A Polish war crimes tribunal sentenced Foth to death in 1947. During the six Stutthof trials, which took place in Gdańsk between 1946 and 1953, a total of seventy-two SS officers and six female overseers were found guilty of war crimes.23 Of these, twenty-two were subsequently executed.
Fey did, however, see Hans Kretschmann, the young lieutenant who had denounced her to the Gestapo in the autumn of 1944.
His telephone call came, out of the blue, one hot afternoon in the summer of 1984. Forty years had passed since the war and after Detalmo’s successful career as an EU diplomat, primarily working in Africa, they were living in semi-retirement, dividing their time between Rome and Brazzà.
Fey was in their apartment in the centre of Rome when the telephone rang. ‘The caller spoke in German and asked for me. I knew immediately that it was Kretschmann. He spoke just as he did then, flatly and to the point. He was with his wife at the Grand Hotel, attending a European telecommunications conference. He had become a director of the German telephone authority. To my amazement, he asked if I could join them for a drink at the hotel that evening to meet his wife and talk about old times.’
Reluctantly, after Kretschmann pressed her, Fey accepted the invitation. ‘Punctually at seven o’clock, already feeling deeply troubled, I arrived at the bar at the Grand Hotel. There he was, looking very different from how I imagined. He had become fat and seemed much smaller than I remembered.’
The conversation was awkward from the beginning. Kretschmann had a photograph of Corrado and Roberto in his wallet, which he showed Fey, curious to find out what had become of the boys. Responding politely to his questions, Fey was taken aback when he began to speak about the war. ‘He talked fondly of the good times spent with us at Brazzà, of “how pleasant and peaceful it had been when his regiment was stationed there”. His wife smiled; she must have heard the “happy” story many times before.’
Overwhelmed, after a short time, Fey made some excuse and left. As she was leaving, Kretschmann gave her his card and asked if he could visit her at Brazzà.
That night, she was unable to sleep. ‘I felt used and violated by the encounter. Why had he wanted to see me? He was in part responsible for my imprisonment and for my separation from the children. I could only think that he was eager to cleanse himself of his past as a fanatical Nazi, and his callous behaviour in betraying me to the SS.’
Seeing him brought her worst memories of the war to the surface – memories that, with the help of a psychiatrist and by focusing on her family and the household at Brazzà, she had, for the most part, managed to process.
Some days later, still haunted by the meeting, Fey made the decision to write to Kretschmann. Her letter quickly dispensed with the usual courtesies.
‘Dear Kretschmann,’ she began:
I was glad to meet you after all these years, and to meet your charming wife.
I write today to tell you that, after thinking about it at length, I would prefer not to see you again, and this for the following reasons.
Before meeting you at the hotel, I found myself incomprehensively anxious. After meeting you and your wife and coming home this anxiousness has not left me, and for many nights now I have slept very badly, my mind filled with thoughts of the past.
It has all come back so vividly – all the things which I have tried to forget. So many men and women have been destroyed by the memory of their terrible past, and I do not want my memories to destroy me. Yet, in seeing you, all stood before me: the sudden communication of my father’s cruel death; the brutal separation from my two small boys; all the harrowing scenes I saw in the concentration camps; the traumatic search with my husband for the children after I was lucky enough to be freed, believing they would never be found.
Of course such things are impossible to truly forget, but your presence made the sights, the thoughts, the feelings from those times, come back – things that I have worked hard to bury.
Please give this letter to your wife; she will understand.
I wish you all the best for your future.
Fey’s letter was frank and resolute. But, as she would later write, she forgave Kretschmann. ‘He was young, and had no education other than under the Nazis. To forgive is one of the most important feelings in life.’
In her private struggle to come to terms with her experiences, this was one of her central tenets.
