The Lost Boys: A Family Ripped Apart by War
CATHERINE BAILEY
(VIKING, 480 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The Wehrmacht officers implicated in the failed July ’44 plot to assassinate Hitler met a peremptory and grisly death, many of them strung up on meat hooks as an example to others. The desperate fate of their families, however, is less well known. Fey von Hassell, whose beloved father Ulrich had been the Reich’s ambassador to Rome before he broke ranks to join the plotters, found herself caught up in the ensuing storm. The bomb that Claus von Stauffenberg smuggled into Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair shredded Hitler’s trousers and killed and maimed others, but the Führer survived with mere burns and bruises, swearing black revenge on the “brood of vipers” responsible.

Fey’s peaceful life with her Italian husband, Detalmo, and young sons Corrado and Roberto at Detalmo’s family castle, Brazzà, near Udine, had been upended in 1943 by Italy’s surrender to the Allies, and the ensuing German invasion. Detalmo joined the partisans and urged Fey to leave for Rome, but she decided to stay at Brazzà, where food was plentiful and she could rely on the protection of the estate workers. Or so she thought.