Emilio was being held in the notorious San Vittore Prison in Milan, routinely used as a staging point for transports to the death camps at Auschwitz and the site of gruesome abuses. Hilde knew it. But, when the heavy door to his cell opened with a creak, Hilde still gasped at her first sight of Emilio. His bloodied, broken face was unrecognizable. He struggled to lift himself from the floor. Hilde had cried a lot in the past few days, and she started crying again at what they had done to Emilio.
She sat with Emilio in the cell and explained to him that she was a German spy and needed his cooperation to save him. Emilio would need to agree to be smuggled across the border into Switzerland. In exchange for his life, he would need to agree that, once in neutral territory, he would pass to Edda the Gestapo’s warning: If she spoke of Galeazzo’s diaries or made any effort to have them published, German intelligence would liquidate her and the children. When Hilde explained that the bargain was, in effect, his help in terrorizing Edda into silence and suppressing Galeazzo’s testimony of war crimes, Emilio gallantly and stubbornly refused. He wanted no part of that mission. He would not do anything that would harm Edda, he insisted, and he had no interest in helping the Germans. Hilde pleaded with him. The Germans would kill him. Emilio just looked at her through eyes half swollen shut with bruises.
Hilde put her head in her hands. She “said that she didn’t care what I did,” Emilio said then. She told him that “she only wanted to get me out of prison and into Switzerland because she felt personally responsible for my life since I had been arrested because she turned the letters in too soon.” For her to save him, he had to accept his role in the German mission. He could do whatever he wanted once he was safely in Switzerland. Finally, Emilio agreed that he would pass to Edda the message. It had dawned on him that Edda’s life was already in danger from the Gestapo. And if that was the case, someone did need to warn her.
* * *
On the day that Hilde and Emilio met in Milan, Edda was coming to terms with her new reality in Switzerland. She had been accepted as a refugee, on the condition that she agree to live incognito and not draw any attention to her presence in the country. If she made a nuisance of herself, the border officials warned her sternly, she would be expelled, and she could take her chances back in Italy. That would be a certain death sentence. If she remained, she would also be placed under strict house arrest for her entire stay in their country. Her de facto prison in those first days was a convent in the village of Neggio, where she lived with the children. Orders were that Edda Ciano should have no outside contact and should be permitted no political information. The local corner shop had been barred even from selling her a newspaper.
But on the morning of January 14 she was allowed to have one official visitor from the Italian consulate. The man—likely Franco Bellia—was an old friend of Galeazzo and had offered to be the one to come tell Edda the news that she was not allowed to read: Galeazzo had been executed. Edda was seated at a small table with a pink-and-white-checked tablecloth. She traced out the checkered pattern with her fingertip while the diplomat spoke. After he had said the words, she thanked him for the courtesy of coming in person. Her face showed no emotion. Back in her room, alone, she howled in grief and fury. But Edda had closed in on herself now. She no longer trusted anyone.
After she composed herself, Edda summoned the children. “Come, let’s go for a walk,” she told them. Her daughter, Raimonda, could see that their mother had been crying. Despite the bitter cold, the children walked with her to the top of a hill in the village, where a large wooden cross with flowers marked a convent sanctuary, looking out a long distance over the valley. Fabrizio was thirteen, Raimonda not quite eleven, and Marzio turned six that winter. “Papa is dead,” she said simply, looking out over the mountains: “They shot him.”
The children walked quietly back with Edda. Raimonda locked herself in the convent bathroom. Her brother remembered later that “she shouted with an incredible force for a girl ten years old. She shouted words that could not be understood, broken by sobs, and she beat her head against the wall.” Edda begged her to open the door. The convent gardener had to be called to break it open. Fabrizio said of his grandfather’s role in the execution of his father that winter, “everything got mixed up, crossed together and fought together: hatred with affection, the obvious with the incomprehensible, great certainties with great doubts…I cried many nights following. As did Edda.”
Edda and the children had not yet begun to comprehend the Gestapo danger. The Swiss police had, however. The next week, on January 18, Edda and the children were moved under police escort to a new location in Lugano, where surveillance was tighter. By February, they had been moved again, farther north and well away from the Italian border, to the remote village convent of the sisters of Santa Croce in Ingenbohl.
