The relationship between Edda and Hilde was not precisely a friendship. But it was not unfriendly either. The two women definitely had their doubts about each other. Hilde, a cool, strategic thinker, worried that Edda was too hotheaded, too Italian. Edda’s impulsivity and fearlessness had created all sorts of problems in Munich. Edda, for her part, didn’t fully trust the younger woman’s motives. Hilde was a Nazi intelligence agent, and it did not take a genius to figure out that her mission was to secure the diaries that the Germans so badly wanted. Whose team was she on, really? And which mattered to her more: Galeazzo or the manuscripts? Those questions niggled at Edda. But both women were running out of options by mid-December, when they turned to the only avenue either could see ahead: “the idea of my husband’s escape in exchange for his notebooks.”
Hilde—described by one commentator as “a semi-young German girl with the Dresden type of beauty”—saw this swap of the diaries for Galeazzo’s life as a win-win solution to what was, for her, an otherwise intractable problem. Her mission as an agent was to get possession of the papers and pass them to her bosses, and her chain of command was Harster, Höttl, Kaltenbrünner, and, ultimately, Himmler. The shared objective of those four men was first to take down Ribbentrop, a project Galeazzo would have supported even had his life not hung in the balance, and second—this was where Galeazzo’s aims and the aims of her Nazi bosses parted—to prevent the embarrassing publication of the count’s diaries. Hilde still planned to execute her duty, and she acknowledged later that, at the time of her first meeting with Galeazzo, she was still a Nazi, holding the rank of an SS major.
Hilde needed—and wanted—to execute her mission successfully. But there was nothing in her assignment that required Galeazzo to remain in prison in Verona. The show trial was an internal Italian political melodrama, not a German state security matter, and her loyalty was to Berlin and not to Salò. Neither was there anything in her assignment that required Galeazzo’s execution, which she saw already was where things were heading. Hitler himself doubted that Mussolini would have the mettle to execute the father of his grandchildren, though he certainly would have executed Galeazzo himself had the count been German.
Hilde had been sending back reports to her superiors throughout the fall and laying the groundwork for a plan to secure the diaries and free Galeazzo at the same time. They might have pulled off the swap back in Munich in September if Edda hadn’t blundered into the situation and alerted Hitler. Edda had learned that lesson. Galeazzo intended to publish his diaries once the war was over, to restore the family’s confiscated fortunes, and Hilde now advised Höttl that, since his incarceration, Galeazzo had taken the necessary steps to ensure that if he were executed they would be published immediately via the United Press International wire service. The diaries were in the hands of those diplomatic friends, poised to take action. This was a bold assertion and perhaps nothing more than a bluff of daring proportions, although on the whole the evidence suggests that Edda had passed at least part of the documents, either in the original or in copy, to diplomatic friends in the early autumn. Whether it was a bluff or the truth, Hilde’s goal in making sure her superiors knew of the claim was to remove any incentive to have Galeazzo quietly assassinated before the location of the diaries could be discovered.
Why kill him anyhow? she reasoned to her bosses. He was willing to sell the papers instead to the Germans, Hilde noted in intelligence briefings. All Galeazzo wanted was safe passage for himself and his family and enough money to live on. “We practically have two options,” Hilde advised her bosses: “to insist that he be executed [or] to conclude an agreement with him.…[i]f we buy the books for a generous price, and secure the needed guarantees [from him], we will be able to prevent this type of propaganda and get the useful knowledge ourselves.” She assured her handlers that the diaries, while replete with “funny episodes [about Ribbentrop] that are not always indicative of an above average intelligence,” were not critical of Hitler or Himmler. Mocking Hitler or Himmler would have been a deal breaker.
