The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  The long wait compounded her misery. She knew the train would arrive eventually, but she kept wishing it would never come. As she paced up and down, she tried to contain her panic; but there were too many uncertainties. On the way to the station, Colonel Dannenberg had admitted that, after Innsbruck, the Gestapo might send her to Germany. Her best hope was that it would be to Ebenhausen, where her mother was under house arrest. But if not there, where? Again, she found herself thinking about the possibility that she and the children might simply disappear. A cousin of Detalmo’s, with contacts in the Red Cross, had promised to send a message to him, explaining what had happened. But would it be handed on? The thought that he might never get it made her feel even bleaker; at least if he knew she and the boys had been arrested, she could imagine him there in spirit.

  After several hours, a close friend, Maria Nigris, appeared. A neighbour at Brazzà, she had heard of Fey’s deportation and had come to say goodbye. ‘I was very grateful for this demonstration of affection at a moment when I felt that even God had abandoned me,’ Fey remembered. ‘Especially since in associating with me, she inevitably risked arrest herself. We tried to ignore the uncertainty hanging over me and talked instead of Brazzà and what we would do at the end of the war.’

  Maria kept her company for a few hours. Not long after she left, another friend – Luciano Giacomuzzi – came rushing on to the platform. He was out of breath and relieved to see Fey; after hearing of her situation, he had cycled to Brazzà in search of her – and back again to Udine – a distance of 18 miles. It was Luciano who had hidden Detalmo when he had returned from Mortara to say goodbye before leaving to join the Resistance in Rome. The memory of the precious night they had spent together at the Giacomuzzis’ house in Udine was too much for Fey: ‘At the sight of Luciano, the sensation of being on the verge of losing everything overwhelmed me. For the first time since the shock of my departure, I cried.’

  Even Fey was not aware of the huge risk Luciano was taking in coming to the station. The director of the Udine Electricity Company, he was working for British intelligence. In recent months, he had supplied Hedley Vincent, the Coolant Mission leader, with plans of the regional electricity network, enabling the partisans to sabotage the Germans’ supply by blowing up a number of substations in the mountains.3 In Udine itself, Luciano was working with the Adlestrop Mission, also under Vincent’s command. Named after an airbase in Gloucestershire, Adlestrop was a covert SIS operation whose agents had been infiltrated into Udine to work with ‘certain reliable individuals’ – of whom Luciano was one.fn1,4 RAF planes had dropped the three men on to Mount Joanaz in the small hours of the morning of 17 August. Dressed in civilian clothes, as opposed to the uniforms worn by SOE agents, after making their way down to the city, they had established a potentially important network. ‘It seems possible,’ Vincent reported to London, ‘that many thousands of Allied supporters can be brought together under a central controlling body to form the civilian striking force in support of, and in close collaboration with, both the Allied Armies and the Partisan formations in the nearby hills.’5 The Gestapo’s own network of informers in Udine meant there was always a danger that Luciano’s work for the British would be exposed. While he was known to Adlestrop and Coolant under an alias, if his true identity was discovered, he faced the death penalty. Yet there he was coolly chatting to Fey on the platform under the gaze of the Gestapo official.

  At midday, the train to Villach finally arrived – almost six hours after it was due. It was the first civilian train to be allowed through following the start of the rastrellamento and the platform was jammed with people. Holding the children tightly by the hand, Fey followed the Gestapo official, who, waving his police ID, cleared a passage through the crowds: ‘He led us into a private compartment, where, almost immediately, the children went to sleep. They were good as they had never been good before, as though they realised that on this particular journey they absolutely had to be calm and quiet.’

  It was just 60 miles to Villach, but it would take thirteen hours to get there. Further up the line, the Germans were using armoured wagons to bomb the partisans’ positions and, a few miles outside Udine, the train came to a halt in a tunnel. When, several hours later, it finally emerged, the air was thick with smoke from the guns. Up in the hills to the east, plumes of black smoke marked the partisans’ positions, close to the village of Nimis. This was Osoppo country; it was where Fey and her sons would have been taken had she agreed to the plan to ambush Dannenberg’s car earlier that morning.