* * *
In Lausanne, Switzerland, Galeazzo’s old friend Susanna “Suni” Agnelli also learned that week that she had foreseen his fate correctly that summer afternoon in Rome when she and Prince Raimondo had visited Galeazzo at his apartment. Susanna and her sister Clara had managed to get across the border in the fall of 1943, and she was now a medical student at the university. “The day came when Galeazzo was tried, then sentenced, then shot in the back while tied to a chair in a courtyard in Verona,” Susanna remembered: “I could not talk to my fellow students about being struck by Ciano’s death. They all hated him; he was the symbol of fascism; they all said it served him right. I saw him as Galeazzo, a friend, weak and good, credulous and childishly vain. I imagined him disbelieving to the last, hoping in some magic charm that would save him.”
* * *
In Italy after the “trial,” the bodies of the executed men were displayed to the public, and then Galeazzo’s bruised and broken corpse was placed in a coffin and buried in Verona. Locals wondered later at the identity of the mysterious young woman who came, her face covered in a veil, to place a bouquet of red roses on the site. “As long as his tomb remained in Verona, it was covered in flowers—difficult to find there during the winter months of the war,” locals remembered.
Hilde, determined that Galeazzo’s last personal objects—his watch, his fountain pen, his overcoat—should reach his family as she had promised him, delivered them to his mother, Carolina, who was by then in a hospital in Varese with heart troubles, before departing for Switzerland with Emilio. Hilde too felt her heart was bruised and broken that January. “I loved Galeazzo, Countess. And I still love him,” Hilde confessed tearfully to Carolina Ciano. “It was the great love of my life.” She had only realized it when it was already too late to save him. But like Edda, Hilde was now determined that there would at least be justice and a reckoning. Galeazzo had wanted his diaries turned over to the Allies and published, as an indictment of fascism. And she had vowed to him that she would try to protect the lives of Edda and his children. Hilde was going to do whatever it took to keep both promises. She would do it for Galeazzo.
* * *
It took a few days for the German intelligence office known as Amt VI to arrange the details of Hilde’s mission and to smuggle Emilio into Switzerland. With her intelligence director Wilhelm Höttl on the ground in Verona to oversee operations, her cover story was processed by the German consul in Switzerland the next morning, January 15. She would travel as a diplomatic employee and as an office secretary at the German mission in Lugano. Two days later Emilio Pucci, alive but in bad shape, was transferred north; the following night, January 18, German intelligence smuggled him by boat across Lake Lugano into Switzerland. He landed ashore on January 19, at four o’clock in the morning. The Swiss were not aware of his clandestine arrival. Later that day, Hilde entered Switzerland at the official border checkpoint on her diplomatic visa.
Hilde checked into the Hotel Alder, a lake-view villa in Lugano, where she would stay for the duration of her time in Switzerland, and the plan was for her to reunite with Emilio at the hotel immediately on the afternoon of January 19, as soon as she had entered the country. She was not supposed to see Edda in person—that would break her cover—but she would assist Emilio in acting as an intermediary in Lugano, where German intelligence knew Edda and the children had been relocated a day earlier. Emilio’s presence in Switzerland was unknown to anyone outside Amt VI. With Hilde’s help as an undercover Nazi agent, he would secretly make contact with Edda in person in Lugano and convey to her the German messages and warnings.
Emilio, however, was not in any condition to be making clandestine boat trips. His skull was badly fractured, and he was suffering from terrible headaches and nausea. His face was black and blue, and his features were distorted from internal bleeding. On his first day in Switzerland, he collapsed on the street before he could reach the Hotel Alder, and anyone looking at him could tell that here was a man in serious medical trouble. He was rushed to a hospital in Bellinzona, north of Lugano, and admitted to the emergency ward, where his status as an undocumented active-duty Italian military officer in Switzerland was quickly discovered.
