Galeazzo’s trial finally got under way, after all the fits and starts of the previous weeks, on Saturday, January 8. This was the same morning that saw Edda standing bedraggled in Harster’s office with the diaries strapped to her waist. The trial was held in Verona’s Castelvecchio, an ancient military fortress, where German officials and Galeazzo’s most zealous fascist enemies filled the noisy gallery. Galeazzo, dressed in a sports coat and trying to stay calm, was forced to balance before the judges on a rickety wooden chair, while behind him and his five co-defendants, black drapes dramatically framed Mussolini’s emblematic fasces—the ancient Roman “bundle” of thin wooden branches, from which the word fascism comes—and a crucifix.
The trial—talked of as the trial against the traitors to fascism—was both extraordinary and entirely predictable. The morning the trial began, Galeazzo had been informed of the resignation of his chosen defense attorney, he did not doubt under pressure, and he was assigned instead an almost comically incompetent public defender. A good attorney, however, would not have made a difference. The trial was, as Galeazzo had written to the king in his December 23 letter, “nothing else but premeditated murder.” The vote at Grand Council had been an entirely legitimate action—indeed, had been explicitly permitted by Mussolini—and there was no legal case to answer for. This was raw political theater. The charges were score settling on the part of his accusers and, for Mussolini, a test set by the Germans to prove his mettle and a chance to display his ideological commitment to fascism to increasingly war-weary Italians.
There was one aspect of the trial, though, that attracted a good deal of speculation and gossip in Verona. Throughout the trial, at every break, a young German woman was seen beside Galeazzo, whispering to him words that seemed to raise his spirits. As soon as Edda and Emilio’s flight from the clinic at Ramiola had been discovered, Hilde had returned to Verona and Galeazzo, and they hardly bothered anymore with pretending they were not involved.
* * *
All day on January 9, as the wheels of Galeazzo’s “infamous destiny” ground forward, Hilde had been anxiously awaiting word from Emilio Pucci. She had hoped to hear that Edda had crossed the border on the eighth. When she returned home on the night of January 9, to the Hotel Gabbia d’Oro, the Gestapo and SD staff house where she shared a room with some other female agents, she was beginning to worry. Emilio was supposed to come and bring Edda’s ransom letters. She had expected him all day and understood that something must have happened. Hilde tossed and turned when she went to bed that night just before midnight.
She would not sleep long. That night, Emilio had waited at the border an hour or two, to make sure that Edda had crossed, before turning south to Verona with the three letters. When he arrived in front of the Hotel Gabbia d’Oro, it was just after one o’clock in the morning of January 10. He knew where Hilde lived, but, in all the stress and confusion, he remembered her room number incorrectly and gently called into a room a floor below her. As Emilio told the story: “I went into a room where two girls were sleeping.…One of the girls told me she slept in Number 70. I climbed to Number 70 and called. [Frau Beetz] came out of her room and I gave her the letters and told her that Countess Ciano had gotten into Switzerland, taking the documents with her; that she must tell Count Ciano this, and hand in the letters as soon as possible and to prevent his execution.”
Edda had written three blackmail letters, and Emilio was about to pay an unfathomable price for being the bearer of news that was certain to enrage all of the recipients. They were letters calculated to ignite a firestorm. The recipients each knew Edda well enough to understand that she was not bluffing. She had smashed her room in the clinic. She would bring their regimes crashing down with her if it were in her power. As Mussolini’s daughter, she knew a great deal of sensitive information. And she had the diaries.
* * *
To General Harster, Edda had written:
General: For the second time I have entrusted myself to the word of the Germans with the outcome which you know. Now it is enough. If that is not done which was promised me I shall release against the Axis the most fearful campaign and thereby I shall make use of all the materials which I have and of all that I know. My conditions are: that within three days from the moment at which these letters will be transferred to Frau B[eetz] my husband must be at the Bern railway station, accompanied only by Frau B. between 10:00 and 15:00 hours. If this should be carried out in a completely loyal way, we will retire into private life and let nothing more be heard from us. The diaries will be turned over to Frau B. by my husband on that same day. I enclose two letters on this same subject, the one to the Führer, the other to the Duce. Turn these over immediately together with a copy of this letter itself. Edda Ciano.
