Hitler used the broadcast to issue emergency orders. ‘No military authority, no leader of any unit, no soldier is to obey any orders emanating from these usurpers; on the contrary, it is every German’s duty to arrest or, if they resist, to kill at sight anyone issuing or handing on such orders … I am convinced that with the elimination of this very small clique of traitors and conspirators we shall at last create in the homeland the atmosphere which the fighters at the front need.7 For it is unthinkable that at the front hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of good men, should be giving their all, while a small gang of ambitious and miserable creatures here at home perpetually tries to sabotage them. This time we are going to settle accounts with them in the manner to which we National Socialists are accustomed.’
Meeting with senior Nazi leaders earlier, Hitler had elaborated on how he proposed to ‘settle the accounts’: ‘I shall crush and destroy all the treacherous creatures who tried to stand in my path today.8 Traitors in the bosom of their own people deserve the most ignominious death – and they shall have it! I shall wreak vengeance – inexorable vengeance – on all who were involved in this, and on their families, if they aided them. I shall exterminate this whole brood of vipers once and for all! Exterminate them, yes, exterminate them …’
By the time Hitler’s address to the nation ended – at ten minutes past one on the morning of 21 July – five of the leading conspirators had already been executed. Among them, Claus von Stauffenberg, who planted the bomb, and Colonel General Ludwig Beck, Ulrich von Hassell’s closest friend and the man who would have been president had the plot succeeded.
Listening in the dead of that night to Hitler’s broadcast, it did not occur to Fey that her father was one of the conspirators. Hitler had mentioned just one name: Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. When her younger brother had visited at Christmas, Stauffenberg’s name had not cropped up in their conversations about their father’s circle.fn1 Yet, as the days and weeks passed and it became evident that Hitler was taking advantage of the failure of the plot to arrest and liquidate anyone he thought opposed him, Fey grew increasingly anxious: ‘As these events unfolded and more and more people were implicated, I became terribly worried about my father. The names of the men who had been executed, published in the papers, were all too familiar to me. Even though they were mainly army officers at that point, many were friends of my father. Maybe, I thought, the “civilian” opposition groups had not been discovered. Letters arrived regularly from my mother, but they carried no word about the attempt. Given the tight censorship, how could it have been otherwise? But she did refer to “one great preoccupation”. This made me suspect something, but I did not give it much weight. Gradually, I found reassurance in the absence of bad news. I presumed that my father, if involved, had not been found out.’
In truth, as the summer wore on, Fey was beset with her own troubles. Tension in the region was escalating rapidly. With the help of the British SOE missions, the partisans now controlled the mountains to the north and east of Brazzà, encompassing an area of more than 1,000 square miles – right up to the Austrian border. Only one or two isolated German detachments remained. There had been fierce fighting on Monte Narat, which Fey could see from the house, and hundreds of German soldiers had been killed. In response, the SS were carrying out brutal reprisals, setting fire to houses and murdering indiscriminately. In the last week of July alone, it was reported that ninety had been killed at Sutrio, thirty at Arta, twenty-two at Pramosio and fifty-two at Paluzza.9 Down on the plain, the ‘rakings’ continued and, as all men of military age had fled the villages, the SS were now rounding up women, children and the elderly.
‘Udine is paved with posters put up by the Garibaldi, calling for people to rise up and embrace Communism,’ Fey wrote to Santa Hercolani at the end of July.10 ‘Due to the dreadful SS “rakings” and reprisals, the Garibaldi brigades are getting bigger and bigger, and in order to feed the men hiding out in the mountains, the number of raids on local stores and shops has increased dramatically. Still no sign of D.’
Since 4 June, when the Allies liberated Rome, Fey had been waiting for Detalmo to come home. Thousands of members of the Resistance had made the perilous journey from Rome across enemy lines to join partisan forces in the north to continue the fight against the Germans. As the staff at Brazzà reported sightings of large numbers of men stealing through the villages on their way to the partisans’ hideouts in the mountains, Fey could barely contain her excitement.
