April 19, 2023
Espionage and the Archives: Diaries of Count Ciano
Tilar Mazzeo
Faculty, University of Montreal; New York Times Best-Selling Cultural Historian
Minutes of the 28th Meeting of the 81st Year
President John Cotton convened the twenty-eighth meeting of the Old Guard’s 81st year with 108 unique viewers attending via Zoom from the comfort of their homes. Patti Daley read the minutes from the previous meeting. John Cotton then recognized the guests: Anton and Alison Lahnston hosted by Ralph Widner and Sandy Shapiro’s four guests, Elizabeth Littlefield, Elisabeth Bish, Daniel Linke. and, notably, Jaqueline de Chollet in Paris, the daughter of a lead protagonist in the day’s scheduled presentation. The meeting invitation noted the death of John Stephen Hegedus, an Old Guard member since 2012.
Sandra Shapiro then introduced our speaker, Dr. Tilar Mazzeo. From Sandra’s introduction, our speaker emerged as a polymath of a woman—a professor in fields ranging from English literature to business management, the author of best sellers in cultural history and biography, an internationally recognized reviewer of fine wines, and, to boot, the onetime owner/operator of a vineyard on Vancouver Island.
Dr. Mazzeo spoke to us on Espionage and the Archives: Diaries of Count Ciano, a recap of her most recent book, Sisters in Resistance, which recounts the intertwined, undercover exploits of three exceptional women during World War II: Mussolini’s daughter, Edda Ciano; Hilde Beetz (a Nazi spy cast in the mold of a John le Carré “honey pot”); and Frances de Chollet (a wealthy American socialite, married to a French baron) who was recruited by Allen Dulles as an OSS agent. In doing so, our speaker regaled us with a cinematic tale of double-crosses, buried documents, and high-speed car chases, with a soupcon of aristocratic dalliance and romantic obsession—a fusion of action movie and soap opera.
As a personal aside, and somewhat apropos of Lanny Jones’s talk the prior week on our obsession with celebrity, I just recalled that I previously volunteered to write the meeting minutes for Lynne Olson’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret War—and fear that I may have metamorphosed into a geriatric groupie of World War II female swashbucklers.
Dr. Mazzeo began by observing that a common denominator of her writing has been her interest in uncovering the hidden histories of remarkable women. She also noted that a 65-year moratorium on the release of World War II personnel archives explains why many stories such as the Sisters, in Resistance are only now seeing the light of day.
The saga itself centers (Maltese Falcon like) on the personal diaries of Edda’s playboy husband, Galeazzo Ciano, her father’s foreign minister charged with negotiating Italy’s relationship with its Axis partners. In these chatty, irreverent diaries, Ciano recorded unflattering portraits and embarrassing anecdotes of Hitler himself and his inner circle.
In 1943, Ciano joined other Fascist leaders in stripping Mussolini of his powers, mistakenly thinking that the king would anoint him as his father-in-law’s successor. Edda then naively sought Hitler’s help in their fleeing Italy for Portugal, but the Germans, aware of the diaries and eager to get their hands on them, diverted the Cianos’ plane mid-flight to Bavaria.
The Nazis then deployed Hilde Beetz to seduce the notoriously loose-lipped Ciano and locate the diaries. However, she and Ciano became genuinely enamored with one another, all with the acquiescence of Edda, who, meanwhile, had taken Emilio Pucci, the future fashion icon, as her lover.
Edda had counted on the diaries as a bargaining chip to save her husband from Nazi vengeance, but with Mussolini now reinstalled as a German puppet, Hitler shipped Ciano back to Italy for execution. In accordance with Ciano’s last wishes, Hilde and Etta then conspired to secret the diaries from their hiding place in Italy and place them in Allied hands. Coincidentally, Allen Dulles, learning that Edda was in Switzerland with the diaries, charged Frances de Chollet to gain her trust. With the Nazis in hot pursuit, the diaries moved with Edda from garden burial plot to Swiss convent, to mental asylum, and, finally, with Frances at the wheel, over a mountain pass to her kitchen table where they were photographed. Ultimately, the diaries (in Dr. Mazzeo’s telling) provided evidence crucial to the Nuremburg trials.