To Hitler, she wrote:
January 10, 1944
Führer: For the second time I believed your word and for the second time I have been betrayed. It is only the fact of the soldiers who fell together on the battlefields that restrains me from going over to the foe. In case my husband is not freed in accordance with conditions which I have specified to your general no considerations will restrain me any longer. For some time the documents have been in the hands of persons who are authorized to use them in case anything should happen to my husband, to my children, or to my family. If, however, as I hope and believe, my conditions are accepted and we are left in peace now and in the future, one will hear nothing from us. I am distressed to be forced to act in this fashion, but you will understand. Edda.
And to her father:
January 10, 1944
Duce: I have waited until today for you to show me the slightest feelings of humanity and justice. Now it is enough. If Galeazzo is not in Switzerland within three days in accordance with the conditions which I have made known to the Germans, then everything which I have at hand in the way of proofs will be used without pity. If, on the other hand, we are left in peace and security against everything from pulmonary consumption to auto-accident, then you will hear nothing further from us. Edda Ciano.
Emilio passed the three letters, each sealed and inside a larger envelope on which Edda had written “General Harster,” to Hilde, and in the hallway they debated in urgent whispers. Hilde was of the view that they should wait to give the letters to General Harster. Galeazzo’s trial was ongoing. Perhaps at the last moment Mussolini would pardon his son-in-law, making Edda’s dangerous threats unnecessary. There was no coming back from Edda’s letters, Hilde reasoned. Hilde also reminded Emilio that he needed to flee Italy, that night if he could reach the border again in time. The letters would trigger his arrest warrant and interrogation by the Gestapo. She wanted to give him a head start. Emilio agreed to leave it to Hilde’s judgment and departed, intending to set off immediately on the road to Como and, he hoped, from there to Switzerland and Edda.
As Emilio crept down the stairs to his car, their luck failed disastrously. He was spotted by another resident agent, who demanded to know where he had been and why he was in the building. When Emilio replied that he had come to deliver a message to Hilde, the agent let him pass. Emilio drove into the night, thinking he had made a narrow escape. But at the Hotel Gabbia d’Oro, Emilio had unwittingly set into motion a chain of events that would undermine Hilde’s plans to stall the delivery of the letters and that would put his life in immediate danger. Hilde would blame herself for it later.
* * *
The agent watched Emilio drive away and then stormed up the stairs to find Hilde and get to the bottom of matters. Hilde heard footsteps on the stairs, then threw the packet of letters to the ground as the door opened on the darkened bunkroom. When the agent demanded again to know who had visited, suspecting a tawdry romantic liaison, Hilde lied, claiming she hadn’t heard a thing. Unconvinced, the agent turned on the light to take a good look at Hilde and whomever or whatever else she might be hiding. There on the floor, where Hilde had tossed it, was the packet of letters, clearly addressed to General Harster. They must have been left while she was sleeping, Hilde offered lamely. The agent studied her, and then announced that he would take the packet immediately to Harster.
Hilde leapt forward. They had been delivered to her; she would take the packet herself, as soon as she dressed. When the door closed and with the suspicious agent waiting outside, Hilde tried to put on her clothing as slowly as possible and to stall. The best she could do for Emilio now was to give him time to make his getaway. But he couldn’t get to Switzerland in ten or fifteen extra minutes. All hell was about to break loose, and Hilde knew it.
Hilde could not stall forever. Sometime before dawn on the morning of January 10, a clerk roused General Harster from sleep. Frau Beetz was waiting outside with an urgent message for him and Walter Segna. Hilde passed the general the unopened packet of letters, stating that they had been delivered to her at the hotel by Emilio Pucci, along with the message that Edda had fled the clinic at three o’clock the previous morning and was headed for the Swiss border. She had likely crossed over already. General Harster surprised Hilde by laughing. “I guessed it!” he exclaimed.
“However, she has done well,” he went on seriously, reading the letters and shaking his head ruefully, “otherwise at this hour great troubles would have begun for her.” Mussolini’s letter was placed into the hands of a courier, with instructions to take it to him immediately. Someone would need to place the calls to get Hitler on the line. A nervous General Harster read the letter to him over the phone also before dawn on January 10. Hitler ordered an immediate manhunt for Edda. Mussolini, too, received the letter before daybreak. In the morning he rang for his personal secretary, Giovanni Dolfin, who later recorded what the Duce told him:
Last night a letter was delivered to me from Edda, who has fled. In case Ciano is not free within three days, she threatens to publish a complete documentary account of our relations with the Germans. I had known for some time Ciano kept a diary.…His personal relations with Ribbentrop were never good, and toward the end they hated each other. The publication of this diary which aims to show the continuous German treachery toward us, even during the period of full alliance, could at this time provide irreparable consequences.…It is peculiarly my destiny to be betrayed by everyone, even by my own daughter.
