the rest of Europe, bombing raids and the apparatus of Nazi terror were the framework of people’s daily lives,’ Fey wrote.
Then, in the spring of 1944, Major General Ludolf von Alvensleben was appointed Polizeiführer (SS and police commander) in Udine. Previously attached to Einsatzgruppe D, the notorious SS paramilitary death squad, he had been implicated in some of the worst excesses of German rule in Russia.1 His unit’s murderous activities in the Crimea were detailed in regular communiqués to Berlin. ‘In the period under summary,’ the reporting officer noted in the spring of 1942, ‘further success was achieved concerning the arrest and the disposal of unreliable elements thanks to the extended network of secret informants … From 16 to 18 February 1,515 people were shot: 729 Jews, 271 Communists, 74 partisans, 421 Gypsies and asocial elements, and 20 saboteurs.’2
At the beginning of the war, Alvensleben had served in Poland, where he was alleged to have murdered 4,247 Poles in the months after the Germans invaded.3
Fey was not aware of his previous history, but he came from an old Prussian family known to her parents. In the hope that she could use the connection to gain a reprieve for Italians threatened with deportation, she invited him to tea. ‘Knowing that he was in overall charge of the SS and Gestapo, I mentioned a man called Feliciano Nimis, a local lawyer, and told him that Nimis’s deportation to Germany would have disastrous consequences for his family. To my surprise, Alvensleben acquiesced and the order was rescinded.’
Confident that the major general could be persuaded to reprieve others in the community, Fey issued further invitations. As it transpired, Nimis was her one success. However, the sight of the SS chief’s car on the road to Brazzà was noted by the contadini working in the fields.
Within weeks of Alvensleben’s appointment, the SS began to raid the villages around Brazzà. The locals called them rastrellamenti – rakings. Looking for men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, the troops moved from house to house and combed woods and farm buildings.
Throughout the winter months, the Germans had been trying to conscript men of military age. Under pressure from the Allies in the south, reserves were needed for the Wehrmacht and for the labour battalions tasked with constructing defensive lines at strategic points across central Italy. Repeated orders went out for the men to volunteer at recruiting stations. But few had turned up and the raids were intended to flush out those in hiding.
The SS search parties set out from depots in Udine. ‘Going past the barracks this morning, I saw ten trucks pulling out in convoy,’ Umberto Paviotti, a resident of the city, noted in his diary on 10 May.4 ‘Each one had about 10 Germans on board, armed to the teeth, and with a machine gun mounted on top of the vehicles. The backs of the trucks were empty.’
Paviotti, aged forty, was exempt from military service and his job as a water surveyor meant that he could move around freely on his bicycle. Some days later, he cycled past the school the SS had requisitioned to imprison men rounded up in the villages. ‘There are about 500 of them,’ he recorded.5 ‘You can see them hanging out of the windows, all shouting. Outside, there are crowds of women, trying to see their sons and husbands. Three or four Germans and about twenty of these damned Fascists hold them back … I heard the men were seized by force – coming out of church and bars, and from their houses. The Germans helped themselves to anything they wanted as they dragged the men away … At Nimis and Qualso, a bunch of them, aided by Fascists, made all the villagers leave their homes. They kept them hostage while they went through all the houses, taking anything valuable – money, gold, silver, clothes etc.’
The villages lay within a 10-mile radius of Brazzà. At Feletto Umberto, the closest – just 2 miles across the fields – most of the young men in the tiny hamlet, twenty-six in total, were taken away.
With the SS manhunts in full flare, German armed forces became increasingly visible in the area. At Campoformido, the Luftwaffe base close to Brazzà, the peasants were banned from nearby fields. ‘The Germans are building wooden aeroplanes and wooden anti-aircraft guns around the airfield to act as decoys for Allied reconnaissance planes now flying over the area,’ Fey wrote to her friend, Santa Hercolani.6, fn1 ‘The locals say, what are they thinking? Do they expect the Allies to drop wooden bombs on these wooden planes?!’
The partisans were also stepping up their activities; railway bridges and electricity substations were attacked, and numerous Fascists murdered. In Povoletto, a small village 6 miles to the north-east of Udine, Communist partisans shaved the heads of seven local women for sleeping with German soldiers.7 In this febrile atmosphere, wild stories circulated. ‘Mussolini is building a weapon of mass destruction in Venice, people say.8 One that is going to throw this terrible death ray, which will shoot 3,000 kilometres and will win him the war,’ Paviotti reported. ‘The news on the radio is that the Allied troops in the south have launched a big offensive. People are anxious for further news but we hear very little and understand even less.’