  For the partisans, and the SOE agents who had armed and trained them, the offensive would prove catastrophic. After two days of non-stop fighting, they were completely surrounded. Forced to withdraw to escape annihilation, they fled east, pursued by the Germans. From the shelter of a monastery, high in the Julian Alps, Hedley Vincent sent a garbled cable to London:

  WE ARE AT CRAVERO 10 KM E.N.E. OF CIVIDALE. ALL EQUIPMENT SAFE. ALL DOCUMENTS AND MESSAGES DESTROYED. ENEMY EMPLOY SEVERAL THOUSAND TROOPS. BROKEN THROUGH ON ALL FRONTS, NOW OCCUPY ZONE WHERE WHOLESALE MURDER AND BURNING IN PROCESS. OUR LOSSES SEVERAL HUNDRED. AM TRYING REGAIN CONTACT REMAINING PARTISAN FORCES. MEANWHILE WE ARE OUT OF BUSINESS. WILL REVERT WHEN POSITION CLEARER.6

  German losses had also been heavy – over 500 dead, wounded or missing. After the partisans withdrew from Nimis, SS troops and detachments of Cossacks moved in to avenge the casualties.7 They were led by two of the most hated, most brutal men in the region – SS-Sturmbannführer Ludolf von Alvensleben, the police commander in Udine, and ‘Patriarca’, the leader of the Fascist militia in Tolmezzo. Moving from house to house, they rounded up the occupants and corralled them to the end of the village. Thirty-six men were singled out for deportation to Germany; twelve others were summarily executed, shot one by one in front of their neighbours and relatives. Leaving their bodies uncovered on the ground, the troops set about looting the village. They killed all the livestock, loading the carcasses, together with furniture and other possessions, into a convoy of trucks. Then, on Alvensleben’s orders, they set fire to their houses. While they burned to the ground, the surviving inhabitants – women and the elderly – were forced to watch as children, who had hidden from the Germans, were thrown back into the flames by the Fascist commander, ‘Patriarca’.

  It was almost dark when the train carrying Fey and the boys reached the wall of mountains that bordered the edge of the plain. North of here, the line to Villach wound through a ravine carved by the River Fella; it was desolate country, the sheer faces of rock rising hundreds of feet on either side of the track. With the rastrellamento still in progress, military traffic took priority and there were endless halts in cuttings and tunnels.

  Over the interminable hours, the enforced intimacy of the small compartment meant that Fey had to talk to the Gestapo official. To her surprise, he led her to understand that he considered her deportation absurd. She pressed him to tell her exactly where she and the children were being taken. Would it be to Ebenhausen, where her mother was living? He was unable to say. His instructions were solely to escort them to Innsbruck, where he was to hand them over to a different branch of the Gestapo.

  By the time they got to Villach, it was one o’clock in the morning and they had missed their connection to Innsbruck. The next train was not until dawn and the station was heaving with people, who were also stranded. The Gestapo official led Fey and the boys into a large hall, where hundreds of women and children were sleeping on the floor. The emergency accommodation was segregated and he left them there, saying he would return at first light. With the constant murmur of voices, Fey lay awake for hours: ‘My mind was filled with worry about the next day, and I was haunted by images of my father, Detalmo and Brazzà and all I knew and loved. Luckily, the children, without a single complaint, curled up at my side. Their innocent, trusting faces seemed the only good thing left to me.’

  A Gestapo official was there on the platform when their train pulled into Innsbruck the foll
owing afternoon. After taking them to a police station, where they were made to wait for several hours, he drove them to an interrogation centre on the outskirts of the city.

  Inside the building, Fey and the children were ushered up a flight of stairs, and along a corridor, which seemed never-ending. The cells on either side were exposed, and the sight of the gaunt, frightened faces peering out through the bars alarmed Fey:

  My grip instinctively tightened on the hands of the boys, who said not a word, asked no questions, but trotted along beside me, solemn-faced.

  Beyond the iron bars, at the end of a second corridor, two other Gestapo men approached us, one in plain clothes and the other in uniform. After a couple of routine questions, which I answered without much enthusiasm, the uniformed official suddenly screamed, ‘You are the daughter of that criminal whose head we cut off: that dog, that pig! Do you expect to be treated with kid gloves?’ Then he laughed.

