The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  If Himmler’s office replied to the message, it was not intercepted at Bletchley. But more than fifteen years later, Josef Hanser, a priest in the village of Sillian in East Tyrol, shed light on the ‘special task’ the Reichsführer had assigned to the SS.7 At some point on ‘1 or 2 May’, he received a visit from Hans Philipp, the Gestapo chief in the district. In great distress, Philipp asked the priest to hear his confession. Showing him a copy of the Reichsführer’s orders, he said his mission was to recapture the hostages – either at Villabassa or the Hotel Pragser Wildsee – and transport them to Klagenfurt, where they were to be executed. The priest managed to talk him out of committing mass murder but later recounted that the Gestapo chief ‘left in a spin’. Some hours later, fearing he would be forced to carry out the order anyway, Philipp took his own life with a lethal dose of the sedative Veronal.8

  The war in Italy ended at midnight on 2 May. His was one of the first of many suicides among SS and Gestapo officers in the coming days.

  At last, unannounced – at six-fifteen on the morning of 4 May – a company of US troops reached the Hotel Pragser Wildsee. Jeeps and light tanks came roaring up the drive, Italian partisans clinging to every handle-hold. Straight away, the troops rushed to disarm the German guards.

  ‘Jimmy’ James was returning with a group of prisoners from an early Mass in the chapel by the lake: ‘As we approached, we saw a line of vehicles parked on the road in front of the hotel and there were soldiers, unmistakably American soldiers.9 It seemed unbelievable … In no time, the Americans were sharing their rations of chocolate and cigarettes with us, a mobile laundry had been set up on the lawn, and nets were erected for handball and other games. Our rations were supplemented by such mouth-watering and long-forgotten items as waffles and syrups, eggs and bacon, while they apologised for having only front-line rations!’

  The Germans in the group, horrified that Alvensleben and his men – their true saviours – were now prisoners of war, were less ecstatic: ‘Our soldiers had to pile their weapons in a heap.10 Then they were placed under arrest. A shocking picture,’ Gagi von Stauffenberg noted in her diary.

  Seeing the men as they waited to be taken away, Isa felt desperately sorry for them: ‘The majority of the German soldiers sat somewhere quietly in the sun, their legs stretched out in front of them, with expressions of tired sadness on their faces.11 It had nothing to do with them or their want of courage that the war was lost. Their strength was spent. Spent and wasted was the blood and life of countless comrades too, every one of them, sold and toyed with by a clique of unscrupulous scoundrels.’

  The efficiency of the US troops – and the resources available to them – astounded the group. Almost immediately, GI uniforms were handed out to the Allied prisoners of war and a strict delousing and bathing regime imposed.12 Using a pump to draw water from the lake, and an oil-fired tank to heat it, rows of showers were erected on the lawn in front of the hotel. Soap and fresh towels were handed out to everyone – the soldiers bathing at 2 p.m., the men in the group at 3 p.m. and the women at 4 p.m. That same evening, the troops set up a cinema in the dining room showing the film America.

  ‘The American troops make a deep impression on us,’ Kurt Schuschnigg wrote in his diary after the screening.13 ‘They do what they can for us; they are helpful, sympathetic, understanding, unobtrusive – in short, they are human. So this is America. This is the un-soldierly, utterly mechanised and decadent nation of which we read in the Nazi papers. Well, it is easy to understand now why they have won the war. There is only one flaw: the Press Reporters.’

  With the US troops came hordes of camera crews and newsmen, eager to question the celebrity prisoners. They clamoured for interviews with Léon Blum, Prince Xavier of Bourbon and Schuschnigg himself. ‘I cannot begin to express our feelings,’ he wrote.14 ‘Who can describe Freedom? … What can we tell them? Plans? Why we don’t know; we have not yet thought about plans.’

  For Fey, the days at the Pragser Wildsee were ‘intensely romantic … an earthly paradise’. Freedom meant she was able to spend every minute of the day with Alex. Finally, after months of being surrounded by others, they were alone.

