Alvensleben’s reprisals continued. On 30 May, the SS rounded up a further 600 men from villages close to Brazzà. As if the deaths of thirteen of their sons was not enough for the hamlet of Feletto Umberto, a force of 1,000 Germans and Fascists returned four days after the hangings and took more men away. Two villagers were shot dead – one for trying to run, the other for attempting to attack the troops.
As the partisans sought the informer who had given the men away, the finger of suspicion fell on Fey. A number of the contadini at Brazzà were related to families in Feletto Umberto and stories of Fey’s fraternization with the Germans – the teas with Alvensleben, the Christmas lunch she hosted for the Luftwaffe officers, her entitlement to send letters through the military post – had leaked out. Her apparent failure to use her influence with the Germans, together with her knowledge of the whereabouts of local men hiding in the area, fuelled the speculation that she was a collaborator. The rumours were compounded by Brazzà’s physical isolation from the community. As partisan attacks on German troops stationed in the region had increased, sentries were posted along the drive up to the villa, and trenches, fortified by high coils of barbed wire, dug around the perimeter of the park, lending the place the appearance of a fortress.
The situation was further complicated by the enmity between the various partisan groups. While Brazzà itself, and the area to the west of it, was controlled by the Osoppo, which was affiliated to liberal and right-wing political parties, the area to the east, including Feletto Umberto, was controlled by the Garibaldi partisans, who were largely Communist. The Garibaldi far outnumbered the Osoppo and were linked to Slav brigades that were also operating in the area and who had territorial ambitions over the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region.
Among the Osoppo, Fey’s loyalty was unquestioned; Detalmo’s cousin, Alvise di Brazzà, commanded one of the brigades, and the Tacoli brothers, Ferdinando and Federico, whose family owned the neighbouring estate to Brazzà, were also leading figures. ‘The Osoppo’s work is valuable and courageous, but I cannot help them,’ Fey wrote to Santa; ‘the German presence here means that I must be a passive resister.20 I cannot hide or feed the Osoppo, as other landowners are doing. The Garibaldi, on the other hand, frighten me. They are mostly Communists and want to expropriate all landed estates in Friuli, so I keep my distance.’
Soon after the Feletto Umberto hangings, Fey learned that she had been placed on the Garibaldi ‘blacklist’. It meant that she was now a target in the attacks they were orchestrating against collaborators. Houses had been set on fire, property vandalized, and a number of people murdered. In an attempt to show the Garibaldi that her sympathies lay with the locals, she instructed her farm manager, Bovolenta, to sell the estate’s produce in the markets at reduced prices. But it made no difference.
As the weeks went by, Fey found herself more and more out of her depth. Her one opportunity to prove her anti-Nazi credentials was to use her influence with the Germans to prevent deportations. But with the exception of the lawyer Nimis, she had failed. She considered leaving Brazzà and returning to the Papafavas’ estate near Padua; but, without access to the military post, she would have no means of communicating with her family in Germany, and she could not bear the thought of losing touch.
Very quickly, the situation deteriorated. Collaborators and Germans were being killed on a daily basis and, in response to SS reprisals, thousands were joining the Garibaldi in the mountains to the east of Brazzà. Paviotti, whose job as a water surveyor meant that he visited remote villages high above the plain, noted the strengthening support for the Garibaldi movement: ‘The word “partigiani” [partisans] is known even among the children and the partisans move around these villages day and night, well supplied by the locals.21 People are saying that the Communists will soon control the area. Even now, Garibaldi men, armed with machine guns, are manning roadblocks up in the mountains. In response, the Germans have started requisitioning bicycles. Someone said they need 20,000. The rumour is that they are gathering them in order to flee if they have to.’
Throughout this period, acutely aware of the increasing danger, Fey kept the children with her at all times. ‘I held Corradino’s little hand on one side and Robertino’s still smaller one on the other. Whatever I was doing they came with me – seeing to the animals, going about the woods and fields, and to meetings with Bovolenta, the farm manager. If I went to see Alvise, Detalmo’s cousin, he would tease me, saying, “Here comes Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi” – a reference to the Roman widow who dedicated her life entirely to the education of her sons.’