Where Galeazzo would go was a delicate question. Any escape would have to be a crossing at a land border. Flying to Spain and from there to South America was no longer an option. At first, Hilde thought perhaps Galeazzo could remain within the Third Reich once the diaries were exchanged, and in their initial planning an idea was floated to spirit him away to the remote estate of a friendly aristocrat in Hungary. But Hungary was still within the Reich, so that plan left Galeazzo potentially exposed to retribution from Ribbentrop, who would certainly be in a murderous mood when the content of the diaries reached him. Thus they decided that Galeazzo would also need to flee to Switzerland.
* * *
By December 1943, the broad outlines of a swap—the diaries in exchange for a prison break orchestrated by the German spy services—were coming together. Hilde was the broker and the chief architect. “It has been said,” Edda wrote later, “that the person most active in this operation, set up by Kaltenbrünner and Himmler in order to cause Ribbentrop’s downfall, was Frau Beetz. That is correct.”
Hilde flew to Berlin in December, around the same time that the Ciano children were being reunited with their mother, to make a preliminary pitch for the swap directly to Wilhelm Höttl. Höttl approved of the plan. He asked Hilde to draft a formal memorandum that he could share with Ernst Kaltenbrünner, detailing especially “the possibilities of using Ciano’s diaries to expose Ribbentrop’s shortcomings.” Hilde promptly delivered the memorandum, then returned to Verona on December 9 to await news of a decision, landing back in Italy just as Emilio and Edda were spiriting the Ciano children into Switzerland.
* * *
Hilde described the feelings that she held for Galeazzo as something “more intense than simple sympathy, something that arose from my heart,” and she was constantly in and out of his cell, often staying for hours. Hilde was falling in love. It was a genuine complication.
Hilde confessed to Galeazzo that she was a German spy, and, although her bosses didn’t know it, Galeazzo was by now drafting her intelligence briefings back to Berlin and Munich. They discussed for hours how to best make the case to Kaltenbrünner that the diaries were worth the trouble. As long as Galeazzo’s enemy was the Italian Fascist party and not the Third Reich, Hilde did not have to choose between love and her country—a powerful motivation for the young agent to make this deal happen. Somehow, in this moment of moral crisis, Hilde still hoped to remain neutral.
* * *
Back at Scalzi, however, it wasn’t just the friendly prison guard, Mario, who noticed certain “unequivocal” signs between Galeazzo and Hilde. Their conspiratorial intimacy was raising all sorts of red flags in the two weeks before Christmas. Afraid that she might be pulled from her assignment at the crucial moment if her personal feelings for Galeazzo were suspected and she was considered compromised, the couple embarked now on a campaign of deliberate misdirection. At his pre-trial hearing, Galeazzo put on a great show of irritation, demanding that the magistrate explain “who is that woman they have put at my side?…She stays continually with me. She prepares my coffee in the morning, she puts my cell in order, she stops to talk for a long time. She returns in the afternoon, she prepares my tea, she stops to play chess or checkers. In short, I don’t manage to free myself from her. She is like my shadow.” The magistrate, with a smug smile, was pleased to see Galeazzo was chafing under German surveillance, which he hoped the prison would ensure was ongoing.
Galeazzo’s friend Zenone Benini was in on their secret, and he wasn’t entirely sure what to make of Hilde. His assessment in December, though, was that Hilde was at least “slightly in love” with Galeazzo. Zenone Benini was among Galeazzo’s oldest friends. Their relationship went back to their early days together at the same high school in Livorno, and they had worked together in close quarters. During his rise to political and social prominence, Galeazzo secured plum government assignments for Zenone, including a post as his undersecretary. Now Zenone was in prison in large part because of that friendship. Not a member of the Grand Council, he had not been involved in the July 25 vote against Mussolini, but he had been arrested anyhow and was being asked some hard questions about whether his loyalties were to friends like Galeazzo Ciano and Dino Grandi or to the Fascist party.
Smuggled into Galeazzo’s cell by a friendly prison guard, presumably the amiable Mario, who let the old friends talk sometimes in the evenings, Zenone was surprised to meet there “a pretty, smiling young woman…with a light German accent, but her Italian was perfect.”