On the night of 14 May, Allied planes started bombing the region. ‘At four in the morning we heard three loud explosions coming from Udine,’ Fey wrote to Santa.9 ‘The next day we heard the air-raid sirens and the sound of machine-gun fire coming from the direction of the airport. The English bombers were seen flying very low, close to Udine, and the accompanying fighters fired their machine guns at the ground. Some German planes went to attack them and we watched a dog fight, high above us. Luckily, none of the planes was downed but it was quite something. Passing through a village nearby, I saw that someone had written “God Curse the English” on a wall. After the bombings in the north and now this, people are turning against the British and the Americans in favour of the Russians and thousands are joining the Communist partisans here. To cap it all, the weather is hot and oppressive and thunderstorms threaten to destroy the hay harvest. Our contadini look tense and gloomy as they go about the fields.’
The contadini depended on the hay harvest to feed their animals throughout the year. Hail and thunderstorms frequently swept down from the mountains and at Brazzà the peasants still relied on the warning system that had been in use for centuries. In is
olated villages, high up in the mountains, storms were announced by a pealing of bells. Lower down the slopes, hearing the warning, the villagers would ring their own church bells, a signal to the contadini to go out into the fields to do what they could to bring in the hay or protect the crops. In this way, the warning of an approaching storm was communicated from the mountains to the foothills and across the plain, the harsh clamour ringing out from every village campanile.
The weather broke on 16 May, the night Allied planes returned to bomb electricity substations near Trieste. ‘The storm finally came last night,’ Fey wrote to Santa.10 ‘Very little rain but huge claps of thunder and a great deal of lightning. The children were already awake as the bells were going off in the villages before it started. In between the thunder we could hear loud explosions coming from the mountains. The boys, of course, were very frightened. I sat with them for several hours and eventually managed to get them off to sleep by singing their favourite lullaby.’
It was Brahms’s ‘Lullaby’ that Fey sang, with its chorus: ‘Lullaby and goodnight, you are Mother’s delight / I’ll protect you from harm and you’ll wake in my arms.’
On 24 May, the shooting of two German soldiers outside the village of Premariacco, 5 miles from Brazzà, ratcheted up the tension in the neighbourhood. Umberto Paviotti spoke to the villagers the next day: ‘It’s unimaginable what consequences this is going to bring,’ one resident reported.11 ‘People are saying the Germans are going to shut the whole village down, seize all men and carry out pointless reprisals against the innocent.’
The SS descended on the village the following day and all the houses were searched. ‘Some weapons were found in one house and they told the woman present to immediately find her husband and son,’ Paviotti recorded.12 ‘But she didn’t know where they were. So they shot her twice, doused the house in petrol, set fire to it and threw the dying woman into the flames. People said they heard her screaming and then silence.’
Two days later, with the culprit for the murder of the two German soldiers still not found, Alvensleben judged that the time had come to set an example.
On 28 May – Pentecost Sunday – Lieutenant Kitzmüller was on duty at SS headquarters in Udine when his immediate superior, Major Moller, asked him to select thirty prisoners for execution from among those rounded up in the villages. ‘I was speechless and even Moller, who was used to such things, seemed a bit perturbed.13 When I objected that we absolutely didn’t have that many detainees who deserved to be executed for their crimes, he replied brusquely: “I hope that among 500 prisoners you will find 30 candidates for the death sentence.” And he let me go. At first I couldn’t resign myself to this terrible order and I leafed through the register from beginning to end at least twenty times without finding a single candidate. So then I decided to go to Moller again to tell him that I hadn’t been able to identify anyone. I did this in the hope that he would ask someone else to do it. When I told him that I hadn’t found anyone appropriate, he declared: “That’s rubbish. Their crimes are irrelevant. I need people for an act of reprisal that will spread terror.”’
Twenty-six prisoners were selected, of which thirteen came from the hamlet of Feletto Umberto on the border of the Brazzà estate – ‘the Thirteen Martyrs of Feletto Umberto’, as they would come to be known.
There were two twenty-one-year-olds, three twenty-year-olds, five boys of nineteen and three of eighteen. None of them had played any part in the murder of the German soldiers. Rounded up on 9 May, they had been in prison in Udine when the killings took place.
It was Alvensleben who made the final selection. In stripping Feletto Umberto of its young men, his aim was to send a warning to the neighbourhood. The hamlet had a long history of subversive actions against the Fascists and the boys belonged to the Youth Group, a Communist-run partisan organization. Further, when they were originally rounded up, an informer had betrayed their hiding places. The message Alvensleben wanted to communicate was that the SS were omnipotent: no hiding place was safe.
