While Edda and Emilio settled into the Ramiola clinic, Galeazzo remained imprisoned at the castle in Bavaria with Hilde. Now that Edda had returned to Italy and had, he presumed, safely relocated the diaries, Galeazzo felt calmer, more buoyant. As long as the Germans didn’t have the papers, he felt confident that he was not expendable. With Mussolini returned to power, Hitler surely would not harm Il Duce’s daughter or her family. Hilde reported back to her superiors with satisfaction in intelligence briefings that Galeazzo had “made peace with the fact that he would remain in Germany for a long time. He never spoke of escape and abroad anymore.” He expected Edda’s return soon and, soothed by Hilde, began to talk of buying a family home and settling somewhere in Germany.
Having just settled into the idea that his stay in the Reich would be a long one and that he, Edda, and the children were not in daily peril, Galeazzo was surprised to receive a message on October 16, just a few weeks after Edda’s departure, that he had been given permission to return to Italy. According to the notice, “the Duce wished to speak to him.” The request was odd. Mussolini had been in Munich as recently as September. Edda’s mother, Rachele, was still in Germany, wanting to be near her grandchildren and other members of the family, who had fled after the installation of Pietro Badoglio as prime minister. Galeazzo had talked with Mussolini then about the fiasco in July. Galeazzo had insisted to his father-in-law that “events after the Grand Council had gone completely against his and his fellow voters’ intentions.” That was a completely true statement, as far as it went: Galeazzo most assuredly had not wanted Pietro Badoglio in power. But Galeazzo had intended to see Mussolini removed from office as prime minister and had cooperated with the king and others to make that happen. Mussolini might have forgiven him, but Galeazzo was clear that his mother-in-law, Rachele, had not. She stared daggers at him. When she bothered to acknowledge his presence at all, that is. Years later, she would write her memoirs and notably had nothing good to say about her eldest daughter’s husband.
When Galeazzo in response to this “invitation” suggested that he had made his peace with a quiet domestic life in Germany and no longer wished to return to Italy, the tone altered. Wilhelm Höttl arrived at the castle the following day, in the middle of a Sunday. Perhaps the count had not quite understood Führerprinzip. Nazism was based on one fundamental law, known in German as Führerprinzip—the Führer principle. Hermann Göring once offered a simple translation: “The Führer alone decides.” Hitler had decided. Return to Italy was imminent and not actually optional. When Höttl then told Galeazzo and Hilde that the count would be accompanied south on Tuesday morning by two police officers, in case he had any “concerns” in transit, Galeazzo understood at once that Mussolini was not preparing him a warm filial welcome.
Galeazzo would be returned to Italy for his reckoning with Mussolini and the reconstituted Fascist party. The children would remain in Germany, as would their grandmother. Hitler already knew that Galeazzo would never attempt to flee for Spain or South America if it meant abandoning his children to the Nazis. On the Monday before his departure, he gathered his three children together in the grand salon. “Ciao, kids, we will not see each other for a while,” his son Fabrizio remembered his father saying. Rachele, determined to let Galeazzo know just how much she hated him, poured the tea silently, scowling. “[A]lways behave with honor,” he told Fabrizio gravely. “Don’t forget ever that we are Italians,” he said to his daughter, Raimonda. He just kissed his restless little boy, Marzio, whom he and Edda affectionately nicknamed Mowgli. Edda adored wild things. She had once kept a pet jaguar at the Villa Torlonia. They both loved in their youngest son his Jungle Book demeanor. Tea over, Galeazzo went out for a brief appointment in Munich. By the time he returned, the children and their grandmother were gone, and, except for Hilde and the SS, the castle was empty.
* * *
By now, Galeazzo and Hilde were inseparable. Hilde had been sent to prey upon Galeazzo’s weakness for pretty women, and she had played the hand coolly. Galeazzo certainly found her charming. Hilde reported back to her superiors in the German security office in the autumn of 1943 that Galeazzo had fallen hard for her and was planning their future together. Whether Edda knew it or not yet, Galeazzo had come up with the idea that Hilde would join their household as his personal “secretary.” “Should he be able, against his expectation, to live freely in Italy,” Hilde wrote in her intelligence briefing to Wilhelm Höttl, “he would get his children to follow him immediately and would ask that I accompany them.” Hilde and he would work together on preparing his diaries for post-war publication. Hilde was encouraging him to think about the diaries as a bestselling book and wanted to know all about their most thrilling aspects.
