There was news, however, regarding other members of her family: ‘One of the new arrivals explained the mystery behind my brother’s contact with the Gestapo. Apparently, soon after the coup, my mother and my sister, Almuth, had been arrested and imprisoned in Munich. Immediately Wolf Ulli, who was in Berlin, had rushed to Gestapo headquarters, offering himself in their place. He said that he, not they, had been with my father when the bomb was planted. Wolf Ulli’s persistence and courage so surprised the Gestapo that they sent him to Munich with a letter authorizing my mother’s release to house arrest. It was a unique case. Even more extraordinary, Wolf Ulli himself was allowed to remain free. It all seemed so illogical given what had happened to me.’
Fey heard this from Lotte von Hofacker, the wife of Colonel Cäsar von Hofacker, who had been arrested in Paris.fn1 She was with her two eldest children – a boy of sixteen and a girl aged fifteen. The others – a boy aged nine and two girls, aged twelve and six – had been seized by the SS. Later that night, Lotte introduced Fey to two other women whose young children had also been taken, and an intuitive understanding quickly developed between them: ‘While each person in the group was suffering and grieving for one reason or another, we four women, Lotte, Mika, Irma and I, were brought close to each other in our terrible worry. Each of us knew that, whatever we might be saying or doing, thoughts of our children were always just below the surface.’
‘Mika’ was Countess Maria von Stauffenberg, the wife of Berthold, Claus’s eldest brother.1 She had last seen her children on the night of 22 July when the SS had arrived at Lautlingen, the family’s castle in southern Germany. After ransacking and sealing the castle, they had taken her away, leaving her son and daughter, aged five and four, in the care of the Gestapo. Branded a ‘Bolshevist’ by the Nazis, Mika, who was in her mid forties, had grown up in Tsarist Russia. She had worked closely with her husband on the details of the Valkyrie plan, editing the draft of the proclamation that would announce Hitler’s death to the German people. Berthold had been executed on 10 August, a few weeks after Mika had been arrested. Fey was overawed by her courage in bearing the loss of both her husband and her children: ‘She was a glamorous woman, with a deep, languorous voice. As a child, she had already lived through one brutal period, the Russian Revolution, after which her family had escaped to Germany. Perhaps this accounted for her strength in facing her loss.’
Irma Goerdeler, married to Carl Friedrich’s eldest son, had been separated from her sons – a three-year-old, and a baby of just nine months – in mid August.2 When the SS arrived to seize the children, all she was told was that they would be taken to ‘an estate in the country’. She had heard nothing since. Nor did she know what had become of her husband, who had disappeared without trace.
Of the three women, it was to Lotte that Fey was most drawn: ‘Full of energy, with a heart of gold, she was to become one of my closest companions in the period ahead. Added to her worry for her husband, of whom she had heard no official news, was her anxiety for her three youngest children. They had been taken from the family home in Berlin in early August. This preoccupation with our lost children bound us together. It was a tremendous relief to be with someone who could understand the constant torment that such separation caused. However, Lotte would never let her suffering show. She always remained outwardly cheerful so as not to upset the two older children still with her. I, on the other hand, felt somehow crippled by what had happened and could scarcely disguise my anguish.’
Comforted by Lotte and the other mothers whose children were missing, Fey began to recover her strength. The food at the Hindenburg Baude was good and the mountain air restorative. The staff looked after the prisoners well, cleaning their rooms and waiting on them at meals. But for the isolation, and the permanent presence of the SS guards, it was, as Fey described, like staying at a ‘luxury hotel’.
Far away from people who might be drawn by idle curiosity, the hotel had been carefully chosen by the SS. Situated 3,500 feet above the Kladsko Valley, it was surrounded by pine forests. Aside from a few isolated farms, there were no houses for miles around. Two SS officers watched the prisoners around the clock. Walks, however, were permitted, and they were allowed to send and receive letters.3 At mealtimes, the guards left them to talk freely, sitting discreetly at their own table in a corner of the dining room. The lax security meant the group discussed the possibility of escape; but they had no official papers, and they dared not run the risk of reprisals as it was clear they would all pay if anyone did get away.
