The double cross by General Harster had not been intentional. Once again, the problem was Hitler.
On January 6, 1944, the down-payment papers had been winging their way to Berlin with Walter Segna. Emilio had been en route back to the clinic at Ramiola with the hidden Germania packet under his overcoat. In Germany, Ernst Kaltenbrünner had given his official go-ahead for Operation Conte, and the SS men were on the ground in Italy and ready to deploy. Wilhelm Harster had been commanding the raid, and very soon Galeazzo Ciano would have been broken out of his Verona prison on January 7.
Then a phone had rung in the Verona headquarters. The call came sometime on January 6, as Emilio and Edda were driving toward Milan to collect the hidden diaries from Tonino Pessina. Harster went white when the line connected. Adolf Hitler was on the line. He had a personal message for his general: If Galeazzo Ciano disappeared from that prison, Harster would be the next one executed. As Walter Segna put it later: “Hitler had at the last moment vetoed Ciano’s liberation.” The Führer had decided. General Harster was not going to debate such clear instructions. He knew how Hitler executed those who disobeyed his orders. It generally involved meat hooks and piano wire. The general promptly called off the rescue mission.
* * *
No one is quite certain how Hitler got wind of the plan to free Galeazzo Ciano. Some believe that Kaltenbrünner and Himmler decided to ask Hitler’s permission at the last minute, repeating Edda’s mistake in Munich. Some say Ribbentrop learned of the operation and informed the Führer. In Berlin, there are some hints Kaltenbrünner and Himmler may have tried to buy some time. Galeazzo’s rescheduled trial was slated to begin on Saturday, January 8, and no one doubted that it would be a speedy verdict and a speedy execution. Someone in the German embassy reached out to the Fascist party in Italy on January 7, just after Operation Conte had been scuttled, asking if the trial could not be postponed a few days longer, though no one could understand the reason. Perplexed, party officials with Salò took the request to Mussolini, who was equally mystified. By now, though, Mussolini considered that the matter was settled. Turning to his personal secretary, he remarked: “No intervention now can halt the course of events! For me, Ciano is already dead. He will not be able now to maneuver around in Italy, to let himself be seen, to have a name. Whoever voted for Grandi’s order of the day will be condemned for it.”
* * *
Hilde learned that the deal was off—and that the Germans, naturally, were keeping the down-payment diaries—sometime on January 6 or possibly January 7. She confronted General Harster. He explained that there was nothing he could do: The orders came from the Führer. Hilde wrote to Kaltenbrünner to protest. She had brokered a deal in good faith, she said. Galeazzo would think she had tricked him. He had been dubious all along, and she had pushed for the deal wanting both to save him and to accomplish her mission. Kaltenbrünner couldn’t care less what Galeazzo Ciano thought. She had finished her mission and should be happy. The papers most damaging to Ribbentrop were now in the hands of his internal enemies. Kaltenbrünner and Himmler were delighted. The fate of Galeazzo was not their interest. Kaltenbrünner’s only reply to her plaintive message was to send Hilde a huge bouquet of roses with a personal note of congratulations.
She had completed her mission. So why did she feel so bad? “I was then a little naïve,” Hilde said later.
* * *
Telling Edda that she had been duped for a second time by the Nazis was going to be unpleasant. Hilde was dreading it, especially since Edda would have to be persuaded to keep quiet. Edda would have to keep her head down now or there would be real trouble. Operation Conte had been a secret mission, and had it succeeded it would have been a stinging embarrassment for the Italian Fascist party. Talking about the failed mission could only harm Galeazzo in prison.
Edda, as yet, knew nothing of what awaited her. On the morning of January 8, she was desperately making her way back to Verona from the failed rendezvous and a cold night in a roadside ditch. She had waited all night for a car that was never coming. But she had been late and thought that, somewhere, Galeazzo was free, and she had simply missed the meet-up. There must have been a reason they could not wait for her. Maybe Galeazzo was already safe in Switzerland.