  Before I had time to recover, the first Gestapo agent, who had brought us as far as Innsbruck and who had, throughout the journey, been relatively kind, was saying goodbye. Without noticing it, tears started to pour down my cheeks. Even though this man belonged to the Gestapo, he was my last tangible link with Italy and home. Unfortunately, the agent in uniform saw the tears I was trying to hold back and again shouted at me. ‘Why are you snivelling? Don’t be so stupid!’ It was the best I could do to stop myself from collapsing as I tried to hide my fear and worry for the sake of the children. Although they must have been shocked to see their mother crying and being yelled at, they showed no reaction. I braced myself for an interrogation, but after a few minutes, the officer ordered his assistant to take us to a hotel in the centre of Innsbruck.

  The Albergerhof – a fashionable hotel with 110 rooms – was located in Südtiroler Platz, next to the main railway station. Built for travellers at the height of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was an imposing four-storey building, the roof of which was topped by a decorative minaret. Inside, it was cosily furnished; chintz-covered sofas were arranged around the large fireplaces in the main salons, and pictures of skiing and hunting scenes decorated the oak-panelled walls.

  To her amazement, Fey was shown up to a large, comfortable room, with a chambermaid on hand. From her window, she could see the mountains and the busy square below. There was even a garden at the back of the hotel where she could sit with the boys. ‘After the dreadful things I had been expecting, it felt like paradise. I found the luxury of it hard to believe. But thinking about it as I unpacked, I interpreted it as a good sign. The Gestapo had not interrogated me: perhaps I was only required to attend one more session to answer some routine questions and then I could go back to Brazzà with the boys.’

  The next morning, after a good night’s sleep, Fey took the children down to breakfast. Years later, she remembered how proud she felt sitting with her two impeccably behaved ‘little princes’ in the dining salon. They spent a happy morning sightseeing and playing in the garden. Then she took the boys back to the hotel room for their afternoon nap.

  She had only just settled the children when there was a knock at the door. Opening it, she was confronted by two Gestapo agents, neither of whom she had seen before:

  The two officials said that I would have to go with them for a few days to ‘clear up’ some ‘outstanding questions’. The children would naturally have to stay behind. They would be sent to a good children’s home, and some SS ‘nurses’ would arrive in a few minutes to take them away.

  Corradino must have understood or at least sensed what was going on. He became agitated and kept asking if I was going away. I did not believe the two agents and I wanted to tell him the truth. ‘Please tell me,’ I pleaded. ‘Is it just for a few days or for much longer?’ Smiling, one of them said, ‘I assure you, it is only a question of a few days; you can relax, Madame.’

  The two SS ‘nurses’ arrived, both large blonde women without the slightest hint of gentleness. They enquired about the children’s habits but made no effort to be friendly with them. I put on their little coats and told Corradino, as calmly as I could, ‘Mama will follow you very soon, but first you will go for a nice walk.’ Robertino thought this was a wonderful idea and confidently took the nurse’s hand. But Corradino suddenly gave way to panic, flinging himself backward and howling wildly. He tried desperately to escape from the SS woman, tearing at the hand she had clamped around his little wrist. She managed with great difficulty to drag him away from me and out of the room. I wanted to scream out loud, but it would have served no purpose. I had to stand there like a statue listening to Corradino’s wails growing fainter and fainter as he and little Robertino were dragged down the stairs.

  Fey could still hear Corrado screaming when – as if the scene he had just witnessed had not taken place – one of the Gestapo agents asked her if she would be kind enough to pack up her things. He would look after them while she was held for questioning. They would be quite safe, he promised.

  Some minutes later, the two men ushered her out. There were forty rooms on this floor of the hotel; but the corridor was deserted, the doors to the rooms closed. Evidently, the other guests had heard Corrado’s screams; yet not one of them had come out to see what was going on. Walking along the corridor, Fey had the feeling that the people inside were standing, listening out behind the doors, holding their breath. She felt a similar sensation as she passed the old man who was busy polishing the banister rails on the stairs to the lobby. A member of the hotel’s staff, he had greeted her and the children on the way to breakfast that morning. Concentrating fixedly on his polishing, his movements exaggerated, as the three of them clattered by, he did not look up.

