The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  A few hours into the journey, the SS guards allowed her to stand on the footboard of the carriage for a breath of fresh air. Looking out at the landscape, she was disorientated by the unfamiliar country. She knew the southern part of Germany as her mother’s house was close to the Austrian border. She could see the Alps receding into the distance yet, on either side of the track, there was dense forest where there should have been rolling fields. Anxiously, she studied the houses in the tiny hamlets slipping past. Instead of the white chalets favoured by the Bavarians, with their gabled roofs and pretty wooden decorations, they were built of brick or poorly constructed from a primitive sort of wattle and daub. Then, seeing the sun setting in the west, she realized the train was heading due east, away from Germany: ‘I felt numb and in a daze as I struggled to get my mind in order and decide what could be done. In my confusion, I asked a kind woman, who was standing amid what looked like all her worldly possessions, for a pen and a piece of paper. After some difficulty, she found them, and I hurriedly scribbled down my mother’s address. I wrote that I was being escorted to the east and that the children had been taken from me at Innsbruck. I had no idea where they were, or where I was headed. I then dropped the paper on to the tracks of some small station in the hope that it might be passed on.’

  For hour after hour, the train continued through dense forest. Staring out at the same, monotonous landscape, it seemed to Fey that the journey would never end. She struggled to visualize a map of central Europe. Were these the ancient forests of Bohemia? Or was she somewhere else entirely? Silesia or Galicia, perhaps?

  After two days on the train, they began passing through towns and villages that the Soviets had bombed. In the space of nine months, the Russians had advanced 1,200 miles and were now outside Warsaw. Tens of thousands of refugees were fleeing west, ahead of the Red Army. Fey could see them from the footboard: lines and lines of them, coming towards her, walking alongside the tracks. She was shocked by the lack of hope or happiness in their faces, and the absence of conversation as they trudged onwards. Frequently, the train was shunted into a siding to allow troop carriers to pass. The sight of crowds of young German boys destined for the Russian Front horrified her: ‘I felt I could see branded across their unknowing foreheads the slogan that met the eye wherever one looked; on roads, in stations, in squares and shops: “Alle Räder müssen rollen für den Sieg” (“All Wheels Must Turn for Victory”).’

  There were long stops at bombed-out stations where Fey, watched closely by her minders, would sit, slumped on her suitcases, as they waited for a connection: ‘During the stops at these desolate stations, frequently no more than piles of rubble and ash, I tried to keep my thoughts off the children by observing the life of men and women who had been at war for over four years. At first sight, everything seemed to be collapsing. People had shabby clothes and strained, nervous faces. There were few men around; all the station officials were women. Great crowds were shifting in one direction or another, entire cities moving, a thing not seen for centuries. Although the scene gave the impression of total disorder and chaos, on closer inspection this was not the case. While there were incredible delays (all trains were running twenty hours late), everything was functioning. Amazed, I watched soldiers and officers go off on leave according to plan, as if all were well on the two fronts … This astonishing efficiency in the midst of death and destruction surprised me again and again.’

  The train rumbled slowly on under frequent air attacks until, ‘after three days of constant travel,’ she recorded, ‘we arrived at a small town called Bad Reinerz, deep in the forests of Lower Silesia. It was a pretty place, quiet, orderly, and surrounded by mountains. This, then, was the mysterious destination that, for reasons of their own, my SS escorts had kept secret from me.’

  21.

  An SS officer was waiting on the platform as the train pulled in. He was dressed in an immaculate black uniform and a silver-grey skull and crossbones glinted above the peak of his cap. As Fey stepped down from the train, he greeted her with exaggerated courtesy; placing his right hand across his abdomen, he bowed stiffly and with his left hand took hers and raised it to his lips. For an instant, his lips brushed against her fingertips; coming from a man like him, she found the gesture unbearable.

