Fey from Hassell

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Fey von Hassell with her father Ulrich von Hassell (early 1940s)

Fey von Hassell (born October 22, 1918 in Berlin ; † February 12, 2010 in the Castello di Brazzà near Udine , Italy ) was a German-Italian author and daughter of the German local politician and resistance fighter Ulrich von Hassell . Because of her father's involvement in the attempted coup against the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, she and her two sons were prisoners of the SS from 1944 to 1945 .

Life

Fey von Hassell came from the old rural noble family of the von Hassell . She was born as the youngest daughter of the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell and his wife Ilse von Tirpitz, daughter of the Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz . She had a sister and two brothers (Almuth, Wolf Ulli and Hans Dieter). She spent her youth in Rome , where her father was German ambassador from 1932 to 1938 . She lived in Villa Wolkonsky , which is now the British and then German embassy. In Rome, where she initially received private tuition and only attended the German School from the age of fifteen, she also met her future husband, the young noblewoman Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli , whose family owned an apartment in Via Panama.

Marriage and children

Fey von Hassell with her sons Corrado (left) and Roberto (right) (1943)

Fey von Hassell married on January 8, 1939 and moved to the family seat of the Pirzio-Biroli family, the Castello di Brazzà, a 48-room complex near Udine in northern Italy. The marriage resulted in two sons and a daughter:

SS clan prisoner

During the Second World War , the Castello di Brazzà was requisitioned by SS troops in September 1943 as part of the occupation of Italy by German troops and later by the Wehrmacht.

On September 8, 1944, her father was executed on July 20 for his involvement . The next day, Fey von Hassell was arrested as a clan prisoner on behalf of the SS and taken to the Udine prison, where she was released after ten days. She spent the next few days under house arrest in the Castello di Brazzà. On September 27, she was arrested again and taken to Innsbruck with her two sons . There the children were taken away from her and placed in a place unknown to her in a children's home controlled by the SS.

On October 22nd, 1944, her 26th birthday, Fey was transported from Hassel to Grunwald (today Zieliec ) in Lower Silesia. In this part of Bad Reinerz (today Duszniki-Zdrój in Poland ) was the "Hindenburg-Baude" hotel, which burned down after 1945 and which the SS had reserved for clan prisoners. Here she lived for the next few weeks as a prisoner, but relatively comfortably together with members of the von Stauffenberg, Goerdeler, von Hofacker and other families. a. Kinship prisoners of July 20th. On November 30th we went to the Stutthof concentration camp , where typhus , scarlet fever and dysentery broke out among the prisoners of the clan. When the Russian troops approached from the east, the group was transferred to a camp in Matzkau (today Maćkowy), where one of the clan prisoners, Anni von Lerchenfeld, died of her illness.

The journey continued via Danzig, Stettin, Eberswalde and Berlin to the Buchenwald concentration camp , where the group arrived on March 2, 1945. The SS had already brought numerous other special prisoners and clan prisoners here. Via Weiden in the Upper Palatinate , Regensburg and a six-day stay in a school in Schönberg , we went on to the Dachau concentration camp .

Liberation in South Tyrol

Ten days later, on April 25, 1945, a transport of over 140 special prisoners and clan prisoners continued from Dachau to South Tyrol. There the prisoners were freed from the hands of the SS on April 30, 1945 in Niederdorf by the Wehrmacht. However, Fey von Hassell's description of the events in Niederdorf differs considerably from the actual events.

Fey von Hassell with husband Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli (left) (1945)

On May 4, 1945, the American troops advancing from Italy took over the former prisoners who had been quartered in the hotel on Lake Braies, which still exists today . From May 8th the Americans moved them in several groups by bus to Verona and from there by air to Naples . Fey von Hassel left Lake Braies on May 10th. Together with most of the other German clan prisoners, she was interned in the "Paradiso Eden" hotel in Anacapri on the island of Capri , which no longer exists . There, at the end of May, her Italian husband, who had gone into hiding in the Italian resistance, picked her up after a year and a half of separation. When they held a small farewell party for the Stauffenbergs and Hofackers on May 28th in Capri, they had absolutely no idea where their two sons were.

Successful search for the sons

The Castello di Brazzà near Udine had meanwhile been requisitioned by US troops and served the Air Force as quarters until 1947. Nevertheless, Fey von Hassel was able to find makeshift accommodation there, whereas her husband worked in Rome. Shortly after the war it was not possible to get a travel permit for Austria or Germany, so they could not look for their children there.