The owner of the hotel was a ‘cunning, crafty woman’, disliked by Fey. ‘She was obviously a shrewd character. She cooperated amicably with the SS, though she would have got on just as well with anybody else if things had been different. She gave us to understand that she was personally opposed to the Nazis, but we did not dare talk to her openly for fear that she was a spy. Those working for her, mostly Poles and Russians, wore high boots and thick fur jackets. We wondered if they were prisoners, too, but we were unable to find out. Mika and Tante Anni would occasionally speak to them in Russian, but they did not reveal much.’
All contact with the local population was forbidden. Nevertheless, rumours of the SS-run hideout spread and, from time to time, parties of hikers could be seen at the edge of the woods, trying to get a glimpse of the hotel. One morning, Fey was looking out of her window when a man suddenly appeared below. ‘He shook his fist up at me, saying “It’s time to get rid of these criminals.” He spoke in a low voice, and was looking around furtively, so he must have meant the Nazis, rather than us.’
Cut off from the outside world, the group quickly established a routine. Prayers were held after breakfast, followed by long walks in the surrounding woods with everyone telling each other their own story. In the afternoons, they read books, played bridge and organized group activities – musical evenings, drawing classes and lectures, given by Alex von Stauffenberg, who had been a professor of ancient history at Würzburg before the war.
Thrown together into such enforced intimacy, a special bond developed between the prisoners. While different in character and experience, they were united by grief and worry. Torn from children and other family members whose fate they did not know, they worried constantly. Denied information, they could only imagine their loved ones’ physical and emotional pain. The lack of logic in the Gestapo’s methods compounded their anxiety; there were no satisfying answers to the questions of why one person had ended up in a concentration camp and another in a prison, or indeed why they were now being held in a comfortable hotel.4
Yet, inevitably, Fey noticed, cliques developed as the prisoners got to know each other’s foibles, and individuals were singled out and whispered about: ‘We never seemed to tire of talking about Miss Gisevius, who brought us no end of amusement. Single and of a “certain age”, when arrested she had been wearing the lightest of summer frocks and so was of course now freezing cold. Everyone gave her things to wear, most of which did not fit, so she looked quite odd. On top of this, the poor woman had a round face with a prominent nose tilted upward at an impossible angle, crowned by an enormous pair of spectacles. She had a knot at the back of her head to hold her hair and her mouth was set in an eternal smile. She clearly felt lonely and her method of being kind to people was somewhat embarrassing. She would shower us with little expressions of affection, and was constantly offering favours of one sort or another so that we would talk to her. People did not like to spend too long in her company because she would not stop chattering.’
Aunt Anni, who circled the corridors ‘in a pair of gigantic slippers’, was also to be avoided: ‘She would tell us in endless detail about her time in Russia during the revolution when her husband was a prisoner in a Russian fortress, and how she would wait day and night to help him escape, which he eventually did. She had a fertile imagination and you never knew what was true or not. Like Miss Gisevius, people tended to avoid her because she was too talkative.’
By the end of the f
irst week, the group had divided into subgroups, and ‘clan rooms’ emerged as relatives sought refuge with their families. With no relatives of her own, Fey spent her time with the Stauffenbergs. ‘I was steadily drawn into their close family circle, soon calling them by their nicknames and spending most of my day with one or another of them. They gave me back a sense of comfort and security that I had altogether lost that terrible day in Innsbruck when the children had been taken.’