  Following a brief exchange of paperwork, the SS escorts left, and the ‘gentleman’ officer led her to a small, unmarked car. Exiting the station, he took the valley road, heading south out of the town. Seated in the front next to him, Fey could smell the polish on his leather pistol holster and his long black boots. ‘We did not utter a word. I was still beside myself with grief for having lost the children and I felt anxious and confused. Where was he driving me to? To another prison? But then the fact that he was treating me with such respect made me think not.’

  A few miles outside Bad Reinerz, he turned right on to a single-track road. They continued in silence as they climbed higher and higher, the road twisting in a series of hairpins around the mountain. Thick forest obscured the view on either side. A few hundred feet below the summit, they reached a small track, marked by a wooden sign. ‘Halt! This hotel is closed,’ it warned. The words were printed in large Gothic script; beneath them, Fey could see the double Siegrune – the chilling lightning bolts of the SS.

  Ignoring the warning, her driver veered down the track.

  Some minutes later, they pulled up outside a large, imposing chalet. Four storeys high, with a gabled roof, it was both grand and homely. Hand-painted wooden shutters adorned the windows, and there was a wide terrace from which to admire the view. Stepping out of the car, the beauty of it all stunned Fey: ‘I felt completely disorientated. I had suddenly returned to the civilized world. Looking at the scenery all around me, I felt as if I was dreaming.’

  The Hindenburg Baude, as the hotel was called, stood on a plateau. To the east, the view stretched for miles, over the Kladsko Valley; in the near distance, the spire of a church rose from the fields, ringed by the sloping roofs of isolated farmhouses. The one blot in the otherwise picture-postcard landscape was the swastika that flew high on a flagpole outside the entrance to the hotel. Fey shuddered at the sight of the familiar colours, vibrant in the pale winter sun.

  Taking her suitcases, the SS officer showed her into the lobby. With the same formal manners as before – as if, she recalled, ‘we were at some grand society party’ – he introduced her to a handsome boy in his late teens. He was with his sister, a striking woman, aged around thirty. Hearing their names, Fey realized that, unless the SS intended to liquidate her, she would be kept prisoner until the end of the war. They were Otto Philipp and Gagi von Stauffenberg, and they were cousins of Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who had planted the bomb at Hitler’s headquarters.

  No sooner had she begun to talk to the couple than a porter appeared to carry her luggage upstairs. She followed him up to a room on the first floor of the hotel. It was light and spacious and prettily decorated, with a large bed, a washbasin, and a mahogany wardrobe and dresser. Seeing the room made her feel sadder still; it reminded her of skiing holidays with Detalmo. It was now five months since she had heard from him; thinking about him, she felt only emptiness.

  Before leaving her to unpack, the porter handed her two letters. One was a note from her grandmother, Marie von Tirpitz, which had been forwarded on from the prison at Innsbruck:

  My dearest Fey

  Thank you for your letter of 2 Oct. I was really touched that, despite everything, you thought about my birthday. I wish I could do something for you. For example, send you some medicines to give you strength? Write to me if this is allowed. Did you know that Almuth and Hans Dieter obtained permission to come and see you in the prison at Innsbruck, but unfortunately, when they got there, they were told that you had been taken away somewhere else? I wonder where they have taken you? I hope to God that I will have news of you and the children soon. Bless you – and all love – from your old Grandma.

  Tears of frustration welled as she read th
e letter. She knew she had been at the prison when her brother and sister had visited. If only the Gestapo had allowed her to see them – even for a few minutes.

  The one consolation was that there was no mention of her father. It was almost two months since Kretschmann had told her that he had been executed; since then, she had received letters from her mother, her brother, and now this one from her grandmother. Not one of them had referred to his death.

  Buoyed by the conviction that her father was still alive, Fey turned to the second letter. It was from Lotti, who was replying to the letter she had sent from Brazzà, enclosing the photographs of the boys:

  You are alone and abandoned! But you are not on your own! All those who love you are with you every day. I am sending you all my best wishes from the bottom of my heart and never forget that God protects us all, although it is hard to believe this in such tragic times. My little brave fighter – I think of you and pray for you.