In the end the Old Guard was left to ponder the question posed by John Cotton but left unanswered: Whom to cast in the movie? As Edda? As Frances? And, with Marlene Dietrich long departed, whom as the femme fatale, Hilde Beetz?
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Epstein
Sandra Shapiro then introduced our speaker, Dr. Tilar Mazzeo. From Sandra’s introduction, our speaker emerged as a polymath of a woman—a professor in fields ranging from English literature to business management, the author of best sellers in cultural history and biography, an internationally recognized reviewer of fine wines, and, to boot, the onetime owner/operator of a vineyard on Vancouver Island.
Dr. Mazzeo spoke to us on Espionage and the Archives: Diaries of Count Ciano, a recap of her most recent book, Sisters in Resistance, which recounts the intertwined, undercover exploits of three exceptional women during World War II: Mussolini’s daughter, Edda Ciano; Hilde Beetz (a Nazi spy cast in the mold of a John le Carré “honey pot”); and Frances de Chollet (a wealthy American socialite, married to a French baron) who was recruited by Allen Dulles as an OSS agent. In doing so, our speaker regaled us with a cinematic tale of double-crosses, buried documents, and high-speed car chases, with a soupcon of aristocratic dalliance and romantic obsession—a fusion of action movie and soap opera.
As a personal aside, and somewhat apropos of Lanny Jones’s talk the prior week on our obsession with celebrity, I just recalled that I previously volunteered to write the meeting minutes for Lynne Olson’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret War—and fear that I may have metamorphosed into a geriatric groupie of World War II female swashbucklers.
Dr. Mazzeo began by observing that a common denominator of her writing has been her interest in uncovering the hidden histories of remarkable women. She also noted that a 65-year moratorium on the release of World War II personnel archives explains why many stories such as the Sisters, in Resistance are only now seeing the light of day.
The saga itself centers (Maltese Falcon like) on the personal diaries of Edda’s playboy husband, Galeazzo Ciano, her father’s foreign minister charged with negotiating Italy’s relationship with its Axis partners. In these chatty, irreverent diaries, Ciano recorded unflattering portraits and embarrassing anecdotes of Hitler himself and his inner circle.
In 1943, Ciano joined other Fascist leaders in stripping Mussolini of his powers, mistakenly thinking that the king would anoint him as his father-in-law’s successor. Edda then naively sought Hitler’s help in their fleeing Italy for Portugal, but the Germans, aware of the diaries and eager to get their hands on them, diverted the Cianos’ plane mid-flight to Bavaria.
The Nazis then deployed Hilde Beetz to seduce the notoriously loose-lipped Ciano and locate the diaries. However, she and Ciano became genuinely enamored with one another, all with the acquiescence of Edda, who, meanwhile, had taken Emilio Pucci, the future fashion icon, as her lover.
Edda had counted on the diaries as a bargaining chip to save her husband from Nazi vengeance, but with Mussolini now reinstalled as a German puppet, Hitler shipped Ciano back to Italy for execution. In accordance with Ciano’s last wishes, Hilde and Etta then conspired to secret the diaries from their hiding place in Italy and place them in Allied hands. Coincidentally, Allen Dulles, learning that Edda was in Switzerland with the diaries, charged Frances de Chollet to gain her trust. With the Nazis in hot pursuit, the diaries moved with Edda from garden burial plot to Swiss convent, to mental asylum, and, finally, with Frances at the wheel, over a mountain pass to her kitchen table where they were photographed. Ultimately, the diaries (in Dr. Mazzeo’s telling) provided evidence crucial to the Nuremburg trials.
In the end the Old Guard was left to ponder the question posed by John Cotton but left unanswered: Whom to cast in the movie? As Edda? As Frances? And, with Marlene Dietrich long departed, whom as the femme fatale, Hilde Beetz?
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Epstein