CHAPTER TWELVE

ALPINE REFUGE

As dawn broke on the morning of Saturday 28 April, the convoy of buses carrying Fey and the others completed its crossing of the Brenner Pass and continued to head in the direction of Bolzano. Then it turned onto a side road and trundled through several small villages before abruptly stopping. After a while it veered right along a narrow road and over a railway crossing before coming to another halt. It was now almost nine o’clock in the morning. They were about a mile outside the small town of Villabassa. Neither Bader nor Stiller appeared to know what was happening. Fey saw the two SS men arguing on the road before they stamped off in the direction of the village. Ominously, sentries armed with automatic weapons took up positions along the road at ten-yard intervals. Léon Blum was convinced their end was imminent. Where? When? How? seemed the only valid questions left to ask.¹

Fey sat in the bus for hours. Midday came and went. Outside, it was pouring with rain. She had had nothing to eat or drink since leaving the camp at Reichenau the day before. Nor had anyone else, including the guards. As the time passed some of them relaxed and talked about how much they were looking forward to being reunited with their families now that the war was almost over. They appeared to have no more idea than Fey of what was going to happen next. Everyone grew hungrier and thirstier. In late afternoon, the atmosphere changed again. The prisoners were becoming impatient and the guards nervous and restless. What were the SS men up to in the village?

One of Fey’s companions was already busy finding out. During the interminable overnight drive through the mountains, Colonel von Bonin had overheard a whispered conversation between two of the SS men sitting at the front of the bus. Thinking that all the prisoners were asleep, they had been discussing what they were going to do about those on their list who had to be liquidated. “Well,” said one, “we were ordered to put the bomb under the bus either before or just after the–” Then the noise of the bus drowned out the rest of the sentence. But von Bonin had heard enough. Shortly after Bader and Stiller had set off for Villabassa he used his status as a uniformed Wehrmacht officer to browbeat some of the younger guards into letting him off the bus. Then he followed the two SS officers into the town to find out what was going on.

In another of the buses, Captain Payne Best was also convinced that something sinister was afoot. So he suggested to Thyssen and Schacht that the time had come to try some bribery and asked if they would put up a hundred thousand Swiss francs, which could be offered to the more pliant Stiller to take them to the Swiss frontier. The former industrialist and the ex-Reichsbank director agreed to act as bankers, but then they balked at putting the deal to Stiller. This angered Payne Best, who felt it was time for some of the Germans in the group to take the initiative.

Amid these discussions, a group of cyclists on a morning outing passed by, and they recognized Schuschnigg. (The ex-Austrian Chancellor was a well-known and revered figure in the region.) The cyclists quickly spread word of the convoy and its passengers, and the news reached the ears of the local resistance leader, Dr. Antonio Ducia. Before long, he was organizing billets for the prisoners in houses and inns around the village.

Meanwhile, Bader, Stiller and most of the SS guards were stuffing themselves with sausages and beer at the Hotel Bachmann, a small inn located on the main square. Their plan still was not clear. But whatever they had in mind was suddenly disrupted. Von Bonin had already decided that he had to get word to General von Viettinghof, the commander of German forces in Italy and a friend of his from his days on the General Staff. As he was wondering how to do this, though, he glanced across the square and spotted a group of German officers talking together. It did not take him long to persuade them to allow him to telephone von Viettinghof and alert him to what was happening. The last thing the German commander needed on the very day that he was negotiating the surrender of his forces in Italy was a massacre, so he promised von Bonin that he would take all “appropriate measures.”

An hour later, the SS men were still enjoying their lunch when the door of the inn flew open and in walked a Wehrmacht major with a pistol in his hand and a squad of armed soldiers behind him. The astonished SS men had no time to react as the major shouted at them to hand over their weapons. Bader flew into a fury, but he was told abruptly to shut up and make sure his men were disarmed. Sullenly, he obeyed.

With the Wehrmacht now in control, at last the prisoners were safe. The German Army would act as their guardians, not their captors. But they still needed protection in case the SS attempted to recapture them.

