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.