CHAPTER TWO

“SORROW AND DARKNESS”

Hitler’s war was fought not just on the battlefield. It was a struggle he waged against enemies wherever he found them. As a totalitarian ideology, Nazism had everyone in its sights, and its opponents were nowhere more obvious and threatening than at home. If Germany was to be renewed, believed Hitler, then he must first eliminate the internal forces he blamed for the catastrophe of the nation’s defeat in 1918. This primarily meant the Jews, the Bolsheviks, socialists, liberals, democrats–the list was easily expandable. Since 1933, he had been steadily “cleansing” the Third Reich of these groups’ influence with his racial laws and relentless political persecution. Those designated as hostile, alien or degenerate were thrown into prisons or concentration camps, dozens of which had sprung up across Germany since his seizure of power. Since the outbreak of war and Germany’s occupation of most of Europe, their population had expanded into hundreds of thousands. Millions of Jews had been shot in mass killings or murdered in extermination camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor.

The concentration camps were run by the SS. Its head, Heinrich Himmler, claimed they existed to reeducate their prisoners, who were invariably depicted as criminal, along the paths of obedience, self-sacrifice and “love of the Fatherland.” In reality, they were little more than licensed centers of brutality and terror, designed to isolate and break the spirits of their inmates.¹ By April 1945, they had become places of unspeakable atrocity as food ran scarce, disease became rampant, and arbitrary violence and killings took hold. Their existence was no secret; indeed, the SS had been glad to use their reputation as a weapon to terrorize the population into submission. But outside their barbed-wire perimeters, no one had any inkling of the full scale of the horrors that were about to be exposed.

The ancient, small town of Dachau lies about twelve miles northwest of Munich. For centuries it was favored by Bavarian princes as a summer residence, and in the eighteenth century they remodeled its medieval castle into a grand royal palace. By the end of the following century, the town had also become a flourishing artists’ colony, a welcome refuge from the noisy streets of Munich.

But this serenity was soon to be broken by the First World War, when the voracious demands of the Kaiser’s armies led to the construction of a large munitions plant on the outskirts of the town. After the war ended with the drastic disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, the factory was closed down. Its acreage became a forlorn and abandoned site crying out for some new development. Salvation arrived just two months after Hitler came to power. On 21 March 1933, Heinrich Himmler announced that it had been chosen as the location of a detention camp for “the enemies of National Socialism.”

Dachau was the first of what, over the next twelve years, was to become a vast empire of Nazi prison camps. Its early inmates were members of the German Social Democratic and Communist parties, but soon they were joined by thousands of others deemed enemies of the Reich, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, clergymen and homosexuals. After Kristallnacht in 1938, some ten thousand Jews were also shipped there, although most of them were released after a few weeks. Once the war began, the numbers were swelled by such groups as resistance fighters from across occupied Europe, anti-Nazi German émigrés captured in Paris, Amsterdam or Prague, gypsies, Polish priests and dissident Wehrmacht officers.

By April 1945, over two hundred thousand prisoners had passed through its gates, and more than thirty thousand had died. In addition, and unrecorded in its otherwise meticulously kept records, tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war had been shot en masse. Dachau also played host to medical experiments on live prisoners, such as measuring the effects of rapid decompression and freezing temperatures on the human body.

As Hitler’s empire collapsed, the camp ultimately provided a dumping ground for prisoners from other concentration camps. The already appalling conditions deteriorated sharply. By the time of Hitler’s birthday, the daily ration for inmates was down to six hundred calories–a starvation diet–and typhus had taken hold; two hundred prisoners were dying from the disease every day. Just the week before, Himmler had told the camp’s commander that there was to be no surrender to allied forces. The prisoners were to be evacuated, he ordered, and on no account were any of them to fall into the hands of the enemy.

The camp now held seventy thousand inmates, none of whom knew if they would survive these last few days of the war. Among them was a blue-eyed, twenty-six-year-old German named Fey von Hassell. A few short years before, she could never have imagined she would end up behind the camp’s barbed-wire perimeter. After all, she was a child of privilege. Her father, Ulrich von Hassell, was one of Germany’s most urbane and distinguished diplomats, with a career stretching back to the days of the Kaiser. He had been posted to Rome as German Ambassador only weeks before the Nazi seizure of power and stayed there until 1938, when he was dismissed by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, for criticizing Nazi policy towards Britain.

In Rome, Fey had enjoyed all the pleasures of an ambassador’s daughter, with an endless round of society balls and glittering parties. In the Villa Wolkonsky, the German Embassy, she had had a beautiful bedroom all to herself. “It has a lovely balcony overlooking the garden,” she wrote in her diary. “I feel like a princess!”²

But her fate was inextricably tied to her father’s. Like many other conservatives and nationalists committed to rebuilding a powerful Germany by reversing the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, he had deluded himself that Hitler could be controlled. So, when his own party, the right-wing DNVP, was dissolved in 1933, he had joined the Nazis. Unlike some other senior German diplomats, he had also stayed at his post.

Yet, long before his dismissal, he had become disgusted with the barbarities of the regime and seriously alarmed by the march to war. On leaving Rome, he linked up with conservative opposition groups, and later in his secret diary railed at the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews, the euthanasia program against the handicapped and insane, the savagery of the war in the East, and the general barbarity that now ruled his country. This did not prevent the émigré novelist Thomas Mann from judging him harshly: von Hassell, declared Mann, was “one of the people who should never have served the Nazis and yet who did so out of ambition, cynicism, or ignorance. Too late did they regain their sight.”³

Perhaps aware of this responsibility, von Hassell also drew close to the conspiracy that culminated in the July 1944 plot by army officers to assassinate Hitler with a bomb planted beneath the conference table at his military headquarters at Rastenberg in East Prussia. The device exploded but failed to kill its target. Nazi retribution was savage and widespread. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who planted the bomb, was executed along with dozens of other plotters. Thousands more across Germany suspected of anti-Hitler sympathies were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to camps. Organized opposition to the regime–and with it any hope of ridding Germany of Hitler through internal revolt–was crushed.⁴

News of the bomb plot had filtered through to Fey in Friuli, the region of northeast Italy bordering Yugoslavia. By this time she was married to a young Italian aristocrat, Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli, and was living on his family’s estate at Brazzà, close to the snow-covered peaks of the Dolomite Mountains, not far from Udine. His family had an ancient and distinguished lineage: Brazzaville, capital of the Congo, took its name from his grandfather’s brother, the explorer Count Detalmo Savorgnan di Brazzà; while his grandmother was the American heiress Cora Slocomb. The estate had been in the family’s hands for almost a thousand years.⁵

A few days before the wedding, Detalmo had written Fey a special letter:

I begin my life as the happiest man on earth . . . As for you, my darling love, I wish you good luck with all my heart! You are leaving your glorious family and your people to follow me! You are coming away with me to a house that is dull [and] empty . . . You are marrying a young man who still has everything to do! Who can present you with absolutely nothing: no cozy home, not much money, no advanced career, really nothing . . . You face the unknown! I understand all this very well, Fey, and I admire you so.⁶

When he wrote these words, he could have had no idea how immense the unknown that she faced was to become.