Bedraggled and wet, but hopeful that Hilde could reunite her with Galeazzo in hiding, Edda made straight for German headquarters. When she gave her cover name, Emilia Santos, she got blank stares, and they refused at the front desk to let her see General Harster. When she lost her temper and announced that she was Edda Mussolini Ciano and commanded that she be taken to General Harster, she was immediately shown into an empty office, while the clerk considered. He called upstairs to Hilde. Hilde rushed down from her office and burst into the room where Edda was waiting. “She stared at me, incredulous and panic-stricken,” Edda remembered. Edda was making a scene. It was dangerous. Worse, Edda’s muddy fur coat bulged at the waist at funny, crooked angles. The diaries were still strapped to her waist. That they were here was obvious.
* * *
Hilde’s brief was to get the diaries. Another tranche of the diaries was in front of her. With their discovery would come rewards and a major promotion. She had a husband deployed, and her success would buy him safety and security. This time, if she took the diaries from Edda here in headquarters, her reward would be more than a bouquet of flowers. All she had to do was say the word. Harster would order a search of Edda. Hitler would have his diaries. “Frau Beetz could have taken the notebooks then, if she had wished, because she knew that I had them on my person,” Edda said of that moment.
Hilde also knew what would come after that. Edda would be arrested. The possession of the diaries would seal Galeazzo’s fate. The Germans would have no incentive to stop his execution. Hilde had done her job and delivered up papers that could cripple Ribbentrop with his internal political enemies. She had pleased her bosses. She should have been glad. Instead Hilde felt terrible. She had been part of a trick on Galeazzo and Edda—the second trick that the Germans had played on them.
Hilde had come to realize in those last few weeks of December and the first week of January something else: She loved Galeazzo. Not half in love. Not sympathy and affection. Not sex and passion. Or not just sex and passion. They had been constant companions in a prison cell, facing together terror, death, and sorrow, thrown together over a holiday when Galeazzo ached for his children. Galeazzo had opened his heart. Hilde’s heart had responded. Far fewer self-disclosures have been known to make strangers fall in love with each other, and Galeazzo and Hilde were not strangers.
* * *
General Harster, when he arrived, was grim-faced. Hilde looked at the general. She looked at Edda’s bulging coat. Here was Hilde’s dark thicket, and she chose what she could see was the only straight way forward. Her decision in that moment changed the entire course of her life, though Hilde could not yet know it. She said nothing.
* * *
Signaling to General Harster that she would manage the situation, Hilde waited until the corridor was quiet. Then she grabbed Edda by the arm and half dragged her to the street. “You are crazy to have come here,” Hilde hissed in the courtyard, frightened. Edda demanded to know where Galeazzo was. Hilde tried to look her in the eye as she confessed that her superiors had called off the operation. Edda exploded.
Hilde urged Edda to be quiet. She would come and explain it all to her. But Edda must listen: She needed to check into a hotel and stay there. The terror in Hilde’s eyes finally convinced Edda that the street was too dangerous a place for this conversation. After, in a nondescript Veronese hotel room, Hilde tried to explain to Edda that there had been no choice. Edda had no patience with excuses. “You have deceived us in the most despicable manner, and I would swear that you are ready to do it again. One can never trust you, not even when the life of a human being is in the bargain,” Edda raged at Hilde. There was nothing Hilde could say. She knew it was true. There had been base treachery, though she had not meant to be a part of it, and she had not saved Galeazzo.
Hilde tried to explain that General Harster’s own life had hung in the balance. Edda had to understand. The order had come directly from Hitler. Edda surely understood that Harster could not disobey the Führer. It was the same law with her father; the law at the heart of fascism. Führerprinzip. When Edda stopped crying, she took Hilde’s hand, nodded, and thanked Hilde for trying.
Edda also had to know the rest. Hilde in a few words spoken in a hotel room in Verona that morning crossed a frontier from which there was no returning. To say nothing was one thing, a sin of omission. To help Edda—to aid her in the commission—was active treason and directly contrary to the interest of the German security services. American spymaster Allen Dulles would later see what Hilde Beetz said next as the moment she went from being a Nazi spy to being the Allies’ self-appointed double agent.
