‘Fey’s War’ by Catherine Bailey

This is a remarkable book. It is an extraordinarily well-researched work of history, but it draws on all the techniques of exemplary thriller writing to tell a story which I found completely compelling. Once I started reading it was quite impossible to stop, despite the harrowing and repellent nature of some of the content.

The words to describe the feelings one has reading about the excesses of the Nazis do not feature in our dictionary. ‘Disgusting’, ‘wicked’, ‘brutal’ and so on are far too mild, but they are all we have.

There are numerous fine histories that discuss the final months of World War Two as the Third Reich collapsed and bit by bit Europe was liberated from what can only be seen as the vilest regime ever to ascend to power - a competition for which there are sadly many contenders in the twentieth century and quite a few extant now.

I have read some accounts over the years and thus had some knowledge of forced death marches of concentration camp survivors and the activities of partisans in Northern Italy. I knew that there were a number of plots to assassinate Hitler that failed, and also that Nazi regime, like as many brutal psychopathic governments do, kept opposition in check by punishing the families of those who dared to challenge them as well as the actual offenders themselves. I knew that children were sometimes removed from their parents, taken to orphanages and given new names before being adopted, as appears to have happened on a vast scale in Ukraine very recently. I knew that Heinrich Himmler committed suicide using a cyanide capsule, and I have long known about the disposition of Russian soldiers advancing westwards in 1945 to rape, loot and murder with impunity.

But I did not know about any of these things in detail. It is not pleasant to read about them, but it is important that we all should do so periodically so that we can remind ourselves of just how easily criminal monsters can get into positions of authority and despoil human civilisation and remain vigilant.

What is so superb about this book is the way that all this is told - novel like - from the viewpoint of a single major protagonist. Her name was Fey Pirzio-Biroli, a German woman aged twenty-six when the events described here unfolded. She was the daughter of the former German ambassador to Rome, Ulruch von Hassell, the grand daughter of former Naval supremo, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, and had married into Italian high society. The family lived in a castle with their two young boys not far from Trieste and until 1944 the Second World War had not affected them as much as many.

Things then changed thanks to two developments. The first was the division of Italy in the wake of the allied invasions of 1943. Fey’s husband then started working in Rome for the new government, while she and her two sons, were still living in the Northern provinces that remained under Fascist control and Nazi occupation. The second was the involvement in 1944 of Ulrich von Hassell in the July suicide bombing plot which failed to bring about the death of Hitler and the installation of a new government in Germany.

In September, in response to the actions of her father, Fey was arrested by the SS and imprisoned, along with other relatives of the July plotters, in a camp at Stutthof in what is now northern Poland. Her two children, then aged just two and four, were taken to an orphanage near to Innsbruck, but she was never told anything about their whereabouts.

This book tells the story of what happened next as Russian troops advanced from the east, government in Germany steadily disintegrated, and she, together with her fellow prisoners, were moved from place to place over the ensuing eight months, mostly being housed in accommodation close to or inside labour and concentration camps.

Ultimately they were joined by a group of prominent prisoners of all kinds of nationalities, including former presidents Blum of France and Von Schuschnigg of Austria, who Himmler intended to use as bargaining chips when negotiating with Eisenhower to save his own skin following Germany's imminent defeat. Throughout this dreadful period Fey had no knowledge of what had happened to her sons and no definitive knowledge of whether her father was dead or alive.

The book is long and detailed. Catherine Bailey has pieced the story together using all manner of letters, diaries and interviews. There are many characters, several subplots and some very harrowing passages. But it is all fascinating and, once you are into the story, quite impossible to put down. An epilogue sets out exactly what ultimately happened to all the protagonists.

This is a brilliant piece of writing by an ungarlanded author who has now written three outstanding history books but still awaits even her own Wikipedia page.