  Despite her moral qualms, she could not find the strength of will to stop herself from being completely turned by him. ‘I found an inner peace with Alex such as I’d never found before,’ she wrote. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of a future without him. I wanted to start a new life with him.’

  When, in the still of one night, Alex asked Fey to leave Detalmo and marry him, she said yes.

  38.

  On the afternoon of 9 May, Brigadier General Leonard Gerow, commander-in-chief of the US 15th Army, arrived at the hotel to address the group. He was under orders from the Allied High Command to take them to Naples and they were to get ready to leave.

  The next morning, punctually at nine o’clock, a long line of vehicles pulled out of the large courtyard in front of the hotel.

  Fey was in an open-top jeep with Alex, Payne Best and the Schuschniggs. The comfort and style in which they were travelling could not have been more different than their experience of SS transports. Leading the convoy was a light tank, followed by army personnel vehicles, with numerous spares in case of breakdown. Then came an ambulance, military buses for the older people, further light tanks and a rear-guard of more jeeps.1 A US fighter plane flew overhead; for ‘their protection’, the American officers said.

  The convoy followed the course of the River Adige down through the mountains, past Lake Garda. The four-hour drive to Verona, from where the US Air Force would fly the group south, was dusty, the road littered with abandoned German vehicles. ‘Everywhere we met with destroyed bridges and there were thousands of refugees,’ Fey recalled. ‘It was my first sight of Italy since leaving Brazzà and it was heart-breaking to see how, amidst the beautiful landscape, war had ravaged the country and its people.’

  Arriving in Verona, the group was put up in a luxury hotel, where they were treated to a three-course dinner of asparagus, roast chicken and ice cream. The next morning, after ‘an enormous breakfast’, they were driven to an airfield outside the city. There, as Peter Churchill described, ‘We beheld something like fifty shining transport planes capable of holding thirty passengers each in comfort.2 There was no squeezing or stinginess about the number set aside for the political prisoners; at least six were used for the purposes of flying us to Naples.’

  For most of the non-military members of the group, it was their first flight and, on the approach to Florence, the pilots obligingly descended to 5,000 feet so they had a view of the city. Some 250 miles further on, they descended again, flying low over Monte Cassino – of interest to the prisoners of war. Circling two or three times above the ruins of the abbey, they could see the battlefield which, between January and May 1944, had claimed 115,000 Allied soldiers – dead, wounded or missing.

  At Naples, scores of film crews and news reporters were waiting when the planes landed after the two-and-a-half-hour flight. Here – for the Germans in the group – the celebrity treatment ended. Separated from other nationalities, they were escorted by American soldiers, armed with machine guns, to a hangar behind the airfield. ‘We were not even allowed to say goodbye to the others, people I liked so much and with whom I had shared so many experiences,’ Fey wrote. ‘They were going home. We, on the other hand, as people of a defeated nation, were once again prisoners. We hung around that airport for hours, waiting for someone to tell us what was going on.’

  None of the Germans had passports and, without papers, the Allies had no means of telling who they were. Before being repatriated to Germany, they had to be vetted to allay concerns that they were war criminals. After a long wait in the hangar, an American official appeared and announced that they were being taken to Capri, where there was a US Army clearing station run by the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC).

  A British ship ferried them across to the island. As soon as they disembarked, soldiers separated the men from the
women and took them to a nearby POW camp. ‘It was awful seeing Alex and the others being led away,’ Fey remembered; ‘the guards said we were to be kept apart until the interrogation process was over. The rest of us were taken to Anacapri at the southern end of the island where we were put up, under armed guard, in a small hotel. The Americans warned us that it was forbidden to leave the hotel until they had finished interrogating and identifying us.’

  Anacapri, situated high on the side of Monte Solaro, was a beautiful spot with splendid views over the Mediterranean. The Hotel Paradiso, however, did not live up to its name. A modest building, with a white stucco front, it was located in a narrow back street. The rooms were small and it was unusually hot for May, the temperature over 36 degrees. Sleeping four to a room, the heat was stifling.