Edda would have laughed bitterly at that statement. She knew precisely who she blamed most for this betrayal: her father.
* * *
For days, there had been fresh rumors that at any moment Galeazzo’s trial would be suspended, and on January 10, as the case entered its final stage, Hilde, sleepless and on edge, was still half expecting some sudden turn in the direction of their fortunes. Edda’s blackmail letters to Hitler and Mussolini had been dispatched by General Harster sometime after 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. Hilde dared to hope that there would be some kind of amnesty as the two dictators weighed the problem.
Hilde had gone to Galeazzo’s cell that morning as usual, and she had told him that Edda was on the run. Hilde and Emilio assumed that she was safely over the border, but there was as yet no confirmation from the German police. In fact, at that moment Edda was still sitting in the station at the border, waiting for the Swiss diplomats and police to decide whether to process her refugee application. Galeazzo cried tears of relief when Hilde told him of Edda’s flight. He hoped desperately that Edda made it. He missed his children.
Galeazzo began his morning, as in previous days, in the prisoner’s dock, and both he and Hilde expected the trial to continue for at least another day. They were anxiously waiting to see whether Edda’s ransom demands would trigger a delay or perhaps even a modification of the charges. Instead, after a break for lunch, the judges returned to the courtroom and abruptly announced a shocking verdict: guilty. No one in the courtroom was prepared, least of all Hilde or Galeazzo. Hilde broke down at the back of the room, crying heaving sobs that, more than anything else, said she was not just a run-of-the-mill German intelligence agent.
Galeazzo sat rigid and unmoving in shock at the unexpected announcement. Six men had been tried. Five of them—all of whom had voted against Mussolini at the Grand Council—were condemned to death for treason: Emilio De Bono, Luciano Gottardi, Carlo Pareschi, Giovanni Marinelli, and Galeazzo Ciano. Only one indicted man, Tullio Cianetti, was spared the death sentence. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison, his reward for having shrewdly written Mussolini an abject and early letter of apology.
In fact, there could have been no other decision, no matter what Hilde or Edda had hoped for. If the eight judges had voted to acquit Galeazzo, they would have been shot along with the defendants in a volley of machine-gun fire in the courtroom. The fascist police chief covering the trial, Major Nicola Furlotti, confessed two decades later that an attack would have taken place that afternoon if there had been any attempt at a pardon: “We were determined not to allow Ciano to escape.” The party-run police were prepared for extrajudicial action. Assassination or execution were the only two outcomes possible.
* * *
The verdict came at 2:00 P.M. The sentence was for death by firing squad the next morning. After the sentence was announced, the prisoners were returned to their cells, and behind the scenes there were frantic efforts throughout the day to secure from Mussolini a last-minute commutation. Galeazzo’s old friend Zenone Benini, still incarcerated on other charges, was permitted to see Galeazzo that afternoon in prison. As Galeazzo entered his cell, Zenone could not help but start crying.
Galeazzo chided his friend. “Ah, I come to see you so that you can give me courage and you burst into tears!”
“Sit down,” Zenone invited, politely gesturing toward the single chair.
But Galeazzo was full of black humor. “Oh, no, you sit down, I shall have all the time in the world to rest.”
Zenone remembered how, after he had dried his eyes, Galeazzo “spoke of his children, of his wife, who had tried everything under the sun to save him.” Galeazzo spoke of his love for Hilde, “that noble creature whom the Germans set to spy on me.” “To her,” Galeazzo confided to his friend, “I have entrusted my political testament and other correspondence of great importance.”
* * *
Hilde came to Galeazzo’s cell too that evening. She brought him the only gift that in the first days of January either Hilde or Edda could think to procure for him that now could matter: a small vial of poison. It had been Edda’s idea. Edda had been determined, if she could not save her husband, to put a painless death within his power. Galeazzo was ready. He would take it, with Hilde beside him.