Inevitably, at Brazzà, the boys saw a lot of the Luftwaffe airmen and, for the most part, Fey was grateful for their kindness. They would bring the children treats and allow them to sit at the steering wheel in their trucks. There was one officer, however, whom Corrado saw more of than she would have liked – and sometimes even knew. This was Lieutenant Kretschmann, whose strong Nazi views she had mistrusted from the beginning. As the unit’s political officer, he was based in the house during the day, rather than at the airfield at Campoformido, and his office overlooked the garden. Frequently, if Fey and the boys were passing, he would come out and invite Corrado into his office to ‘use’ the telephone, which was, as Fey recalled, ‘a source of endless fascination’ to the four-year-old. The children, especially Corrado, adored Kretschmann and, on the occasions when she had a meeting in town and it was necessary to leave them behind, they would beg to be left with him, rather than with Cilla and Ernesta, two of the maids.
If Corrado disappeared, Fey knew where to find him. ‘Kretschmann once told me that if my back was turned Corradino would knock on his door asking if he could play with the odd bits of electrical apparatus lying about the office. If Kretschmann said, “I am busy now, could you come back later,” Corradino would answer solemnly, “Of course, I’ll come back in a while,” and he invariably did. These were his private excursions. Robertino, on the other hand, hardly left my side. He was, after all, only two and a half years old. But if he did disappear, I knew he would be in the stables with Mirko, the little white horse. He would talk to Mirko for hours.’
Fey assumed that, as long as the Germans remained at Brazzà, she and the children were safe. But then, on 3 July, the Garibaldi attacked a villa belonging to a friend in the neighbouring village of Martignacco, which was also occupied by the Germans. After a gunfight that lasted a couple of hours, the villa was set on fire. That same day, 2 miles to the east on the road to Tavagnacco, the partisans killed a man because he was ‘too pro-German’.
The next day, Fey wrote in panic to her mother:
The situation is becoming more and more complicated for me every day. The Communist partisans have put me on their blacklist as they say I’m too friendly with the Germans. On the other hand, the local people appreciate me because they know that I help when I can … But, if Communist partisans were to arrive here out of the blue, they wouldn’t for a moment think of asking how I behaved and what I did. For this reason, I really don’t know what I should do. My gut feeling is to stay put and I’m sure this is what I will decide in the end. What is certain, anyway, is that I don’t know what I would do without Nonino, my great and constant support.
Andreina’s house was burned down yesterday during a partisan attack.fn2 She had Germans in the house. These days, partisans with Communist leanings frequently attack houses. It happened to some peasants nearby. The partisans took away linen and books, saying reading was unnecessary. They also wanted to set fire to the house, but the peasants begged them not to do it because otherwise they would be homeless. The partisans said, ‘Well, you’re not the landowners, you’re only peasants, so we won’t set fire to it.’
I continue to hide the most important things. I’ve buried the silver, and Nonino helped me dig a hole in the park. Plates, glasses and linen have been hidden with our peasants – all of this in the eventuality of my having to leave or a fire caused by partisan attacks.
It was n
ot just the attack on her friend’s house and the knowledge that she was on the Garibaldi blacklist that triggered Fey’s anxiety. However committed to eliminating collaborators and wealthy landowners, it was widely known that the Communist brigades were inhibited by a lack of weapons. But a few days before she wrote to her mother, Detalmo’s cousin, Alvise di Brazzà, had told her that British commandos were now in the area and that they were supplying and arming the partisans.
The sound of the planes woke her at night – and always in the minutes coming up to midnight. They flew low over the house and she could hear the change in the pitch of their engines as they turned and circled, searching for the drop zone. Yet, whenever she got up to look out of the window, she could not see them; but she could see a dim orange glow on the peak of Mount Joanaz, the closest in the chain of mountains that formed the foothills of the Alps.