Soon afterwards, the other prisoners arrived in the village and bedded down in the various comfortable places found for them by Ducia. Fey and several of the younger women in the group slept on mattresses on the Hotel Bachmann’s floor, their stomachs contentedly full after a delicious, piping-hot traditional Tirolean meal served by its staff.

Celebration was in the air. Over the course of the evening, groups of excited German soldiers heading for home drifted into the inn. But some, noted Fey, seemed convinced that the war was not yet over. “Churchill and the Americans are going to join us in an attack on the Russians!” they shouted. Fey felt sure that they knew this was not going to happen, but they were desperate about the fates of their wives, daughters and mothers at Russian hands. “Besides everything else,” she wrote, “this pathetic ranting brought home to me the criminality of Hitler and the Nazis against the Germans themselves.” As if to confirm this, now that their ordeal was over, Stiller finally confessed that an order had been sent from Himmler’s headquarters that on no account should the prisoners be allowed to fall into allied hands. The date for their elimination had been set for 29 April–the very next day.

Payne Best, too, made himself comfortable in the inn. Later in the evening, he slipped down to the kitchen in search of a drink. A couple of the SS guards had remained in the inn, and they were sharing a bottle of wine, so he decided to join them. One of them, Fritz, was already well in his cups and had not yet absorbed the turn of events. Being in turn lachrymose and truculent, he talked sentimentally about his wife and children and about how he would never allow himself to be taken alive.

Then, out of his pocket, he took a piece of paper. “Here is the order for your execution,” he told Payne Best: “You won’t be alive after tomorrow.” He waved it wildly in Payne Best’s face. Then, in another emotional turn, he confided, “Herr Best, you are a friend.” The plan, he revealed, was to set fire to a building that would eventually be found for the prisoners, then they would be shot as it burned. But shooting was a messy business, Fritz confessed. It was not always quick, as he knew from personal experience. So, when the time came, he would give Payne Best a sign so that the Englishman could get close to him. Then he would give him a quick “Nackenschluss”–a shot in the back of the head–and it would all be over in a second.

By this time, Fritz’s SS companion had passed out and was lying with his head on the table, while Fritz himself was getting increasingly glassy-eyed and ever more melancholy. His dear wife and children had no idea, he admitted, how many hundreds–no, thousands–of people he had shot during the war, and that was a terrible thing. But it was all the fault of the Jews and the plutocrats in England and America. Hitler was a good man and only wanted peace . . .

As he rambled on, Payne Best slipped out quietly and returned to his room. Fey slept on blissfully, gloriously comfortable on her mattress on the floor.

Their peril was by no means over, however. Other SS units were roaming around in the vicinity, the war was officially not yet over and a safe and secure place still had to be found for the prisoners. To his alarm, early the next day, Payne Best discovered that General Garibaldi and Colonel Ferrero were planning a rising by the local Italian partisans that very night to capture the village and spirit the prisoners away to safety in the mountains.

The idea had already won support from a few members of the British contingent, including Peter Churchill and the RAF escapees, but Payne Best could see only disaster in the plan, which he denounced as “absolutely mad.”² Garibaldi’s local partisans seemed little more than youths who had quickly wrapped red scarves around their necks. They would have no chance at all against the professional and well-armed Wehrmacht contingent.

So he took Garibaldi aside and stressed the dangers. Suppose that things went wrong and people like Blum or Schuschnigg were killed, he pointed out. Imagine the international outcry, and who would be blamed. What would then happen to the South Tirol, only recently handed over to Italy? Such an episode, if seen to be the fault of Garibaldi and his men, could seriously backfire and affect the future of the region as part of Italy. Besides, added Payne Best, the Wehrmacht had no interest at this stage of the war in harming the prisoners, so why try to move them?

This impassioned appeal persuaded Garibaldi to call off the plan, although not without the bitter disagreement of Colonel Ferrero, who flounced out of the room. At noon, as Fey and the others gathered in the dining room, Payne Best clambered onto a tabletop and announced that they could now all consider themselves free, but he cautioned that for the time being they should remain where they were while arrangements were completed to take them to another hotel, higher up in the mountains. With only a single narrow approach road that could be easily guarded, this would be a safe place to wait for the arrival of allied forces and the official end of the war.