  A week went by, and nothing happened. Incarcerated in the hotel, with access only to a tiny garden, Isa recorded that ‘after a very short time the mood became unbearable … in an attempt to give each other space, we kept treading on each other’s toes … No one told us anything and it felt as if the “American machine” was taking forever to set itself in motion.’3

  Recognizing their distress at being held captive, the soldiers finally allowed the women to leave the hotel. None of them had summer clothes, and the Red Cross equipped them with swimsuits, straw hats and sandals so they could go to the beach. While they were allowed to roam freely around the island, the men were not granted the same privileges and it bothered and depressed them all.

  To their relief, after ten days, they began to be questioned. CIC officers responsible for investigating war criminals conducted the interrogations. The sessions were long and onerous. The officers needed to know exactly who they were freeing and who they should detain. Once the group’s stories had been checked and cross-checked, detectives from Scotland Yard’s Special Investigation Bureau took over. The women were asked to supply details of the SS and Gestapo men who had guarded them in the camps – their names and rank, a physical description (including height, build, eye colour and any distinguishing marks or facial features) and specific incidences of brutality.

  After the sessions, in the few hours of daylight that remained, Fey and the others went for long walks on Monte Solaro, with its spectacular views of Vesuvius and Naples. It felt strange and unnatural to be in such a beautiful place, untouched by the war, when their families at home might be starving. It seemed that they had swapped one prison for another and everyone longed to go home. For the mothers in the group who knew their children were waiting at the SS orphanage at Bad Sachsa, Isa noted, it was a disquieting time: ‘Every moment spent in this magical garden was a guilty one – they could not escape the thought of their little ones anxiously expecting their return.’4

  Throughout this difficult period, Fey was engaged in a very private struggle. No longer living in the moment of her time with Alex at the Pragser Wildsee, her conscience plagued her and she realized the impossibility of her promise to leave Detalmo.

  Her father was also constantly in her thoughts. The officers conducting the interrogations at the Allied clearing station admired his courage and wanted to know all about him: his life, his character, his motives in opposing Hitler. Comforted by the opportunity to honour her father’s memory, Fey spoke about his sense of duty, his faith and his strict moral code. As she did so, she knew it was her duty to stay with Detalmo; to leave him would be to abrogate the values her father had taught her and which he had given his life to uphold.

  And she thought about the children. Since her conversation with Sergeant Lenz at Buchenwald, while she had clung to the hope that the boys would be found, a part of her recognized that, sooner or later, she would have to face up to the fact that they were irretrievably lost or dead. But, not long after arriving at the hotel, representatives from the International Red Cross came to see her, giving her renewed hope. Slowly, they said, families were being reunited and there was every chance the children would be located. Vatican Radio had even broadcast a list of missing children, which included Corrado and Roberto. If, by a miracle, the boys were found, Fey knew that should she marry Alex she risked losing them again; under Italian law, the children would remain with their father.

  Yet, after 18 May, when Fey and the others were finally allowed to leave their hotel, she could have sent a telegram to Detalmo to tell him she was safe and well and in Capri. But she did not. She wanted to see Alex one last time to explain her decision and to say goodbye to him.

  A week went by and there was no sign that the Americans would allow him to leave the camp where he was detained. Still Fey postponed contacting her husband. After the long sessions at the clearing station she spent most of that time on her own – swimming off the beach at the foot of Monte Solaro or walking through the countryside. ‘The beauty of the island made me feel even bleaker,’ she wrote. ‘When I thought about Detalmo and the future, it was with dread.’

  It was now eighteen months since she had seen her husband and almost a year since she had heard from him. Their last contact – the message he had sent via a courier to tell her that he was staying in Rome – had rankled throughout her time in the camps. She could not help feeling that if he had come home, rather than abandoning her and the children, things might have turned out differently. Had he been with the partisans in the mountains, he might have come up with his own rescue plan after her father’s execution. Notwithstanding these feelings of resentment – and her feelings for Alex – could any marriage survive such a gulf of separation and experience? Would Detalmo ever understand what she had been through in a way that would not leave her feeling permanently alone?