“And who is that woman?” Zenone asked his friend.
“A spy,” Galeazzo replied with a shrug, “but you can trust her.”
“Aside from Frau Beetz, who was acting from selfish motives or perhaps because she was slightly in love with Galeazzo,” Zenone wrote later, “the only person who attempted to soften Ciano’s situation” was that friendly prison guard, Mario Pellegrinotti.
* * *
Meanwhile the political trial moved forward. They were all caught up in a complex political tangle of motives, Galeazzo especially. Some factions in Verona wanted the count out of the way. Both the German ambassador to Salò and the Italian-based SS pressed for the trial to continue. Ribbentrop, it now transpired, had been behind the count’s forced return flight to Italy, and he looked forward eagerly to his rival’s execution. The diaries could only cause problems for Ribbentrop, after all, and if they were to disappear along with Galeazzo—all the better. Hilde’s superiors in the security service, especially Kaltenbrünner, on the other hand, took umbrage at the idea of Galeazzo’s political execution by the Italians, and they hated Ribbentrop sidestepping judgment. That left the SD and its sister branch, the Gestapo, tentatively discussing at Hilde’s urging a side deal to free Galeazzo secretly. Mussolini didn’t seem to give a consistent answer from one day to the other. Negotiating a release would require delicate handling.
Mussolini issuing a pardon was the obvious solution. Edda made one last trip to Lake Garda to plead with her father in the middle of December. Mussolini casually assured Edda that Galeazzo would soon be free but insisted that, for the moment, he was powerless to stop a trial in process. Perhaps Mussolini truly could do nothing to help Galeazzo. He was more or less a political prisoner of the Germans himself in his lakeside villa. More likely, Mussolini was weighing his political survival against the life of Galeazzo. What could he offer his daughter in the meantime? Galeazzo had written to Edda a moving letter. “I approach Christmas feeling very sad, without [the children], without you,” he told her. Edda wanted her father’s permission to see Galeazzo on Christmas Day. Mussolini promised.
* * *
Edda wrote to Galeazzo on December 23, telling him of Mussolini’s promise for the holiday visit and announcing her visit. They would have at least a little celebration. “Truly I have moments in which I seem to be going mad,” she wrote her husband. “I am sad and I love you so much and I am more than ever near you.”
Galeazzo knew better than to trust his father-in-law. He had already accepted the inevitable. Galeazzo that same night, alone in his cell after Hilde had gone, wrote three letters: a letter to Victor Emmanuel, the exiled king of Italy; a letter to the British prime minister, Winston Churchill; and a preface to his diaries, addressed to us, his future readers.
To the king, Galeazzo condemned his father-in-law as the sole author of Italy’s tragedy. “One man, just one man,” he wrote, was responsible for the war that had destroyed their country.
To Winston Churchill and the world beyond Italy, he placed the blame equally on Mussolini and the Germans. “I was never Mussolini’s accomplice in that crime against our country and humanity, that of fighting side by side with the Germans,” he wrote the British prime minister. He tried to explain that he had seen and known hellish darkness, and the diaries were the only atonement he could offer. “The crime which I am now about to expiate,” Galeazzo wrote, “is that of having witnessed and been disgusted by the cold, cruel and cynical preparation for this war by Hitler and the Germans. I was the only foreigner to see at close quarters this loathsome clique of bandits preparing to plunge the world into a bloody war. Now, in accordance with gangster rule, they are planning to suppress a dangerous witness.” Galeazzo already knew that he would be executed. But he wanted the prime minister to have the diaries.
Above all, Galeazzo wanted to explain to Churchill and the Allies the importance of those diaries that were his last obsession and his testimony:
I put a diary of mine and various documents in a safe place, which will prove, more than I myself could, the crimes committed by those people with whom later that tragic and vile puppet Mussolini associated himself.…Perhaps what I am offering you to-day is but little, but that and my life are all I can offer.…This testimony of mine should be brought to light so that the world may know, may hate and may remember, and that those who will have to judge the future should not be ignorant of the fact that the misfortune of Italy was not the fault of her people, but due to the shameful behavior of one man.