While she recognized that, with the Germans in occupation, it was impossible for Detalmo to return to Brazzà, she assumed he would join the Osoppo, many of whom were affiliated to the centre-left Partito d’Azione. Their hideouts were a fifteen-minute ride away, which meant she would be able to see Detalmo regularly. After the long months on her own, the thought that he would be close by and there to protect her and the boys in an emergency was a great comfort.
As the weeks passed, and there was no sign of Detalmo, Fey became increasingly anxious. In one respect her life was slightly easier now than it had been. Though, as the wife of a wealthy landowner and therefore a class enemy, she remained on the Garibaldi blacklist, the arrival of the British SOE missions had at least reduced the danger that she would be attacked for ‘collaborating’ with the Germans. Shocked by the extent to which the Garibaldi partisans’ Communist goals prevented them from working with the Osoppo, Hedley Vincent, the commander of the Coolant Mission, had ordered the two groups to form a unified command.11 It was only by threatening to withdraw the mission – and thus the much-needed supplies – and by convincing the Osoppo of Winston Churchill’s loathing of Communism – that Vincent had succeeded in persuading the two battalions to unite.
The Osoppo command had informed their Communist counterparts that Fey was not a collaborator. However, she still feared that, with the Germans on the back foot, Brazzà itself would be attacked. As a leading figure in the Partito d’Azione and scion of a family that had been among the most powerful in Friuli for centuries, Detalmo’s standing was high in the Osoppo and Fey hoped that, if he were home, he could use his influence to persuade the partisans to spare the house.
It was not until the first week in August that she finally received a message from him. It contained the devastating news that he had decided to remain in Rome. Sergio Fenoaltea, a senior minister in the newly formed democratic government, Italy’s first in twenty years, had offered him a job as his political secretary and it was an opportunity Detalmo felt he could not turn down. He knew that his proficiency in English and his contacts with the Allies were important to the Partito d’Azione, and Fenoaltea, a close associate of Ugo La Malfa, was a man he admired.12
Fey felt deeply betrayed by Detalmo’s decision; that he had placed his political loyalties above his family upset her terribly. With the front straddling central Italy, they were now on opposite sides of the fighting line. It meant that she and the boys would be alone at Brazzà for the duration of the war.
In the ensuing months, Fey would come to look back at his ‘desertion’ as the moment when something in her marriage was broken.
A few days after Detalmo’s message arrived, Fey received another blow. ‘I was informed of something I had been dreading for some time,’ she wrote. ‘My protector, Major Eisermann, was leaving for a new posting. For almost a year he had supported and helped me with other less well-disposed officers and had made my life in the occupied house bearable. With his departure, I felt my position at Brazzà would be less secure.’
Before leaving, Eisermann introduced Fey to his successor, Colonel Dannenberg. ‘Tall and rather stiff in manner, he seemed a nice enough man, but I sensed that he was weak and would never oppose decisions made from above or by the political officer, Lieutenant Kretschmann. Although Kretschmann was not hostile to me, he was far too fanatical a Nazi to be trusted.’
The strain of it all was affecting her health and at the end of August she spent several days in hospital in Udine having blood tests.
From there, she wrote a guarded letter to Santa Hercolani, in which she summed up her worries:
My guests are beginning to have strange people around them, who come and steal things, and they’re not safe any more.fn2,13 I keep coming across strangers in the corridor. The guests remain the same, but their boss has gone, and one [Kretschmann] is an absolute thug. This worries me, not so much for now but for the future. I can only hope that D is in good health and is doing something useful because it would have been much better if he had come back to give me a sense of protection. When will we see each other again? I’m fed up with all these separations without end and endless dangers. I can cope with living dangerously, but I don’t want it to go on forever and ever.
In her list of concerns, Fey did not mention her father. She still had no idea that he had been arrested.
