The Teenage Spy Who Arrested His Nazi Boss

Lee Habeeb (00:10):
This is Lee Habeeb, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And all month long, we’re telling stories of the Italian and Italian-American experience. Pino Lella was a teenager in Italy when World War II swept him into the gears of history. Here’s his son Michael with his father’s astonishing story of resistance and survival.

Michael Lella (00:36):
If you were 17 and growing up in Milan, Italy, in 1943, more than likely you would have been forced, indoctrinated, and brainwashed into fascism. The dictator of Italy responsible for it, Benito Mussolini, had been in power since 1922. My dad was born in 1926. The voice and image of Il Duce, as Italians were obliged to call Mussolini, were ubiquitous in Italy at the time. Mussolini would ultimately drag the country into the Second World War on the side of Germany’s Adolf Hitler. My father is now 92 and lives an hour north of Milan. His name is Pino Lella.

Michael Lella (01:23):
If you had to pick a time to be a teenager in Milan, 1943 would have been the worst of choices. In June, as my dad was nearing his 17th birthday, the British began an intensive six-month bombing campaign. It left a third of the city’s population homeless, about 400,000 people. My father’s younger brother, my uncle Mimo, narrowly escaped death one night following the bombing of a movie theater. They were there to see You Were Never Lovelier with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, and they witnessed many casualties. My grandfather, Michele, in an effort to keep his boys from becoming victims of the continued bombing, sent my father and uncle to a Catholic boys’ school.

Michael Lella (02:06):
They were familiar with this school because it was there that they had learned to ski and loved the mountains as children. The school was located high in the Alps, above Lake Como, not far from the Swiss border. It was called Casa Alpina, and it was run by a very courageous priest by the name of Father Luigi Re.

Michael Lella (02:25):
Being the oldest of the boys, my dad was singled out by Father Re and trained to become an alpine guide. At first, my father knew nothing of the Nazi brutality against Jews and others. In fact, he had learned to respect the Nazi high command, many of whom were customers of his family’s leather goods store in Milan. They had occupied Milan as brothers in arms to defend Milan from the British bombing. But my dad became brutally aware of the Nazi crimes in September of 1943, when word came of 52 prominent Jews being rounded up by the Nazis and executed in the village of Meina on Lago Maggiore.

Michael Lella (03:06):
Their bodies were thrown into the lake for the local citizens to see. It was then that many Italians rebelled and began hiding and protecting their Jewish-Italian friends. They formed an underground railroad. For nine harrowing months, while at Casa Alpina, my father guided many Jewish refugees across the Alps into neutral Switzerland to escape Italy.

Michael Lella (03:32):
He risked his life evading Nazi patrols, surviving avalanches and grenade attacks. He was robbed by bandits disguising themselves as anti-fascist partisans. He often carried the weak and the elderly on his back in the dead of winter over the top of the Alps, some of the world’s most rugged mountain terrain. Some had embarked on this journey with my father in such a way that they wore street shoes, not exactly hiking gear for the Alps and below-zero temperatures.

Michael Lella (04:07):
At the time, my dad simply did what he was told to do and thought little of it. Father Re instructed him to take people to safety, and so he did it. He knew it was dangerous, of course, but even to this day he doesn’t think of what he did as heroic. He had faith in doing the right thing and such a high regard for Father Re that he would have done anything for him. The missions gave him an identity, a meaningful purpose, and an opportunity to lead. And like many 17-year-olds with reckless abandon, he thrived on the excitement and adventure of it all, at least while it lasted. In June of 1944, my father turned 18, the age at which young Italians were drafted by the state into the military.

Michael Lella (04:52):
He had two choices. He could join Mussolini’s fascist army and quite likely end up on the Russian front. His other option was to conscript with the German army. His aunt and uncle had connections that might land him a secure and hopefully a safer job in the Organization Todt. This was the armament and construction division of the Third Reich. For safety, but against his wishes, Pino’s father and mother talked him into enlisting in the German army. Dad reluctantly donned the military uniform with a Nazi swastika.

Michael Lella (05:18):
What happened next was almost unbelievable. Through a series of extraordinary circumstances, including his wounding during an Allied bombing raid, my father was ordered back to Milan to convalesce for two weeks. Then, with a little help from family and his ability to speak French and drive a car, he landed a position as the personal driver and confidant for one of Hitler’s most mysterious officers in the German high command. He was a man so powerful in Italy that he responded directly, personally, and only to Adolf Hitler. His name was General Hans Leyers, the plenipotentiary of the Italian sector for Organization Todt.

Michael Lella (06:17):
To Pino’s aunt and uncle, his assignment as a driver for such a powerful figure was a serendipitous opportunity of a lifetime. It could help change the direction of the war. They understood the importance of it because they were already working in secret for the Allies and the Italian resistance. The kind of information their nephew would now have access to could be critical for the fight against the Germans. My father, still a teenager, as a new personal driver for this top Nazi commander, became a spy, known to the Allies as the Observer.

Michael Lella (06:59):
For the last year of the war, while driving General Leyers around northern Italy, my dad learned the locations of tank traps, landmines, ammunition tunnels, and every fortification between Florence and Milan. He observed the Germans’ main defensive positions. He secretly documented troop movements. He took notes and photos. And he fed mounds of that crucial information to the Allies by using Uncle Albert’s shortwave radio, an OSS radio.

Michael Lella (07:28):
More than once, my father was nearly caught, which would likely have led to his torture and execution. But he kept the trust of an unwitting General Leyers. My dad personally witnessed the Nazi persecution of Jews, as well as the working to death of slaves from many faiths and nationalities in work camps, hoping and dreaming that one day he could testify against those responsible.

Michael Lella (07:56):
At midnight on April 24, 1945, upon orders from the resistance, my father single-handedly arrested General Hans Leyers and delivered him to the American command, which was led by Fifth U.S. Army Major Frank Knebel. For the next five days, he became Major Knebel’s personal guide and translator, at last discarding his uniform and the Nazi swastika. On April 28, Pino and Major Knebel witnessed a hideous moment in Italian history: the public desecration of Mussolini’s body in Piazzale Loreto amid the hysteria and fanaticism of the frenzied Italian mobs. Hitler killed himself in Berlin two days later.

Michael Lella (08:42):
With the deaths of the two fascist dictators, my father thought he was finished with the war. But in fact, the war wasn’t quite finished with him. In early May, the famous Brenner Pass through the Alps was the most dangerous corner of Europe. The German army was retreating from Italy through the pass into Austria. Thousands of Nazi troops who refused to surrender were on the run, being chased down and cut off by Italian resistance fighters and the U.S. Army.

Michael Lella (09:15):
In the midst of this, my father was asked if he would do America a favor and accept the final mission. The Americans asked my dad to be a guide one last time, leading one final escape from Italy. His mission was to drive an important, high-ranking Nazi from American custody to the Austrian border, where he could safely be interrogated for the intelligence he possessed about Hitler’s Reich. Who was this top general my dad was enlisted to escort to safety? None other than the very man he had driven for, the very man he had arrested and turned over to the Allies just weeks before: General Hans Leyers.

Michael Lella (10:00):
Distraught and tormented over the events of the last week of the war, my father accepted that final mission. You can only imagine the conversation in the car between my dad and General Leyers. By the evening of that same day, May 3, 1945, my dad delivered General Leyers to the Americans awaiting him on the Austrian border. That final escort ended my father’s involvement in World War II. But like many of that greatest generation, the experience and the weeks preceding the war’s end continued to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Lee Habeeb (10:38):
The story of Pino Lella, celebrating Italian-American Heritage Month all October long, here on Our American Stories.