The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (198 page)

At a later conference shortly after midnight the question was raised as to what to do with the
Vatican
. Hitler answered it.

That night also Hitler gave orders to secure the Alpine passes, both between
Italy
and Germany and between Italy and France. Some eight German divisions from France and southern Germany were hastily assembled for this purpose and established as Army Group? under the command of the energetic Rommel. Had the Italians, as Goebbels noted in his diary, blown the Alpine tunnels and bridges, the German forces in Italy, some of them already heavily engaged in
Sicily
by Eisenhower’s armies, would have been cut off from their source of supplies. They could not have held out for long.

But the Italians could not suddenly turn on the Germans overnight. Badoglio had first to establish contact with the Allies to see if he could get an armistice and Allied support against the Wehrmacht divisions. Hitler had been correct in assuming that that was exactly what Badoglio would
do, but he had no inkling it would take as long as it did. Indeed, this assumption dominated the discussion at a war conference at the Fuehrer’s headquarters on July 27 attended by most of the bigwigs in the Nazi government and armed forces, among them Goering, Goebbels,
Himmler
, Rommel and the new Commander in Chief of the Navy, Admiral Karl Doenitz—who had succeeded Grand Admiral Raeder in January, when the latter had fallen from favor.
^*
Most of the generals, led by Rommel, urged caution, arguing that any contemplated action in Italy be carefully prepared and well thought out. Hitler wanted to move at once even though it meant withdrawing key panzer divisions from the Eastern front, where the Russians had just launched (July 15) their first summer offensive of the war. For once the generals seem to have had their way and Hitler was persuaded to withhold action. In the meantime as many German troops as could be rounded up would be rushed over the Alps into Italy. Goebbels took a dim view of the hesitancy of the generals.

He and Hitler need not have worried. The Allies waited not a week, but six weeks. By then Hitler had his plans and the forces to carry them out ready.

In his feverish mind he had in fact hastily conceived the plans by the time the war conference on July 27 convened. There were four of them: (1) Operation
Eiche
(“Oak”) provided for the rescue of Mussolini either by the Navy, if he were located on an island, or by Luftwaffe parachutists, if he were found on the mainland; (2) Operation
Student
called for the sudden occupation of Rome and the restoration of Mussolini’s government there; (3) Operation
Schwarz
(“Black”) was the code name for the military occupation of all of Italy; (4) Operation
Achse
(“
Axis
”) envisaged the capture or destruction of the Italian fleet. Later the last two operations were combined under the code name of “Axis.”

   Two events early in September 1943 set the Fuehrer’s plans in operation. On September 3 Allied troops landed on the boot of southern Italy, and on September 8 public announcement was made of the armistice
(secretly signed on September 3) between Italy and the Western Powers.

Hitler had flown to
Zaporozhe
in the
Ukraine
that day to try to restore the sagging German front, but, according to Goebbels, he had been seized “by a queer feeling of unrest” and had returned that evening to Rastenburg headquarters in East Prussia, where the news awaited him that his principal ally had deserted. Though he had expected it and prepared for it, the actual timing took him by surprise and for several hours there was great confusion at headquarters. The Germans had first learned of the Italian armistice from a
BBC
broadcast from London, and when Jodl put through a call from Rastenburg to Field Marshal
Kesselring
at Frascati, near
Rome
, to ask if it were true the commander of the German armies in southern Italy confessed that it was news to him. However, Kesselring, whose headquarters that morning had been destroyed by an Allied bombing and who was preoccupied with rounding up troops to meet a new Allied landing somewhere on the west coast, was able to get out the code word “
Axis
,” which set in motion the plans to disarm the
Italian Army
and occupy the country.

For a day or two the situation of the German forces in central and south Italy was extremely critical. Five Italian divisions faced two German divisions in the vicinity of Rome. If the powerful Allied invasion fleet which had appeared off
Naples
on September 8 moved north and landed near the capital and was reinforced by parachutists seizing the nearby airfields, as Kesselring and his staff at first expected, the course of the war in Italy would have taken a different turn than it did and final disaster might have overtaken the Third Reich a year earlier than happened. Kesselring later contended that on the evening of the eighth Hitler and OKW “wrote off” his entire force of eight divisions as irretrievably lost.
⁵
Two days later Hitler told Goebbels that southern Italy was lost and that a new line would have to be established north of Rome in the Apennines.

But the Allied Command did not take advantage of its complete command of the sea, which permitted it to make landings almost anywhere on both coasts of Italy, nor did it exploit its overwhelming air superiority, as the Germans had feared. Moreover, no effort seems to have been made by Eisenhower’s Command to try to utilize the large Italian forces in conjunction with its own, especially the five Italian divisions in the vicinity of Rome. Had Eisenhower done so—at least such was the contention of both Kesselring and his chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, later—the predicament of the Germans would have become hopeless. It was simply beyond their powers, they declared, to fight off Montgomery’s army advancing up the peninsula from the “boot,” throw back General Mark
Clark
’s invasion force, wherever it landed, and deal with the large Italian armed formations in their midst and in their rear.
^*
6

Both generals breathed a sigh of relief when the American
Fifth
Army landed not near
Rome
but south of
Naples
, at
Salerno
, and when the Allied parachutists failed to appear over the Rome airfields. Their relief was all the greater when the Italian divisions surrendered almost without firing a shot and were disarmed. It meant that the Germans could easily hold Rome and, for the time being, even Naples. This gave them possession of two thirds of Italy, including the industrial north, whose factories were put to work turning out arms for Germany. Almost miraculously Hitler had received a new lease on life.
^*

Italy’s withdrawal from the war had embittered him. It was, he told Goebbels, who had again been summoned to Rastenburg, “a gigantic example of swinishness.” Moreover, the overthrow of Mussolini made him apprehensive of his own position. “The Fuehrer,” Goebbels noted in his diary on September 11, “invoked final measures to preclude similar developments with us once and for all.”

