‘After a few speechless seconds, Corrado broke free from Almuth and rushed over to Detalmo, who was standing in a corner of the room. He grabbed hold of Detalmo’s trousers and put his little feet on top of Detalmo’s shoes, something he had always done when he was younger. Robertino trotted over to me, clambered up on my lap, and sat without saying a word. Holding him in my arms, he seemed the most precious thing in the world.’
Epilogue
Corrado was four years old, and Roberto three, when Ilse found them at the Wiesenhof. Being that much older than Roberto, Corrado retains some memories of their time there. Particular scenes stand out: of a nurse playing a violin to them during air raids; of berry-picking expeditions to the nearby woods, when he had to keep an eye on Roberto in case he picked poisonous ones; of being warned that if he cried too much, he would be fed to the wolves in the forest. He can remember swallowing some beads which they had been given to make necklaces, and a doctor telling him that he would have to cut out his stomach. And he remembers seeing a dead man, killed in a bombing raid, lying in the road in front of the orphanage. He can still see his body – half inside, half out of a drain.
After he came home, Corrado suffered from a recurring nightmare: that he and Roberto were with Fey in a concentration camp. They were lined up in front of a trench, about to be shot. Later, he suffered from shyness and was mistrustful of people, never believing what he was told. ‘As a teenager, I had to work hard to overcome this paranoia,’ he said.1 Unsurprisingly, the therapist he saw thought his mistrust stemmed from the moment when he was seized by the SS: ‘My mother told me that we were only being taken for a walk. She promised me she would join us. But of course she didn’t.’
Today, Corrado and Roberto – now in their late seventies – are still living at Brazzà. Both brothers had successful careers. Detalmo had joined the European Commission in 1966 and Corrado would take the same path. His work as an economics adviser took him to Africa, to Japan and to America where, for a time, he was chargé d’affaires at the EU mission in Washington. Then, in 1992, he was appointed EU Ambassador to Austria – the country where the SS had hidden him as a small boy. In what was to prove an extraordinary coincidence, in his last position as chief of staff to the EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development and Fisheries, he worked with Commissioner Franz Fischler, who had grown up on a farm just a few hundred yards from the Wiesenhof orphanage. Fischler’s family knew the farmer who was due to adopt Corrado and Roberto had Ilse not arrived at the eleventh hour.
Since retiring, Corrado has published biographies of his great-uncle, the explorer Pietro di Brazzà, after whom Brazzaville in the Congo was named, and his great-grandfather, Admiral von Tirpitz. He is married to Cécile, a Belgian artist, and they have one son.
Roberto’s love for horses resulted in his becoming one of Italy’s most accomplished riders. In 1964, at the age of twenty-two, he was selected to represent his country at the Tokyo Olympics. He did not, however, take part, opting instead to complete his diploma in architecture. He became one of the leading figures in the reconstruction of Friuli after the earthquake that devastated the region in 1976, and is well known for his landscape design projects, most notably the garden at Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam. He married a South African and they have four children.
Ilse lived at her home in Ebenhausen until her death in 1982 at the age of ninety-six.
Following the loss of her husband, she devoted the remaining decades of her life to his memory. As soon as the war ended she dug up the diaries he had hidden in the foxhole at the end of the garden. Only she knew the code words he had used and she spent many months tirelessly editing the diaries prior to their publication in 1946.
In the years that followed, Ilse never failed to revive and defend her husband’s memory, extolling his fight for justice and decency and his primary allegiance to moral values over and above State and Nation. Her greatest pleasure, however – her ‘joy’, as she described it – was the month she spent every summer at Brazzà with Fey and her grandsons. ‘Naturally,’ Fey wrote, ‘my mother was the central figure at the children’s weddings.’
Alex von Stauffenberg was detained by US war-crime investigators until September 1945. Broken-hearted at losing Fey, he continued to send her letters and poems from the villa in Frankfurt am Main where he was imprisoned.