Galeazzo unbuckled his watch from his wrist and slipped from the hem of his overcoat a diamond ring that he had hidden. He passed the mementos, along with his fountain pen, to Hilde, asking that she safeguard them for his wife and children. Galeazzo lay down on his narrow prison cot, said a last prayer with Hilde, and drained the vial of cyanide. Hilde wept quietly. With her hand on his arm, they waited together for Galeazzo’s passing.
Galeazzo’s heart began beating violently. Panic swept him. The work of the poison had started. “But then I became aware: my heart was beating normally. This was dying? What, I was alive, very alive”: Something had gone wrong with the formulation. He wasn’t dying after all. The poison was strong enough to make him nauseous, weak, and miserable. But the cyanide was not strong enough to kill him. Galeazzo was devastated. It meant there was no escape.
Thus began, Hilde said, the “most terrible night of my life.” She and Zenone sat with Galeazzo in his cell all that evening and throughout the long night ahead of them. Later, when the Germans suspected that Zenone knew the location of the diaries, revealed to him in a dying man’s prison-house confession, Zenone would also pay for his loyalty to his old schoolmate.
Hilde and Zenone talked that night of clemency, still daring to hope that Edda’s letters or Mussolini’s loyalty to his daughter might change the outcome. As night fell, the five condemned men signed a joint request for pardon to be delivered to Mussolini. Surely Mussolini would not allow the father of his grandchildren to face execution. Galeazzo, sick from the attempted poisoning, dismissed these cheerful words. “Forget about the plea for mercy: Let us speak of serious things,” he said. “When you return among men, and this cursed war will have finished (and it will finish soon) do not abandon my children and my wife: they are the only things that I still have. Edda has conducted herself admirably toward me.” He did talk to Zenone of the diaries, as the Germans suspected, saying they “have stripped me of my possessions. I am poor now. But there is one treasure they have not taken which is of more value to me than all the rest: my Diary, now in the hands of my wife.”
The confirmation of Edda’s safe escape just before dawn was the one bright spot in an otherwise harrowing night. Sometime before six o’clock, the prison chief, Dr. Olas, came with the news from the prefecture for Hilde: German intelligence had evidence that Edda was in Switzerland and had been granted refugee status. “The German lady again was there,” Zenone recorded, and “Ciano’s face radiated satisfaction when he got that news.” They passed the hours that remained talking and reading Seneca on Stoicism. Galeazzo had ceased to hope, and he would soon also cease to fear.
* * *
Neither Mussolini nor Edda’s mother, Rachele, slept that night either. Rachele remembered seeing the light on under her husband’s door all night and hearing him pacing. Edda’s furious letter, threatening revenge and speaking of betrayal, bothered her father. She also had to be stopped from publishing the count’s papers. Their publication would damage him with Hitler. More than that, though, Mussolini was desperate for some reconciliation with his daughter. She was his favorite child. He spent hours vacillating. He loved Edda. She would never forgive him for the death of Galeazzo.
Mussolini that night expected the request for a reprieve to come. Just after 1:00 A.M. on January 11, Mussolini asked his secretary if there had been any news, and a rumor began to spread that he had called a cabinet meeting to discuss a possible pardon. But it was nothing more than a rumor. Mussolini was told there had been no update, no correspondence.
Had the clemency appeal come at that moment, he may even have signed it. He was torn. Mussolini, awaiting the possibility of a plea, telephoned General Karl Wolff, the head of the SS in Italy, to broach the subject of a pardon. General Wolff advised him that Hitler’s instructions were that the matter was “an exclusive and absolute internal Italian” decision. But General Wolff hinted slyly that Hitler did not believe that Mussolini had the resolve to carry out the sentence. Mussolini was stung. “A failure to execute could harm me in the consideration of the Führer?” Mussolini asked. “Yes, very much so,” the general advised him.
Mussolini was determined in that moment. He would not intervene. Or maybe he would. But he didn’t think so. There was, in any event, still time to consider the best course of action. He expected to receive a petition of mercy at any moment, and he would decide on its merits. What Mussolini did not know was that the clemency appeal, submitted hours earlier, had been stalled. The appeal had fallen into the hands of Minister Alessandro Pavolini, an ardent Fascist party loyalist, and Minister Pavolini had no intention of placing before Il Duce any such temptation. Minister Pavolini welcomed Galeazzo’s execution. He intended to see that it went off without any interruption.