The Germans, she confided to Edda, were still determined to find the remainder of the diaries. They did not suspect that Edda had the diaries on her, but they did suspect that she knew their location. Edda would be watched, and, ultimately, she would be arrested. They needed now to get Edda and the diaries out of the country. Edda had to run. Switzerland was the only hope if she were to save herself—and perhaps, in one last bold gamble, Galeazzo.
Hilde would help her make the escape and help her take the diaries with her. “I felt an obligation to repair the wrong,” she explained later, and she didn’t know how else to do it.
* * *
It would take a team of conspirators, in fact, to make Edda’s escape now possible. Fleeing was a hundred times more perilous than it had been just forty-eight hours earlier. Edda and Hilde would need help in making the slip, and they knew they could count on Emilio Pucci. Emilio had waited that night with the car on the side of the road to Brescia, while Edda trudged on to the milepost; in the morning, he had finally been able to repair the flat tire. He arrived back in Verona around noon, not long after Edda. Hilde, expecting him, quickly intercepted his arrival.
He and Edda would be, from now on, she warned them both, under constant Gestapo surveillance. General Harster had a grudging admiration for Edda. She was a brave and charming woman. But he had been made personally responsible for making sure she did not go missing, and he was not willing to risk his neck swinging in a noose for Mussolini’s impetuous daughter. If their plot succeeded, Harster would be in some considerable difficulty. If Hilde’s role were revealed, the Nazis followed the ancient Aryan rule of Sippenhaft—kin punishment. She and her family in Germany would be executed as traitors.
When Emilio saw Edda in Verona that afternoon, he could hardly recognize her. How twenty-four hours could make such a difference, he could not imagine. The events of the last day had shaken and exhausted Edda. She looked old and ill and haggard. Emilio simply took her in his arms and said nothing.
For the time being, Hilde explained that they would have to turn themselves over to the Gestapo. Those were General Harster’s orders. Surveillance was being mobilized. They would have to pretend to go along with the German instructions and appear to accept retirement in the clinic. Edda was bundled into a waiting car. Emilio was permitted to follow. A police convoy accompanied them back to Ramiola. Fourteen heavily armed SS agents and a contingent of Italian fascist police swarmed around vehicles on motorcycles, poised from sidecars to shoot in the event there was some undiscovered plot to free them. The clinic had been torn apart in a search, and Edda and Emilio would be under house arrest while the hunt for Galeazzo’s remaining papers was under way in other locations. Little did the Gestapo know that the missing papers were at that very moment being escorted with Edda back to the clinic under guard, wrapped around her waist under her matted fur jacket. If the situation had not been so frightening, the irony might have been funny.
Before the convoy rolled out, Hilde had managed to pass to Edda one last private letter from Galeazzo, written from prison when he first understood that Operation Conte had been aborted. Only once she was back in her room in Ramiola that night, with the door locked, did Edda dare to open the letter. “Darling,” Galeazzo had written in that long day when he knew the truth already and when Edda was still rushing toward a milepost on a highway shoulder, “meanwhile you are still living in the wonderful illusion that in a few hours we are going to be together again and free; for me agony has already started…bless the children and bring them up to respect and worship what is right and honorable in life.”
It was too much for Edda. She had spent so long living in terror. They had been trying to flee to safety as a family since July. Now the hope that had kept her moving forward was gone. Galeazzo’s trial, even now, was under way. There would be a verdict soon. She would need to be in Switzerland with the children before that verdict came if she were ever to see them again, because she did not doubt that Hilde was right: When the search for the diaries failed, she would be arrested.
