This is the second time that Heinrich Stelben has been arrested by the Carabinieri. The first occasion was at a villa on Lake Como shortly after the surrender of the German Armies in Italy. He was taken to Milan and handed over to the British for interrogation. A few days later he escaped. He disappeared completely. Carla Rometta, a beautiful cabaret dancer, with whom he had been associating, also disappeared.
It is understood that his latest arrest was the result of information lodged with the Carabinieri. With him, at the time of his arrest, were two Germans posing as Italian workmen. It is not known yet whether they are also war criminals.
Heinrich Stelben and his associates have been removed to Rome where they have been lodged in the Regina Coeli.
Translated from the Corriere delta Venezia of November 24,1946 GERMAN WAR CRIMINAL COMMITS SUICIDE Shortly after Heinrich Stelben, infamous German War Criminal, had been taken from the Regina Coeli and handed over to the British Military Authorities, he committed suicide, according to a British press message. Whilst being interrogated, he broke a phial of prussic acid between his teeth.
The two Germans who had been arrested with him near Cortina were involved in the recent rioting in the Regina Coeli. It is understood that they were killed in the course of an attack on the Carabinieri by the inmates of the central block. It was not known whether they were wanted as war criminals.
I read those two cuttings through. And then I glanced again at the photograph. Carla! Carla Rometta! Heinrich Stelben! It was certainly a strange coincidence.
Joe Wesson looked tired and cross when I met him at breakfast the next morning. He had been up until the early hours playing stud poker with two Americans and a Czech. ‘I’d like to get Engles out here,’ he rumbled morosely. ‘I’d like to put him on top of that damned col, cut the cable of the slittovia and leave him there. I’d like to give him such a bellyful of snow that he’d never even face ice in a drink again.’
‘Don’t forget he’s a first-class skier,’ I said, laughing. Engles had been in the British Olympic team at one time. ‘He probably likes snow.’
‘I know, I know. But that was in his early twenties, before the war. He’s got soft since then. That’s what the Army does for people. All he wants now is comfort — and liquor. You think he’d enjoy it up here in that hut — no women, no proper heating, nobody around to tell him how marvellous his ideas are — probably not even a bath?’
‘Anyway, there’s a bar,’ I told him.
I I He gave a snort. ‘Bar! I’m told that the man who runs that bar can trace congenital idiocy back through his family for three generations, that he specialises in grappa made from pure methylated spirits and, furthermore, that he is the dirtiest, laziest, stupidist Italian any one has ever met — and that’s saying something. And here I’m supposed to drag my camera up to the top of that God-damned col and prance about in the snow taking pictures to satisfy Engles’s megalomania. And I don’t feel like going up a slittovia this morning. Those sort of things make me dizzy. It was constructed by the Germans and the man who owned it was arrested only a fortnight ago as a German War Criminal. The cable is probably booby-trapped.’
I must admit that when I saw the thing, I didn’t like it much myself. We stood at the bottom of it and looked up to the rifugio more than a thousand feet above us. Its gabled roofs and wooden belvedere were just visible at the top of the sleigh track cut through the pinewoods. It was perched high on the shoulder of Monte Cristallo, the great bastions of the mountain towering above it. It was about as remote from civilisation as an eagle’s nest.
Our chauffeur got out of the car and shouted, ‘Emilio!’ A little man, wearing British battle-dress and the most enormous pair of snow boots, emerged from the concrete building that housed the cable plant. The boots dated back to the German occupation when there had been a flak position in the Tre Croci pass.
The snows had only just started down in Cortina, for it was early in the season yet. But up here it was already getting thick and the previous night’s fall lay like a virgin blanket over everything.