While there, he had difficulty in convincing the Americans that he found it impossible to sit at the same table as fellow prisoner and war criminal Field Marshal von Rundstedt.2 Tasked by Hitler in 1941 with the conquest of the Ukraine, Rundstedt had urged his senior commanders to commit atrocities against Jews and Communists. Following the 20 July plot, he had overseen the posthumous expulsion of Alex’s brothers – Claus and Berthold – from the army.
After his release, Alex went to live with a group of friends at Überlingen, on the northern shore of Lake Constance.3 During this time, he learned that Fey had had another child – a daughter, named Vivian – removing all hope that she would leave Detalmo and marry him. Three years would pass before he was ready to face the outside world.
In 1948, he was reappointed Professor of Ancient History at Munich University – a position he had filled before the war. With Gerhard Ritter, he was tasked with writing the history of the German Resistance which was included in Ritter’s biography of Carl Goerdeler. He was also a staunch campaigner against nuclear weapons.
He married for a second time in 1949 – to Marlene Hoffmann, a widow whom he had met while at Überlingen. Alex had no children of his own, but he developed a close bond with his stepdaughter, Gudula. ‘He was a true father,’ she remembers; ‘a loving, caring, attentive, generous and reliable man.’4
Alex continued to correspond with Fey and the two met up on several occasions, in both Italy and Germany. Their last meeting was in Rome in 1963. Nearing sixty, he had lost none of his allure. Fey found him as striking then as she had done at the Hindenburg Baude.
A few months later, to her ‘immense sadness’, she received a letter from Uncle Moppel, saying that Alex had died of lung cancer.
Isa Vermehren, Gagi von Stauffenberg and the other Sippenhäftlinge left Capri on 13 June – two weeks after Detalmo arrived to collect Fey. They were not flown home, but to a British-run Displaced Persons Camp at Versailles. There, undergoing further questioning, they remained for three days. ‘It is not a nice feeling being in this very unfriendly environment,’ Gagi wrote in her diary.5 ‘We have to eat in an English canteen and the race to our table feels like running the gauntlet. Mika Stauffenberg can’t bear this palpable animosity and goes up to people to tell them that we are related to the July plotters. This raises no comment, but afterwards cigarettes, chocolate and fruit land on our table.’
Gagi was flown to Munich in mid June. On her way home to Baden-Württemberg, she joined an official tour of Dachau with Canon Neuhauser, who had also been imprisoned there. While Gagi herself had briefly seen the camp as she and the other Sippenhäftlinge were marched from the hospital wing the night they left Dachau, the true scale of Nazi atrocities here and in other camps was only just coming to light. ‘The tour of the camp is gruesome,’ she wrote later that day; ‘I wanted to sink into the ground for shame.’6
Clemens, Gagi’s father, never recovered from his ill-treatment at the hands of the SS and he died in February 1949. His death was followed nine months later by that of his 55-year-old wife; her health had been similarly compromised by her experiences in the concentration camps.
Gagi remained unmarried. Thirty-five years after the end of the war, she returned to live on her parents’ old estate at Jettingen. She decided to publish her war diary on the seventieth anniversary of her release from captivity. She died in 2018, just short of reaching the grand age of 104.
Isa Vermehren began her own book after her release and repatriation in June 1945. Entitled Reise durch den letzten Akt (A Journey Through the Final Act), it charted her experiences in the camps, and also her thoughts on the Nazi regime and its cri
mes.
After the war, she trained as a teacher, entering a convent in 1951. She later became a headmistress. An advocate of moral education, she campaigned for its introduction to the curriculum: ‘A society without a consensus on moral values … of what is desired and demanded on a moral plane … is doomed.’7
Following her retirement from teaching, she became a presenter on Germany’s second-longest-running television show, Wort zum Sonntag, a forum for discussing religious themes. She died in 2009 at the age of 101.
Together with the other Sippenhäftlinge, in the late 1940s and 50s, both Isa and Gagi struggled to acclimatize to post-war Germany, where there were mixed feelings about the July plotters. Among some sections of the population they were seen as Landesverräter (traitors) who had broken their oath to the Führer. In the wider community, the families of the conspirators often encountered limited understanding and support and were forced to rely on close friends and relatives who shared their political views.