  Fey put the precious letters carefully away and, steeling herself to be the ‘fighter’ her old governess remembered, she went downstairs to meet the other guests. She found Gagi and Otto Philipp von Stauffenberg, to whom she had been introduced earlier in the lobby. They were talking to an older couple, and a gaunt boy in his early twenties, whose shaven head made him look disfigured. Straight away, Fey could tell from the way they were laughing and teasing each other that they belonged to the same family. Evidently, they had not seen each other for some time.

  As she chatted to them, their story emerged. While they were cousins of Claus von Stauffenberg, the family had not been involved in the coup; they had been imprisoned only because they shared the same surname. The parents’ names were Clemens and Elisabeth. A slim, stylish woman in her early sixties, Elisabeth had been arrested soon after the attempt on Hitler’s life.1 The Gestapo had taken her to Stadelheim prison in Munich, where she had been held for almost three months. In mid August, their three children – Otto Philipp, Gagi and Markwart – had also been arrested. Eighteen-year-old Otto Philipp and his elder sister, Gagi, had been imprisoned at Nördlingen in Bavaria. Markwart, who was twenty-three, had been sent to Dachau, where the SS had put him to work in the block for medical experiments. Clemens, a gentle and clearly very frail man, had only been arrested the day before. Arriving at the clinic where he was being treated for a heart condition, the SS had dragged him from his hospital bed and brought him directly to the hotel. It was the first time the family had been reunited following their terrible experiences.

  Fey was moved by their story. Yet she could not help envying their joy at being together again. Their closeness, and the easy way they related to each other, reminded her of her own family. The relationship between Clemens and Elisabeth was particularly touching; while Elisabeth fussed and teased, saying that her husband, for the sake of his health, would have been better off staying at the clinic, Clemens whispered to Fey that for the three months he had been apart from his wife, he had felt completely lost without her and doubted whether he could have survived for much longer.

  While they were talking, other prisoners were arriving. As they were brought into the lobby, the guards shouted out their names to an SS officer, who stood over by the entrance, ticking off the new arrivals on a list. Hearing the names, Fey caught herself scanning the drawn faces, her heart racing with anticipation. ‘Goerdeler’, ‘Gisevius’, ‘Hofacker’. These were the leading families of the German Resistance – people her father had mentioned and with whom he had worked closely. At any moment, she expected members of her own family to walk through the door.

  More prisoners were brought in that afternoon and in the early evening. Fey spent much of that time in the lobby, returning once or twice an hour, hoping that her mother and her siblings would be among the new arrivals. But this did not happen.

  Seventeen of the twenty-two prisoners the SS brought to the Hindenburg Baude came from three families: the Stauffenbergs, the Hofackers and the Goerdelers.

  The composition of the family groups pointed to the terrifying reach of Himmler’s Sippenhaft directive – the concept that a traitor’s family was also guilty.

  The Goerdelers, of whom there were six at the hotel, were the immediate relations of Carl Friedrich Goerdeler – the man who would have become chancellor of Germany had the coup succeeded. They included his wife, his two daughters, his daughter-in-law, his niece and his elder brother.2 Goerdeler himself was in Plötzensee prison in Berlin, awaiting execution. A few days before 20 July, after finalizing the list of the men who would form his cabinet, he had gone into hiding, but had been arrested in mid August after a woman recognized him and denounced him to the Gestapo.

  Cäsar von Hofacker, a high-ranking Luftwaffe officer and a cousin of Claus von Stauffenberg, had been arrested in Paris five days after the attempted coup. The right-hand man of Carl Stülpnagel, the military governor of Paris, Hofacker was deeply implicated in the plot. Hours after the bomb exploded, he and Stülpnagel had been responsible for the arrest of over 1,000 Gestapo and SS. When it became clear that the coup had failed, Hofacker had had every chance to escape, but he had chosen instead to remain at his office, saying it would be better if the world knew what had happened. A few days later, as he was being brutally tortured, the SS had rounded up his family. His wife and two of their children – a boy and a girl, aged sixteen and fifteen – were among the prisoners at the Hindenburg Baude.