Edda looked around her room at the clinic and decided to smash everything to pieces. She would bring the world crashing down with her. Mirrors, lamps, photograph frames, and whiskey glasses: She hurled them at the walls and windows, taking furious satisfaction in the sharp tinkle of glass as it fell and shattered. Emilio came rushing in and, alarmed, called the clinic doctors. The doctors tried to calm her, but she refused to be sedated. There was no sedating this anger. The doctors left to confer, and it was Emilio’s blunt words that finally stopped her. They needed to get across the border. There was only one route left to them. She had children. And she still had most of the papers. They did not have time for drama, and they could not make the run for the border if Edda got herself arrested. Edda grew quiet. “I decided to go to Switzerland,” Edda said after, “in order to stake everything on one last attempt with my father and with the Führer by sending them both letters that my friend Emilio Pucci would have delivered once I passed the frontier.” She would blackmail Mussolini and Hitler. And if they did not spare her husband’s life, she would make them suffer. She would be, she swore, an avenging fury.
A decision made, Emilio and Edda turned their minds immediately to the logistics. They would have to leave in the next few hours. First they would need to evade house arrest and the police stationed outside their bedroom windows. Then they would need to travel, undetected, hours north, and slip across a heavily guarded border in the winter. And they would need to select the most important of the papers for Edda to carry with her and find somewhere safe to hide the rest, because it was now even less possible to make for the border with three suitcases of documents.
Edda and Emilio selected the five most damaging of Galeazzo’s seven wartime foreign-office diaries, and Emilio again wrapped them around Edda’s midriff in a thick makeshift belt fashioned from the legs of her pajamas. The remaining two foreign-office diaries, along with the documents they called the Germania papers, Edda’s personal records and her Red Cross diary, some jewelry, and some phonograph voice recordings, were carefully wrapped into a package, sealed with wax on the strings, and given to the clinic director. Dr. Elvezio Melocchi, they had learned, was a partisan in the Italian resistance, and the papers would help the Allies. He agreed to hide the package inside a local electrical power plant, where the risk of electrocution would prevent anyone idly looking. If Edda and Emilio were caught and executed, the doctor promised to deliver the package to the Americans or the British.
There were now at least three sets of papers: those left with the clinic doctor, those notebooks already transferred to Berlin as down payment, and the diaries that Edda would carry with her in her flight. There may also have been other papers or copies of papers still lodged with friends in the diplomatic service. The package left behind at the clinic became known as the Ramiola papers and, later, simply as “the chocolates.”
* * *
Edda would have to make her escape quickly if she were to have any hope of saving Galeazzo, whose trial was already under way, and by morning the net was tightening around her. On January 9, 1944, the following day, SS Lieutenant Robert Hutting rudely began his day with a seven o’clock Sunday morning phone call from his boss, General Harster. Kaltenbrünner had sent a warning telegram from Germany, reaffirming Hitler’s orders and directing the SS in Italy to “Watch closely the daughter of Mr. Mayer [i.e. Mussolini]. She can move and go where she wants, but she is not to put a foot in Switzerland. An eventual attempt by her to leave must be impeded even by force. The diaries of the son-in-law of Mr. Mayer are still to be found. Search for them.” Harster was putting Lieutenant Hutting in charge of making sure orders from Berlin were followed and that Edda Ciano went nowhere near the Swiss border.
Lieutenant Hutting immediately set off for Ramiola with another seven SS agents in tow, an entourage that this time included both Hilde Beetz and Walter Segna as operational supervisors, to ensure Edda remained at the clinic. By the time they arrived, they learned that Emilio Pucci, still active in the Italian military, had been given permission to attend a previously scheduled medical appointment at the base in Ferrara and had departed early that morning in his air force uniform. That made Hutting nervous.
But Edda was the target of this operation, not the marchese. The Gestapo men on the overnight watch assured the SS lieutenant that Edda was still fast asleep in her room at the clinic. The doctors confirmed that she had asked for sleeping pills before going to bed, and, as staff observed to the Germans, they could see plainly that the note she had posted on her door in the early hours of the morning was still there: “I am very tired and I don’t feel well. Please do not disturb for any reason.” Placated by these reassurances, the SS returned to their posts with instructions to inform Hilde and Walter Segna as soon as Edda was available.