It was Sunday 29 April–the day marked for their death by the SS. Already, Fey was feeling less among strangers and more with friends. The Wehrmacht officer guarding them turned out to be a Major Werner von Alvensleben. Fey quickly discovered that he knew her family and had once even stayed with her parents on the family’s estate. By grimmer coincidence, he was also the brother of the SS officer in Udine who had refused to help her after her arrest at Brazzà. “Let’s not talk about him!” said von Alvensleben bitterly. “As you can imagine, he’s the black sheep of the family. He has always been a Nazi and I only hope for his sake that he doesn’t make it through to the end of the war.”³

In France, meanwhile, Francesca Wilson was finding it a relief occasionally to escape from Granville and forget about the war. One of the UNRRA directors was a retired general and, like herself, from Northumberland. They drove out one day into the countryside. It was even more beautiful than she had expected. “Beech, lime, plane and poplar leaves were shining in the enamel of their fresh leaves,” she remembered, “and the air was full of the faint songs and rustles of a spring warm as midsummer.” They passed convoys of German prisoners of war out collecting firewood and guarded by black GIs. The countryside of orchards, pastures and plowed fields was placid, dotted with picturesque stone villages and graceful churches that reminded her of her native county and of towns such as Hexham, with its ancient Saxon abbey, and Corbridge on the River Tyne, with its historic Roman connections. As a child, she had spent regular family holidays up on the lonely moors and found comfort in the landscape, with the desolate Roman wall, the sound of complaining plovers on the wind, and the echoes of Meg Merilies from Walter Scott’s Old Mortality.⁴

Most of her fellow British recruits at Granville were retired army officers, many of them Indian and colonial army men, and there was much talk in the bar at night about Poona and the good old days of the Raj. Others came from local government or civil defense organizations. Given that UNRRA duties involved a great deal of social work, she was surprised to find she was one of only a handful of women.

“It is difficult,” she had written earlier that year in a pamphlet for the Quakers, “to choose the right people for relief work abroad. Upheavals attract the unbalanced as well as those with constructive powers. People who have made a mess of their own lives in their own country are eager to leave it,” she warned, “and they may get excellent testi-monials from friends who think they will make good somewhere else–and prefer to see them there.” Drug addicts, alcoholics, criminals fleeing from the law, all “worm their way into relief agencies, along with a miscellany of adventurers desperate to escape the confines imposed on them by the war.” A spirit of adventure was all very well, she added, as well as the obvious need for specialist qualifications, but what was required above all, she stressed, was charity, “in its old-fashioned and Biblical meaning.”⁵

But at Granville, for the most part, the women she met had been well chosen. Mostly between the ages of thirty and forty-five, they brought valuable experience as billeting officers for evacuees, welfare workers in factories, child guidance experts, and organizers of rest homes and shelters during the Blitz. There were also a large number of Frenchwomen. Some had worked with refugees during the great debacle of the French collapse in 1940; others had helped the resistance; and yet others had valuable experience behind the lines of the First French Army in Alsace. In addition, there was a handful of Americans. Few knew any foreign language, which was a handicap, but Francesca had to admit that they had far more professional experience in social work than most of the others and proved first-rate administrators.

However, as April drew to an end and the hour for action got closer, anxiety grew among all the UNRRA volunteers. Francesca wondered if the others in her team would prove congenial. And as there were more than a dozen nationalities being trained at the camp, she had doubts that she would even be able to talk to her teammates.

By now, in preparation for an imminent departure, they had been moved five miles south to the small seaside town of Jullouville. Instead of the comforts of the Hotel Normandie, Francesca found herself immured in a bleak and squalid old school building. There was no privacy, they all slept together in huge drafty spaces that resembled dismal train station waiting rooms, and the toilets without seats distressed the Americans. Team lists began appearing on the noticeboards and were eagerly scanned. Afterwards, Francesca heard murmuring and rumbles and sometimes muffled sobs in the corner of the room. Occasionally, faced with rebellion, the center’s staff would reluctantly shuffle the teams. All in all, Francesca was glad to put April behind her.⁶

On Sunday 29 April, four days after Fey von Hassell had left the horrors of its concentration camp behind her, advanced elements of General Patch’s US Seventh Army moved into Dachau. In Milan, Mussolini’s battered and mutilated body was hanging next to that of his mistress in the Piazzale Loreto. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler was preparing to dictate his last will and testament.