* * *
In the prison cell at Scalzi, the ringing of the monastery bells told Galeazzo and Hilde that it was 6:00 A.M. There had been no response to the appeal for mercy. Galeazzo expected to be shot at dawn, but by seven thirty, the sun was rising. For half an hour, Hilde dared to believe that the sentence had been postponed. By 8:00 A.M., her hopes were dashed, and the prefect confirmed that the execution was moving forward.
The five condemned men were driven through deserted streets to a local shooting range outside of town, established in the courtyard of a nineteenth-century military fort at San Procolo. The morning was cold and wet, and in the prison van Galeazzo raged against the perfidy of his father-in-law. But the moment he stepped into the compound he set his jaw in defiance. He would not let them see him beg or grovel. “I shall not give those who wanted my death the pleasure of seeing me die a coward,” he had confided to Zenone during that long night reading the Stoics. Hilde stood in the corridor of the fortress, sobbing against a wall and fingering tenderly Galeazzo’s gold watch, which she wore on her wrist throughout the morning. In the yard, German journalists armed with film and cameras jostled for position, while a firing squad of young men dressed in black and army green ranged themselves in two tiers, one standing and one kneeling. Their commander, Nicola Furlotti, one of Galeazzo’s implacable enemies, paced quietly in anticipation. Among the twenty-odd witnesses were the prison director, Dr. Olas, a priest, Father Chiot, and a physician, Dr. Caretto, who would certify the executions.
* * *
Just after 9:00 A.M. on January 11, with Mussolini still waiting for the clemency petition and unaware that the execution was proceeding, the condemned men were handcuffed. Father Chiot led them out into the courtyard where flimsy wooden chairs were lined up facing a wall. Hilde turned toward a corridor wall, unable to watch what was happening. De Bono was led out first, followed by Ciano and then Marinelli, who, hysterical and fainting, had to be dragged to his execution. Galeazzo, still light-headed from the aftereffects of the cyanide, was unsteady. The sky was gray, and the photographers fiddled with their cameras as Galeazzo was led to his chair. He slowly took off his overcoat and scarf and asked the prison director to see that his son received them. Pressed to sit, Galeazzo threw himself at the chair in anger, fell over, dizzy, and sat again, while a soldier tightly bound him. The prisoners were placed with their backs to their executioners. When the soldier tried to put in place a blindfold, Galeazzo twisted his head in defiance. The soldiers shrugged. The count could die watching if that was what he wanted.
In the silent courtyard, the swish as the guns were raised and the bullets clicked into chambers seemed louder than one could have imagined. De Bono defiantly called out in the instant before the shots fired, “Viva! Italia! Viva! Duce!” Marinelli in raw terror screamed, “Don’t shoot!” Galeazzo said nothing.
Galeazzo Ciano had seen—and even done—terrible things. He had witnessed firsthand the infernal, bitter machinery of the fascist regimes spreading death across Europe and had been part of that engine. He had tried to find a way out of that heart of darkness in July 1943 when he renounced Mussolini and voted to depose him. He had tried to preserve his diaries as a testimony. This was the price. At the final instant, just as the volley exploded, Galeazzo made his last decision. He flung himself against the ropes that bound him and turned to look over his shoulder to face the firing squad, eye-to-eye with his executioners. It was a horrible moment, caught forever on film in the flash of cameras.
Perhaps his young executioners were rattled by the burning gaze of a condemned man. De Bono, struck cleanly, died instantly. The other four were struck but alive. Galeazzo had been inexpertly struck with five bullets in the back but remained conscious. A German SS officer who witnessed the execution was contemptuous. It was complete incompetence. “The men lying on the ground had been so inaccurately hit that they were writhing and screaming,” he reported. The squad reorganized and a moment later a second round of shots was fired.
Another bullet this time grazed Galeazzo’s neck, sending blood in a long cascade with each heartbeat. He was now, among the prisoners, the only one still living. He lay on the ground, moaning in pain, and the firing squad balked at a third volley. Dr. Caretto and Nicola Furlotti walked to where he lay in the dust and gravel. Furlotti leaned forward. Then he fired a shot from his revolver into Galeazzo’s temple. Still Galeazzo lived. Furlotti shot point-blank again. Only with the second shot did Galeazzo expire.
The executions and the events that had led Galeazzo to his death that morning would be known in Italian history afterward simply as the processo di Verona—the trial of Verona. But those who had witnessed the firing squad that morning knew that it had always been about murder and not about justice.