  The Stauffenbergs, the relatives of coup leader Claus von Stauffenberg, were the largest family group. In addition to the cousins Fey met when she arrived, they included Claus’s 72-year-old mother-in-law, his sister-in-law, his brother and another distant cousin. This was Markwart, Count Schenk von Stauffenberg, known as Onkel (Uncle) Moppel in the family. A colonel in the German Army, he had arrived still wearing his uniform.

  The remaining three prisoners were a middle-aged couple, named Arthur and Hildegard Kuhn, and Annelise Gisevius, an unmarried teacher in her early forties. The Kuhns’ son, Joachim, an infantry officer on the Eastern Front and a recipient of the Iron Cross, had been drawn into the conspiracy early on.3 A close friend of General Henning von Tresckow, he had been trusted with obtaining the British-made explosives for the bomb. After the coup failed and Tresckow committed suicide, Kuhn had endeavoured to protect the general’s reputation. He brought his body back from the forest where Tresckow had blown himself up with a hand grenade, reporting to the German High Command that he had been killed as a result of a partisan attack. Subsequently, Kuhn was captured by the Red Army and transferred to a prison in the Soviet Union, where he remained until 1956.

  Annelise Gisevius was the sister of Hans Bernd, a senior officer in German military intelligence. A covert opponent of the Nazi regime, he had worked closely with Ulrich von Hassell, acting as a secret liaison to the Vatican and to US spy chief Allen Dulles. Annelise had been arrested in lieu of her brother, who had used his contacts to elude the SS following the coup.

  Apart from Annelise, Fey was the only prisoner on her own at the hotel: the others were there with their families. Further, with the exception of two in the group, they had received privileged treatment in the months following their arrest. Accorded special status by the Gestapo, they had been entitled to individual cells and extra food rations. As an ‘ordinary’ prisoner at Innsbruck, Fey’s experiences had been far more traumatic.

  22.

  Fey was formally introduced to the other prisoners as they gathered for dinner in the dining room at the hotel. It was the first time the cousins had seen each other since their arrest and a loud hubbub of excited, happy voices filled the room. Feeling excluded, and desperately anxious about her own family, Fey took her place at one of the tables.

  The room, which was oak-panelled with a low, half-timbered ceiling, looked as if it had changed little since the last century. The panelling was coated with a rich, dark brown patina and a fire blazed in the large hearth. The tables were covered with crisp white linen cloths and the walls were decorated with antlers, and pretty ornamenta
l porcelain plates. The effect might have been described as charming were it not for the ubiquitous portraits of Hitler, and the Nazi posters and emblems that hung beside them.

  Since her arrest, Fey had lost over a stone in weight. Glancing around the room, it was not difficult to spot the other prisoners who had been as harshly treated. They were 23-year-old Markwart von Stauffenberg, who had spent two months at Dachau, and Baroness Anni von Lerchenfeld, who had been imprisoned at Ravensbrück concentration camp. The cousins called the baroness ‘Aunt Anni’. A redoubtable woman in her early seventies, and a famous beauty in her youth, her hair was unkempt and her shabby black dress hung off her thin shoulders. No one could explain why Markwart had been sent to Dachau, but Fey was told that Aunt Anni was especially hated by the Nazis. Not only was she Claus von Stauffenberg’s mother-in-law, but her husband, Hugo von Lerchenfeld, had been one of the people responsible for Hitler’s imprisonment following the Munich putsch in 1923.

  Over dinner, the talk, unsurprisingly, was of the assassination attempt. Seated next to Alexander von Stauffenberg, Claus’s elder brother, Fey listened in silence, agog: ‘Everyone was swapping information, gleaned from friends and relatives, and people they had met in prison. Most of the details were new to me. Cut off at Brazzà, my only source of information had come from the radio. Then, at Innsbruck, I was not with the families involved in the plot. Every detail of the assassination attempt was discussed – the background to it, and its failure. Towards the end of the evening, the conversation turned to the fate of the participants – the executions and the thousands of arrests. I sat there with a feeling of dread, expecting my father’s name to come up at any minute. But no one mentioned him and I was too nervous to ask.’