Brazzà boasted forty-eight rooms and had a little chapel in the grounds. The family always spent the summers there, and here its members were born, married and buried. Fey thought of it now as her home, too. It was, as Detalmo said, “like a huge old hen protecting us with its broad wings.” She loved it, especially amid the turmoil of war. “It is standing on a hill far from all the troubles and worries of the world,” she wrote to her mother when she first caught a glimpse of the villa surrounded by shaded marble seats, gravel paths and cypress and pine trees. All around lay the vast Friuli Plain, studded with brilliant white houses and poplars that stretched far into the distance. “On one side you look down over a great plain towards Venice,” she enthused. “On the other you can see the mountains, still topped with snow.”

But a few years later, in the aftermath of the bomb plot, the troubles of the world finally sought her out. Evidence of an active opposition exhilarated her, and at first she pushed aside worries about her father. “The names of the men who had been executed, published in the papers, were all too familiar to me,” she wrote. “Even though they were mainly army officers at that point, many were friends of my father. Maybe, I thought, the ‘civilian’ opposition groups had not been discovered.”⁷

Letters from her mother continued to arrive from Germany, but they made no reference to the plot–naturally enough, for everyone knew that mail were heavily scrutinized by the Gestapo. Fey was not overly worried, although several references to “one great preoccupation” concerned her. Nevertheless, when she heard no bad news, she assumed that if her father had been involved, he had not been found out.

However, an undercurrent of worry persisted, especially as she had no one to reassure her. She had hardly seen Detalmo for months. After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, Italy had signed an armistice with the allies. That same day, Detalmo had quit the Italian Army to go underground and work with the resistance in Rome, his native city. As the Germans flooded the north of Italy with troops, his last gesture of defiance had been to throw open the gates of the prisoner-of-war camp he was guarding and allow thousands of allied soldiers to escape into the surrounding countryside.

Now Fey heard from him only through occasional letters. As they had agreed in advance for security’s sake, he signed them either “Isabella” or “Giuseppe.” Sometimes, though, he was able to arrange for a letter to be delivered by hand to her personally at Brazzà by a resistance fighter. On those occasions he wrote frankly. In December 1943 he had written in English, their common language, to tell her what he was doing for the resistance, which was mostly working with contacts abroad and writing propaganda to be circulated in America about the Italy he hoped to see emerge from the war.

To Detalmo, as to others in the resistance, victory would see a rebirth comparable to the great nineteenth-century Risorgimento inspired by Garibaldi. “My darling,” he’d concluded,

I love you, and you stand out in my thoughts as something extremely great and important in life. I would like to be with you and try to console you a little. This is a great revolution, like the other great ones in history. We must make the new world. Let us only think of this difficult task and especially that we are going to work together with the children under the blessing of our great love. Put all other mournful thoughts aside.8

But building new worlds was easier said than done. To make matters worse, Brazzà itself had been requisitioned by the Germans. First, a regiment of the SS took it over, and when they left, officers of the German Army’s Corps of Engineers arrived. Only after fierce bargaining had Fey got them to agree that she and the boys could use three of the rooms on the first floor. Life became increasingly difficult and stressful. To get through the weeks and months of unaccustomed isolation, she had to draw on all her inner strength.

She was a German living in occupied Italy, where anti-German feeling was rising in leaps and bounds. Daily, she had to negotiate with the officers about tiresome but essential details regarding domestic affairs and the running of the estate. Beyond its gates, Italian partisans were growing in number and daring. They roamed around the countryside, descended on villages and houses to demand or steal food, sniped at German soldiers, and provoked sometimes brutal retaliation against the peasants.

Fey did not have much time for them, believing that a lot of what they did was stupid or counterproductive. Taking pot-shots at German soldiers was easy compared to the far more dangerous and useful work of blowing up bridges and roads, she thought; and it provoked more reprisals.

Behind her reaction lay the knowledge that her brother Hans Dieter was serving with the Wehrmacht in France. He had been seriously wounded fighting against the Russians and was now adjutant to one of the leading generals in occupied Paris, where the French resistance had also begun killing German soldiers. He had visited Brazzà a few months before and had been able to jolly along the officers who were occupying the house, which made things easier for a time. Then, after eight short and wonderful days, he had returned to Paris.

After he left, Fey felt more alone than ever. On several occasions she dealt with pleas from the local populace to intercede to prevent someone being shot or deported. To help, she tried her best to keep on decent terms with the local SS. From time to time she even invited the Udine representative of its security service, a Major Alvensleben, whose family was known to her parents, to tea at Brazzà, and once she successfully talked him into rescinding a deportation order against one of the locals. As a result of these tactics, she was accused of being too cozy with the hated occupiers.

Negotiating her way through the political minefield that had become Brazzà was exhausting. In a rare letter she managed to have delivered by hand to her mother, she wrote:

The partisans have put me on their blacklist, because they say I’m too friendly with the Germans. On the other hand the local people appreciate me because they know that I help when I can. However, that is only useful to me when dealing with Italian partisans. If the Slavic ones [i.e., Tito’s communist partisans from Yugoslavia] should arrive, they will not ask how I behaved or what I did . . . I’m rather at a loss.9

The only real comfort she found in this crash course on female independence was with her sons, Corrado, aged three and a half, and Roberto, who was eighteen months younger. She and Detalmo had planned to wait until the war was over to have children, yet Corrado’s unexpected arrival in November 1940 had given her quiet satisfaction. His brother’s arrival had been less welcome. “It must be the supreme spell of Nature,” Detalmo resignedly told his mother-in-law, “which evidently wants to fight death with life.” But Fey had quickly adjusted and adored them both: “They are all my joy in uncertain times,” she wrote to Detalmo in one of her secret letters. However, even this small oasis of family happiness was to be snatched away from her.

On Saturday, 9 September 1944 Fey was lying in bed. It was 7 a.m. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Outside stood Lieutenant Hans Kretschmann, the twenty-three-year-old aide-de-camp to Colonel Dannenberg, the officer in charge of the contingent billeted in the house. Fey deeply distrusted him. “Educated by the Nazis and soaked in their propaganda,” she recorded, he “lacked flexibility of thought. I do not believe he had a single independent idea in his head. His opinions had been learned in school, in the Hitler Youth, and at military college.” His only apparent weakness was a tendency towards melancholia, which he would drown out by drinking. Sometimes, other officers informed her, he’d leap on the table after dining and tap dance “like a man possessed to the wild applause of his audience.”¹⁰

Yet it was a cold and indifferent Kretschmann who now stood in front of her. His face was ashen, and she could read fear in his eyes.

“For heaven’s sake what’s happened?” she asked irritably as he stood there saying nothing.

“Luckily you are still at home.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” she asked.

“You didn’t listen to the radio last night or early this morning?”

“No,” she answered. “How could I? I have guests; they’re still asleep next door. What has happened?”

Without any more preliminaries Kretschmann threw his response in her face. “Your father has been arrested and executed. He has been hanged.”¹¹

All the self-control Fey had been brought up with was mustered at that instant. Only her body betrayed her as she began to shake. Like most people confronted with shocking news, her mind seemed to close down and focus on the immediate and practical. She asked her guests to depart at once and, as they left, hid some of her diaries in their pockets. If the SS needed any proof of her own anti-Nazi feelings, they would find it in her diaries.

At ten o’clock, a Gestapo official, along with Colonel Dannenberg, arrived to take her to Udine. It was the colonel who had informed the secret police that von Hassell’s daughter was living at Brazzà. He looked duly embarrassed and guilty, mouthing apologetic words of condolence. She asked her maids to take the children to their rooms so they would not see her being taken away. As she was led to the waiting car, members of the estate’s staff silently watched, frightened and weeping.

