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.