It was a gray, sunless and freezing morning as the American infantry cautiously advanced through the town of Dachau, keeping a lookout for snipers. But its streets were deserted and there was no resistance. Advanced patrols pushed on towards the camp itself. One of them approached it from the south, bypassing the main gate.

Dachau was the largest concentration camp to be liberated by American forces. By now, the horrors of Buchenwald were known to virtually everyone, but what the GIs next discovered was even worse than any of them had expected. On a spur off the main rail line to Munich they stumbled on thirty-nine stationary boxcars. Usually they were used for transporting coal. As they neared, they were overwhelmed by the stench of death. All the cars were piled high with rotting human corpses. In total, they contained the bodies of some 2,300 men, women and children. All were either totally naked or clad in their striped blue-and-white concentration camp clothes smeared with blood and excrement. Most had starved to death while being transported from Buchenwald nearly three weeks before. The train had reached the siding only two days prior to the arrival of the Americans, and the few prisoners who had survived the journey had been shot or clubbed to death by the SS.

The GIs were stunned into silence and disbelief by what they saw. “We had seen men in battle blown apart, burnt to death and die in many different ways,” recalled one of them, “but we were never prepared for this. Several of the dead lay there with their eyes open. It seemed they were looking at us saying, ‘what took you so long?’ ” Some of the infantrymen wept. Others began screaming and shouting with rage. “It’s haunted me for thirty six years,” another GI recalled long afterwards. “I mean, who are they? What’s their name? What nationality are they? What is their religious faith? Why are they there?”⁷ Cries of “Let’s kill every one of those bastards” and “Don’t take the SS alive” went up.

Most of the SS guards had slipped out of the camp the day before, but a few remained. Four emerged from a hiding-place, their hands raised, but an American lieutenant simply herded them into one of the boxcars and emptied his pistol into them.

Meanwhile, other American units approached the main gate of the camp. As they got close, though, machine-gun fire broke out from the watchtowers. Excited prisoners milling about in the large square began to charge the towers and for a few moments the guards turned their fire on them as well. In the end, the US infantry rushed the towers and most of the guards were killed. The official history says that American soldiers tried to protect the guards from the prisoners, but at least one eyewitness account claims that in their fury they shot them.

Close to the camp’s infirmary, another SS group was rounded up. The Americans stood them against a wall while a machine-gun was set up to keep them in order. Thinking they were about to be shot, the SS men panicked and started to run. Someone shouted, “Fire!” and the machine-gun burst into life. In the hail of fire, seventeen of the SS men were killed.

The camp still housed some thirty-one thousand prisoners existing on a meagre six hundred calories a day. In compliance with Himmler’s orders, the Germans had begun to evacuate the camp several days before the Americans arrived. Just two days earlier, a group of over six thousand prisoners had been marched out, supposedly to help build the Alpine Redoubt. But only about fifteen miles from Munich, in a secluded area, their guards opened fire and massacred them. Only sixty survived.

Now, the remnants in the camp were close to death from starvation and typhus. There was no electricity or water, and sanitation was non-existent. Eventually, though, the firing died down. In front of the main gate, with its arched motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free), the commandant of the camp officially surrendered to the Americans. After this, the prisoners were told they were free. “First American comes through the entrance,” scribbled one of the prisoners in his notebook. “Dachau free!!! Indescribable happiness. Insane howling.”

Many desperate inmates tried to rush the barbed wire, but an American officer told them that they would have to stay in place until food, water and medicine arrived. “Then I saw bodies flying through the air with the prisoners tearing at them with their hands,” he reported. “[They] were killing the informers among them. They actually tore them to pieces with their bare hands.”