They drove to the Gestapo headquarters in Udine in silence, too. There, after some discussion, it was decided to put her in the city prison. The women’s section was run by nuns belonging to the order of Ancella della Carita (the Handmaidens of Charity). For years they had been used to handling nothing but common criminals and delinquents, and Fey found their commands “rude and harsh.” The Gestapo ordered them to find her a cell to herself, but the prison, built for fifty, now held more than three times that number, and the “politicals” were mixed up haphazardly with the criminals. Some were packed thirty to a room and had to sleep without blankets on wooden boards.

Fey was lucky, though. She was put in a cell with just two other women. Between them they had two iron camp beds and two mattresses, as well as blankets. She was too tired and shocked even to talk to her cellmates. She just slumped down exhausted on one of the beds.

During the lonely months at Brazzà she had begun to pride herself on her power of patient suffering, but quickly she found it being severely tested. There was only one toilet in the whole prison. Twice a day the cells were opened and Fey stood in a long queue awaiting her turn on the filthy, primitive bowl. The cells crawled with insects and buzzed with mosquitoes. All she got to eat each day was a single bowl of disgusting soup.

Meanwhile, the nuns prayed constantly. They prayed in the morning, they prayed before the meal, they prayed after the meal, and they prayed last thing at night. They even prayed during the toilet break, and during the few precious minutes every day when the inmates were let out for exercise in the courtyard. Every morning they all celebrated mass in the tiny chapel. “At least it was a change from being locked up,” wrote Fey, who had been brought up as a Protestant. She even recorded that she found the mass quite beautiful.

But she found agonizing the periodic roll-call when the guards would read out the names of the women to be deported to Germany. The prison would fall totally silent, and everyone would wait with dread for their name to be read out. The prisoners unlucky enough to be called would fall to the ground in convulsions and have to be dragged away. It was a frequent reminder to Fey of her father’s death, which haunted her waking hours.

Aside from the mass, her only relief came in the form of almost daily visits from one or other of the German officers at Brazzà. Even Kretschmann and Dannenberg appeared, obviously racked with guilt and promising to speak with the SS and get her freed. A long week passed with no news, but after ten days, they succeeded. She could return home until further orders were received.

“I felt like a queen sitting in Kretschmann’s car,” Fey recalled, “speeding through the countryside under a splendid blue sky. The fresh air, the sun, and the green fields seemed to promise a liberty far greater than I had any hope of obtaining.” The children were ecstatic to see her again. Corrado kept hugging her and crawling into her arms, and when she began to cry he shouted, “Mama is crying. Corradino wants to help mama!” Roberto simply rushed crazily from room to room in his excitement. That evening, she said prayers with them before putting them to bed. “Mama must never go away again,” Corradino said, “without telling Corrado where she’s going and when she is coming back; it’s a terrible thing.” Elated by the day’s events, Fey promised it would never happen again.¹²

But a mere five days later she was woken up again by a knock on the door. This time an officer handed her a letter from Dannenberg. He had unexpectedly been called away to Verona, he explained, but he had been informed that the next day she and the children were to be taken, for the moment, to Innsbruck. He would personally drive them to the station at Udine, where a man in civilian clothes would collect them. “So, Mrs. Pirzio-Biroli,” he concluded, “chin up, even if everything is very difficult for you.”

Her reaction was despair mixed with anger. Despite the fact she was obviously a marginal figure, had two small children, and was not even living in Germany, she was being sucked into the Nazi terror machine. She had already rejected offers from the resistance to help her escape, mostly because of fears about the reprisals that might fall on her mother, and she now felt angry at herself for turning them down. But she still refused as impractical a last-minute plan by the resistance to attack the train to Innsbruck.

With only twenty-four hours to get ready, family servants stayed up all night busily knitting sweaters for the boys while a local cobbler hurriedly made them shoes. One of the German officers gave her three hundred marks, which he advised her to sew into the lining of her coat. Her baggage consisted mostly of things to eat, including an entire ham and several large salamis.

The news of her transportation quickly spread, and friends and neighbors came with cigarettes, biscuits, tins of meat, tea and condensed milk. That evening more friends came over and they drank some cognac. Before they left she asked them to make sure that Detalmo was told what had happened. She also wrote a hurried note to Lotti, her old governess, who had virtually become one of the family and was living in Rome. After telling her in a few short lines what was happening, she signed it: “Your desperate and worried Fey.”¹³

At four o’clock in the morning, while it was still dark, Dannenberg’s “big black car,” as one of the boys would forever remember it, picked them up and drove them to the station. Here Dannenberg helped carry Fey’s suitcase before handing them over to the Gestapo man in civilian clothes. One or two friends came to the station to lend moral support, and Fey burst out weeping. She felt that she was on the verge of losing everything.¹⁴

After an agonizing wait, the train finally arrived, the Gestapo men led them to a private compartment, and the children fell instantly asleep. The train was slow, they missed a connection, and only the next afternoon did they arrive at Innsbruck. Its Gestapo office was housed in a comfortable villa, but Fey’s arrival was far from friendly. “You are the daughter of that criminal whose head we cut off: that dog, that pig! Do you expect to be greeted with kid gloves?” were the first words that greeted her. It was a foretaste of what was to come.

The next day, as Fey was putting the boys down for their afternoon nap, two SS nurses arrived and abruptly took them away. It would be for only a few days, they assured her, and the boys would be kept comfortable and safe in a children’s home; meanwhile, the Gestapo wanted to ask her some questions. As calmly as she could, she told the boys: “Mama will follow you very soon, but first you will go for a nice walk.” Roberto seemed happy at the idea, but Corrado, sensing that all was not right, began to scream and tried desperately to escape the grip of the nurse. Fey could hear his wailing as it faded away in the distance and she was left alone in the room. She had no idea where they were being taken. Still less did she know what her own fate was to be.

Three weeks later, she found out. An SS officer arrived at the villa and said simply, “We’re going on a little trip.” “Where to?” she asked. “Silesia,” he replied, and her heart sank–this was hundreds of miles away in eastern Germany. “And my children?” she inquired. His response chilled her to the bone. “You’ve got children?” he asked. “I didn’t know that.” Nor did he care. That night, as she sat in the chilly Innsbruck railway station between two guards, she wept for her children, abandoned without friends or family in a strange country. She shed tears for herself too, for her father, and for Germany itself, run now by gangsters. It was the most wretched moment in this young twenty-six-year-old’s life.

Thereafter, in a nightmare of travels, she was shifted round Germany and the rest of Central Europe like a sack of produce. In a deserted old hotel in the forests of Bohemia, she joined a small group of other prisoners. As soon as she heard their names, she realized they had something in common: they were all relatives of the bomb-plot conspirators. Officially, the SS termed them Sippenhafte, or prisoners of kin.

Whatever their ultimate fate, it quickly dawned on Fey that their destinies were now intimately bound up together until the end of the war, or death. Their situation was bizarre–privileged yet precarious. One of the hotel staff politely carried her cases up to her bedroom, which had a pleasant view over the trees. A couple of letters were waiting for her at the reception desk. Outwardly, it seemed as though all was normal and peaceful.