Hilde knew, of course, that Edda was already gone. Or at least she hoped that Edda and Emilio had made a break for it, because, if they had not, it was now too late for them. She would do everything she could to stall a search of Edda’s quarters, to give them time if they had attempted a flight to the border. And this time, Edda and Emilio had not hesitated. Just after three o’clock in the morning, when the clinic was silent and they hoped their minders would be least attentive, Edda crept to the clinic basement and squeezed through a small window in the foundation. She trudged alone in the darkness through the fields and woods to a small country lane, where she waited for Emilio to arrive with his car just after seven o’clock in the morning. As Emilio pulled to the shoulder, engine still running, Edda dashed from her hiding spot in the thicket and leapt into the car. In a few moments, they were gone.
On the run, the couple had no way of knowing how long it would be before their escape was discovered, and they had a long and perilous journey in front of them. Every moment that put ground between them and the SS counted. All morning and long into the afternoon they followed small back roads north, trying to avoid detection or suspicion. Hilde would do all she could at the clinic to delay Edda being “awakened” to give them as much of a head start as possible.
* * *
They were making for Como, where the Swiss border juts down deep into Italian territory south of Lugano. Tonino Pessina and his wife, Nora, had an apartment in Como and once again stepped into the breach to try to save Edda and her family. Tonino would arrange for a smuggler to take Edda across the border. But first they had to get to Como safely. There would be checkpoints. They knew that, when their flight was discovered, the police all across northern Italy would be searching for them.
The journey was less than 120 miles, but they crawled along the most obscure back roads, Emilio driving and Edda struggling to map out a route on the most remote byways possible. They could not risk the highway. They traveled through countless small villages, skirting far around Milan, and always careful to keep Edda’s face casually covered with a head scarf if they passed a transport truck or a roadside farmer. She would be instantly recognizable as Mussolini’s daughter.
Darkness was falling when they crept into Como, and they allowed themselves a few hours with Tonino and Nora to rest, eat, and leave behind a cache of valuables—some say perhaps even a further cache of political papers—that Edda and Galeazzo might need to recover later. Then, taking advantage of the lull at the dinner hour and the early winter sunset, they set off again that night in a small convoy heading west, toward the village of Cantello-Ligurno, a mile or two out of Varese. From Cantello-Ligurno, they continued north, following the contours of the Swiss border, until they reached the small village of Viggiù, at the foot of the Poncione d’Arzo, a mountain peak separating Italy and Switzerland.
At 10:30 P.M., according to later German police reports, Tonino, Edda, Emilio, and a man they called Uncle Piero checked into the Hotel Madonnina, while arrangements were made with a local smuggler to escort Edda across the border. She might have crossed that night, January 8, and it would have been far safer had she done so. But when the smuggler learned that it was Edda Ciano that he was to risk his neck for, the price of his services skyrocketed at the last moment, forcing Uncle Piero to spend the night working contacts in the black market to locate the sack of rice that the smuggler demanded as his bonus. The setback put them all in danger, and they spent all night listening to every sound, afraid their location would be discovered.
The delay of a whole day at the small border town was harrowing. They would have to evade arrest all of Sunday, January 9. The entourage had no choice but keep out of sight and wait for nightfall. They guessed that by now the Germans would be looking for them in towns along the Swiss frontier, and if their steps had been traced it would be all over.
In the hotel room that morning, Edda put the final touches on three letters. Emilio would hand-deliver them to Hilde as soon as Edda was safely across the border. All three letters were postdated. They were ransom demands, her last effort to rescue Galeazzo. One was for General Harster. One was for Hitler. And one was for her father. They would go down in history as the most fearless and reckless letters anyone would ever write to either Hitler or Mussolini and as the central elements in one of World War II’s most determined rescue missions.
* * *
All day at the hotel, the conspirators tried to remain inconspicuous and to keep quiet. The tension of waiting was nerve racking. Twilight came at 5:00 P.M. As dusk settled, they finally moved. Emilio drove Edda east to the border alone. They didn’t dare to risk headlights. He stopped the car a few hundred yards away from the heavily policed crossing, and standing on the side of the road he embraced Edda one last time. Then he looked at her seriously and placed into her hands his loaded military pistol.