15.
After the catastrophe of 20 July, Hassell could have run away; he could have gone to ground, hidden with friends or tried to escape with false papers, as a number of his fellow conspirators did. But he thought it dishonourable to flee. So he stayed in Berlin, waiting in plain sight for the Gestapo to come and get him.
On 24 July, he dined at the Adlon, a luxurious hotel close to the Reichstag, frequented by Nazi apparatchiks. On 26 July, Hans Gisevius spotted him, out walking in the peace of the Grunewald, a forest on the edge of Berlin. Gisevius, Beck’s liaison officer to Allen Dulles, the head of US intelligence in Geneva, was himself wanted by the Gestapo and was hiding out in a house nearby. ‘There goes someone who has death on his heels,’ Gisevius wrote of his sighting of Hassell.1 ‘His head was bent in a curious fashion … as if he were trying to hide from some terrible danger that was pursuing him.’2
It was around three in the morning on 28 July that an insistent ringing of the doorbell woke Ilse von Hassell at Ebenhausen.3 She opened the door to two Gestapo officials and the local policemen. Almuth was with her. They asked where her husband was and, knowing that it had never been his intention to hide, she told them exactly where they would find him – at his office in Berlin. Before leaving, the Gestapo demanded to search his desk and papers. Ilse managed to divert their attention from a photograph album in which the last notes of his diary lay hidden. Despite her cooperation, she and her daughter Almuth were arrested and taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Munich and, after renewed interrogation, to a nearby prison.
A few hours later, Hassell was arrested in his office at the German Institute for Economic Research; he received the Gestapo agents, seated at his desk, as if they were official visitors.
He was taken immediately for interrogation at the Reich Main Security Office in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where he remained briefly until his transfer to Ravensbrück. This notorious camp, set up to hold women, had a section in it for special prisoners or Prominenten, as the Gestapo referred to them. There Ulrich was treated humanely; in a letter to Ilse he reassured her that he was allowed out for walks in the courtyard and in fine weather could drink his soup on the steps of the block. The sculptress Puppi Sarre, also detained at Ravensbrück, saw him and was struck by ‘his serenity, his confident mien and manner’.4
But on 15 August he was brought back to Berlin in chains and interrogations at Gestapo HQ began. Hassell was held at the prison in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse with others involved in the 20 July plot – among them members of the German intelligence service and senior military figures. Though they were forbidden to speak, they were able to have fragments of conversations in the communal bathroom at the end of the row of cells. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, arrested for his part in the plot, remembered being told by Hassell: ‘My death is certain.fn1,5 When you get out, please give a message to my wife. My last thought will be of her.’
Hassell did not leave a record of his sessions with Commissioner Habecker of the Criminal Police, who conducted the ‘sharpened interrogations’.fn2 But as Schlabrendorff describes in his detailed account of the methods the Gestapo used, the same treatment was meted out to all the conspirators:
One method was to take the prisoner out of his cell for questioning and then let him wait endlessly in an anteroom.6 If this had no effect other means of influencing him were employed. Usually three officials worked together. One would threaten the prisoner and shower him with abuse, the second would talk to him in a soothing manner, urging him to calm down and have a cigarette, the third would then try and appeal to the prisoner’s code of honour. In this way, the Gestapo provided for three different kinds of temperament in the hope that the prisoner would in the end succumb to one of these approaches or to the combination of all three.
If these methods failed to extort a confession or the names of others, yet to be arrested, torture was used. ‘One night I was taken from my cell,’ Schlabrendorff continued:7
There were four people in the room: the Commissioner; his secretary, a girl of about twenty; a sergeant of the Security Police in uniform; and an assistant in civilian clothes. I was told that I was being given a last chance to confess. When I persisted in my denials, the Gestapo officials resorted to torture.
