WAR STORIES
If Edda Ciano were to rescue her husband, she would have to do what no one else dared: she would have to blackmail Adolf Hitler. “Führer,” she wrote in a letter dated 10 January 1944, “for some time the documents have been in the hands of persons who are authorised to use them in ease anything should happen to my husband”. She gave Hitler three days to release Galeazzo Ciano, or she would publish the Italian's private diaries. It was a gambit as unlikely as it was daring. A young German spy named Hilde Beetz had already been sent to seduce her husband and learn the location of the documents. That spy's mission had already produced results.
But what Hitler could not know was that in the final months of 1943, the young spy assigned to beguile Galeazzo Ciano in a prison cell had fallen in love with her target and was, even now, helping Edda to deliver her brazen blackmail message.
A FAMILY AFFAIR
So, who was Galeazzo Ciano, and why were his diaries of such interest to Hitler? Galeazzo Ciano had been, until the previous summer, Benito Mussolini's.