Like so many others who had come through the concentration camps, she suffered from survivors’ guilt – a feeling that was compounded by the knowledge that, in comparison to the victims of the Holocaust, her experience, as she wrote, had been ‘mild’. Her affinity with their suffering, and her need to try and answer the unanswerable question why, led her to read many of the memoirs written by the survivors of the camps. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, an account of his imprisonment at Auschwitz and other camps, became a touchstone for Fey. Throughout her life she kept it close by, pinning quotes from his writings to the desk where she worked. ‘My mother never complained about what had happened to her because she saw her suffering as an intrinsic part of her destiny which had to be taken as it came, without bitterness or vengeance,’ Corrado said.
In 1948 a report published by the International Tracing Service stated that, in Europe, 42,000 parents were still searching for their children.24
Fey’s gratitude that she had been reunited with her lost boys remained with her until the day she died at Brazzà at the age of ninety-two.fn2
On the face of it, it seemed they had been found by pure chance. But Fey thought differently. Her father, whom she adored, had been watching over her. As she said in an interview years after the war, ‘He found the boys.’
1 Innsbruck, 1939
2 The Wiesenhof orphanage
3 The villa at Brazzà
4 A view of Brazzà showing the castle and the farm
5 Robert Foster, Air Officer Commanding, Desert Air Force
6 Nonino at Brazzà
7 Ulrich von Hassell with Hitler and Mussolini in Venice, 1934
8 Ulrich von Hassell with Mussolini in Rome, 1936
9 Fey, aged sixteen, with her father
10 The Hassell family, c. 1936: (from left to right) Wolf Ulli, Hans Dieter, Ulrich, Almuth, Fey and Ilse
11 SS chief Heinrich Himmler with Hassell (to his right) on National Police Day, Villa Glori, 1937. Auturo Bocchini, Italian Chief of Police, and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo, are standing to the left of Himmler
12 General Ludwig Beck
13 Major General Henning von Tresckow
14 Fey in 1942
15 Fey and Detalmo celebrate their wedding at Ebenhausen, January 1940
16 Fey and Detalmo with Corrado, November 1940
17 Nonino and the farmhands at Brazzà harness Mirko for an outing. Fey and Detalmo are seated in the trap
18 Ulrich von Hassell with his grandsons, Corrado and Roberto, at Ebenhausen, June 1943
19 Fey with her mother, Ilse, and Detalmo at Ebenhausen, June 1943
20 Detalmo and Corrado in the garden at Brazzà. The photograph was taken shortly before Detalmo was posted to the POW camp at Mortara
21 The Campo Imperatore Hotel, where Mussolini was imprisoned before being rescued by the SS on 12 September 1943
22 Cora di Brazzà Slocomb, c. 1890
23 Lieutenant Hans Kretschmann with Corrado at Brazzà, 1942
24 Corrado with the airmen at Brazzà, 1943
25 The ‘Thirteen Martyrs of Feletto Umberto’, Premariacco, 29 May 1944
26 The wreckage of the map room at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, 20 July 1944
27 Ulrich von Hassell’s trial, September 1944
28 Claus von Stauffenberg
29 Captain Sigismund Payne Best
30 Bomb damage in Munich
31 Litta von Stauffenberg
32 Alex von Stauffenberg
33 The liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945
34 The Hotel Pragser Wildsee
&n
bsp; 35 The view from one of the hotel rooms
36 ‘We are searching for these children!’ One of the posters circulated by Fey and Detalmo in the summer of 1945
37 Ewald Foth (second from the right) at the Stutthof trials in Gdansk, January 1947
38 Himmler’s corpse, photographed by a British Army official, minutes after his death from cyanide poisoning
Acknowledgements
I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Corrado Pirzio-Biroli, without whom the book could not have been written. Besides allowing me access to his mother’s remarkable collection of papers at Brazzà, he collaborated on much of the research. Indefatigably, and with great patience, he answered every question and was always ready to suggest new routes of enquiry. With his abiding interest in the history of Brazzà, and as the author of a biography of his great-grandfather, Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, he has shared his knowledge and expertise. I feel tremendously privileged to have had the opportunity to work so closely with him and I shall always be grateful to him for his generosity and encouragement.