This torture was executed in four stages. First, my hands were chained behind my back, and a device, which gripped all the fingers separately, was fastened to my hands. The inner side of this mechanism was studded with pins, the points of which pressed against my fingertips. The turning of a screw caused the instrument to contract, thus forcing the points of the pins into my fingers.
When that did not achieve the desired confession, the second stage followed. I was strapped, face down, on a frame resembling a bedstead, and my head was covered with a blanket. Then cylinders, resembling stovepipes and studded with nails on the inner surface, were strapped to my bare legs. Here, too, a screw mechanism was used to contract these tubes so that the nails pierced my legs from ankle to thigh.
For the third stage of torture, the ‘bedstead’ itself was the main instrument. I was strapped down as described above, again with a blanket over my head. With the help of a special mechanism this medieval torture rack was then expanded – either in sudden jerks, or gradually – each time stretching my shackled body.
In the fourth and final stage I was tied in a bent position which did not allow me to move even slightly backward or sideways. Then the Police Commissioner and the Police sergeant together fell on me from behind, and beat me with heavy clubs. Each blow caused me to fall forward, and because my hands were chained behind my back, I crashed with full force on to my face … None of the brutalities succeeded in getting me to confess a word or to name one of my fellow anti-Nazis.
I am often asked how we were able to endure these brutalities. There are a number of sources from which a man can draw the strength to carry him through such ordeals. We all made the discovery that we could endure far more than we ever had believed possible. The two great polar forces of human emotions, love and hate, together formed a supporting structure on which we could rely when things became unbearable. Love, the positive force, included our faith in the moral worth of our actions, the knowledge that we had fought for humanity and decency, and the sense of having fulfilled a higher duty … Hate, the negative force, was just as important in sustaining us in our darkest hours of pain and need. The consuming, unqualified hatred, made up of equal parts of revulsion, contempt, and fury which we felt for the evil of Nazism, was so powerful a force that it helped us endure situations which would otherwise have been intolerable.
In the short periods of respite from interrogation, Hassell filled in the time left to him by writing his memoirs and such letters as he was allowed. ‘A prison cell,’ he said, ‘is a good place to start one’s memoirs … One sees one’s life and one’s self stripped of all illusions.’8 He typed as fast as he could, filling 150 pages using single-line spacing, but only managed to finish the period 1926–30, a happy time for him when the children were young.9 In letters to Ilse, he admitted that his recollection of the past gave him great comfort. His faith, too, upheld him; meditating on it, he had reached a sense of peace. Towards t
he end of the manuscript, visible in the margin, Ulrich copied out three lines from a well-known hymn: ‘You can lead us dreaming through the gates of death and at once give us freedom.’10
On 31 August, Ilse’s widowed mother, Frau von Tirpitz, wrote directly to Hitler imploring him to show leniency towards her son-in-law. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, replied that the Führer was unable to ‘facilitate mercy’ as ‘von Hassell has himself confessed and cannot be released’.11
A week later, together with nine other conspirators, Hassell was brought before the People’s Court to face the notorious judge Roland Freisler. The retinue of lawyers and courtroom officials failed to create any semblance of a proper trial, with Freisler acting as prosecutor, jury and judge. Wearing a wing collar, white bow tie and a scarlet robe over his suit, he enjoyed playing the lead in the drama. His main props were the president’s table and, behind it, a huge swastika, the folds of its drapery concealing a camera.
Freisler’s modus operandi was singularly cruel; he interrupted the defendants, shouted them down, insulted them and swore at them. Made to appear like common criminals and stripped of their dignity, the cream of the Wehrmacht and the aristocracy came shuffling into the court with no laces in their shoes, and their belts and braces removed so that they were forced to hold up their trousers when they rose to be interrogated.
One of the German press representatives attending the trial recalled that Freisler’s ‘hatred’ was directed primarily against the ‘impressive Hassell’: ‘The shouting Freisler called him the father of lies, before he had even opened his mouth.’12
The Lost Boys Page 15