The planes were Dakotas, used by British and American Special Forces. Painted black to reduce their visibility in the night sky, some had flame-arrester devices fitted to the engine exhaust vents to further obscure their position.22 Inside, special blackout curtains covered the windows so that the internal lights necessary for flight and navigation could continue to operate.
Flying from Foggia, an Allied airbase in the southern half of Italy, the planes were dropping weapons and other supplies to a brigade of partisans on the summit of Mount Joanaz. The orange glow Fey saw came from the fires the men lit to guide the planes in.
British SOE agents were on the ground to supervise the drops. Codenamed Coolant, the mission, consisting of two officers and a wireless operator, was the first to parachute into Friuli.23 Jumping from a height of 6,000 feet above the mountains to the east of Brazzà, they had landed on the night of 9 June.24
‘Body drops’ depended on a clear, moonlit night to enable the teams to see where to touch down, and that night the sky had been cloudless and the moon full. To ensure their safe arrival, the partisans had sabotaged several miles of high-tension pylons, throwing the area into darkness.
Though operating behind enemy lines, the three-man team wore British uniforms – a precaution in case of capture. The Geneva Convention defined the rights of wartime prisoners: if caught in uniform, they would be treated as prisoners of war rather than spies liable to summary execution. Each man jumped with a hundredweight pack of weapons and supplies. Otherwise, they depended on their training for survival.
Rules for surviving in enemy territory, drawn from the experiences of previous missions, were circulated among all SOE operatives. Major Duncan, attached to Mission Cisco Red, an operation based in central Italy, compiled a list of dos and don’ts for agents assigned to Italian operations:fn3
Never remain static: one night and day in a house is ample.25
Don’t let children see you or, if they do, pretend to be a German if in uniform or an uncle if in mufti.
If the Partisans say there are 1,000 Germans coming up the road you are all right. But if they are laughing or happy, beware! They become easily overconfident.
Trust no one; there are spies everywhere.
The poorer the house, the safer it is: rich houses are invariably Fascist.
Women working in the fields are usually safe.
If a farmer sees you hiding in his fields, he will pass by where you are and pretend not to have seen you. Later, he will come back and, if he is sympathetic, will ask if you are hungry and produce food. If he doesn’t produce food, go away quickly.
Any farm with young men walking about is safe; they are deserters either from the Army or Germany and are in as bad a spot as yourself.
Once you have stayed at a house and eaten there, you are safe; they will not tell the Germans as their house would be burnt down for having kept you there for the night.
Facing this unpredictable, dangerous environment, Captain Hedley Vincent, Coolant’s 34-year-old commander, had briefed the team on its mission before taking off from Foggia.26 The objective was to secure partisan-held territory from which to attack the Wehrmacht’s main supply lines from the Reich. The immediate priority, however, was to turn the partisans into an effective fighting force by supplying them with the arms, explosives, food and clothing they lacked. As Vincent later admitted, ‘The execution of the mission depended entirely on the safe receipt of stores in sufficient quantity.27 We could not just walk into towns and villages. We had in many cases to fight for them and then defend them.’
It was Vincent who selected Mount Joanaz as a dropping site.28 Some 3,000 feet above sea level, it offered security from surprise attack, the easy post-drop distribution of stores, and was acceptable to the RAF crew who had to pinpoint the site and make the perilous run to the drop.
Typically, a delivery would take place around midnight.29 Waiting in Canebola – a remote hamlet of just ten or twelve houses – Vincent and his team would listen out for the BBC ‘crack’, the coded announcement of an imminent drop. After climbing the 900 feet to the summit of Mount Joanaz, they laid out fires in the shape of a T. On hearing the drone of the approaching aircraft, a torch was used to flash the same letter in Morse code to guide the pilot to his target.
The success of the drops depended on the pilot’s precision; on one side of Mount Joanaz, there was a sheer precipice, 3,000 feet down, and if the despatcher was a little early, the supplies were lost. As one SOE officer recalled, other factors also came into play. ‘Not every package dropped from an aircraft gets gathered in to the central collecting point; if conditions are right a keen-eyed watcher will have counted the number of parachutes that opened and others will have marked where they landed – another argument for dropping by moonlight – but some may get caught in an air-current and be carried too far; with luck these may be found in the morning, not always by the partisans.30 A few seconds’ mis-timing by the pilot or despatcher can spread the drop far and wide.’