Downstairs, in the paneled old lobby, she quickly got to know the others. They included several relatives of Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the conservative former Mayor of Leipzig who had been removed by the Nazis and chosen by the conspirators as the head of the post-Hitler government. But the group she was instinctively drawn to was the Stauffenbergs. They included several of Claus von Stauffenberg’s cousins, as well as members of his more immediate family. With Mika, the widow of Claus’s elder brother Berthold, who had also been executed, she felt an immediate bond. Mika, too, had had her two small children taken away by the SS. Soon, Fey was calling them all by their nicknames and spending most of her time with them. For the first time since being wrenched from her children at Innsbruck, she felt like she had a family again.

Of all the Stauffenbergs, however, she felt closest to Alex, Berthold’s twin. “Fey–what a pretty name!” he had exclaimed spontaneously when first meeting her, and she had blushed deep red. He had been arrested while serving with the army in Greece and was still wearing his officer’s uniform, but he was no professional soldier. On the contrary, he was an unworldly and melancholy character who had been Professor of Ancient History at the University of Munich. He fitted the stereotype of the vague and untidy academic to perfection, with his hair never properly combed and a gentle dry humor that instantly endeared him to Fey. Smiling, with twinkling eyes, he would sit back in his chair after a meal and refer ironically to their “SS hosts.” It always made her laugh.

A few days later she found him reading Dante’s Inferno in Italian. It was a language he did not know, but he was making sense of it with the help of his Latin and an accompanying English translation. So when Fey decided to offer Italian lessons to others in the group as a way of taking her mind off the children, Alex came along. He picked up the language far quicker than the others, and soon they began taking long walks together, speaking Italian.

It was not long before they were confiding in each other. Alex was still in shock over the execution of his two brothers. In turn, Fey poured out the anguish she felt over Corrado and Roberto, and the grief over her father. Talking with him, she also realized that during her long years in Italy she had become profoundly homesick for Germany. Unlike the Nazis and the SS, Alex personified all that she loved about her native land. Tall and with a handsome profile, he could recite by heart the poems of Goethe, who was her favorite writer. He also wrote poetry himself. The growing friendship between them helped assuage her grief and fear, and gave her some welcome consolation.

Many of the prisoners came from deeply aristocratic families, as did Fey of course, and not just on her father’s side. Her mother, Ilse, was the daughter of Admiral von Tirpitz, the mastermind behind Kaiser William II’s High Seas Fleet that had contested the naval race with Britain before the First World War. Tirpitz had been a powerful influence on her father, who had absorbed much of the admiral’s nationalist fervor.

Ironically for the granddaughter of the man who did so much to turn British opinion against Germany and all things Teutonic, Fey, like many young women of her class, had received some of her education at the blue-chip Cheltenham Ladies’ College. She had found England a friendly but strange place stuck in a world more familiar to her grandmother. “We go for long walks through the woods and fields, have picnics in all weather, play tennis, ride bicycles and take afternoon tea on green lawns,” she wrote in her diary. “Everyone is kind, although not at all intellectual. I have the feeling,” she concluded, “that people in England, living on an island, are very closed.” On the other hand, she was impressed by the spirit of democracy she saw in Parliament and everyday life. “I wish we had that, too,” she wrote wistfully. “Will Germany and Italy ever be capable of democracy?”¹⁵

To the Nazis, destroying and humiliating families like the Stauffenbergs and von Hassells was an integral part of their policy of ridding Germany of a reactionary elite that stood in the way of social revolution. “Hitler’s speeches are all . . . spiced with sharp attacks on the entire upper class,” Ulrich von Hassell had once noted in his diary. “Scum” was the word chosen by Hitler.¹⁶ And Himmler vowed to exterminate all the Stauffenbergs after the bomb plot.

Now, only their role as hostages was keeping them alive.

The Sippenhafte joined hundreds of thousands of political and other prisoners of the Reich being shuffled endlessly and apparently arbitrarily around a vast closed system of camps. “Dangerous” prisoners who could not be moved were systematically murdered, often just hours or days before allied troops arrived. The Gestapo drew no distinction between Germans or foreigners, and often the victims’ crime was no worse than having listened to allied broadcasts.

The rest were continually evacuated in a vain and desperate effort to cover up Nazi crimes–and as a savage act of nihilistic revenge. “If National Socialism is going to be destroyed,” Himmler told his doctor in March 1945, “then her enemies and the criminals in the concentration camps shall not have the satisfaction of emerging from our ruins as triumphant conquerors. They shall share in our downfall.”¹⁷ Although he quickly backtracked, it was by then far too late to prevent local SS leaders from making lethal decisions on the spot.

In any case, the evacuations almost all became death marches. Even the fittest prisoners had been weakened before they began, and there was little food, poor clothing and no shelter. A low estimate of those who died en route is a quarter of a million. “The marchers, many barefoot in deep snow, were herded about by guards who no longer received orders,” writes one historian, “and who shot the exhausted. They also machine-gunned people into the sea, or burned thousands of people in barns, while sometimes taking the most arduous routes so that their captives would die.”¹⁸

Thus, in its end, the Third Reich revealed its true contempt for humanity. Only Himmler’s desperate desire to save his own skin and strike a deal with the allies was keeping even the Sippenhafte alive. Before Dachau, they first spent two months in Stutthof, a notorious camp outside Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland). Although Fey and the others were nominally privileged and so were housed in special barracks apart from the main body of the camp, they still endured terrible conditions. Stutthof was mostly packed with Poles and Russians and was equipped with a gas chamber that housed one hundred and fifty people at a time.

Fey was not subjected to that, but she did suffer severe malnutrition and cold, and was lucky not to succumb to a deadly typhoid epidemic that swept through the camp. She began to think she might not survive to the end of the war, or see her children again. Alex entered her room each morning and afternoon, bringing wood for the fire. She had done the same for him several weeks before. Exhibiting the proverbial professorial lack of practicality, he had almost cut off his toes while chopping wood and she had visited him frequently during his convalescence. He had shown her some of his poems, which she thought “were simple, in beautiful German, and full of feeling. Even in his weakened state, Alex was becoming more and more a magnet for my wounded emotions.”¹⁹

It was at Stutthof, too, that Alex wrote his first poem to her. “Will you walk with me a little/With me in sorrow and darkness?” it began. Thereafter, through all their misery, they drew even closer together.

The only other comfort came in knowing that Hitler was losing the war. By January 1945, Fey could hear the noise of approaching Russian artillery to the east. But this proved a mixed blessing. The Sippenhafte were too valuable to fall into Russian hands, and soon they were heading west. Shipped out of Danzig in below-freezing weather in a cattle truck, several days later they arrived at Buchenwald.

The Ettersberg is a small, thickly wooded hill rising to about 2,500 feet eight miles north of the city of Weimar, the capital of Thuringia. Here, in the eighteenth century, Goethe sought quiet refuge in long, solitary walks among the trees and flowers. Shortly after Hitler came to power, the Nazis chose the Ettersberg as the headquarters of their crack “Death’s Head” division of the SS and built a huge concrete barracks for its troops, along with luxurious, half-timbered villas for its officers. Then, in 1937, they began construction of a concentration camp. They called it Buchenwald, or “Beech Forest,” so as not to offend the local authorities, who were eager not to be associated with it. Goethe, after all, was being idealized as “the embodiment of the German spirit.”