Just beyond the prisoner enclosure stood the crematoria and torture chambers. In one of these buildings lay the rotting corpses of another twelve hundred prisoners, and beyond the crematoria the Americans found another two thousand bodies. They had been thrown into a ditch by the SS men, who had not had time to burn them before fleeing. Only after a war crimes investigation team visited the camp a few days later were all the bodies that had been found in the camp removed for burial.

One of the first US war correspondents to enter Dachau was the twenty-four-year-old New York Herald Tribune reporter Marguerite Higgins. “Are you American?” shouted out one of the prisoners, and she nodded. Pandemonium broke out. “Tattered, emaciated men weeping, yelling, and shouting ‘Long Live America’ swept toward the gate in a mob,” she wrote.

She then inspected a crematorium. It contained hooks on which the SS had hung their prisoners to flog them, as well as a grotesque mural painted by the guards themselves depicting a headless man in uniform with the SS insignia on his collar sitting astride a bulbous pig into which he was digging his spurs. She was also shown the exact spot where prisoners had knelt to be shot in the back of the neck. There, just ten days before, General Charles Delestraint, the head of General de Gaulle’s Secret Army in France, had been executed. He had been captured by the Gestapo in the summer of 1943 and kept in quarters close to those housing Léon Blum and his wife. He was led to his death believing at first that he was simply being transferred to another camp.⁸

The American troops who liberated Dachau had been temporarily diverted from their primary mission of occupying Munich–what Eisenhower described as “the cradle of the Nazi beast”–which lay fifteen miles to the south. “I am more attached to this city than to any other spot of earth in this world,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. Since the party’s birth there in the revolutionary aftermath of the First World War, the city had assumed paramount ideological and emotional importance for the Nazi movement. After coming to power, Hitler had bestowed two honorific titles upon it–“Haupstadt der Deutschen Kunst” (Capital of German Art) and “Haupstadt der Bewegung” (Capital of the Movement)–a move that reflected Hitler’s love for the city where he had spent so much of his youth, and which helped transform it into the central pilgrimage site of the Third Reich’s political religion. The honors were physically embodied in several new monumental buildings, such as the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) and the Nazi Party offices, which were constructed as vast neoclassical palaces on the Konigsplatz. In 1937 the city was also declared one of the Third Reich’s five “Führerstadte” (Führer Cities). If not interrupted by war, the project would have resulted in a massive program of urban renewal, including the building of Hitler’s own mausoleum.⁹

So far, the American advance through Bavaria towards the city had met with little resistance because the German forces were undermanned and ill-equipped. In many of the picturesque villages the inhabitants flew white flags and the American tanks simply roared through and on to the next small dot on the map. But where the Germans did make a stand, tanks, artillery and planes simply and instantly reduced buildings to rubble. The message quickly got through. Soon, virtually all of the villages were flying the white flag.¹⁰

The pattern of no resistance also appeared in the towns. At Memmingen, the Americans sent ahead a contingent of burgermeisters from towns that had already been captured to warn that only white flags would save the city from instant destruction. No one fought back. At Landsberg, where Hitler had written Mein Kampf after being imprisoned following the abortive 1923 Munich putsch, the Hungarian garrison simply lined up in parade-ground formation to surrender–and there was no struggle at all. At Augsburg, the German commander was given five minutes to surrender, and he dutifully marched his forces in good order out of a city already bedecked with hundreds of white flags. Here too, for the first time, evidence began to emerge of some internal resistance to the Nazis. A group calling itself the “Freedom Party of Augsburg” had managed to reach an American regiment by telephone to announce that the city wanted to surrender, and some other civilians had even led a US column to the bunker housing the German commander and top city officials.

Bavaria, the cradle of Nazism, appeared to be crumbling without protest. But Munich proved a tougher nut to crack, although even here some internal resistance to the Nazis manifested itself.

On Saturday 28 April, two days before the first US troops reached the city, an attempted coup took place spearheaded by a small group calling itself “Freedom Action Bavaria.” Led by a Wehrmacht captain from a company of army interpreters, it also included a handful of lawyers, professors, civil servants and physicians. Joined by other groups, some genuinely anti-Nazi, others simply war weary, and yet others purely opportunistic, the uprising began at dawn.