The number of prisoners selected, and the date and manner of their execution, were designed to incite maximum terror in a population whose daily lives revolved around their religious beliefs. The men were to be executed in two groups of thirteen: the first at Premariacco, where the German soldiers had been killed; the second at San Giovanni al Natisone, a village further south. Thirteen was a number of religious significance: there had been thirteen present at the Last Supper. The date Alvensleben chose for their execution was also symbolic – 29 May, Pentecost Monday. A holiday of great spiritual importance in the villages, Pentecost was when the Holy Spirit had descended to bestow the gift of tongues on the twelve Apostles so that they could go out and spread their faith. The festivities normally lasted the whole weekend. The village priests, wearing red vestments to signify the flame of the Holy Spirit, scattered rose petals through the streets, doves were released and there were outdoor feasts on long tables set up in the village squares. Above all, it was a time of renewal, when the villagers celebrated the new life the Holy Spirit breathed into their faith.
The Germans did not announce the executions. On the morning of 29 May, at Premariacco and San Giovanni al Natisone, they turned up out of the blue.
In the piazza in Premariacco – the site chosen for the execution of the thirteen men from Feletto Umberto – the rose petals were still strewn across the square. Situated 15 miles from Brazzà, the village, like so many in the region, was one of the poorest in Italy. The petals were the only splashes of colour in a place that poverty rendered monochrome. The roads through the village, mud-bound in the winter, dust-blown in the summer, were unmetalled; the houses, made of bleached white stones hauled from the bed of the nearby river, lacked plaster facades; the wooden shutters, rotting and hanging from their hinges, were unpainted. Inside the houses, but for crucifixes and embroidered pictures of the Sacred Heart, the rough walls were bare.
Vittorio Zanuttini, a farm labourer, lived in a house close to the square. ‘At about 8 o’clock in the morning, I was stopped in the piazza by some German soldiers and they ordered me to oversee the works for a hanging.14 Full of terror, I ran to the village hall to ask for clarification from the secretary to the mayor, who advised me to obey their orders. A German lieutenant, carrying lengths of rope, took me to the Osteria ai Cacciatori – the village bar – where he taught me how to tie the knots for the nooses. He said that if they didn’t hold, I would end up on the gallows myself. In the meantime, outside in the village square, soldiers were forcing passers-by to put up the beams they had taken from the mayor.’
Basic in structure, the gallows consisted of a single beam nailed to two pillars, like a goalpost. A bench then had to be found for the condemned men to stand on and someone was sent to the church to retrieve a pew. As one group of soldiers supervised the erection of the gallows, another combed the village. Only women, children and the elderly were left, and they were rounded up – out of the fields where they were working, and from their houses – and forcibly taken to the village square to watch the hangings.
Vittorio Zanuttini was in the square when the trucks carrying the thirteen men from Feletto Umberto arrived. ‘At about half past nine, two trucks entered the village.15 One was civilian and painted in red. On board was a group of youths, dressed in civilian clothes. Following behind was a military truck, filled with German soldiers, heavily armed. The youths were told to get off the truck. I remember they were laughing and chatting among themselves, and smoking cigarettes. I don’t know whether they thought they were a working party and the Germans were going to ask them to build something in the piazza or what, but they clearly had no idea what was about to happen to them. Suddenly, a German officer gave an order and the poor men had their hands tied behind their backs.’
‘The boys arrived there quite happily,’ another man wrote.16 ‘They actually thought they were being taken home. Try and imagine how they felt when the lorry stopped in front of the gallows and the soldiers starte
d tying their hands behind their backs.17 They shouted out that they were innocent. They invoked their mothers and their children. They begged for a moment so that they could write or pray.’
The village priest asked the Germans if he could give the men the last rites, but they refused and he retreated to a wall where he performed absolution, keeping in close eye contact with the men.
‘They were all made to stand on the bench in a row,’ Zanuttini continued. ‘I know there were thirteen because that’s how many nooses the Germans made me tie. They put the nooses around their necks and suddenly kicked the bench, leaving them suspended in space. It was a stomach-churning scene that lots of us had to witness because the Germans had marched us down to the piazza at gunpoint.’
On Alvensleben’s orders, the SS left the bodies of the thirteen men on the gallows until five o’clock the following afternoon so that people could see what happened to partisans. Hundreds from all over the region came to view the macabre sight and to hear the stories circulating in the village. Umberto Paviotti cycled there a few days after the hangings: ‘I heard from the local priest that he was barred from giving the boys a Christian burial.18 And I heard from someone who was present at the execution that after it happened the Germans walked around the bodies, sniggering. I also heard that once the bodies were removed, two partisans came and took the rope down and swore they would hang Germans with the same rope.’
On the night of the executions, a German plane clipped the bell tower in a nearby village and crashed in flames. The villagers interpreted it as an act of God in revenge for the hangings. ‘The seven crew rose high into the sky without an aeroplane. What a shame!’ Paviotti wrote.19
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