Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Read online

  Pino was gone for months that time, traveling, looking, and not really understanding what he was searching for. When he returned, after thirteen years of marriage, Yvonne decided that while she loved him, she couldn’t live with him anymore. Oddly, though divorced, they stayed the best of friends.

  Pino aged. He watched his children grow and his bank account dwindle, but he remained in remarkably good spirits through his sixties. He skied. He wrote about motor sports for several Italian publications. He had interesting friends and girlfriends. He never once spoke of Anna, or General Leyers, or Father Re, or Casa Alpina, or what he’d done in the war.

  A researcher from the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at California’s Humboldt State University approached Pino in the 1980s. She was doing a study on people who had risked their lives to save others. She said she’d gotten his name through Yad Vashem, which was a surprise to Pino. He’d never been contacted by anyone regarding his activities with Father Re.

  Pino spoke with the young woman briefly, but her study’s focus upset him, brought up memories of Anna that led him to end the interview with a promise to fill out her detailed questionnaire and return it to her. He never did.

  Pino maintained his silence until the late 1990s, when he had a chance meeting in northern Italy with Robert Dehlendorf, a successful American who’d owned, among other things, a small ski area in California. Dehlendorf was retired and staying on Lake Maggiore.

  The two men, roughly the same age, bonded. They ate. They talked. They laughed. Late the third night, Dehlendorf asked, “What was the war like for you, Pino?”

  Pino got a faraway look in his eye, and after a long hesitation, said, “I’ve never told anyone about my war, Bob. But someone very wise once told me that by opening our hearts, revealing our scars, we are made human and flawed and whole. I guess I’m ready to be whole.”

  Long into the night, fragments of the tale spilled out. Dehlendorf was stunned. How was it possible that so little of the story had ever been told?

  That chance meeting between Dehlendorf and Pino led serendipitously and eventually to a dinner party in Bozeman, Montana—the evening of the lowest day of my life—and to my decision to fly to Italy to hear the story firsthand and in full. Pino was in his late seventies when I landed in Milan the first time. He had the cheer and vigor of someone twenty years younger. He drove like a maniac. He played beautiful piano.

  When I left three weeks later, Pino looked much older than his age. Opening up a story he’d kept locked away for six decades had been traumatizing, and he remained haunted by a lifetime of unanswered questions, especially concerning General Hans Leyers. What had become of him? Why hadn’t he been charged with war crimes? Why had no one ever come to hear Pino’s side of the story?

  It took nearly a decade of research on my part to give Pino Lella answers to some of his questions, largely because General Leyers had been so devastatingly good at burning his way out of history. So were other officers of the Organization Todt. Even though the Nazis were compulsive record keepers, and even though the OT had literally millions of prisoners and slaves under its command, the organization’s surviving documents would fill only three file cabinets.

  General Leyers, who by his own admission had sat at the left hand of Adolf Hitler and who was arguably the second-most powerful man in Italy during the last two years of World War II, left behind fewer than one hundred pages from his time there. In most of those documents, his name is merely noted as a participant in one meeting or another. It is rare to see a paper where Leyers appears as a signatory.

  However, from the documents that did survive, it is clear that after Pino delivered Leyers to paratroopers on the Brenner Pass, the general’s assets in Germany and Switzerland were frozen. Leyers was taken from the pass to an Allied prisoner of war camp outside Innsbruck. Strangely, no records of Leyers’s interrogation statements remain or have been made public, nor is he mentioned in the open proceedings of the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

  The general did, however, write a report for the US Army on the Organization Todt’s activities in Italy. The report is on file in the US National Archives, and is, in short, a total whitewash of Leyers’s own actions.

  In April 1947, twenty-three months after the end of the war, Hans Leyers was released from prison. Thirty-four years later, he died in Eischweiler, Germany. Those two dates were the only things about Leyers I was certain of for nearly nine years.

  Then, in June 2015, while working with an excellent German researcher and translator named Sylvia Fritzsching, I tracked down General Leyers’s daughter, Ingrid Bruck, who was still living in Eischweiler. Though on her deathbed, Mrs. Bruck agreed to talk to me about her father and what had happened to him after the war.