Galeazzo had a reputation for being an inveterate gossip, unable to keep a secret. True to form, he had already told Hilde where he and Edda had hidden the diaries before they left Italy. “[H]e had already told me in conversation, before the notice of his departure arrived,” Hilde reported to her superiors, “that they are in three parts (originally, they were in 4, one part he had in Rome in his house and burned it on the 26th of July[)].…One part is held by a ‘neutral’ friend in Rome, two parts are buried in Tuscany.” These were the papers held by the former Spanish ambassador and hidden by Carolina Ciano.
Edda, of course, had already moved those papers to a safe location, with the aid of Delia di Bagno, and in a sense Galeazzo was sharing with Hilde information that he hoped was already outdated. But the fact that he told her at all simply confirms what was inevitable: Galeazzo Ciano was infatuated and could not resist gossiping. Was Hilde Beetz in love with her target? She was a rookie spy, on her first real assignment, and Galeazzo was undeniably gallant and handsome. She had not been impressed with Galeazzo at their first meeting. Now she felt for the despondent count something that he perceived, at the very least, as a warm friendship and intense sexual attraction. Were those feelings real on Hilde’s part or was the flirtation part of a ruse to gain his trust and accomplish her mission? There is no way to know for certain how things stood in the beginning. Perhaps both things were true simultaneously. Hilde later said that, before their sojourn in the Bavarian countryside ended, she had already “taken a strong liking for him and was working to save his life.” At the same time, Hilde Beetz was ambitious and professional, she was newly married and apparently in love with her husband, and her career depended on her delivering up Count Ciano’s diaries. Keeping him alive and infatuated was the best way to make that happen.
* * *
On Tuesday, October 19, as scheduled, a German transport plane took off from Munich, destined for Verona, the city at the heart of Romeo and Juliet’s ill-fated love story. On board was Galeazzo Ciano, flanked by two grim-faced, gun-toting SS minders. He wore a gray flannel suit and a light raincoat. He had no luggage. No umbrella. He carried with him only a photograph of Edda and the children in his breast pocket and a Russian icon of the Catholic Madonna that had been a wedding present. Hilde Beetz was permitted to accompany him on the southbound flight, to keep him calm and compliant, though she would be expected to make the immediate round-trip journey.
The plane swept low on the approach. Galeazzo could see below them the Adige River winding through the city, a sprawl of red-tiled rooftops, and the stone husk of the Roman amphitheater. The transport plane came in fast, rattled, and then jerked to a halt. His minders nodded toward the exit. Verona in 1943 was under the nominal control of Mussolini, part of the so-called Italian Social Republic, often known simply as Salò, after the town on the banks of Lake Garda where it was centered. An Italian military police officer stepped forward as Galeazzo blinked in the sunlight, and a hand was on his arm in practically the same moment as his foot hit the tarmac: “Galeazzo Ciano, you are under arrest.”
“I am aware of that,” Galeazzo replied coolly.
He was determined not to let on that he was rattled. But he was rattled.
* * *
Hilde, soon back in Munich, was worried. She needed to figure out how to be reunited with Galeazzo and transferred to Verona. Maybe there was genuine sympathy for the count. But the reality was that unless Hilde could convince her bosses that, given just a bit more time with Galeazzo, she could deliver the diaries, she was back to being an office secretary. She was not going to miss her chance for a promotion by having her first mission disappear now.
Galeazzo had told her of the three sets of papers hidden in Italy. Hilde saw the opportunity. On October 23, Hilde filed an intelligence brief with Wilhelm Höttl, her boss, making the case for continuing to be assigned to the mission. “I am determined even now to find out more about the documents,” she pressed Höttl. “The Count would not be surprised by my arrival in Verona.…He would certainly share his plans with me.” Wilhelm Höttl, seeing a determined young Nazi agent keen to take her quarry, agreed to Hilde’s proposed plan. By November 3, 1943, Hilde, along with Rachele Mussolini as a passenger, was on her way to Verona.
Internal Nazi party politics were a key driver in the decision to send Hilde Beetz back to Italy. The race was on for the count’s diaries. Ribbentrop was worried about what Galeazzo Ciano might say if he were able to escape Italy now with the manuscripts and was pressing for a speedy execution as a decisive resolution. Wilhelm Höttl’s boss, Ernst Kaltenbrünner, still wanted to kneecap Ribbentrop with Hitler, and Ribbentrop seemed awfully worried about something in those papers. That made Kaltenbrünner very curious about the reason.