To us, the future readers of those diaries, Galeazzo wrote: “Within a few days a sham tribunal will make public a sentence which has already been decided by Mussolini…I accept calmly what is to be my infamous destiny.”
* * *
Galeazzo Ciano bore moral responsibility and had committed other crimes, passed over in his self-reckoning, but, as far as the letters went, they were the truth: Galeazzo had fought at every step against the Italians entering the war on the side of the Axis and had paid with his freedom—and he knew, would pay with his life—for having voted for a separate peace and for Mussolini’s removal from power. He hoped his diaries would absolve him, but more important he hoped that they would absolve the Italian people for having gone to war with Hitler.
These letters would have been of great interest to the Nazis, who had every reason to wish to see them suppressed, as well as the diaries. Had the letters been intercepted, it would have been a death warrant for Galeazzo. In a sign of how certain Galeazzo was that he could trust Hilde, he gave all three letters to her the next day, with instructions to deliver them to Edda. And Hilde did, faithfully.
Edda, for her part, promptly posted the documents for the king and Churchill onward to Switzerland, asking her brother-in-law Massimo Magistrati, the Italian minister in Bern, to arrange their hand delivery. Galeazzo’s letter to his future readers she added to the manuscripts. If Galeazzo had come to moral clarity about the war, and taken his faltering steps toward some kind of redemption, Edda’s panic was completely personal. She just wanted to save the life of her husband. The Germans would get Galeazzo’s letter if they set him free. If they betrayed her, she would make sure that the entire world read Galeazzo’s last, bitter indictment.
* * *
Christmas morning was clear and bright in 1943 in Ramiola. That morning, Emilio and Edda set off in his military officer’s car to Verona for her promised visit with Galeazzo. Edda was missing the children, but they were in good spirits. They stopped for a holiday lunch together in a little restaurant, and in the early afternoon Emilio dropped Edda off at the entrance to Scalzi Prison. She had put on a pretty dress for Galeazzo and carried with her a gift basket with a bottle of his favorite cologne, a bouquet of flowers, and a box of candy. At the gate, she was refused entrance. There was nothing they could do, an agent explained impassively. These were Mussolini’s direct orders. Her father had personally instructed that she not be permitted to see Galeazzo. It was a crushing betrayal for Edda.
Hilde came out to stand in the cold and try to explain, because it was worse than Edda imagined, and Hilde was also reeling. Mussolini had decided that Ciano’s trial would go ahead immediately. Galeazzo had been instructed to name his defense attorney that morning. His execution—because there was no doubt what the outcome of the trial would be—was expected before the new year. Her father didn’t want Edda to upset herself by seeing her husband again. There could be no purpose. She would not ever see Galeazzo again. That was her father’s Christmas message.
Edda, unsurprisingly, collapsed in hysterics of rage and grief in the prison courtyard. But no amount of weeping and wailing was going to change Mussolini’s mind. He wasn’t even in Verona. Emilio and Hilde bundled Edda back in the car, and there was nothing to do but take her back to the clinic for sedation. Hilde certainly was not going to tell Edda now what was worrying her desperately. The night before, Galeazzo had been abused in his cell, when drunken German soldiers arrived to show off their prisoner to local prostitutes. Hilde, afraid that Galeazzo would be tortured and lynched overnight, refused to leave the prison even for a moment. As Emilio pulled the car away, Hilde walked slowly back inside with Edda’s gift basket. When Galeazzo saw his wife’s gift and understood she had been turned away for what he knew would have been their last visit, he put his head in his hands and cried.