Emilio’s undocumented status was the first official confirmation that American intelligence had that Edda had entered the country, and it set off chatter in Bern. Spymaster Allen Dulles fired off an immediate telegram to Washington: “We have learned from a source…that Edda Ciano was…permitted to enter Switzerland with her children. We are attempting to have this verified.” A few hours later, he followed up with a second report to the State Department: “News of Edda’s arrival has now been received by our newspapermen who say, however, that they have been absolutely forbidden to send out this information.”
* * *
Emilio Pucci’s role as an involuntary German agent was over before it started. Emilio would spend the next several months in recovery at the hospital. When he was finally released, he would be interned and placed under police surveillance. Internment was part of the Swiss policy for managing the risk of foreign nationals. Switzerland, a small, neutral nation caught in the middle of war on all sides, was in a difficult position when it came to refugees like Emilio and Edda.
Edda, as the daughter of the putative Italian head of state and as the widow of a man recently executed, was a clear political case and also a security risk. There was no question she would need to remain under house arrest in the convent and under constant police watch. The US diplomatic service noted in internal messages that “steps [were] taken to intern Countess Ciano in a convent so that she cannot cause trouble for Switzerland or make herself talked about,” but even her being placed “under rigid surveillance, in the cloister at Ingenbohl,” didn’t prevent the press complaining about the Countess Ciano being given the benefit of asylum few thought she merited.
Emilio Pucci, on the other hand, was an active member of the Italian air force, and internment rules for soldiers were equally strict. Swiss “neutrality” depended on all refugees with military status being interned. The authorities in the case of Emilio Pucci stretched the rules as far as they could, in light of his aristocratic status as a marchese and his obvious Gestapo beating, ultimately offering a compromise solution. Once his hospital stay was over—which in January 1944 was still many weeks away—Emilio could be released from internment with the payment of a bond, surety that he would not attempt to return to Italy until the war ended and would not engage in any military or political action. The price, fourteen thousand Swiss francs, was not a vast sum for a man of his considerable means, but the funds proved impossible to obtain once he had fled Italy. Hilde—who, of course, could not visit Emilio without breaking her own cover as an agent—was determined to raise that bond and free Emilio. She needed him as part of the team to work with Edda. They still had some diaries to pass safely to the Allies, just as Galeazzo wanted.
* * *
Locked away in the convent in the winter of 1944 and struggling to process the death of Galeazzo and the family betrayal that it represented, Edda meanwhile was falling apart. Edda couldn’t even help herself. She certainly couldn’t have helped Hilde that winter, even if Hilde had been able to reach her. But no one was allowed contact with Edda, apart from clergy and the children. Fabrizio shared a room in the convent with his mother and was an eyewitness to her devastation. “From her eyes ran a river of tears: it seemed never to finish,” he remembered, “[a] continuous, silent crying, but without a sob. Only her shoulders trembled. Poor Edda: at that time she was really reduced to a rag. All skin and bones.”
Soon the Swiss authorities became concerned with reports that Edda slept until noon and passed the day in bed, chain-smoking cigarettes and binge-drinking cognac while the Ciano children ran feral. When an inspector came to interview the children, he was shocked when Fabrizio, asked about his father’s death, simply shrugged and advised him without the least trace of emotion, “So it goes, in the destiny of men.” None of them were going to school. Edda couldn’t be bothered with dressing. The police removed Raimonda and Marzio from their mother’s custody and placed them as boarding students at Theresianum school, a convent-associated school a few hundred meters away, where they could visit Edda on weekends.
Fabrizio, however, was sent to a high school in the nearby Schwyz canton. Frightened to leave his mother alone, he promptly ate a bag of tobacco on arrival at school to make himself sick. They sent him to the infirmary rather than home to his mother. He crawled out the infirmary window in his pajamas and walked half dressed through the winter snow back to Edda. The police gave up and let the boy stay. The family was clearly too traumatized to worry about a teenager’s education.