If they stopped her, she must use it and try to defend herself. She had to get across the border. If she were stopped and could not escape, they would brutalize her. Did she understand? Edda nodded. “As I said goodbye to her,” Emilio remembered, “she was extremely calm and firm. I gave her a revolver to shoot if the German or Italian guards tried to stop her, and to shoot herself if they got her. Then she went.”
In the darkness the smuggler was waiting for Edda in a small roadside wood. There was a bright moon—not good, but they did not have the luxury of waiting days for nighttime cover and passing lunar phases—and they would have to watch carefully and cross in between armed patrols. Crouched to the ground, Edda and the smuggler waited, taking care not to break a twig or make a sound. Edda would have to run, bent over as low as she could manage, across an open field in the last approach to the border, and the smuggler would tell her when to go. If she were spotted, she should expect gunfire. She should try to zigzag and not let razor wire stop her. Once she stepped into that no-man’s-land, it was Switzerland or nothing.
As a German patrol passed out of range, the smuggler hissed to Edda, “Go, now!” She knew she was supposed to bend and keep down as she made her way through the grassland. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She was tired of being frightened and broken, and perhaps fear too made her delirious. “I don’t know why, but at that point I didn’t care what might happen to me,” she remembered. Standing tall, Edda Ciano walked slowly, majestically across the field of no-man’s-land and strolled into Switzerland.
* * *
The Swiss customs inspector at the checkpoint had been notified that a refugee would make the crossing and was not surprised to see her come through the field, and he had to admire her poise, however foolhardy. But they had been told to expect the fleeing Duchess of Aoste, a member of the endangered Italian royal family. “[H]e was astonished and annoyed to hear me say that I was Edda Ciano,” Edda remembered. Accepting a member of the exiled Italian royal family was one thing. Accepting Mussolini’s daughter as a refugee was a problem. The Swiss had already been tricked into accepting the Ciano children, and Edda knew that she could not expect to find a warm welcome in Switzerland. She was as despised as her father, and her presence had the potential to compromise Switzerland’s precarious neutral status. The border agents now had on their hands a major diplomatic incident.
They would be up all night dealing with the problem. The phone lines buzzed back and forth between the border post and Bern for hours, and diplomats were roused from sleep for urgent consultations while the Swiss figured out how to manage this very unwelcome arrival. Edda sat on a bench in the customs post under the glare of a flickering light, staring ahead resolutely and unmoving for hours.
Word eventually reached the head of the American Office of Strategic Services in Bern, Allen Dulles, who already had the so-called Ciano Diaries on his radar. “Shortly after Edda arrived here,” he noted in his files, “I made enquiry of Magistrati.” Massimo Magistrati was the Italian minister in Switzerland, but he was also the husband of Galeazzo’s late sister, Maria Ciano, and the man to whom Edda had forwarded Galeazzo’s December 23 letters to Winston Churchill and Victor Emmanuel III. “[H]e conveyed, and I believe honestly,” Dulles recorded, “the impression that she did not have the Diaries and that they were still in Italy.” That was good news for Edda—had she been suspected of having the diaries, her situation would have been perilous even in Switzerland. But it also meant that Allen Dulles let the matter drift longer than he would have liked later.
* * *
The next morning, January 10, the Swiss decided there was nothing else to be done. They would try to hide Edda’s presence at all costs, but they could not return her to Italy. The Gestapo was hunting her. She would obviously be executed if deported. The Swiss threw up their hands and processed the refugee application. Then Edda was taken by car to the nearby Swiss village of Neggio and reunited with her children.
Seeing her that day for the first time in months, her son Fabrizio remembered his impression of his mother: She was “[s]mall, very thin, upset, in dire straits and wearing a navy blue short coat. She carried the diaries around her waist.” Those who witnessed her bulky figure that day quickly speculated that Edda was pregnant. Her “delicate condition” was the only reason, in fact, that she had not been searched at the Swiss border. If she had been, the diaries would have been discovered. But no one thought to ask if she were hiding something that in that moment to her was equally precious. It was the last chance at Galeazzo’s life that she carried with her.