Warmest thanks too to his wife, Cécile Pirzio-Biroli, who took me to Mount Joanaz to see the village of Canebola, the site of Allied supply drops to the partisans during the war, and to Villabassa and the Hotel Lago di Braies (Pragser Wildsee) in South Tyrol, where the Sippenhäftlinge spent their final days before they were liberated by the Americans in May 1945.
I would also like to thank Roberto Pirzio-Biroli for his invaluable insights into his extraordinary family.
I owe a great debt too to the late David Forbes-Watt, Fey’s son-in-law through his marriage to her daughter, Vivian. The co-author of A Mother’s War, his archives contain a wealth of papers, including notes he made of conversations with Fey and others relating to her story. Following Vivian’s death in 1995, David married Helen and I am hugely indebted to her for her tireless efforts in searching through her late husband’s papers for material for this book, and for her kind permission to use extracts from his work. David and Helen visited Fey and Detalmo often. I am grateful too to Helen for the many enjoyable hours spent listening to her fond memories of Fey and life at Brazzà.
Other family archives yielded valuable material. Orsina Hercolani, the granddaughter of Santa Borghese Hercolani, very kindly devoted a day to showing me the correspondence, spanning many decades, between her grandmother and Fey. It was fascinating, too, to meet Mike Foster, Robert Foster’s son, who gave me a copy of his father’s unpublished memoir, an insightful account of his first meeting with Fey and Detalmo and the Desert Air Force’s occupation at Brazzà.
Thanks also to Valerie Riedesel, the daughter of Ännerle von Hofacker, and to Dr Gudula Knerr-Stauffenberg, who shared her memories of her stepfather, Alex von Stauffenberg.
In taking on a subject with primary sources in so many different European languages, I have depended on the work and guidance of others. I should like to express my thanks to Angelica von Hase for sourcing documents in Germany and Poland, and for pointing me in the right direction during the research; to Lily Pollock, for her help and enthusiasm at the outset; to Lucy Lethbridge for her perceptive reading of a section of the manuscript; and to Dan Booth, Sarah Niccolini and my mother, Carol, for their translations of the Italian material. Luca Colautti and Pietro Feruglio in Friuli, and Heinz Blaumeiser in the Tyrol, were invaluable in finding primary sources relating to Brazzà, and to the orphanage at Wiesenhof. The material they provided, including unpublished memoirs, local newspaper cuttings, and oral recollections passed down through the generations, offered an insight into the way of life during the Nazi period that I would otherwise have missed, and I am extremely grateful for their contributions.
I should like to thank Venetia Butterfield and all at Viking, especially my editor Mary Mount for her encouragement and her wise suggestions. Thanks too to my literary agent, Georgina Capel, to Rosanna Forte for her work in sourcing illustrations, and to Sarah-Jane Forder, my wonderful copy-editor.
It has also been a great pleasure for me to work with Alexandra Campbell and I cannot thank her enough. Besides culling German, French and Italian letters, diaries and published works, she has been a brilliant sounding board throughout. I am truly grateful to her for her eye for detail and her perceptive comments.
Finally, thanks to my family, and to my friends, Sarah Cole, Dorothy Cory-Wright, Jasper McMahon, William Sieghart and Sara Tibbetts, for their forbearance, and for their love and support during the writing of the book.
Notes
There are many different sources for Fey’s story: the diaries she kept over the course of her life and the letters she wrote to her family and friends as well as her own memoir, A Mother’s War, published in 1990 by John Murray. She also wrote copious notes about her father’s work in the German Resistance and about her own experiences in the concentration camps, which she updated continually in the years after the war. These papers, together with the varying drafts of the manuscripts for the Italian, German, French and English editions of her memoir, are held in the archives at Brazzà, as are those of the late David Forbes-Watt, Fey’s son-in-law and the co-writer of A Mother’s War. Throughout the research and writing of this book I have tried to look at all sources for each stage of the narrative. Inevitably there is a difference in tone between work meant for publication and edited several years after the events described, and private correspondence and contemporaneous notes, so, in all cases, I have made every attempt to get as close to Fey’s voice and experience as I could and have often used several different primary sources for one scene.