* * *
The only hope now was a German prison break. The operation to swap the diaries was still in the planning phase; Hilde would need more time to arrange it. Mussolini’s decision to expedite the trial put all that in jeopardy. Hilde could only think of one person who could persuade Mussolini to spare the father of his grandchildren. She decided to write a letter directly to his mistress, Clara Petacci, asking her to stop an execution. Clara, moved by the plea, did what she could, writing, “My Ben, I have had a long, terrible night. Nightmares, anxieties, blood and ruins. Among the figures, known and unknown, appearing in a red cloud, was that of Ciano. Ben, save that man! Show the Italians you still control your own will. Fate, perhaps, will be kinder to us.” Clara’s dream would later seem like a premonition. Fate would not be kinder to either her or Mussolini.
* * *
On the long drive back to Ramiola, Edda wept, head against the window. By the time she and Emilio arrived back at the clinic, though, she had rallied. If her father would not budge and if Hilde could not help them—the plan to break Galeazzo from prison in a swap for the diaries now seemed stalled, and the clock was ticking—then, by God, Edda would mount the rescue operation herself. She decided to blackmail her father and Hitler. “I now realized,” Edda said, “that there was nothing more to be done in Italy and that I had to flee my country to play my last card—blackmail—in neutral territory.”
She would flee with the diaries to Switzerland, where her children remained in hiding, and, once there, with Emilio’s help as a messenger, she would bargain for Galeazzo’s life directly. Time was short. She would make everyone pay with the truth if they failed her. Edda and Emilio returned to the clinic late on Christmas. The next day was December 26. Galeazzo’s trial was expected to begin immediately, with a verdict and sentencing on December 28. Execution, they assumed, would take place the following morning, December 29. If Edda was going to reach the Swiss border in time to make her threats of retribution effective, she would have to leave now. She was ready.
They would have to be strategic in selecting which part of the diaries to take with her in her flight for the border. Edda would not be able to carry all of the diaries and papers. There were too many volumes. She had to be able to carry them hidden. She had to be able to cross a militarized border at a run with them. There were also some other immediate logistical challenges. Edda had some of the papers with her in Ramiola, but portions remained hidden in Rome, miles away. There would be no time to go to Rome that night and rifle through them.
Choosing the most important and damaging volumes from among those at the clinic, Emilio and Edda set off early in the morning for Como in Emilio’s car, managing to lose a Gestapo minder on the road—Emilio had not been a race-car driver for nothing. They delivered the papers to Tonino Pessina, who promised to hide them somewhere near the border to be recovered in the hours before her crossing.
Those who whisper that Christina Granville played a role in arranging Edda’s flight say that Christina, accompanied by Delia di Bagno, met Edda and Emilio at the Pessina residence that morning in Como. At least one report says that Edda gave Christina a copy of Galeazzo’s preface to the diaries and allowed her to take photographs of the diaries, destined for the Allies, as Galeazzo had wanted. If true, those photographic negatives have never been discovered, although it might explain the astonishing lack of interest from British intelligence in recovering the Ciano files later. Until the wartime personnel files of Christina Granville are found, there is no way to know for certain.
Edda and Emilio were in Como only briefly. Almost immediately, they turned back south for the long drive home to Ramiola. No one could suspect that Edda was planning to make a break for the border. She had to show her face overnight at the clinic. Tonino Pessina, meanwhile, agreed to arrange things with a smuggler for the next evening. The plan was to return to Ramiola overnight, then drive to Verona early in the morning to see Hilde, so she could pass to Galeazzo the message that Edda was fleeing and planning to issue an ultimatum to her father and Hitler. They would turn then to the most dangerous part of the adventure: Emilio would drive her nonstop for the Swiss border, where the diaries would be waiting, and she would cross out of Italy on the night of December 27. Then she would blackmail Hitler.
* * *
The plan went smoothly the next morning. They hit the road in good time. They would have lunch with Hilde at noon in Verona. They planned then to drive on to Como and, at nightfall, the border.
They arrived to find Hilde determined to do whatever was necessary to stop them.