* * *
The drafty stone building in which Galeazzo was being held prisoner had not always been a jailhouse. The seventeenth-century church of Santa Teresa degli Scalzi belonged to an order of Carmelite nuns. After that, for a time, it had served as military barracks, before being converted to a prison at the end of the nineteenth century. Located in the heart of old Verona, not far from the Castelvecchio or “old castle,” Scalzi, as it was simply known, had a fearsome reputation in 1943 as a prison for fascism’s political enemies. And that was how the new Fascist party of Italy saw Galeazzo Ciano. He had repudiated Mussolini’s fascism at Grand Council, but fascism and Mussolini were not done with the count.
Galeazzo was not the only one of the party members at the Grand Council who had been caught. All nineteen of those who had voted against Mussolini and betrayed fascism were being hunted. The ground floor of the church had been emptied out and reconfigured to house them as, one by one, they were captured. Some of the conspirators managed to flee to safety. Six of them were unlucky, among them Galeazzo Ciano and the elderly Emilio De Bono.
The impending trial of the Grand Council “traitors” in Verona was inherently political and partisan. Mussolini’s new council of ministers set up a special court to try the men on charges of treason. Galeazzo was one of several indicted, but, as Mussolini’s son-in-law, he was a particular lightning rod for party outrage. At the Fascist party conference in November, there were pounding feet and chants from the convention floor calling for “Death to Ciano,” and it was hard to see how Mussolini could retain control over the party or prosecute any of the others if he pardoned Galeazzo. The outcome of Galeazzo’s trial was not in doubt: This was not a jury trial but political revenge theater.
Hilde Beetz arrived on the steps of the Baroque prison on November 6, a Saturday, with orders that she have access to Galeazzo Ciano as a “translator.” Everyone understood immediately that this was a euphemism: She was clearly a German spy, sent to keep an eye on the wily prisoner. The prison prefect, a man named Cosmic, readily agreed that Hilde would spend the afternoons and evenings each day with Galeazzo. When she was ushered into cell twenty-seven, Galeazzo was delighted. He wasn’t a fool; he understood that Hilde worked for German intelligence. But he did not believe that Hilde was playing him. The chemistry between them he felt certain was genuine. He seems never to have considered that it was possible for Hilde both to find him sexually attractive and to act as a loyal Nazi, reporting everything that he said back to headquarters.
* * *
Galeazzo confided now that he was desperate to hear that Edda was safe and that the diaries had been hidden securely. He was not permitted to send messages out of his cell, and he didn’t know if Edda was even aware that he was in Verona and had been arrested by her father’s new government. Hilde, unsurprisingly, promptly offered to act as a confidential messenger between the two. She would hand-deliver to Edda any private communications about the diaries that Galeazzo wanted to send her. Galeazzo trusted her.
Hilde traveled north the next week to Ramiola, where Edda and Emilio Pucci remained in residence at the rest clinic, with Galeazzo’s first message. Edda was surprised and somewhat startled to see their German “hostess.” She had guessed since Munich that Hilde was a spy. There was no other reason for Hilde to have joined the family at the castle. She knew that she and Galeazzo had spent long weeks alone, and she knew that her husband could not keep a secret. She quickly concluded that Hilde Beetz must by now be “Gallo’s” new mistress.
If Galeazzo was a trusting soul—and that had always been Susanna Agnelli’s worry about her friend—his wife was not. Edda was Mussolini’s daughter, and experience had been a good and hard teacher. She did not doubt that this very pretty young German spy would be happy to hear the locations of the diaries and convey the good news to Galeazzo, right after the Gestapo took possession of the documents. Edda was not going to give anyone the information about where the diaries were hidden. Not even Galeazzo. Edda knew her husband’s weaknesses. She was pretty certain she was looking at her.
Edda demanded that she be allowed to see her husband in person. She was not going to pass messages. And she had no intention of negotiating with Hilde. Mussolini was nominally the leader of fascist Italy. Edda lived within his jurisdiction. Galeazzo had been arrested on his authority. Her quarrel was with her father. Mussolini, in truth, had little power as Hitler’s puppet. Rachele was shocked to see, on her return to Italy, that the SS had taken over even their home. “I was stunned to find that, although back in his own home, he had retreated into a modest room, while the German officers assigned to serve and guard him ostentatiously occupied most of the house,” Rachele remembered indignantly years later. But, hoping desperately for reconciliation with his daughter, Mussolini agreed that Edda be allowed to see Galeazzo, and her brother Vittorio, now returned to Italy, arranged for a private car to drive Edda from the clinic at Ramiola to Verona.