At first, it met with success, capturing two radio stations, and the group’s leader was able to broadcast an appeal for citizens to join them. Suddenly, the white and blue flag of Bavaria appeared all over the city and people began to pour into the streets amid rumors that Hitler was dead and the war was over. Within hours, however, the uprising collapsed. The rebels failed to capture the Gauleiter of Munich, Paul Giesler, and could not even persuade General Ritter von Epp, the chief Reich executive in Bavaria, to support them. Nor did they succeed in seizing the city’s military or Nazi Party headquarters. Meanwhile, from an SS barracks in the north of the city, loyal Nazis offered fierce resistance. By two o’clock in the afternoon Giesler had reasserted control over the city, and the leaders of the coup fled in a car bearing SS number plates.¹¹

Yet Munich was in no position to defend itself against four American divisions. The Wehrmacht had left the city to its fate, and it was now only hard-line Nazi zealots who were ready to resist. “For most of the day,” writes the official historian of the Americans’ last offensive,

it was a question of pouring in heavy artillery fire, attacking behind smoke across city streets, dodging deadly fire from anti-aircraft guns or persistent machine guns–all the usual accoutrements the men had come to expect in clearing rubble-strewn German cities. Even as a big white streamer flew from the highest building in Munich, troops from the 45th Division were fighting from room to room in the SS caserne to dislodge die-hard defenders.¹²

In the chaos of these last few hours, a mob stormed Hitler’s Führer Museum, where more than seven hundred mostly looted paintings from all over Europe were stored, including the entire Schloss Collection, taken from a private collector in France.¹³

The city that American forces entered early on Monday 30 April was the hollowed-out ruin glimpsed briefly by Fey von Hassell as she was driven through its streets in the back of the truck evacuating her from Dachau. Like most German cities, it had been hit hard by allied air raids. In the previous two years alone it had been bombed at least sixty-six times. Between a third and a half of all its buildings were heavily damaged or destroyed. In the city center, the Altstadt, the figure rose to 60 percent. Its oldest church, the Peterskirche, built in 1169, had suffered severe damage to its tower, roof and nave, as had the Frauenkirche (Cathedral of Our Lady), with its famous twin onion domes. The historic seat of the Wittelsbach dynasty that had ruled Bavaria until 1918, the Residenz, had lost most of its roofing, and on the city’s main square, the Marienplatz, the old City Hall lay completely wrecked. The Wittelsbacher Palais, built by King Ludwig I for his son, the Crown Prince Maximilian, and used during the war both as Gestapo headquarters and as a satellite camp for Dachau, had been completely gutted by fire; only its outer walls remained standing. The central railway station was little more than a tangle of twisted metal.

“I had imagined it would be terrible, but it was even worse,” recorded the writer Klaus Mann, eldest son of Thomas, when he returned to the city a few days later for the first time since going into exile in 1933, “Munich no longer exists. The entire city center from the main train station to the Odeonsplatz is composed only of ruins . . . all the streets that I knew so intimately had become . . . horribly disfigured.” The futile last-ditch resistance by SS troops had made things even worse, as the only way to flush them out was by concentrated heavy shelling.¹⁴

One of the first US soldiers to enter the city was a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant who spent much of the morning with his company advancing at a snail’s pace through deserted streets and edging cautiously round buildings not knowing what to expect. “Even if we didn’t see anybody at all,” he noted, “we never knew what was hiding around the next corner. We didn’t have any dogs or tanks or anything like that. Just jeeps. My soldiers had rifles. I had a pistol. That’s all.”

It was two o’clock in the afternoon by the time he reached the Marienplatz.

There was a bunch of people. Really quite a few. Most of them were made up of very old people who were too old for the Volkssturm. We were greeted as the great liberators of the city, which, to be honest, really made me angry at the time. This was, after all, the capital of the movement. It was where the Nazi party got its start and where its main propaganda organ the Volkischer Beobachter was headquartered. And they were now happy to be “liberated”?