  “He was taken to the prisoner of war camp, awaiting his prosecution at Nuremberg,” she said, wan and sick in her bedroom in the sprawling German manor she had inherited from her parents. “He was charged with war crimes, but . . .”

  Mrs. Bruck started coughing and got too sick to go on beyond that. But it turned out that General Leyers’s spiritual adviser of twenty-five years and his friend and aide of three decades were both available to explain the rest to me, or at least what Leyers had told them about his time in Italy and his miraculous release from the prisoner of war camp.

  According to Georg Kashel and retired Reverend Valentin Schmidt of Eischweiler, General Leyers was indeed indicted for war crimes. They weren’t familiar with the specific charges, and they claimed to know nothing about Leyers’s taking slaves or participating in genocide through his implementation of “Vernichtung durch Arbeit,” the Nazi policy of “Extermination by Labor” that was part of Hitler’s final solution.

  The reverend and the estate manager did agree, however, that Leyers was to be tried at Nuremberg along with other Nazis and Fascists who committed war crimes in Italy. A year and then two went by after the war’s end. During that time, most of Hitler’s surviving henchmen were tried and hanged, many of them after being testified against by the führer’s Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production and the leader of the Organization Todt, Albert Speer.

  At Nuremberg, Speer claimed he knew nothing about the concentration camps even though the Organization Todt built them, and even though many of the camps featured signs that identified them as OT work camps. Whether the Allied prosecutors actually believed Speer, or just valued the damning testimony he offered, the tribunal saved Hitler’s architect from the hangman’s noose.

  After being told that Speer had turned on Hitler’s inner circle and sent them to the gallows, General Leyers cut his own deal with prosecutors. On his own behalf, Leyers provided evidence that, among other things, he had helped Jews escape Italy, he had protected high-ranking Catholics, including Cardinal Schuster, and he had saved the Fiat company from total destruction. The general also agreed to testify in closed court against his titular boss, Albert Speer. Based in part on evidence provided by Leyers, Hitler’s architect was ultimately convicted of taking slaves and sent to Spandau Prison for twenty years.

  At least that’s how the minister and Leyers’s longtime aide told the story of why the general came to be released from a POW camp in April 1947.

  Though the account was thoroughly plausible, the Leyers’ family legend was no doubt somewhat more complex. Less than two years after the war’s end, the world was sick of its aftermath and growing apathetic about the ongoing Nuremberg trials. There was also increasing political concern about the expanding power of Communism in Italy. The thinking went that a series of sensational trials against Fascists and Nazis would only play into pinko hands.

  The “Missing Italian Nuremberg,” as historian Michele Battiti has called it, never happened. Nazis and Fascists who had committed unspeakable atrocities, including General Leyers, were simply allowed to walk in the spring and summer of 1947.

  There was no trial for Leyers’s crimes. No assignment of blame for the slaves who died under his watch. All the
evil and savagery done in northern Italy in the last two years of the war was kicked into a legal hole, buried, and forgotten.

  Leyers returned to Düsseldorf with his wife, Hannelise; son, Hans-Jürgen; and daughter, Ingrid. During the war, the general’s wife had inherited Haus Palant, a medieval manor and estate in Eischweiler. It took six years of legal wrangling after the war for Leyers to regain full control of the sprawling property, but he did, and spent the rest of his life restoring and running it.

  He started by rebuilding the large manor house and the barns, which ironically had been burned to the ground shortly before the war ended by Polish men taken slave by Organization Todt. Leyers’s minister and aide said he never spoke about the nearly twelve million people abducted by the Germans and forced into labor all over Europe.

  Nor did they know where the general got the enormous sums of money required to rebuild his estate, other than to say that for years after the war he provided consulting work to various German supercompanies, including steelmaker Krupp and munitions manufacturer Flick.

  Leyers, they said, had an incredible network of connections, and someone always seemed to owe him a favor. He would want something—a tractor, say—and, poof, someone would give him a tractor. It happened all the time. Fiat was said to be so grateful to Leyers that the company used to send him a new free car every other year.