When Edda arrived at Scalzi and demanded to be taken to see Galeazzo, the prison prefect greeted her with an open hostility and calculated rudeness that startled her. Any deference due to Edda because of her father was more than outweighed in the prison director’s mind by the fact that she was the wife of fascism’s most infamous scoundrel. Edda brushed off the scorn, but privately it worried her. This, indeed, was a tramontana—a bad wind blowing. In the cell too, Edda was alarmed to see that their conversation was openly monitored. There would be no opportunity to discuss anything candidly, including her many questions about what had happened during those last days outside Munich. Soon the guard announced that the visit was over. Edda leaned to kiss her husband goodbye, and she only had time to whisper one short secret sentence, the thing above all she had come to tell him: “They are safe.” She had saved the diaries. Galeazzo held her close for a long moment.
* * *
That whisper came with a price. Edda would not be allowed to see Galeazzo for weeks afterward, no matter how much she pleaded with or threatened her father. On the ground in Verona, Wilhelm Harster, the local SD commandant, was now Hilde’s immediate supervisor. General Harster ordered that Hilde be given unrestricted access to Count Ciano, and she was with Galeazzo constantly from mid-November forward. They played chess cozily late into the evenings; Galeazzo’s favorite restaurant delivered gourmet meals to the cell. Anyone looking at the scene might have said it looked positively romantic.
Indeed, by now Galeazzo and Hilde were almost certainly lovers. Mario Pellegrinotti, a sympathetic prison warden who helped the couple, remembered clearly witnessing the “unequivocal behavior in which I casually surprised them once” sometime in late November or early December. They may have been lovers since as early as October outside Munich, when they were living together at the castle in Edda’s absence and when Galeazzo first began talking of a future together and of bringing Hilde to live in the household with him and Edda. Hilde later insisted that she did not “make love” to Galeazzo and that she was not his “mistress.” Perhaps in saying that she did not “make love” to him, Hilde only meant that she was not playacting the role of an Amt VI agent. Not entirely. Or perhaps she was simply noting what was almost certainly the truth: that, despite her being sent to spy on him and seduce him, it was Galeazzo who did all the pursuing. By the end of November, however, this much seems apparent: Hilde, despite all her clearheaded espionage intentions, was falling in love with Galeazzo Ciano.
Galeazzo’s prison-house liaison with Hilde did not stop him from missing his wife or sending Edda genuine and tender love letters either. Theirs had been a tempestuous marriage, and sexual fidelity had never been either of their strong suits, but this was not the cultural expectation among Europe’s aristocratic classes in the 1930s and 1940s. For Edda and Galeazzo, sexual fidelity was not the barometer of what it meant to be loyal to a marriage or a family. Galeazzo was truly grateful for Edda’s fierce devotion to him and the children in times of trouble, now especially. “Life is sad,” he wrote to her in a letter in November, “I read, read, read…I think of you a lot. With hope and sadness, according to the moment, but always with infinite longing. Kiss our three darlings, if they are with you, and take the most tender kiss of your Gallo.”
Although Edda understood clearly where things stood by November, she too never faulted Galeazzo and Hilde. With Emilio at her side, how could she? “People have claimed that Frau Beetz behaved as she did because she was in love with Galeazzo,” Edda explained after. “Certainly, but of what importance were feelings—or my reactions to this—when the life of my husband was at stake?…Frau Beetz was what she was, but she never betrayed me. She gave my husband the letters that I wrote to him, she delivered to me those he wrote to me.”
For her part, Hilde explained it this way: “the Count and Countess trusted me from the very beginning and often complained [about] the way they were fetched from Rome to Germany and were treated in Allmannshausen where they officially were guests but really prisoners without any rights.…Fortunately [Galeazzo] had mistrusted the Germans from the beginning—contrary to his wife—and had made his preparations at least to revenge himself.” It would be revenge by publication of the diaries.
According to Hilde, on her return to Rome in the early autumn Edda had not just moved the originals to a more secure location. She had also placed copies of Galeazzo’s diaries and perhaps a few crucial original documents with various friends, including several people in “neutral embassies.” There were few neutral nations left by 1943, so it is not hard to guess their destination. The trusted recipients almost certainly included an unnamed diplomatic friend in the Spanish embassy, likely the same friend who had offered to help them flee in August, and former diplomatic colleagues at the Vatican, Galeazzo’s last official appointment. Now, with Galeazzo imprisoned and his trial looming, Edda had sent instructions to their friends, Hilde reported, “authorizing them to publish those things, if later on they did not hear anything about him.”