The anomalies within a country that was both trying to rebuild and come to terms with itself meant that, for a number of years after the war, Claus von Stauffenberg’s wife, Nina, was denied a widow’s pension. Yet the widow of Ronald Freisler, the barbaric judge presiding over the People’s Court, responsible for brutally executing hundreds of enemies of the Nazi state, was given a generous allowance.fn1
Hitler had vowed to wipe out the ‘brood of vipers’ that had plotted against him. He had sworn to extinguish the lines of the aristocratic Prussians he loathed. When Nina died in 2006, at the age of ninety-two, the announcement of her death carried the names of her four surviving children and their spouses and also the following information: ‘twelve grandchildren and twenty great-grandchildren’. She had made a nonsense of Hitler’s revenge.
Himmler slipped out of Flensburg, the headquarters of the German High Command in the north of Germany, on the night of Wednesday 9 May 1945. It was on this night, at 01:00 hours, that the total surrender of German armed forces on all fronts came into effect.
He left Flensburg to evade arrest, taking five loyal SS men with him: his private secretary, two adjutants, the chief of the Gestapo and the chief of his personal security.8 Travelling in four armoured vehicles, they had stripped the insignia from their uniforms, and were dressed in an array of civilian and military clothes. Himmler had shaved off his moustache; in his pocket he carried the papers of Heinrich Hitzinger, a sergeant in a Special Armoured Company, whose identity he had now assumed.
For the first two nights, the group camped in a forest outside Flensburg while they prepared for their journey south. They were heading for the Harz mountains, east of Göttingen. Here, according to Werner Grothmann, one of the adjutants, Himmler hoped to hide out before making his way to the Alps once the ‘hue and cry had died down’.9
Reaching Marne, north of the River Elbe, on the night of 15 May, they were forced to abandon their vehicles.10 The river was several miles wide at this point and they paid an unwitting fisherman 500 Reichsmarks to take them across in his boat. For the next three days, they tramped slowly south, joining the hundreds of thousands of refugees and German soldiers on the road. En route, they slept in the open or inside railway stations or in peasant farmsteads. They spent the night of 18 May on a farm outside Bremervörde where unsuspecting British forces were billeted in the house next door.11
For two more days, the six men evaded capture. Then, on the morning of 21 May, Himmler and his two adjutants, Grothmann and Sturmbannführer Macher, were arrested at a checkpoint manned by Soviet POWS.
The soldiers handed the men over to a passing British Army patrol. A report, based on the later interrogation of Werner Grothmann, describes this moment:
Himmler was wearing civilian clothing and had a black patch over one of his eyes, whilst Grothmann & Macher were dressed half in uniform (tunics & greatcoats without badge of any kind) and half in civilian clothing.12 In view of this disguise, they were not recognised by the Russians …
They were driven to a camp at Seedorf near Bremervörde where their captors still failed to recognise them. Grothmann says this was not surprising, since Heinrich Himmler in civilian clothing and without his glasses appears as an ordinary type of middle-class German and was definitely difficult to identify.
At Seedorf camp, the duty officer’s questions were routine. But there were irregularities in the men’s papers and they were detained in the cells overnight. The following morning, they were transferred to another camp for further interrogation. Again, their disguise remained undiscovered. In the words of Grothmann, the British interrogating officers assumed they were ‘German civilian refugees or deserters from the Wehrmacht’.13
Later that day, the three men were transferred again. As before, they remained unrecognized. After spending another night in British Army cells, the next morning – almost forty-eight hours after their capture – they were moved once more. This time to Camp 031, a British-run POW camp near Lüneburg.
Captain Selvester of the Black Watch, formerly an officer in the Salford City Police Force, was the commandant at the camp. ‘At that time, large numbers of German troops were endeavouring to make their way home, and were carrying in most cases documents issued by senior officers of their respective regiments.14 These troops were being stopped and placed in ordinary POW cages, but if there was any doubt as to their identity they were sent to my Camp for further interrogation … The drill was for such prisoners to be paraded outside my office, and then allowed to enter singly, when it was my duty to obtain from them their names, addresses, ages, and any documents carried.’