The first prisoners to arrive came as transfers from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp close to Berlin. Mostly they were members of the German resistance, Jehovah’s Witnesses, criminals and homosexuals, and they were put to work clearing the forest, laying sewerage pipes, building roads and constructing accommodation for the thousands of inmates destined to follow them. Buchenwald quickly acquired the reputation of being the worst camp in Germany.

After the outbreak of war, like Dachau, it also became a camp for foreigners, and the death toll began to mount. A crematorium was built, lethal injections began to take place, and forced labor in nearby quarries and factories led to hundreds of deaths. In the former stables of the original SS barracks, a special shooting facility was set up where some eight thousand Russian prisoners of war were murdered with a shot through the neck.

Here, too, grotesque medical experiments were carried out on live prisoners, including tests using typhus in which dozens died. In 1943, a large armaments factory was built adjacent to the camp, with the inmates used for labor. There were also several sub-camps, including “Dora,” an underground factory at Nordhausen which used forced labor to build V2 rockets, jet aircraft and other advanced Nazi weapons.

By April 1945, Buchenwald was the largest remaining concentration camp in the Nazi system, with 112,000 prisoners, including 25,000 women, housed in the main and sub-camps. A third were Jews, and nearly all had been shipped to Buchenwald in 1944 from camps further east that were being overrun by Stalin’s Red Army. The numbers of dying were increasing by the day. In all, some quarter of a million prisoners were incarcerated here by the Nazis, and almost sixty thousand died.

Fey described it as a “small city of tarmac streets,” and she and the other Sippenhafte were housed in an isolated barracks surrounded by a red-brick wall covered in barbed wire. The group was joined by more relatives of the conspirators, and it was from one of these newcomers that Fey heard the news she had long been dreading.

Despite everything, including the cruel taunts from the SS, she had kept alive the hope that her father might still be alive. But from one of her mother’s closest friends, Maria von Hammerstein, the widow of the former Reichswehr chief of staff Kurt von Hammerstein, she heard for the first time the full details of her father’s trial before the notorious People’s Court in Berlin. He had defended himself brilliantly and won the admiration of many of those who heard him, but the verdict was predictable. Just two hours after being found guilty, he had been taken out and hanged in the Ploetzensee Prison. At last, Fey let the tears flow freely for the father she would never see again.

Two weeks after her arrival, the camp’s routine misery was shattered. In the morning, a two-seater Fieseler Storch–the plane used by the Luftwaffe for low-level reconnaissance–circled over Buchenwald several times before landing in a nearby field. Fey and the others rushed out to wave because they suspected they knew who the pilot was. And they were right: it was Alex’s wife, Melitta.

Her tale was amazing, even surreal. First, she was ethnically Jewish, her father having come from a middle-class family in Leipzig that had converted to Lutheranism, a fact that to the Nazis would normally have been irrelevant in her designation as racially impure and unfit. She had qualified as an engineer, earned her pilot’s license, and in the late 1920s started test-flying aircraft. Since 1937, the year she had married Alex in Berlin, she had test-flown over two thousand missions in Junkers dive-bombers for the Luftwaffe. Only one other pilot, a man, had surpassed her record. In 1943, she was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class along with the Gold Pilot’s Badge with Diamonds, and she had recently also been nominated for the Iron Cross Class I.

This vital war work saved her from deportation and the death camps. She had been briefly arrested after the bomb plot, but was released to continue her test-flying. Since then, she had exploited her privileges once before, to visit Alex and bring him and the other prisoners food while they were at Stutthof, providing the group’s sole link with the outside world. She had also traced some of the Stauffenberg children, who were being kept in a different camp, and had delighted them with Christmas gifts of medals since she could not find any toys in the shops. “We loved them,” remembered one of the children, “she was very exciting. She told the most wonderful stories of flying and her planes.”²⁰

Only Alex was allowed to go over and talk with Litta after she landed outside Buchenwald. When he returned, the others surrounded him for news. It turned out that Litta had completely lost track of them since Stutthof. The Gestapo had told her that the Sippenhafte were probably now in Russian hands. Unwilling to believe this, she had tried Buchenwald on a hunch.

Fey naturally assumed that her family might think that she was now a prisoner of the Soviets, a thought that profoundly upset her. So she was vastly relieved a few days later when several letters arrived for her. In one, her mother told her about recent heavy air raids on Munich: “Of the Munich we used to know,” she lamented, “there is practically nothing left.”

To distract herself, she started giving lessons in elementary mathematics and languages to a ten-year-old boy imprisoned in the camp with his mother. But this brought to mind the possible fate of her own children. Were the boys better off in a home, even one run by the SS? Or would they, like this one, have been happier with her in a camp, even one as wretched as Buchenwald?

A month after her arrival she heard the familiar thunder of artillery in the distance, and again the order was barked out to pack a bag and be ready to move. Buses arrived, they were crammed in tightly, and off they went into the night, their destination unknown. Accompanying them were two SS officers. One, Obersturmführer Ernst Bader, was a cold, blue-eyed type known to have worked with execution units. The other, Untersturmführer Edgar Stiller, seemed a bit more human. Their fate now rested in the hands of these two men.

On Tuesday 17 April, just before noon, they arrived outside the big stone gateway of Dachau. But thanks to the Nazis’ obsessive paperwork, entering a concentration camp could be almost as difficult as leaving one. The small convoy of buses stood for hours at the entrance while the bureaucrats within wrestled with the files. It was hot, there was no food or water, and despite a rising chorus of desperate pleading no one was even allowed to go to the toilet. In the end, the prisoner sitting next to Fey simply wet the floor. She had become used to such scenes on their journeys, and had long ago abandoned any shame or modesty about bodily functions. The group, men and women alike, were used to sharing a pail hidden behind a rough cloth sheet in the corner of whatever room they inhabited.

Only towards nine in the evening did the buses start up their engines and roll through the gate. Once more, the Sippenhafte were segregated from the main body of inmates, and were placed in a large barracks next to the SS hospital. To Fey’s immense relief, there was the luxury of hot water. At last, she could thoroughly clean herself and wash her filthy, stinking clothes. There was plenty of hot food as well, brought to them by Russian and Polish prisoners.

The main anxiety now was allied bombing. For months, Munich had been under constant attack, and Dachau itself was also a target. Fey found herself having to run to the air-raid shelter as bombs rained down. The fear she felt brought her barely suppressed worries about her children bursting to the surface. Cities throughout Germany were now in flames. Where were her children? Were they safe? Would she survive, only to find that Corrado and Roberto had been killed? She felt an overwhelming desire to escape and find them, but she knew that this was a futile hope, so she ended up feeling even more trapped and helpless than before.

Sunk in these gloomy thoughts, she spotted one of the female warders from Buchenwald walking towards the SS hospital. The woman’s uniform was torn and crumpled, and she looked haggard and exhausted, a far cry from the spruce martinet who had enjoyed lording it over them before. But she was ready to reveal a piece of heart-warming news: she had been transferred just a few days earlier, and Buchenwald was now in the hands of the Americans

On Sunday 8 April, the headquarters of George C. Patton’s Third US Army had picked up a radio signal. “To the Allies. To the Army of General Patton,” it said. “Concentration Camp Buchenwald calls! SOS. We ask for help. They are going to evacuate us. The SS will exterminate us.” The message came from a wireless secretly built in the camp and was transmitted by the prisoners’ underground committee. The US radio operators promised them that help was on the way.