  Postwar life was good for Hans Leyers. As he had prophesied, things had gone his way before Adolf Hitler, during Adolf Hitler, and after Adolf Hitler.

  Leyers was also a devout churchgoer after his release from the Allied prison camp. He paid for the construction of Eischweiler’s Church of the Resurrection, which is just a stroll down the lane from the estate on Hans-Leyers-Weg, a road named in the general’s memory.

  Leyers was said to be the kind of man who “got things done,” and people, including his minister and aide, urged him to enter politics. The general refused, telling them he preferred to be “the man in the shadows, in the darkness, pulling the levers.” He never wanted to be the man out front.

  As he turned elderly, Leyers watched his son grow up and earn a doctorate in engineering. His daughter married and had a family. He rarely spoke of the war other than to boast at times that he never worked for Albert Speer, having always reported directly to Hitler.

  Soon after the führer’s architect was released from Spandau Prison in 1966, Speer paid Leyers a visit. Speer was reportedly congenial at first, and then drunken and antagonistic, hinting that he knew the general had testified against him. Leyers threw Speer out of his house. When Leyers read Inside the Third Reich, Speer’s bestselling account of Hitler’s rise and fall, he became irate and called the entire account “one lie after another.”

  After a period of declining health, General Leyers died in 1981. He is buried beneath a huge boulder in a cemetery between the church he built and the house where he lived, long after leaving young Pino Lella on the Brenner Pass.

  “The man I knew was a good person, a man who stood against violence,” Reverend Schmidt said. “Leyers was an engineer who joined the army because it was a job. He wasn’t a member of the Nazi party. If he was involved in war crimes, I can only believe he was forced to be part of them. He must have had a gun to his head, no choice in the matter at all.”

  A week after I learned all this, I paid Pino Lella one more visit on Lake Maggiore. He was eighty-nine by then, with a white beard, wire-rim glasses, and a stylish black beret. As always, he was affable, funny, and spry, living con smania, which was extraordinary, given that he’d had a recent motorcycle accident.

  We went to a café he liked on the lakeshore in the town of Lesa where he lived. Over glasses of Chianti, I told Pino what had become of General Leyers. After I finished, he sat for a long time looking out at the water, his face rippling with emotions. Seventy years had passed. Seven decades of not knowing had ended.

  Maybe it was the wine, or maybe I’d thought about his story for too long, but Pino at that moment seemed to me like a portal into a long-ago world where the ghosts of war and courage, the demons of hatred and inhumanity, and the arias of faith and love still played out within the good and decent soul who’d survived to tell the tale. Sitting there with Pino, recalling his story, I got the chills and thought again of how privileged I’d been, and how honored I was to have been vested with his tale.

  “You’re sure about all this, my friend?” Pino asked finally.

  “I’ve been to Leyers’s grave. I spoke to his daughter, and the minister he confessed to.”

  Pino shook his head in disbelief finally, shrugged, and threw up his hands. “Mon général, he stayed in the shadows, he remained a phantom of my opera right to the end.”

  Then he tossed his head back and laughed at the absurdity and unjustness of it.

  After several moments of quiet, Pino said, “You know, my young friend, I will be ninety years old next year, and life is still a constant surprise to me. We never know what will happen next, what we will see, and what important person will come into our life, or what important person we will lose. Life is change, constant change, and unless we are lucky enough to find comedy in it, change is nearly always a drama, if not a tragedy. But after everything, and even when the skies turn scarlet and threatening, I still believe that if we are lucky enough to be alive, we must give thanks for the miracle of every moment of every day, no matter how flawed. And we must have faith in God, and in the Universe, and in a better tomorrow, even if that faith is not always deserved.”

  “Pino Lella’s prescription for a long, happy life?” I said.

  He laughed at that, and wagged his finger in the air. “The happy part of a long life, anyway. The song to be sung.”