Was it true? It’s hard to know for certain whether Edda had really made copies and left them in various locations. The papers ran to thousands of pages, and while electrophotography—photocopying—had been invented, the technology was not common. Edda may, however, have had the diaries photographed and circulated in film canisters. On the other hand, it may have all been a bluff. Galeazzo and Edda may have only said that the diaries were in safe hands, in multiple locations, poised for publication, as a ruse, hoping to convince the Nazis that keeping him alive was the price of silence. They had circulated the story far and wide in Germany during their incarceration, and they had all the more reason to tell it now as the prospects grew increasingly dim in Verona.
There is one other tantalizing hint of another “friend” at a neutral embassy who, if the story is true, might have received copies of the count’s diaries from Edda that autumn. Some reports have circulated—though they cannot be clearly confirmed, as is so often the case with classified wartime records—that Delia di Bagno and her mother, the Countess of Laurenzana, did more than just help Edda hide the diaries in October. They may have also helped connect Edda with a Polish aristocrat-turned-Allied-spy then living with the countess and operating under the assumed name of Christine Granville, who may have played an unrecorded bit part in the Ciano drama.
* * *
Christine Granville—better known as Krystyna Skarbek—was later one of the most celebrated British SOE (Special Operations Executive) agents of the war, and officially there is nothing to confirm that she was in Rome in the fall of 1943. Officially, there wouldn’t be. Her personnel files either have not been located or remain classified. There are, however, some odd hints in the public records. Christine was studying Italian and expecting to be deployed on a secret mission in Italy sometime in 1943, possibly connected to a cell tied to the Polish resistance run by a former British diplomat, Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Hazell. Files show that her lover, a fellow spy, was deployed to Italy as early as January 1943, and perhaps they were sent together. Certainly, neither Britain nor Poland was neutral. But did Edda pass along copies of some of the diaries to friends in the diplomatic corps with the help of Christine Granville? We can’t know for sure unless Granville’s personnel files are uncovered somewhere, someday in the intelligence service archives. But if it ever proves to be the case, it would explain a curious thread in the story that unfolded in the year to follow: Galeazzo and Edda, at different times but each anticipating they might not survive, made eleventh-hour efforts to get a message to the British about the diaries.
* * *
By mid-December 1943, Galeazzo had been in prison for more than six weeks, and the political climate was only growing uglier and more vitriolic. The political show trial was moving ahead. Treason was a death sentence. It was clear by now to Galeazzo and Edda that, if they were going to save Galeazzo, they needed to leverage the diaries. This proposed deal more than usually interested Hilde, not only as an intelligence operative but also as the count’s lover. By now, Hilde’s feelings for Galeazzo were genuinely complicated. She wanted to have her cake and to eat it too: She wanted to save his life and deliver the diaries to her Nazi bosses in the bargain.
A preliminary idea soon emerged in conversations among the three of them. They would strike a fresh deal with the Germans, to complete the trade of the diaries for Galeazzo’s life that had been sidetracked in Munich. This time, Edda would share nothing. But the Ciano children were still being held hostage by the Nazis in Germany. Before they did anything, they needed to get the children to safety so they could not be used against them in any covert negotiation.
“My father had a weakness” for Edda, one of her brothers noted pointedly later, “which he made no attempt to conceal,” and Edda, knowing how much Mussolini hated refusing her anything, had been badgering her father to release Galeazzo from prison since November. Mussolini’s reply to his favorite child had been blunt: She wanted to think about that demand carefully. The Gestapo would kill the children if he made a move to spare their father. Edda thought about how the vile Otto had terrorized the children at the castle casually, while they were under the personal protection of Hitler. She could not bear to think what would happen to the children if the SS were given license. She made up her mind now: She was going to get her children. She was going to smuggle them to Switzerland. Then she would turn her mind to saving Galeazzo’s life and bargaining the diaries for their freedom.
* * *
She needed the children returned to her custody so she could plan a brazen escape. Who could resist a mother’s plea? Her youngest child was not yet six. A mother asking for her children played to the Nazi image of ideal womanhood. She tearfully begged her brother Vittorio to intervene with her father and the Führer. Vittorio, moved by his sister’s genuine distress, agreed, boldly demanding the return of the children to Edda and offering to escort them himself to their mother at Ramiola. Hitler could hardly refuse to have Mussolini’s grandchildren returned to him without destroying any pretense of an Italian-German partnership, and so the request was ultimately granted. The Ciano children were reunited with their mother at the clinic just before mid-December.