  On 25 May, having given up hope that Alex would be allowed out of the prisoner-of-war camp, Fey went to the post office in Anacapri. The residue of admiration she had for her husband meant that it did not occur to her that his silence was because he had not come through the war; she had no doubt that his political career was flourishing and that he was living at his family’s palazzo in Rome.

  It was to this address that she sent her telegram, which consisted of just nine words:

  AT ALLIED CLEARING STATION CAPRI. PLEASE COME. AFFECT[IONATELY] FEY.

  Detalmo answered almost immediately. He would come and fetch her the following day.

  That next morning, the Americans finally allowed Alex to leave the prisoner-of-war camp. He went straight to the Hotel Paradiso, but it was too late. Fey had already left to meet Detalmo from the ferry.

  She went on foot, taking the flight of steps that coiled around the side of Monte Solaro, linking Anacapri with Marina Grande, the main port on the island.

  The steps – 921 in number – ran down through steep terraces, planted with vines and olive trees. It was a beautiful clear day and she could see across to the mainland. The sea was an intense, turquoise blue and small boats, their wakes no more than thin trails, pulled in and out of the harbour below.

  Arriving in Marina Grande, she went to a café overlooking the port to wait for the ferry.

  ‘The setting was idyllic,’ she remembered. ‘The café was in a small square lined with ancient houses of all different colours – pale blue and yellow and a deep Pompeiian red. I sat there, watching the comings and goings in the port; the fishermen mending their nets, the women selling every conceivable type of fruit and vegetable, attractively arranged in front of them on the market stalls. I should have been happy. The war was over and I was free. After all this time, I was about to see Detalmo. But I was utterly miserable.’

  Fey was waiting on the quayside when the ferry docked and Detalmo stepped off the small boat: ‘We were so overwhelmed, we didn’t know where to start. We couldn’t find any words. Too much had happened.’

  Then came a heart-stopping moment.

  Disappointed not to see Corrado and Roberto waiting with her on the quayside, Detalmo asked Fey to go and fetch them. ‘He had thought that the boys were still with me and I had to tell him about Innsbruck’ was all she wrote.

  Fey’s brief
account of those first days with Detalmo is matter-of-fact. She did not describe what they talked about nor did she express what it felt like to see him again after the long months of separation. Instead, all her emotion was caught up with parting from Alex, and from the people with whom she had experienced so much:

  Rather than leave right away, Detalmo thought it would be better to stay in Capri another day or two so that we could get used to each other again before going back to Rome. He arranged for us to move into a bigger, more comfortable hotel. He also wanted to meet the people I had been imprisoned with and he organized a big dinner for our last night.

  The dinner took place at a nearby restaurant and we all sat round a long table. There were about twenty of us, including Alex. I had not been able to speak to him alone, but I sensed he knew it was all over and that I had decided to go back to Rome to try and rebuild my shattered family.

  The food was delicious and the wine flowed freely. Detalmo was rather upset because some of the guests did not seem to have much appetite. Still having the ‘prison mentality’, they had been afraid of not getting enough to eat and had also eaten dinner at the hotel. There were lots of jokes and speeches, but all the time I had a knot in my stomach. I did not want to go home. I was not only leaving Alex, I was leaving friends with whom I had endured and suffered so much. Only they could truly understand the thoughts and feelings I knew would always haunt me. Nothing binds people closer to each other than common suffering in dark times and I had come to love them as much as those I had loved and cared for deeply for years.

  The next morning, Otto Philipp, who had helped me with my luggage in the moves from camp to camp, arrived to help for the last time. He came down with us to the harbour, where Detalmo had booked the ferry to take us to the mainland. Alex did not come. But I was holding in my hand the last poem he had written for me. One verse began: You are mine, I shout it to the winds …