  A car was waiting outside the hotel. As the Gestapo drove her through the centre of the city, Fey remembered that her jacket, with the money stitched into the lining, was in one of the suitcases. All her possessions had been confiscated; she had nothing except the clothes she was wearing. Peering out at the unfamiliar streets, she was desperate to know where the children had been taken. If only she could believe that she would have them back in a few days, as the agent had promised. Frightened and terribly shaken, she begged him for more information. He would not divulge their location; it was forbidden, he replied. Then – contrary to his earlier promise – he assured her that it would only be a matter of ‘one or two weeks’ before she was released and reunited with her boys.

  19.

  At Adamgasse 1, a Gestapo prison in the centre of Innsbruck, the agents handed Fey over to a guard. Shouting at her, he marched her down a long, windowless corridor, lit by the fluorescent glare from the bulbs overhead. As they passed rows of cells with metal doors, each with a spyhole, their footsteps echoed on the tiled floor. At the end of the corridor, the guard shoved her into a tiny cell. The door slammed behind her.

  The cell measured 9 feet by 6. Layers of straw were piled on the floor, lending it the appearance of an animal pen. Three bunk beds were crammed into it and messages – scratched into the brickwork by previous inmates – covered every inch of the walls. It was unseasonably cold and there was no heating and the cell was freezing. High up in one corner, there was a small window. It faced east overlooking the railway tracks and the River Sill. Fey could hear the trains and the distant horns of the barges, but all she could see was a small patch of sky.

  The Gestapo headquarters, taking up an entire block, was situated in the heart of the old city, directly opposite the Archbishop’s Palace. For much of the day, its austere facade lay deep in the shadow cast by the spire of the cathedral, which stood directly behind the palace. SS soldiers patrolled the stretch of pavement outside. To deter friends and relatives from throwing notes to the prisoners, or shouting out messages, they were under orders to shoot anyone caught loitering.

  Upwards of 6,800 men and women had passed through the building since the start of the war.1 Of these, the Gestapo had sent only a fraction for trial; the vast majority had been transferred to Dachau, or to other concentration camps. Answerin
g directly to Berlin, the Innsbruck Gestapo employed a staff of 120.2 They included chauffeurs, interpreters, telephonists and a large number of female secretaries – mostly young, unmarried women, conscripted for emergency war work. The various departments were organized according to the perceived threat.3 There was one for enemy agents, and one for foreign workers and saboteurs; another was devoted entirely to industrial and radio security. But the bulk of the Gestapo’s work was focused on the detention and deportation of ‘undesirables’ and ‘political opponents’.4 Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and people with physical and mental disabilities came into the first category; the second included Communists, Socialists, Monarchists, Catholic priests, and Rundfunk Sünder (radio sinners) and Meckerer (moaners) – people caught listening to the BBC and the Voice of America, or who had been overheard expressing negative opinions about the Nazi regime or the progress of the war. Consisting of forty male agents, the operative core – the investigators and interrogators charged with rounding up these individuals – was comparatively small. As one agent remarked, ‘There was no need for a big outfit; we depended on the Tyroleans to denounce their neighbours and relatives, which they did with great willingness.’5

  The chief of the Innsbruck branch of the Gestapo was Werner Hilliges. Aged forty-one in the autumn of 1944, he was a corrupt, hard-drinking man, who had made a fortune profiteering on the black market.6 His ruthlessness was legendary. In the summer of 1943, at Reichenau, the SS-run work camp outside Innsbruck, Hilliges had shot a prisoner in the face at point-blank range after the man had questioned his orders.7 His deputy was SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Busch, who supervised interrogations. Aged forty, he had been transferred to Innsbruck from Gestapo headquarters in Paris, where he was alleged to have tortured and murdered French nationals.8 Beneath these two men, the investigative agents were drawn from the ranks of the SS and the border police. The majority were Austrians, born in the backward, isolated villages of the Tyrol, or in the working-class districts of the industrial towns along the Inn Valley.9 A large number were illegitimate and had grown up as outcasts in the devoutly Catholic communities, where illegitimacy carried a huge stigma. To school leavers, with no formal qualifications, a career in the Gestapo conferred power and status, offering a step up the ladder for men who would otherwise have remained labourers.