  Pino gazed north then, across the lake to his beloved Alps, rising like impossible cathedrals in the summer air. He drank from his Chianti. His eyes misted and unscrewed, and for a long time we sat in silence, and the old man was far, far away.

  The lake water lapped against the retaining wall. A white pelican flapped by. A bicycle’s bell rang behind us, and the girl riding it laughed.

  When at last he took off his glasses, the sun was setting, casting the lake in coppers and golds. He wiped away tears and put his glasses back on. Then he looked over, gave me a sad, sweet smile, and put his palm across his heart.

  “Forgive an old man his memories,” Pino said. “Some loves never die.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to and humbled by Giuseppe “Pino” Lella for entrusting me with his remarkable story, and for opening up his scarred heart so I could tell the tale. Pino taught me too many lessons about life to count, and changed me for the better. Bless you, old man.

  My thanks go out to Bill and Deb Robinson for inviting me to their home on the worst day of my life, and to Larry Minkoff for sharing the first snippets of the story over dinner. I am deeply grateful to Robert Dehlendorf, who tried to write about Pino first, and then gave the project to me when he hit a dead end. Other than my wife and sons, it is the greatest gift I have ever received.

  I am blessed to be married to Elizabeth Mascolo Sullivan. When I came home from the dinner party to tell her, out of the blue and almost out of money, that I was thinking of going to Italy without her to chase an untold sixty-year-old war story, she did not hesitate or try to dissuade me. Betsy’s unwavering belief in me and in this project has made all the difference.

  Michael Lella, Pino’s son, read every draft, helped me find other witnesses, and was critical to getting everything Italian right. Thanks, Mike. I could not have done it without you.

  I am also indebted to Fulbright Scholar Nicholas Sullivan, who helped me immensely during the weeks we spent in the Bundesarchiven in Berlin and Friedrichsberg, Germany. I am likewise thankful for Silvia Fritzsching, my German translator and research assistant, who helped me piece together General Leyers’s life after the war and put Pino’s questions to rest.

  My heartfelt thanks to all the people in Italy, Germany, Great Britain, and
the United States who helped me research Pino’s tale. It seemed as if every time I hit a wall, some generous person would come along and help point me in the right direction.

  These individuals include but are not limited to Lilliana Picciotto of the Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione and Fiola della Shoa in Milan, the retired Rev. Giovanni Barbareschi, and Giulio Cernitori, another of Father Re’s boys at Casa Alpina. Mimo’s friend and former partisan fighter Edouardo Panzinni was a great help, as was Michaela Monica Finali, my guide in Milan, and Ricardo Surrette, who took me on the Brenner Pass escape route.

  Others include Steven F. Sage of the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Paul Oliner of the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at Humboldt State University, US National Archives researchers Dr. Steven B. Rogers and Sim Smiley, Italian and Vatican historian and researcher Fabian Lemmes, and Monseigneur Bosatra at the archives of the chancellery of Milan. In Madesimo, I was helped by Pierre Luigi Scaramellini, and Pierino Perincelli, who lost an eye and a hand in the grenade explosion that took the innkeeper’s son. Thanks as well to Victor Daloia for describing the discovery of his father’s buried war medal; and to Anthony Knebel for sharing his father’s correspondence; and to Horst Schmitz, Frank Hirtz, Georg Kashel, Valentin Schmidt, and Ingrid Bruck for bringing General Leyers’s saga to a close.

  Various organizations, historians, authors, researchers, and organizations were also of great help to me as I tried to understand the context in which Pino’s tale unfolded. Among them were the staff of Yad Vashem, the members of the Axis History Forum, and writers and researchers Judith Vespera, Alessandra Chiappano, Renatta Broginni, Manuela Artom, Anthony Shugaar, Patrick K. O’Donnell, Paul Nowacek, Richard Breitman, Ray Moseley, Paul Schultz, Margherita Marchione, Alexander Stille, Joshua D. Zimmerman, Elizabeth Bettina, Susan Zuccotti, Thomas R. Brooks, Max Corvo, Maria de Blasio Wilhelm, Nicola Caracciolo, R. J. B. Bosworth, and Eric Morris.