At around two o’clock on the afternoon of 23 May, Himmler joined a queue of some twenty prisoners waiting to be interviewed by Captain Selvester. A few hours later, a guard came into the office to inform the captain that three of the prisoners in the queue outside were causing trouble. Apparently, they were demanding to be seen immediately. From experience, Selvester recognized that this was highly unusual; most prisoners were anxious to avoid drawing attention to themselves. His suspicions aroused, he ordered the guard to bring the three men in.
‘The first man to enter my office was small, ill-looking and shabbily dressed, but he was immediately followed by two other men, both of whom were tall and soldierly looking, one slim and one well-built.15 The well-built man walked with a limp. I sensed something unusual, and ordered one of my sergeants to place the two men in close custody, and not to allow anyone to speak to them without my authority. They were then removed from my office, whereupon the small man, who was wearing a black patch over his left eye, removed the patch and put on a pair of spectacles. His identity was at once obvious, and he said, “Heinrich Himmler” in a very quiet voice.’
Himmler’s motives for choosing this moment to turn himself in are unclear but, later that evening, he was driven to a small house in Lüneburg – number 31a Uelzener Strasse.
‘At 22.45 Himmler was brought in,’ Major Norman Whittaker, Commanding Officer of Second Army Defence Company, HQ, recalled.16 ‘He was wrapped in a blanket. No arrogance about him. He was a cringing figure who knew that the game was up. We took him into the front room and the doctor began his search.’
Colonel Michael Murphy, the chief of intelligence on General Montgomery’s staff, was in charge of the interrogation. Believing Himmler to be a suicide risk, the colonel needed to determine whether he was carrying poison before beginning the interview.
Himmler was ordered to strip and to stand, naked, in the centre of the room. Starting with his feet, army doctor Captain Wells – formerly a country GP from Oxfordshire – searched his body. He examined his buttocks, his navel, his armpits, his ears. Then he ordered Himmler to open his mouth. Hidden inside, as Colonel Murphy later described, Wells ‘saw a small black knob sticking out between a gap in the teeth on the right hand side lower jaw’.17 In an attempt to remove what was evidently a phial of poison, Wells put two fingers into Himmler’s mouth and it was then that Himmler twisted his head to one side and bi
t down hard on the doctor’s fingers. ‘My God! It’s in his mouth.18 He’s done it,’ Wells shouted.
Immediately, Colonel Murphy and a sergeant jumped on Himmler and, throwing him to the ground, turned him on his stomach to prevent him from swallowing.19 Simultaneously, Wells held him by the throat, attempting to force him to spit out the poison. ‘The dramatic rapidity of death I anticipated but slightly,’ he later wrote.20 ‘There were a slowing series of stertorous breaths which may have continued for half a minute, and the pulse for another minute after that. The stench coming from Himmler’s mouth was unmistakably that of hydrocyanic.’
‘This evil thing breathed its last at 23.14 [hours],’ Major Whittaker noted. ‘We turned it on its back, put a blanket on it and came away.’21
Himmler’s body, wrapped in camouflage netting and bound with telephone wire, was taken to a secret location near Lüneburg on 26 May. He was buried without religious ceremony. Sergeant Major Austin, a dustman in civilian life, dug the grave. Just three other members of Second Army Defence Company were present. ‘These four were the only people who knew the location,’ it was recorded in the company’s War Diary.22 ‘Subsequently the Map Reference of the location was handed by O. C. Defence Coy to Col. G (I) [Intelligence], HQ, Second Army.’
The exact location of the grave remains classified.
With the exception of Sergeant Foth, the head of the Jewish Camp at Stutthof, little is known of the fate of the numerous SS personnel appointed to guard the Sippenhäftlinge on their journey through the camps. While Sergeant Kupfer was imprisoned for a short time after the war, surviving records contain no trace of Fräulein Papke, who, with Kupfer, was in charge of the Sippenhäftlinge from Stutthof to Buchenwald – or of Rafforth and Knocke, their female overseers at Buchenwald.
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