By December, Fabrizio, Raimonda, and Marzio had not seen their mother for more than two months. Edda needed to prepare them now to be separated again from their parents for what might be considerably longer. She had thought about this carefully. There was only a very narrow window. She planned for the children to remain with her for just a few days. She would need to smuggle them out of the country immediately and in secret, before the Germans or the Italians thought to put monitors in place. Edda was not yet under intense police surveillance simply because no one expected that a mother would try to send her young children away within hours of their being returned to her. But that was precisely what Edda and Emilio were planning.
If her plan failed, she would not get a second chance. Edda knew there would be hell to pay, too, if her plan succeeded. They would try to keep the children’s disappearance a secret for as long as they could, and that meant that Edda would not be able to travel with them to the border. The flight for the border was planned for December 9, less than forty-eight hours after the children were returned to their mother. Edda and Emilio had arranged for two old friends, Tonino Pessina and Gerardo Gerardi, to help get the children across the Swiss border. There are tantalizing hints—unconfirmed and as yet unconfirmable—that Christine Granville may also have been part of this operation. Christine was famous for her ability to cross borders—indeed, she was so good at crossing hostile borders that the British wondered if she might be a double agent.
Edda would need to remain at the Ramiola clinic and keep up the appearance that the children were with her. Emilio Pucci, pretending to be called away on military duty, would manage the transport. Emilio hustled the three youngsters to a waiting car on December 9, a Thursday. They headed north to Milan, arriving on December 10, where Gerardo Gerardi had an apartment. On December 11, they traveled again to the appointed border town, where Tonino Pessina was waiting to walk with the children across the mountain to Switzerland. They had bribed an Italian border guard to let them pass, paying him, Edda said, “with my diamond brooch given me by the King and Queen of Italy as a wedding present, a ruby bracelet, and a solitaire.” All the time back in Ramiola, Edda carried on pretending that the children were with her in her rooms at the clinic, ordering extra meals and talking at doors to deflect attention.
* * *
The three young children would have to cross the mountain pass separating Italy from neutral Switzerland in the small hours of the morning. There was a full moon that night, and they trudged through snowfields, keeping to the edge of forest. It was cold, and the children understood that they were leaving their parents behind, perhaps until the war was over. Fabrizio, twelve, was old enough to understand that it might be far longer. Little Marzio struggled with the long walk through the half darkness. When they couldn’t go on, the children slept for a few hours in an Alpine shepherd’s hut, but they had to pass the border before morning, and they would have to make the last part of the journey alone.
When the children slipped at last through the barbed wire and netting before sunrise, they were met by the Swiss police from the village of Neggio, who had been warned that children were crossing alone. When a kindly Swiss guard offered them a piece of chocolate, Marzio was wide-eyed. Chocolate had been impossible to come by during the war with shortages and rations. He had only ever heard of such a marvel.
The Swiss police had been told that they were meeting the fleeing members of the Savoy royal family. They were in for an unpleasant shock when they learned that it was the Ciano children who had crossed the border. The Swiss would not have taken on the political complications that came with harboring the grandchildren of Mussolini had they been given the option, and diplomatic officials back in Bern were furious with the deception. But there was no option of sending children alone across a fascist border.
Edda had impressed upon the children that they would need to stay hidden even in Switzerland. They would be hunted by their grandfather and the Gestapo once their flight was discovered. Switzerland was safer than Italy, but Edda knew better than anyone the long reaches of the police and the intelligence services. The Swiss sternly gave the three children the same warning. “You must now forget your family name,” they admonished. “You are a Spanish family named Santos.” It was the assumed name Edda was already using at the border, a hint that somewhere along the way she had obtained for all of them false papers.
Emilio waited until morning on the Italian side of the border. When he heard nothing—a good sign—he drove back to Ramiola to let Edda know that the children were presumed to be safe in Switzerland. For as long as she could, she would carry on pretending in all her communications that the children were living quietly in Ramiola with her. As long as no one in her family visited her, the deception was unlikely to be discovered. On December 12, with the help of Hilde, Edda was smuggled into Galeazzo’s cell in Verona for a brief and rare prison visit. She had another important message for her husband. “It’s done, the children are safe,” she whispered this time as they parted.
Now Edda planned to see about saving the life of her children’s father.