Three days later, a tank column belonging to Patton’s Third Army was racing down a road at twenty-five miles an hour when, close to Weimar, it encountered an amazing sight. Several hundred former concentration camp inmates wearing tattered rags were marching eastwards. And they were armed. They told the startled Americans that they had come from Buchenwald. Shortly before, they explained, they had disarmed the SS guards, who had fled. Now they were hoping to catch up with them.

Instead, the Americans suggested they return to the camp and sent two of Patton’s officers along with them. When they arrived, a white flag was flying triumphantly from the main watchtower. All the remaining SS guards had fled at noon, leaving the camp in the hands of the communist-led underground prisoners’ organization. They had run it since 1942, and had acted as trustees to dole out food, assign prisoners to work details, hand out drugs and ration hospital beds. A far less powerful, non-communist organization had been created in 1944. To some extent the two groups cooperated, although each remained deeply suspicious of the other.

Like Dachau, the Buchenwald SS leadership had received orders from Himmler to evacuate the prisoners before the allies reached it. In the four days before Patton’s men arrived, some twenty-five thousand had been marched out of the main camp, including nearly all of the Jews. Only a handful had survived.

The Americans found twenty-one thousand prisoners packed into the camp. Many were hovering on the edge of death, suffering from starvation, tuberculosis, dysentery and typhoid. It was not the first of the camps to be liberated by the allies, but it was the largest and the worst yet.

The world’s press descended almost immediately. In its vanguard came Edward R. Murrow, the chief European correspondent of the Columbia Broadcasting System. He had made his name reporting live on the London Blitz, using his famous opening and closing catchphrases: “This is London,” and “Good night, and good luck.” He had also flown on bombing raids over Europe, making vivid recordings of what he saw, and had assembled an impressive news staff to bring the realities of war to Americans back home.

For the previous week he had been driving hard through Germany, following Patton’s forces from Frankfurt to Weimar and beyond. The Germans appeared well clothed, he reported, and in a healthier state than any civilians he had seen anywhere else in Europe. Old men and women were working in the fields, although cows, not horses, were pulling the plows; the horses had been sent to the Eastern Front or Normandy as transport for the Wehrmacht. “But this is no time to talk of the surface of Germany,” he abruptly said. “I propose to tell you of Buchenwald.” He did so, in the first person, sharing what he had seen when he walked through the gates. He pulled no punches. He talked of people who died at his feet, of children of six with numbers tattooed on their arms, of skeletal people from Vienna, Paris and Prague. Some claimed to have met him when he was a prewar correspondent, but he failed to recognize them. Then he was taken by a Czech doctor to a small courtyard:

It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised though there seemed little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head. But they bled very little. All except two were naked. I tried to count them as best I could, and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than 500 men and boys lay there in two neat piles.

I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words. Dead men are plentiful in war–but the living dead, more than 20,000 in one camp! And the country around was pleasing to the eye, and the Germans were well fed and well dressed.21

The first British correspondent to arrive at Buchenwald was a short, stocky, dark-haired Englishman in his late thirties. His name was Robert Reid, and he was one of the eight British correspondents traveling with Patton’s army. He worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation and was filing regular dispatches for its daily War Report, which was aired every evening after the nine o’clock radio news. A friendly figure with an infectious cackle of a laugh, he was known to all his colleagues as Bob.

Despite the insignia of a lieutenant-colonel he wore on his sleeve, Reid at first glance seemed the least likely of war correspondents. Until recently he had been based in Bradford and Manchester, where he specialized in gritty human-interest stories about life and times in the industrial north, much in the fashion of the famous writer and broadcaster J.B. Priestley. The two men had attended the same school in Bradford and spoke on similar themes with almost identical Yorkshire accents–so much so that one of Reid’s colleagues later described him as “a pocket Priestley.” With his neat dark suit, well-brushed bowler hat and furled umbrella, Reid had been a familiar figure in the newsrooms of northern England. It was hard to imagine him in uniform reporting from the front line.

But he was good at his job and had the born reporter’s nose for truffling out the big story. “He never left a job unfinished no matter how late he stayed,” said one admiring colleague, “he never looked at a clock.” Ink ran in his veins, for both his great-grandfather and his grandmother had worked as journalists in their native Scotland, and his brother was opera critic for Punch magazine. “My job,” Reid wrote, “is to do what journalism has taught me–to worry the basic facts out of the heat of any problem and give them a man-in-the-street interpretation.”²² Yet, apart from a brief spell reporting from France during its dramatic collapse in the spring of 1940, Reid had done no war reporting at all.

Then, just before D-Day, he had joined the special broadcasting team created by the BBC to follow the allied armies through France and the Low Countries into Germany. Its correspondents were “embedded” with the forces and had their own small censorship unit, which meant that sensitive issues could be discussed freely and quickly. Eventually, Reid got to know by instinct what he could and could not report on air. And anyway, he had little interest in tactical or strategic problems, preferring to focus on the experiences of the ordinary soldiers. Good morale on the home front was vital for the war effort, and here Reid’s background stood him in excellent stead: he knew how to report on what was happening to the fathers, sons and brothers of his audience back home.

Ironically, though, what had first made him a household name was a dramatic episode that involved no allied forces at all. It occurred in Paris on Saturday, 26 August 1944, the day that the Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle went to Notre Dame Cathedral for the official Service of Thanksgiving for the liberation of France. The city had been liberated just two days before. More than a million Parisians lined the route from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde as the general walked slowly past, occasionally raising his arm to acknowledge the cheers.

Reid was waiting in the square outside the cathedral. The day before, he had driven into the city from Rambouillet with a BBC colleague. They had been warned to look out for snipers: there were plenty still around, they were told, and they should expect to be fired on from windows or roofs. He had heard the crack of a rifle just the once during the journey, but the bullet had missed them.

He stood ready with his microphone in his hand. Through the open doors of the cathedral he could see a mass of faces turned expectantly towards the entrance. The roar of the vast crowd packing the square swelled to a climax as de Gaulle arrived and was greeted by the waiting group of church dignitaries.

Suddenly, though, a shot rang out, followed by a fusillade of fire. The crowd behind Reid made a sudden rush for the doors. He began to speak into the microphone to record what was happening, but was swept forward and fell to the ground. The microphone and its cable parted company. Reid scrambled back onto his feet and, still gripping the mic, accompanied de Gaulle into the cathedral. The general seemed unperturbed, and had his hands raised, as if to calm everyone around him.

Then came a burst of firing from inside the cathedral. Snipers were hidden high in the galleries beneath the roof. People flung themselves to the floor, or hid behind stone pillars. Gendarmes and soldiers ran inside and exchanged shots with the snipers, lighting up the gloomy interior with brilliant flashes of automatic fire. Amid the din, Reid heard the congregation start to sing the Te Deum.

When the service was over, he slipped out of a side door to see what was happening outside. Sporadic firing and sniping was still going on. His recording trailer was parked outside and the engineer had remained at his controls until Reid’s microphone had gone dead. The disk on the turntable was covered with dust and chips of broken masonry from the bullets. Reid and the engineer reconnected the microphone, and he sat down and recorded what he had just seen in the church. Even as he was talking, a nearby door opened and a line of gendarmes marched out with four captured snipers. They were, Reid told his listeners, a “raffish-looking” lot.