* * *
By the end of January, Hilde was in Lugano and frustrated. There was no way to reach Edda or Emilio reliably without blowing her cover as a diplomatic secretary. Both were effectively incarcerated. She had managed in those first ten days to see Emilio in the hospital just once and speak with him for a few minutes, but he was still too sick to be released and his communications were under constant surveillance. She was still working to arrange his release from internment and the bond, when the doctors did discharge him, but so far that had been a dead end. And now with her mission interrupted by Emilio’s discovery, other Gestapo agents and spies had already been deployed to Switzerland to hunt for Edda and the diaries—“the competition.” German intelligence felt certain now that Edda knew where the diaries were hidden, and Hilde had lost control of the mission. Those other Nazi spies were not acting as covert double agents, and Edda and the children were in terrible danger.
Hilde tried to warn her. She wrote a letter, urging Edda to keep quiet and to try to get herself and the children to Britain as quickly as possible. Hilde didn’t think Switzerland was safe enough any longer, not with the Gestapo actively looking to silence Edda. Edda was desperately broke and, depressed, talked now of wanting to die in Italy. Hilde tried to warn Edda that Italy would indeed be a death sentence. But she couldn’t just send Edda a letter directly. Someone had to take it to her. Emilio promised that he would try to find a friend who could carry the letter to the convent. If he could not, he would find a way to slip the message into one of his communications.
Some of Emilio’s letters to Edda had made it through. His writing to his paramour was, in and of itself, not going to set off alarm bells with any intelligence service, and neither Edda nor Emilio were any longer in Switzerland covertly. As Swiss police files show, however, Edda’s correspondence was very much under surveillance, and the authorities reported on all her visitors and actions. Guessing as much, Emilio’s letters to Edda were carefully generic and full of euphemisms to avoid censors.
Edda used during her time in Switzerland at least two different false last names: Pini, the family name of Galeazzo’s mother, and Santos. And it is clear that either Emilio or Hilde did take the risk of sending to Edda at least one of Hilde’s messages immediately on landing in Lugano. On January 21, 1944, a woman signing her name as Emilia Santos—the cover name that Edda had used entering Switzerland at the border and at the clinic in Ramiola—wrote to Hilde a curious and clearly coded letter. “My dear lady,” the letter reads, “I send you the piece of soap you asked me for. If you should need other things please let me know. The children are well and I am quite well too. I thank your [sic] for all things and am with cordial wishes Emilia Santos.” Whether the “soap” was a pretext for the letter or whether some parcel went with it no one knows any longer, but the existence of the letter strongly suggests that Hilde and Emilio did manage to get at least one warning letter through to Edda. Edda, who had no illusions about Hilde’s relationship with Galeazzo, welcomed the help.
* * *
By the end of January, fretting about Edda’s safety and the safety of the diaries, Hilde and Emilio resolved on a new plan. Hilde thought that Edda needed to flee to London, where she would be outside the reach of German intelligence. She and Emilio would attempt to contact the British intelligence service, hoping now to exchange the diaries for the safe removal of Emilio, Edda, and the children out of Switzerland. The Gestapo posed a constant and real danger to Edda. After all, if Hilde could get into the country to act as an Amt VI agent, so could—and so had—any number of her colleagues.
Galeazzo had wanted his diaries given to the Allies, and he had not cared whether that meant the British or the Americans, but his diplomatic connections were stronger in Britain, and in his final letters he had written directly to Winston Churchill. Their new plan was to sell the diaries to Churchill’s government and to use the funds to support Edda and the children in a new life in the United Kingdom. If the rumors are true that Christine Granville had helped Edda safeguard some of the count’s papers in the autumn of 1943, that may have been another reason for reaching out now directly to British intelligence.
On January 27, Hilde made contact in Switzerland with a British intelligence agent named Lancelot de Garston. Officially, Garston was the vice consul in Lugano, but covertly he was an operative for MI6, in foreign intelligence, and, as Hilde was in a position to know, was being actively targeted by the Gestapo. Hilde passed to Garston a letter, written by Emilio on Edda’s behalf, offering to sell the Allies the diaries for publication. Such contact with British intelligence was for Hilde hugely complicated, because she had to assume that all their messages were intercepted. She forwarded to German intelligence all her communications with Emilio and Edda so as not to get caught as a double agent, informing Höttl of her attempt to make contact with Lancelot de Garston in her intelligence briefings, playing it as an attempt to gain Emilio and Edda’s trust and tricking them into revealing to her the location of the diaries. She was playing so many sides against the middle that Swiss and Allied intelligence began to wonder if Emilio was working for Amt VI. The mission was in shambles.