In his broadcast to the nation on the evening of September 10, which Goebbels had persuaded him to make only after much pleading—“The people are entitled to a word of encouragement and solace from the Fuehrer in this difficult crisis,” the Propaganda Minister told him—Hitler spoke somewhat defiantly on the subject:

Actually, as we shall see, there were a few German generals and a handful of former political collaborators who were beginning once more, as the military setbacks mounted, to harbor treasonable thoughts, which, when the next July rolled around, would be translated into an act more violent but less successful than that carried out against Mussolini.

One of Hitler’s measures to quash any incipient treason was to order all German princes discharged from the Wehrmacht. Prince Philip of Hesse, the former messenger boy of the Fuehrer to Mussolini, who had been hanging around headquarters, was arrested and turned over to the tender mercies of the Gestapo. His wife, Princess Mafalda, the daughter of the King of Italy, was also arrested and, with her husband, incarcerated in a concentration camp. The King of Italy, like the kings of Norway and Greece, had escaped the clutches of Hitler, who took what revenge he could by arresting his daughter.
^*

   For several weeks the Fuehrer’s daily military conferences had devoted a great deal of time to a problem that burned in Hitler’s mind: the rescue of Mussolini. “Operation Oak,” it will be remembered, was the code name for this plan, and in the records of the conferences at headquarters Mussolini was always referred to as “the valuable object.” Most of the generals and even Goebbels doubted whether the former Duce was any longer a very valuable object, but Hitler still thought so and insisted on his liberation.

He not only wanted to do a favor to his old friend, for whom he still felt a personal affection. He also had it in mind to set up Mussolini as head of a new Fascist government in northern Italy, which would relieve the Germans of having to administer the territory and help safeguard his long lines of supply and communication against an unfriendly populace from whose midst troublesome partisans were now beginning to emerge.

By August 1, Admiral Doenitz was reporting to Hitler that the Navy believed it had spotted Mussolini on the island of
Ventotene
. By the middle of August
Himmler
’s sleuths were sure the Duce was on another island, Maddalena, near the northern tip of
Sardinia
. Elaborate plans were made to descend upon the island with destroyers and parachutists, but before they could be carried out Mussolini had again been moved. According to a secret clause of the armistice agreement he was to be turned over to the Allies, but for some reason
Badoglio
delayed in doing this and early in September the “valuable object” was spirited away to a hotel on top of the Gran Sasso d’Italia, the highest range in the Abruzzi Apennines, which could be reached only by a funicular railway.

The Germans soon learned of his whereabouts, made an aerial reconnaissance of the mountaintop and decided that glider troops could probably make a landing, overcome the
carabinieri
guards and make away with the Duce in a small Fieseler-Storch plane. This daring plan was carried out on September 13 under the leadership of another one of Himmler’s resourceful S.S. intellectual roughnecks, an Austrian by the name of Otto Skorzeny,
who will appear again toward the very end of this narrative in another daredevil exploit.
^*
Virtually kidnaping an Italian general, whom he packed into his glider, Skorzeny landed his airborne force a hundred yards from the mountaintop hotel, where he espied the Duce looking out hopefully from a second-story window. Most of the
carabinieri
, at the sight of German troops, took to the hills, and the few who didn’t were dissuaded by Skorzeny and Mussolini from making use of their arms, the S.S. leader yelling at them not to fire on an Italian general—he pushed his captive officer to the front of his ranks—and the Duce shouting from his window, as one eyewitness remembered, “Don’t shoot, anybody! Don’t shed any blood!” And not a drop was shed.

Within a few minutes the overjoyed Fascist leader, who had sworn he would kill himself rather than fall into Allied hands and be exhibited, as he later wrote, in Madison Square Garden in New York,
^†
was bundled into a tiny Fieseler-Storch plane and after a perilous take-off from a small rock-strewn meadow below the hotel flown to
Rome
and from there, the same evening, to
Vienna
in a Luftwaffe transport aircraft.
⁷

Though Mussolini was grateful for his rescue and embraced Hitler warmly when they met a couple of days later at Rastenburg, he was by now a broken man, the old fires within him turned to ashes, and much to Hitler’s disappointment he showed little stomach for reviving the Fascist regime in German-occupied Italy. The Fuehrer made no attempt to hide his disillusionment with his old Italian friend in a long talk with Goebbels toward the end of September.

Hitler and Goebbels were also incensed that Mussolini had had a reconciliation with Ciano and seemed to be under the thumb of his daughter, Edda, who was Ciano’s wife—both of them had found refuge in Munich.
^‡
They thought he should have had Ciano immediately executed and Edda, as Goebbels put it, whipped.
^*
They objected to Mussolini’s putting Ciano—“that poisoned mushroom,” Goebbels called him—in the forefront of the new
Fascist Republican Party
.

For Hitler had insisted that the Duce immediately create such a party, and on September 15, at the Fuehrer’s prodding, Mussolini proclaimed the new
Italian Social Republic
.