Although he had no idea of what had made it onto the disk, or indeed any clear recollection of what he had said amid all the confusion, he made sure the recording was rushed to London by air courier. The next night, when he tuned in to the BBC, he heard his broadcast, including the sound of bullets whizzing past his ear. It was one of the most dramatic reports ever aired during the war, “one of the biggest broadcasts, I think, of all time,” according to the manager of the War Reporting Unit. In an unprecedented move, it was rebroadcast throughout the USA by both NBC and CBS.²³

Since then, though, Reid’s stories had mostly been about the men advancing into Germany. He was as interested in the engineers building roads and bridges, and the wire men stringing out cables to aid communication, as he was in the front-line troops. Not long before, when Patton’s men had overrun a prisoner-of-war camp packed with British soldiers who had survived a forty-day forced march, he had moved from man to man, recording their stories for their families back home. Always, as he interviewed ordinary men doing their jobs, enduring or suffering in the extraordinary setting of war, he bore in mind that his audience back home needed their morale boosted, too.

He entered Buchenwald the day after its liberation. Even hard-boiled cynics were weeping at what they saw. Reid, a family man to the core, found it almost too much to bear. He was already exhausted, he had been away from home for almost a year, and he was missing his family badly. Like the soldiers whose stories he was telling to the world, he waited eagerly, sometimes desperately, for letters from home, and even at the end of a long and tiring day he sat down at his typewriter to write a reply. His daily life was one of constant movement and improvisation. He rarely knew in the morning where he would spend the night. Sharing an evening meal with the other correspondents was the closest he came to any semblance of family life.

For months he had been fed up, and ready to go home. “When I think about the future I feel more and more to have a great desire to get out with you and the children in the country,” he had told Vera, his wife, back in February, “and I keep on planning imaginary holidays in Wensleydale with our paint boxes.”²⁴

The night before he journeyed to Buchenwald, he had received three welcome long letters from Vera. But they made him more homesick than ever. Somehow, the fact that it was spring, that the countryside was greening, and that blossom was flowering on the trees made the separation even harder to bear. “I have been thinking all the more longingly of home this last few days,” he wrote that night. “I keep sighing and thinking of you and the children and how it would be to be just setting off with you for that favorite walk of mine.” He signed off, as he always did, “Love, Rob,” and scrawled twelve kisses at the bottom of the page.

Reid’s family life was as plain and straightforward as the prose he wrote and the words he spoke. He and Vera lived in a rented house in Bramhall outside Stockport on the fringes of Manchester, and they had two small children: Elizabeth, ten, and Richard, eight. Vera packed her letters with the details of her daily suburban life. She also methodically numbered them. Sometimes, traveling through the vagaries of the military mailing system on a rapidly moving front, they arrived out of sequence. This could be confusing, which made her anxious, hence the numbering. She told him about shopping trips to Manchester, the state of the weather, the plumbers repairing a leaking pipe in the scullery, the steam iron that had been giving her trouble, the sewing she did every night to make or mend clothes, the neighbors and relatives, even the hens she fed in the back garden whose eggs she treasured, keeping a record of their production in a small book. She always reported whenever she had heard his voice on the radio. Since his broadcast from Paris, he had become a local celebrity, and even if she missed a broadcast her friends quickly told her about it. Above all, however, she told him about the children.

In Bramhall, as in Berlin, Lüneberg, Italy and Weimar, Friday 20 April was a sunny day, although in the evening there were a couple of showers of rain. After she had pulled the curtains and put the children to bed, Vera sat down to write Bob letter number 55. The big news was about Elizabeth and Richard. Their daughter had walked in proudly from school bursting with the news that she had been made a prefect. It had been announced that morning in front of the whole school at morning assembly immediately after prayers, and the headmistress had pinned the navy-blue badge with a big gold “P” onto her dress. Vera, delighted for her daughter, had rewarded her with a ball of wool so she could knit herself some gloves.

It was also a red-letter day for Richard. He was growing taller, and today, for the first time, he had managed to ride his bike while sitting on the saddle instead of standing on the pedals. He had also learned how to get on and off it “in the boy’s way,” as Vera put it, by putting one leg on the pedal and swinging the other over the seat. He had spent the whole afternoon after school practicing this trick in the street, and Vera had even seen him confidently speeding along with his feet off the pedals. It was time to get the brakes checked, she thought. Then she would allow him to go slightly further afield.

She finished the letter, as usual, by urging her husband to take care. “I wish it would finish soon,” she wrote, meaning the war. “But somehow,” she added, “the nearer one thinks the end is, yet the further it seems away.” She signed it, “All our love, Vera,” and she too added twelve small kisses. It was almost as an afterthought that she included a sentence saying she had heard him on the BBC that afternoon talking about Buchenwald.²⁵

The contrast with the horrors of Buchenwald might have made the details of daily life in Bramhall seem petty and trivial, but to Reid, the vivid picture drawn by Vera of his children at home had the opposite effect. It made him appreciate his family even more, and in doing so lent his reporting on the camp special poignancy. “Don’t you think you bore me,” he assured her the next time he wrote. “All this sort of thing is the breath of life for me darling. It brings home right here to me and I can forget what’s going on all around.”

He filed several reports on the camp, with the most moving and terrible about a group of children. In one of the wooden huts the Americans had found nine hundred children between the ages of two and fourteen. Their fathers had been prisoners who had long since died or been murdered. Most were Polish Jews, and they were being looked after by the older prisoners. Reid described them as “pathetic, ragged waifs, looking like little old men with yellow faces and shrunken cheeks.” One of them, a fourteen-year-old boy with a shaven head, revealed that the camp doctor used to hold medical parades. He would divide them into groups, and then the sickest would be marched off in the direction of the camp crematorium, never to be seen again.

Another Jewish child in Buchenwald was the sixteen-year-old Elie Wiesel. Transported with his family from their village in Transylvania, he had last seen his mother and sister being directed towards the gas chambers at Auschwitz, before he himself was shipped to Buchenwald with his father that January. Here he had watched helplessly while his father, racked by dysentery and denied any medical help, died before his eyes. Once his father was beaten by fellow prisoners who were sick of him defecating in his bunk. “Don’t forget you’re in a concentration camp” was the advice the block leader gave Elie when he asked for help for his father. “Here every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Here,” he added grimly, “there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself.”

One night, an SS guard hit his father over the head after he cried out for water. “I did not move,” Wiesel later wrote. “I was afraid . . . Then my father made a rattling noise and it was my name, ‘Eliezer.’ I could see that he was still breathing spasmodically. I did not move.” The next morning, Elie awoke at dawn. In his father’s bunk lay another prisoner. His father had been taken away in the night to the crematorium. “There were no prayers at his grave,” lamented Elie, “no candles were lit to his memory. His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not reply.”²⁶

Elie himself was lucky to survive. As the Americans approached, the SS decided to evacuate the children and herded them onto the camp’s central square. But that was when the underground resistance decided to act. “Armed men appeared everywhere,” recorded Wiesel. “Burst of gunshots. Grenades exploding. We, the children, remained flat on the floor . . . The battle did not last long and around noon, everything was calm again.” The SS fled, and by the time the Americans arrived the resistance was in control.²⁷

Bob Reid learned more about the camp from another group of prisoners he met. About forty captured British secret agents had been sent there by the SS. Only four were still alive by the time Reid arrived. One was a twenty-year-old Englishman named Christopher Burney. As a bored junior commando officer, he had written a paper about how to liberate France from within. Then, at a cocktail party a few weeks later, his brigadier beckoned him over. “Ever jumped out of a plane, old boy?” he asked. “I’ve a feeling you’re going to.” Not long afterwards Burney was being dropped near Le Mans to join a Special Operations Executive (SOE) network. Unfortunately, though, it had just been arrested en masse, and Burney was quickly picked up by the Gestapo.