The villagers turned out whenever a sortie was expected.31 Taking up position by the fires, they collected the packages as soon as they hit the ground. Bundles of clothing and boots came down without the aid of parachutes and, as one SOE agent recalled, ‘with freefalling equipment, it became a dangerous operation’.32 But arms, ammunition and explosives floated down in containers. These were then unhooked from the parachutes and taken down to the village by men, women and children who frequently carried up to a hundredweight on their backs.
Living side by side with the partisans and dependent on their local knowledge and loyalty for their own survival, the SOE operatives came to admire their courage and commitment in fighting the Germans. ‘One of my most vivid memories,’ one agent recalled, ‘is that of a long line of partisans and friendly village folk carrying enormous loads on their backs after gathering the equipment received from a parachute drop that had scattered itself all over Mount Joanaz, and seeing amongst all these people a little boy of barely four years of age carrying two pairs of heavy army binoculars up and down steep paths all the way to the village of Canebola.’33
Throughout July and August, the drops continued on an almost daily basis.34 Only the dark nights in the moon’s last quarter prevented them from taking place. During those summer months, four additional SOE teams parachuted into the region. The names of the missions were Sermon, Bakersfield, Ballonet and Tabella.
As Fey lay in bed, listening to the circling planes, all her anxiety centred on the threat from the partisans. She recognized that, in her eagerness to protect her children, her house and the families who worked on her husband’s estate, she was embedded with the Germans.
13.
Ulrich von Hassell’s thoughts were never far from his youngest child and in early July he felt a longing again to see Fey, who, he believed, ‘in her isolation needs help desperately’.1 He expressed this concern to a friend on one of the last occasions he and his fellow conspirators gathered. That evening, Hassell found General Beck, the leader of the group, in a negative frame of mind having lost hope of ever removing Hitler from power.
Since the spring of 194
3, when Henning von Tresckow failed in his three attempts to kill the Führer, the chance of success was even more remote. The defeat at Stalingrad marked the start of the Wehrmacht’s long retreat and, with every military setback, Hitler travelled less and less. He refused to visit hospitals for wounded soldiers or bomb-damaged cities, fearing such sights would induce pity and thereby make him weak.2 He now shunned the crowds that he had relied on to bolster his self-image. He made almost no public appearances and was virtually invisible, save to his personal entourage. His low state was noted by one of the few people who saw him regularly – Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda. ‘It is tragic that the Führer has become such a recluse and leads such an unhealthy life.3 He never gets out into the fresh air. He does not relax. He sits in his bunker and worries and broods.’
For some time, Hitler had not even visited Berlin. As the country’s military might withered, so did he.4 A tremor developed in his hands. His left foot dragged behind him as he walked. His face took on a haunted look.
But the one ray of hope for Hassell and his circle was that it was no longer necessary to make ‘desperately isolated attempts’.5 If they could only find a means of eliminating Hitler, an ingenious plan was now in place to overthrow his regime.
The plan was one that Hitler himself had requested to counter the threat of civil insurgency. Fearing that Germany’s 4 million-plus foreign workers – the majority of whom had been forcibly deported from Nazi-occupied countries – might revolt, he and his senior commanders had devised a contingency plan, codenamed Operation Valkyrie. It hinged on mobilizing the Reserve Army throughout the Third Reich to quash an uprising.
Using this framework, Tresckow, in collaboration with General Olbricht, who had drawn up the plan for Hitler, adapted it for the purposes of engineering a coup. Once the Führer was dead, they would proclaim a state of emergency, blaming his death on an attempted putsch by the SS. This cover story would easily deceive unwitting members of the armed forces into believing that they were acting against a treacherous group of SS officers who had turned against their leader. Party officials and SS personnel would be arrested and only then would the operation reveal itself as a full-scale coup.
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