On the opposite side of the square stood a police station, and the American lieutenant marched in to confiscate their weapons. Prepared for the worst, to his surprise he was greeted with military salutes and found that the weapons had already been boxed up and were ready to be taken away. With immaculate efficiency, each of the more than a hundred surrendered pistols carried two tags, one bearing its number, the other the name of the officer to whom it had been issued. The official handing over requested, with scrupulous bureaucratic formality, a receipt.

It was an ironic moment. For with just such bureaucratic nicety, the lieutenant, born in Hamburg and brought up in Berlin as a Protestant, had been identified as a Jew, expelled from the Boy Scouts when it was transformed into the Hitler Youth, and forced to flee his native Germany for America after the Nazi seizure of power. Now, at virtually the same moment, Hitler, still obsessed by the Jews, was about to pull the trigger on his Walther.¹⁵

The day Munich fell, the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph published a report by its special correspondent Noel Panter from the Swiss town of St. Margarethen, across the border from Bavaria. Headlined “Nazi Chiefs’ Wild Flight to Southern Germany,” it told of confusion and panic as fleeing Gauleiters ran out of petrol and desperately sought hiding-places in small Bavarian villages. One SS official sought sanctuary with a Catholic priest but made the mistake of choosing one who had been interned in Dachau for several months. “I can only hear your confession,” said the priest, whereupon the SS man knocked him unconscious with the butt of his revolver before fleeing on a bicycle. Meanwhile, an angry crowd slashed all the tires on his car. Bejeweled and well-dressed wives of Nazi officials tried desperately to barter their wealth for peasant clothing to disguise themselves. The entire border area, reported Panter, was packed with German officers who now regarded the war as finished.¹⁶

South across the Alps, the weather in Villabassa was cold and unpleasant. Fey von Hassell spent most of the day keeping warm in the cozy comfort of the Hotel Bachmann, enjoying her first day of freedom. Except that it was a strange, hybrid kind of freedom. Thankfully, Bader and his dangerous contingent of SS men had finally disappeared. But now she felt trapped by circumstance. She had no money or food, no news from home, and only a very shaky idea of what was happening in the wider world. Separated from her children, she found her predicament agonizingly hard. She was desperate to start looking for them, but how? At this stage of the war, with Germany in total collapse, postal and telephone communications across Europe were non-existent and she had no independent transport of her own. In any case, most land routes were impassable, either smashed or roadblocked. And virtually no trains were running anywhere.

To Captain Payne Best, trying to reassure her and the other 136 men, women and children whose ages ranged from four to seventy-three, they resembled passengers in an old sailing ship crossing the ocean. “We had mutinied and removed the officers and crew,” he wrote, “but did not yet know how our further course was to be set nor who would navigate.”¹⁷

Shortly after five o’clock in the afternoon some buses arrived. Once again they all clambered in. Then they set off up into the mountains. It was a short, steep drive that eventually deposited them in front of a large resort hotel on the edge of a lake. They were five thousand feet above sea level and it was snowing lightly. The hotel, a huge, rambling, old chalet-style building, was the Prager Wildsee–or, to give it its Italian name, the Lago di Braies. It had been closed for the winter, and was consequently freezing cold. On closer inspection it was discovered that the heating plant was frozen solid and consisted of a mess of burst pipes. Anyway, there was no fuel. Log fires were quickly lit in the dining room and kitchen, but they made little difference–the place still felt like a refrigerator.

Nevertheless, to Fey, it appeared like bliss. An advance group had arrived earlier to assign everyone a room, trying as best they could to keep national groupings close together. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime she had a proper bed and a room all to herself. It overlooked the lake, which was still and silent, with not a ripple troubling its pure, glacier-fed, emerald-green waters. All around stood magnificent pine trees. Beyond rose jagged peaks that seemed to enclose her in a safe and comforting embrace. She could hardly tear herself away from the window. As she gazed, entranced at the scene, she realized that her beloved Brazzà was little more than sixty miles away. Briefly, she was tempted to set out for home on her own, but she found she lacked the courage. She had been captive too long. For the moment at least, she had lost the nerve to act on her own.