“They stuck to boots and fists,” he said, “taking care to keep me conscious.” But he told them nothing. The following eighteen months were spent in solitary confinement in Fresnes Prison outside Paris. Then he was sent to Buchenwald. The journey was torture. A hundred men, all stripped naked, were pushed into a truck designed for forty. It took them four days, with only one small can of blackish water to drink, to reach their destination. “Half the men in my truck were mad,” Burney recalled.

After that, he fought to keep himself alive. One of the worst features of Buchenwald, he found, was the control exercised over other prisoners by the communists in the camp, nearly all of whom were German. “They had absolute disciplinary powers over their fellow prisoners,” he wrote, “backed by the SS and the threat of the crematorium behind them. Anybody who savored of a capitalist or an intellectual was promptly marked down as a victim.” Indeed, just ten days before the Americans liberated the camp, the German communists had passed a resolution declaring, “It is in the highest degree regrettable that the Anglo-American capitalists should liberate us. We will do all in our power, even under them, to retain the position which we have always held.”²⁸

In response to this, Burney had busied himself organizing the camp’s non-communist resistance cell. This saved his life. In the final days before liberation, word leaked out that the SS was eager to kill the British officers. This was all too believable: only two weeks before, Burney’s best friend, another secret agent captured in France, had been taken to the crematorium and hanged. Acting immediately, the new resistance group hid Burney and the others in a secret underground cellar until the danger passed.

Two of the other SOE agents were brothers. Henry and Alfred Newton had been an acrobatic act based in Paris when the war broke out. Subsequently, all their relatives–wives, children, parents–had perished in a torpedoed ship, which had prompted them to join SOE. Nine months after being parachuted back into France, they had been arrested and badly tortured. One day in Buchenwald Alfred saw Henry being carried past on a stretcher: “He managed to give a sign that he had recognized me,” said his brother.

The fourth surviving agent, Maurice Southgate, had run a highly successful network in France before falling into a Gestapo trap just six weeks before D-Day following the arrest of his radio operator. Along with the captured wireless set was a file of messages relating to the allied landings. Despite being severely tortured, Southgate held out long enough for the information he had to be useless. He had spent nine months in Buchenwald before Reid arrived. Helplessly and fatalistically, he watched as, one by one, other SOE agents were taken away for execution. This was carried out in a particularly brutal manner, he explained. A butcher’s hook was placed under their chins before the trap beneath their feet was sprung. From the execution chamber below ground, their bodies were then speedily lifted to the crematorium.

Reid uncovered other stories of heroism during his time at Buchenwald. Nearby, in a small hospital, he came across a group of young Polish women who had fought as combat troops during the Warsaw uprising of the previous August. Miraculously, the Germans had treated them as prisoners of war rather than as terrorists to be shot. They ranged from fourteen to sixty years old. Altogether, some seven thousand women had been captured. Microphone in hand, Reid broadcast an interview with one of them.

“What part did the women play in that fight?” he asked. Some were in assault groups, the woman replied; others served in the General Staff of the Polish Home Army. They also acted as observers, front-line fighters and couriers.

“What about the courier girls?” he inquired. One of them was only fifteen, answered the woman. She had been a Girl Guide before the war. “She had to go through the canals [sewers],” she continued in her imperfect English, “and as she was little it was easier for her to do that than for a big man or a more higher woman [sic].” The Germans had thrown gas and grenades into the sewers, she went on, and for her courage the girl had been awarded the Polish Military Cross.

Reid was fascinated. The Warsaw uprising was a big story and this was the first opportunity he had had to talk to anyone involved. “How did the Germans treat the people of Warsaw?” he asked.

“Just like wild beasts,” came the answer. “We were arrested in streets; arrested in trams; arrested in houses. Nobody knew in the morning if he would live in the evening.”

From another woman, Reid learned that even though they had been classified as prisoners of war, the women had suffered severe privations. Thousands of them had been marched out of Warsaw and kept for days without food. “If you could get a piece of dog, meat of a dog,” she told him, “you were lucky.” Then they were taken to Silesia in cattle trucks and locked in them for three days. “They didn’t allow the people to care and give us food and even water,” she said. “And they used to shoot the Poles or other people who wanted to bring us food.”

Most of the women Reid saw had lost teeth through vitamin deficiency and were thin and haggard, but they had taken care to keep themselves as clean as they could, washing themselves and their clothes constantly to ward off disease.

They had been freed just ten days before. The exact second was etched on at least one of the women’s memory: “We are mad with happiness,” she told Reid. “We have been freed on 11th April, ten minutes to four. We remember that very well,” she added, “when we saw for the first time an American car, and American soldiers.”

“How did you receive them?” asked Reid.

“We were shouting and singing and crying with joy, and they were awfully nice to us. They let [sic] us some chocolate and cigarettes.”

“No lipstick or powder?”

“No,” she answered sternly. “We are not allowed to use that if we are soldiers. Although,” she added conspiratorially, “some of us, I think–I will tell you that in secret–dream about it!”

It was a light-hearted moment in what had otherwise been a horrific and depressing few days. When he moved on for his next story, Bob Reid was heartily glad to put Buchenwald behind him.²⁹

But at least he had been able to do one good turn that made him feel better.

The four British SOE agents spent the first night of their liberation sleeping in a comfortable bungalow that had belonged to one of the camp’s SS officers and his family and had been commandeered by one of the Americans.

The next day, a British major in well-pressed battle dress rolled up to the camp in a jeep. “Get us away from this hell-hole,” said Alfred Newton, delighted to see an officer in British uniform, and all too aware that their lives might still be in some danger from the communists still at large in the camp. But his hopes were crushed. They would have to wait until the proper repatriation authorities arrived, the officer told them. He could do nothing to help except make a report when he got back to his headquarters. Then he jumped into his jeep and drove away. He hadn’t even offered them a cigarette.

By this time, Reid had finished his interviews and was chatting with Burney. His jeep with his recording trailer emblazoned with “BBC Recording Unit” was parked by the main gate, and the two of them strolled towards it slowly together. As they got close, Reid offered Burney a lift. “Thanks for the offer, old boy,” replied the SOE man, “but there are three other officers with me, and I couldn’t dream of leaving without them.” Then he introduced Reid to the others.

By this time Reid had noticed the inscription above the gate: “Recht oder unrecht Mein Vaterland.” “Right or wrong my country,” translated Reid in his broad Yorkshire accent. He turned to business: “What the hell are we waiting for? Come on, lads! Pile in. If I don’t get you away from here, my name’s not Bob.”

Burney, Southgate and Alfred Newton packed themselves into the jeep, while Henry Newton settled down in the trailer among the recording equipment. As they left, a GI thrust some K rations into their hands.

It was dusk when they reached Third Army headquarters in Gotha. Here Reid dropped off the four men at the guardroom, then put out his hand and gave them a broad smile. “Right or wrong, my country! Nay, I’m not likely to forget that one . . . Well, lads, Ah must go now. Look me up some time. ‘BBC Manchester’ will always find me. Cheerio!”³⁰