In 1987, Fey von Hassell, younger daughter of the former German ambassador to Rome, published her memoirs. A Mother’s War told the story of the vendetta carried out by Hitler against the families of the men implicated in the July 1944 coup plot – of which her father Ulrich von Hassell was one – and the survival, against all the odds, of herself and her small children. Catherine Bailey, author of two successful family biographies, has retold Fey’s story, filling in gaps and setting it in a wider context. It is indeed an extraordinary tale.
Ulrich von Hassell, an aristocrat and diplomat of the old school, was posted to Rome in 1932. From the first opposed to the Nazis, his opposition grew stronger as Europe moved towards war. Watched by the all too efficient German and Italian fascist spy networks, he was dismissed in December 1937 and returned to Germany to join the resistance. Von Hassell was one of the first men to be arrested after the failed coup, brought before the infamous People’s Court and slowly strangled, the process filmed for Hitler to watch later. Then the Nazis moved on to the plotters’ families, the “brood of vipers”, under a directive known as Sippenhaft, which decreed that a traitor’s family was also guilty.
Fey was then 24, married to an Italian called Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli and living on his family estate, Brazza, a 12th-century castle overlooking the plains of Venice, where local families made lace, kept silkworms and farmed. With her were her two sons, four-year-old Corrado and two-year-old Roberto. German soldiers were billeted in the castle, but Fey, as a German speaker, was treated civilly, though she lived in constant fear of being taken for a collaborator by the Italian resistance. As the allies, having landed in Salerno, were fighting their way up Italy, Pirzio-Biroli joined the partisans and disappeared. Bailey paints a vivid picture of the violence and chaos of Italy’s civil war, with the partisans in the mountains, the fascists and the German occupiers carrying out reprisals, and Italian former soldiers and escaped allied prisoners of war trying to evade capture.
On 27 September 1944, the Nazis came for Fey. In Innsbruck, her first place of detention, Corrado and Roberto were taken from her. She listened to their screams as they were bundled away. Instead of killing her, the Nazis made her one of their hostages, held with a group of important people by Himmler against possible future barter with the allies. Moved from prison to prison, camp to camp, for a while in a former hotel in which she and her companions played bridge and went for walks, later in special barracks attached to the camps of Stutthof, Buchenwald and Dachau, she caught typhoid and nearly died. With her were members of the other plotters’ families – the von Stauffenbergs, the Goerdelers, the Hofackers. Fey was one of four women whose children had been taken from them. The youngest was a baby of nine months.
Most of the hostages, at one time or another, became ill with scarlet fever, typhoid or bacillary dysentery. Towards the end, they were brought together with other eminent hostages, including the former French prime minister, Leon Blum, the pastor Martin Niemöller and von Schuschnigg, the chancellor of Austria. Fey grew very close to Alex von Stauffenberg, elder brother to Claus, leading plotter in the July coup, whose wife Litta, a decorated Luftwaffe test pilot, died in what was probably an attempt to rescue him. At some point, a number of children were brought to join them – but Fey’s sons were not among them. When Himmler realised that they were not going to be useful in saving his life, orders went out to have them killed. But the message came too late: the group had already been moved and were on their way to safety. Bailey deftly sets her narrative against the background of the unfolding mayhem of the closing weeks of the war as Germans, Italian fascists, the Italian resistance and the allies battled their way across northern Italy.
In some ways, The Lost Boys is an imprecise title, for almost the entire book is the story of Fey’s ordeal. But her anguish over the fate of her sons consumed much of her days and acts as an ever-present theme. It was finding them again, in the summer of 1945, more than their survival, that was little short of miraculous.
Reunited with her husband, and finally in touch once again with her mother and sister in Germany, Fey set about trying to locate her children. But postwar Europe was awash with refugees and people who had lost their families, and priority in tracing them went to citizens of allied, “non-enemy” countries. As Germans and Italians, the Pirzio-Birolis were very low on the list. Among the missing were hundreds of thousands of small children, some of them orphans, some Jewish children who had been hidden, others who had been kidnapped and “Germanised” by the Nazis. One of the most poignant sights was of posters hanging in railway stations, offices and refugee centres, with photographs of babies and young children and the words “Who am I?” written underneath. In 1948, the International Tracing Service still had 42,000 families on its books who were searching for their lost children. Most were never found.
The Pirzio-Birolis were among the lucky few. Given new names by the Nazis, the two boys had been taken to an orphanage, a former Rudolf Steiner centre and sanatorium high in the mountains above Innsbruck. Even so, the area in 1945 was a contested zone, occupied by Yugoslav troops and Garibaldi communist partisans, and out of bounds to Italian citizens. It was only the Pirzio-Birolis’ excellent connections and the extreme persistence of Fey’s mother that led to the boys’ rescue. They arrived in the nick of time: Corrado and Roberto were about to be adopted by a new family.
Fey von Hassell and Bailey essentially recount the same story, but the two books are a perfect example of the subtle and important differences between memoir and biography. Fey’s touching and elegant account is told from a single perspective, while Bailey’s is a richer and deeper portrait, as if pulling back, in a film, from a tight shot to a wider landscape. The relationship between Fey and Alex von Stauffenberg is given considerably more emphasis by Bailey, with the suggestion that it was primarily duty that caused Fey to resume her marriage at the end of the war, while in her own memoir Fey herself described finding her husband again with “utter joy and amazement”. Diaries, letters, memoirs and conversations with Corrado and Roberto, now in their 70s, as well as other friends and relations of the family, give Bailey’s version depth. Like A Mother’s War, The Lost Boys is a gripping read.
• Caroline Moorehead’s A Bold and Dangerous Family is published by Vintage. The Lost Boys: A Family Ripped Apart by War by Catherine Bailey is published by Penguin (RRP £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