Of all the Stauffenbergs, it was Alex, the elder brother of Claus, who held the greatest fascination for Fey. ‘I noticed him from the very first moment he walked into the lobby. He was still wearing his uniform as he had been arrested while serving with his regiment in Greece. He was so full of charm and warmth, he stood out – even though he wasn’t classically good-looking. He gave the impression of being a very strong, composed man. Aged about forty, he was very tall. His hair was dark and ruffled, and there were streaks of grey around his temples. He had a fine, well-drawn profile and clear blue eyes and an endearing sort of tic that made his eye twitch. Though I was hugely drawn to him, I felt awkward in his presence. His breezy manner was so far removed from the way I felt. Losing the children had left me with a constant, raw feeling, and he seemed so worldly, so confident.’
To keep her mind off the children, Fey gave Italian lessons to some of the prisoners. Towards the end of her first week, Alex joined the classes. ‘Because of Alex’s knowledge of Greek and Latin, he understood much more about the structure of language than the others, and frequently more than I did. I felt rather shy when he came to the lessons, not just because he was so clever but also because he was constantly amused at my way of expressing myself. Of course, he picked up the language much faster than the others. As we were allowed to go for daily walks through the woods, Alex and I developed a habit of walking along together and speaking only Italian. At the beginning, he spoke haltingly, but as the days passed not only did his Italian improve, but I found out much more about him.’
Alex had been seriously wounded at the Battle of Stalingrad in January 1943. After being declared unfit for active service, he was posted to Athens, where he served as an officer in the Reserve Army. Aged thirty when Hitler first came to power, he had opposed the Nazis from the beginning. As Professor of Ancient History at Würzburg University, he refused to lend legitimacy to the Nazis’ official line on history, questioning the ideals of power-seeking emperors, and attacking the deliberate glorification of ancient Germanic peoples as a bogus means to support fanciful and objectionable racial theories.5 The SS had arrested him the morning after the coup. In the intervening hours, friends had offered him the opportunity to flee to Egypt, but he had honourably refused.
Soon, Fey and Alex were spending most of their time together; they sat next to each other at meals, and went for long walks in the mornings and afternoons. The awkwardness Fey felt in his company quickly vanished. For the first time in weeks, he made her laugh: ‘His great untidiness, his vagueness, his nonchalance, was typical of the “distracted professor” that one reads about in books. Nevertheless his manner was boyish and playful; above all, he had a wonderful sense of humour. During meals he would whisper little jokes and comments to amuse me, mainly about our “compagni di sventura” [companions in misfortune]. The solemn-faced Kuhns, our two table companions, whom we sat next to at every meal, would have no idea what we were laughing about and would give us disapproving looks.’
Over the long hours spent in each other’s company, Fey came to see another side of Alex, which contradicted her first impression of a composed, confident man. As she discovered, the death of Claus, and of Berthold, his twin brother, had affected him profoundly: ‘He had been very close to both of them and he spoke about their times together as they were growing up. All three brothers had been musical; one played the violin, another the viola, and Alex the piano. Alex said they had made quite a successful trio. He talked a lot about his younger brother Claus, whose talents as an officer had led to fast promotion in the Wehrmacht. He was tremendously proud of the fact that he was one of the few top army officers with the courage and decisiveness to organize an attempt on Hitler’s life.’
Yet Fey sensed that Alex was haunted by the failure of the plot – and not only because Claus and Berthold had been executed. To her surprise, he confided that his brothers had told him nothing of the planned coup and it had come as a great shock. The realization that they had kept it secret, feeling they could not trust him, was deeply painful. As Alex explained, it was not because they suspected he might betray them; rather, it was because he was too incautious. Repeatedly, Claus and Berthold had warned him that his hot-headed opposition to Hitler risked drawing too much attention to the family; potentially, it threatened to jeopardize their own work with the German Resistance. He understood why they had excluded him, but he felt his brothers had underestimated him; he also felt that, in some way, he had fallen short of the mark.