Prologue
1 ‘“Monika calling”’ Fritz Molden, Exploding Star: A Young Austrian Against Hitler (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), p. 201
2 ‘The day’ Thomas Albrich and Arno Gisinger, Im Bombenkrieg: Tirol und Vorarlberg 1943–1945 (Haymon-Verlag, 1992), pp. 277ff.
3 ‘The Allies’ Joseph E. Persico, Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents During World War II (Viking, 1979), p. 10
4 ‘With Hitler holding’ ibid.
5 ‘In these circumstances’ Jim Ring, Storming the Eagle’s Nest (Faber & Faber, 2014), pp. 240–44
6 ‘Soon after’ Albrich and Gisinger, op. cit., pp. 307–10; Headquarters 450th Bombardment Group, S-2 Narrative Report, Mission Number 194, 16 December 1944, 450th Memorial Association, www.450thbg.com
7 ‘It is a black’ Roland Sila (ed.), Von Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau: Das Tagebuch der Innsbruckerin Anna Mutschlechner 1944–1951 (StudienVerlag, 2003), p. 36
8 ‘Fräulein Kummer’s’ ibid., pp. 36–9
9 ‘The raid marked a change of tactic’ Albrich and Gisinger, op. cit., pp. 307–10
10 ‘“Tyroleans, we know that you will not permit it”’ Gerald Schwab, OSS Agents in Hitler’s Heartland: Destination Innsbruck (Praeger, 1996), p. 104
1
1 ‘One night that December’ testimony of Frau Buri, Head Nurse, Wiesenhof Orphanage, July 1945, private family archive
2 ‘Both boys were dressed’ ibid.
3 ‘The road itself’ Matthias Breit, Head of the Municipal Museum, Absam, conversation with author, January 2017
4 ‘Within the grounds’ The Times of Israel, 20 October 2012
5 ‘This was the outskirts’ Peter Steindl, former vice mayor of Absam, conversation with author, January 2017
6 ‘In the centre of the village’ Heinz Blaumeiser, social historian and former lecturer, Innsbruck University, conversation with author, January 2017
7 ‘In the pagan mythology’ ibid.
8 ‘In the half-light’ testimony of Frau Buri, op. cit.
2
1 ‘To the locals’ information supplied by local historians Heinz Blaumeiser and Peter Steindl, conversations with author, January 2017
2 ‘Formerly a hunting lodge’ ibid.
3 ‘But he ran out of money’ Peter Steindl, conversation with author, January 2017
4 ‘In the decade that followed’ ibid.
5 ‘On the ni
ght of 10 November alone’ Anschluss and Extermination: The Fate of the Austrian Jews (H.E.A.R.T., 2009), www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
6 ‘Walther Eidlitz, the grandson’ Walther Eidlitz, Unknown India: A Pilgrimage into a Forgotten World (Rider & Co., 1952), p. 8
7 ‘But his mother’ information supplied by Heinz Blaumeiser, op. cit.
8 ‘Yet, as the manager’ Rudolf Hauschka, At the Dawn of a New Age: Memories of a Scientist (SteinerBooks, 2007), p. 69
9 ‘Three years earlier’ Peter Staudenmaier, ‘Between Occultism and Fascism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race and Nation in Germany and Italy, 1900–1945’ (Doctoral thesis, Cornell University, 2010), pp. 186–7
10 ‘Throughout the 1930s’ Hauschka, op. cit., p. 69
11 ‘Without formally endorsing’ Staudenmaier, op. cit., pp. 186–7
12 ‘To Heydrich and’ ibid., p. 245
13 ‘While continuing’ ibid., pp. 182, 380
14 ‘No action was’ ibid., p. 196
15 ‘“Despite the fact”’ Hauschka, op. cit., p. 69
16 ‘It was the villagers’’ Heinz Blaumeiser, conversation with author, January 2017
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