Her mother Ilse von Tirpitz and her sister Almuth, who lived in Ebenhausen near Munich , were very persistent in looking for Corrado and Roberto. At the beginning of July 1945 they tracked them down on the basis of lucky coincidences in a former children's home of the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV) in Wiesenhof near Hall in Tirol . There they were housed as "Vorhof" brothers ( V or h of - v on H assell). This was ten days before the children's home was closed and the two children were given up for adoption .

Due to the poor communication possibilities after the war, Fey von Hassel only found out months later that her children were now living with their grandmother in Ebenhausen. At the end of October 1945 - thirteen months after separating from her sons - she finally managed to travel to Germany with her husband and meet them.

Further life

Fey von Hassell gave birth to their daughter Vivian in 1948 as the third child. Until her death she lived mainly in Rome and in the Castello di Brazzà near Udine. Her husband Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli made a career in the European Union and later was a consultant in Africa .

In 1987 Fey von Hassell brought a first version of her memoirs in Italian to the book market at a publishing house in Brescia . This served as a template for the English edition written in 1989 with the collaboration of her American son-in-law David Forbes-Watt, which was published in New York under the title “Hostage of the Third Reich. The Story of My Imprisonment and Rescue from the SS. ”Appeared. This book was also published in German and French translation. In 2006 she was able to see the film adaptation under the title "I figli strappati" (Eng .: The Torn Children ) on Italian television.

Four years after her husband, she died in 2010 at the age of 91 in the Castello di Brazzà.

Works

  • Fey von Hassell: Hostage of the Third Reich. The Story of My Imprisonment and Rescue from the SS. Edited by David Forbes-Watt. Macmillan, New York 1989, ISBN 0-684-19080-X .
  • Fey von Hassell: Never bend over. Memories of a special prisoner of the SS. Piper, Munich et al. 1990, ISBN 3-492-03352-0 .
  • Fey von Hassell: Les jours sombres: le destin extraordinaire d'une Allemande antinazie. Denoël, Paris 1999, ISBN 978-2207249246 .
  • Fey von Hassell: I figli strappati. 1932-1945: dall'ambasciata di Roma ai lager nazisti. Edizioni dell'Altana, Rome 2000, ISBN 978-8886772211 .

filming

A two-part television film "I figli strappati" (Eng: The Torn Children ), in which Antonia Liskova played her role , is about her separation from her sons .

In the two-part German documentary series “ Wir, Geiseln der SS ”, shot from 2014 to 2015 , the liberation in South Tyrol is portrayed from the perspective of Fey von Hassell as a first-person narrator , played by Henriette Schmidt.

Web links

Commons : Fey von Hassell  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 2.
  2. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 5 u. 8th.
  3. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 48.
  4. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 65.
  5. ↑ Dopo l'architettura razionale del periodo fascista c'è ancora uno stile italiano nelle grandi costruzioni? Intervista all'architetto Roberto Pirzio-Biroli - Bellunopress - Dolomiti .
  6. ↑ Vivian Pirzio-Biroli on espl-genealogy.org.
  7. ↑ David Forbes-Watt on prabook.com.
  8. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 248.
  9. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) pp. 79-80.
  10. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) pp. 104-107.
  11. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 116.
  12. ↑ Fey von Hassell (1989) pp. 124-129.
  13. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) pp. 129-140.
  14. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 147 u. 151
  15. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 159.
  16. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 170.
  17. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 187.
  18. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) pp. 202-204.
  19. ↑ Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol . Online edition Myth Elser 2006, footnote 21.
  20. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 209.
  21. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) pp. 211-212.
  22. ^ Valerie Riedesel Baroness to Eisenbach: Ghost children. Five siblings in Himmler's kin. Ullstein Taschenbuch, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-548-37777-3 , p. 288.
  23. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 219 u. 247.
  24. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) pp. 240-243.
  25. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) p. 236.
  26. ^ Fey von Hassell (1989) pp. Vii-viii.
  27. ↑ I figli strappati (2006) on imdb.com.
personal data
SURNAME Hassell, Fey from
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Italian author and daughter of the German local politician and resistance fighter Ulrich von Hassell
DATE OF BIRTH October 22, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 2010
Place of death Castello di Brazzà, Italy