Hilde was the only one who knew it, though. Her boss at the RSHA messaged her through an intermediary—her “runner”—on January 31 with only positive words about her mission. The Germans still considered Hilde a loyal, crack agent. This message instructed the runner to “[i]nform Felicitas”—Hilde’s code name—that:
she has behaved well and that her main aim is to keep Frau R. [Rio di Savoia, a German code name for Edda] convinced to be politically inactive.…Emil [Emilio] is to influence Frau R. and to not let her get in contact with the other side. If it is possible without risk to Felicitas, it remains interesting as to where the documents are located and the technical possibility to keep them should be preserved.
The “other side,” presumably, was the British and the Americans.
Another week passed, and then two. Nothing. British intelligence appeared to be spectacularly uninterested in the diaries of Galeazzo Ciano. If Christine Granville really had managed—unknown to Hilde or Emilio—to obtain copies from Edda, it would explain the deafening silence, but it also may have simply been that Lancelot de Garston, wary of being drawn by a pretty German “secretary,” assumed he was being set up by a Gestapo “sparrow.”
* * *
In the beginning of February, waiting to contact British intelligence or waiting for Emilio’s recovery and release from the hospital was no longer an option. News arrived that panicked Hilde and changed everything. Mussolini, wanting to persuade Edda to keep quiet and perhaps to return to Italy, had reached out to her confessor, a priest in Rome named Father Guido Pancino, who, as Hilde was also in a position to know, was working as a spy for the Germans out of Hilde’s office, reporting, as she did, to General Harster. Mussolini was almost certainly being played, and Hilde saw instantly the danger a priest reporting back to German intelligence posed both for herself and Edda.
* * *
Father Guido Pancino is a murky character, and unsurprisingly his account and the account of Hilde Beetz tell different stories. What history can agree upon is that Father Pancino was not a physically imposing man. He had balding hair and wore thick, round glasses; he stood a mere five foot four and weighed 145 pounds according to OSS documents. Hilde did not doubt that Edda would trust the priest, just as she would have trusted Emilio had their plan gone smoothly. The Pancino family and the Mussolini family had been neighbors in the 1920s, and Father Pancino said later, “I was friends with [Benito Mussolini’s] children, especially Edda, who was three years younger than me. She was a thin, nervous girl with two big eyes. I got along well with her, we played and enjoyed being together.” The childhood friendship had been renewed in 1941 when Edda and Father Pancino had ended up stationed in the same Red Cross field hospital during the Italian campaign in Albania.
Now, in the first months of 1944, Mussolini wanted to prevent the Germans from locating Galeazzo’s diaries at any cost. His grasp on power was tenuous, and he could not afford to lose face with Hitler, who had long thought that Mussolini needed to take a firmer hand with his unruly daughter. He missed Edda and his grandchildren. He felt some guilt, too, about Galeazzo. Mussolini turned to Father Pancino as a trusted emissary, asking him to travel to Switzerland to persuade Edda to come home and to keep quiet about the diaries. In mid-February, assisted by the Vatican and Joseph Goebbels, the priest’s papal authorization to travel to Switzerland at Mussolini’s request was in process. General Harster assigned his second-in-command, Walter Segna, to escort Father Pancino personally and to ensure that Mussolini’s financial enticement to Edda—a gift of four million lire—made it safely across the border.
This was all bad news for Hilde. What if Edda, confiding to an old friend and her priest under what she would believe was the seal of confession, revealed that she had the diaries with her? Just as terrifying: What if Edda revealed that Hilde had helped her to flee by double-crossing the Nazis? Suddenly it was no longer just Edda’s life that was in danger. If Hilde was discovered, she would be executed for treason. Hilde now had to get to Edda, somehow. And she had to do it quickly.