Alex also spoke of his wife, Litta.fn2 She was a test pilot for the Luftwaffe who had been awarded the Iron Cross and the gold Front Flying Clasp with diamonds, two of the highest military decorations. They had met in the spring of 1931 when she had flown him to a mutual friend’s wedding in Berlin.6 They had not married until the summer of 1937. Litta’s father was Jewish and, under the Nuremberg race laws, she was required to obtain an ‘Aryan certificate’ to marry a non-Jew. It was only after the Luftwaffe recognized the importance of her work that they had risked applying for the certificate. The work, testing the calibration of cockpit instruments in combat aircraft, was dangerous.7 It entailed diving vertically from a height of over 15,000 feet and pulling out at the last possible second. Flying up to fifteen missions a day, Litta was proud of her ability to withstand the incredible g-forces generated in this manoeuvre without experiencing the ‘haze’ that affected most pilots. Her work, and his long tours of duty in the army, meant they had seen little of each other since the start of the war, and he missed her terribly. Litta had also been arrested following the coup, but the Gestapo had freed her after Göring personally endorsed her release on the grounds of ‘war necessity’.
In turn, Alex asked Fey about her life. ‘At first, I didn’t want to talk about it. I found it too painful to remember the time before the children were taken. I also felt ashamed of what had happened, that I was to blame. I didn’t want anyone to see the extent of my pain and I was frightened that if I talked openly to Alex, he would think less of me. But then, under his gentle questioning, I found myself pouring out the story of my life at the embassy in Rome and at Brazzà, describing my father and his ideals, Detalmo, and my anguish over my missing children. As I did so, his support and sympathy made me realize there was no need to be frightened and, for the first time since Innsbruck, I felt able to come to terms with myself and all that had happened.’
As the weeks went by, winter set in and the snow came. During the day, they continued to spend hours together, walking for miles across the white, empty fields, and through forests festooned with icicles. In this frost-bound landscape, which Fey described as ‘ethereal’, she found herself more and more drawn to Alex. ‘During our long walks, I gradually came to realize what it was about him that I found so attractive and compelling. I had spent my childhood outside Germany and grown up and married in Italy. My family aside, I had known only the worst and most tragic sides of my native land; Nazism, the Hitler Youth, the SS, prison, separation from my children and family. Alex was the first person who gave me back all the positive and good aspects of the German nation: culture, intellectualism, moral integrity. He symbolized that side of Germany for which I had been unconsciously homesick in Italy. Here was a man who personified the “perfect” German of my imagination: tall, attractive, very much the gentleman. And then his character; on the one hand, cheerful, with a great sense of humour, and on the other, melancholic, almost sad. After all that he had been through and all that he had lost, Alex had reacted with courage and faced the future with optimism. He was an outstandingly
well-read man and, apart from history, loved poetry and could recite many of Goethe’s poems, which I loved. In the uncertainty of our days at the Hindenburg Baude, those walks and conversations helped me forget our helplessness, our grief for those who had died, and my fear for the children. In the unreal and difficult situation in which we found ourselves, I had fallen in love with him. I sensed he felt the same, but I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t have the courage to say anything. I didn’t know how to tell him.’
Their time alone together came to an abrupt end on 30 November, five weeks after they arrived at the Hindenburg Baude.
Early that morning, Fey was woken by shouts and the sound of heavy footsteps pounding up the stairs from the lobby. Seconds later, the SS came marching along the corridor, thumping on her door with their fists: ‘Schutzstaffel! Alle aufstehen! Abtransport! Packen Sie sofort Ihre Koffer!’ ‘SS! Get up! You’re moving! Pack your bags immediately!’ Stunned, she lay there listening as they moved systematically along the corridor, waking the other prisoners. ‘Alle aufstehen! Alle aufstehen! Sie bis sieben Uhr bereit!’ ‘Get up! Get up! You must be ready by seven o’clock!’
After dressing hurriedly, Fey found the others in the lobby. ‘No one was happy to hear the word transport, since we had all secretly hoped to stay indefinitely at the Hindenburg Baude. We were naturally not told why we were being moved so abruptly or where we were going. Some of the group became extremely upset about the sudden order, and several actually broke down crying.’
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