The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (199 page)

It never amounted to anything. Mussolini’s heart was not in it. Perhaps he retained enough sense of reality to see that he was now merely a puppet of Hitler, that he and his “Fascist Republican Government” had no power except what the Fuehrer gave them in Germany’s interests and that the Italian people would never again accept him and Fascism.

He never returned to
Rome
. He set himself up at an isolated spot in the extreme north—at
Rocca delle Caminate
, near Gargnano, on the shores of Lake Garda, where he was closely guarded by a special detachment of the S.S. Leibstandarte. To this beautiful lake resort Sepp Dietrich, the veteran S.S. tough, who was detached from his reeling 1st S.S. Armored Corps in Russia for the purpose—such were the goings on in the Third Reich—escorted Mussolini’s notorious mistress, Clara Petacci. With his true love once more in his arms, the fallen dictator seemed to care for little else in life. Goebbels, who had had not one mistress but many, professed to be shocked.

A few days before, Goebbels had noted that Hitler had begun “to write off the Duce politically.” But not before, it should be added, the Fuehrer forced him to “cede”
Trieste
,
Istria
and the South Tyrol to Germany with the understanding that
Venice
would be added later on. Now no humiliation was spared this once proud tyrant. Hitler brought pressure on him to arrest his son-in-law, Ciano, in November, and to have him executed in the jail at
Verona
on January 11, 1944.
^†

By the early autumn of 1943, Adolf Hitler could well claim to have mastered the gravest threats to the Third Reich. The fall of Mussolini and the unconditional surrender of the
Badoglio
government in Italy might easily have led, as Hitler and his generals for a few crucial weeks feared, to exposing the southern borders of Germany to direct Allied attack and opening the way—from northern Italy—into the weakly held Balkans in the very rear of the German armies fighting for their lives in southern Russia. The meek departure of the Duce from the seat of power in
Rome
was a severe blow to the Fuehrer’s prestige both at home and abroad, as was the consequent destruction of the Axis alliance. Yet within a couple of months Hitler, by a daring stroke, had restored Mussolini—at least in the eyes of the world. The Italian areas of occupation in the Balkans, in Greece,
Yugoslavia
and
Albania
, were secured against Allied attack, which OKW had expected any day that late summer; the Italian forces there, amounting to several divisions, surrendered meekly and were made prisoners of war. And instead of having to write off
Kesselring
’s forces, as he had first done, and retreating to northern Italy, the Fuehrer had the satisfaction of seeing the Field Marshal’s armies digging in south of Rome, where they easily halted the advance of the Anglo–American-French troops up the peninsula. There was no disputing that Hitler’s fortunes in the south had been considerably restored by his daring and resourcefulness and by the prowess of his troops.

Elsewhere, though, his fortunes continued to fall.

On July 5, 1943, he had launched what was to prove his last great offensive of the war against the Russians. The flower of the German Army—some 500,000 men with no less than seventeen panzer divisions outfitted with the new heavy Tiger tanks—was hurled against a large Russian salient west of
Kursk
. This was “Operation
Citadel
” and Hitler believed it would not only entrap the best of the Russian armies, one million strong—the very forces which had driven the Germans from
Stalingrad
and the Don the winter before—but enable him to push back to the Don and perhaps even to the Volga and swing up from the southeast to capture Moscow.

It led to a decisive defeat. The Russians were prepared for it. By July 22, the panzers having lost half of their tanks, the Germans were brought to a complete halt and started to fall back. So confident of their strength were the Russians that without waiting for the outcome of the offensive they launched one of their own against the German salient at
Orel
, north of Kursk, in the middle of July, quickly penetrating the front. This was the first Russian summer offensive of the war and from this moment on the Red armies never lost the initiative. On August 4 they pushed the Germans out of Orel, which had been the southern hinge of the German drive to capture Moscow in December 1941.

Now the Soviet offensive spread along the entire front.
Kharkov
fell on August 23. A month later, on September 25, three hundred miles to the northwest, the Germans were driven out of
Smolensk
, from which city
they, like the Grande Armée, had set out so confidently in the first months of the Russian campaign on the high road to Moscow. By the end of September Hitler’s hard-pressed armies in the south had fallen back to the line of the Dnieper and a defensive line they had established from
Zaporozhe
at the bend of the river south to the Sea of Azov. The industrial Donets basin had been lost and the German
Seventeenth
Army in the
Crimea
was in danger of being cut off.

Hitler was confident that his armies could hold on the Dnieper and on the fortified positions south of Zaporozhe which together formed the so-called “Winter Line.” But the Russians did not pause even for regrouping. In the first week of October they crossed the Dnieper north and southeast of
Kiev
, which fell on November 6. By the end of the fateful year of 1943 the Soviet armies in the south were approaching the Polish and Rumanian frontiers past the battlefields where the soldiers of Hitler had achieved their early victories in the summer of 1941 as they romped toward the interior of the Russian land.

This was not all.

There were two other setbacks to Hitler’s fortunes that year which also marked the turning of the tide: the loss of the
Battle of the Atlantic
and the intensification of the devastating air war day and night over Germany itself.

In 1942, as we have seen, German submarines sank 6,250,000 tons of Allied shipping, most of it bound for Britain or the
Mediterranean
, a tonnage which far outstripped the capacity of the shipyards in the West to make good. But by the beginning of 1943 the Allies had gained the upper hand over the
U-boats
, thanks to an improved technique of using long-range aircraft and aircraft carriers and, above all, of equipping their surface vessels with
radar
which spotted the enemy submarines before the latter could sight them. Doenitz, the new commander of the Navy and the top U-boat man in the service, at first suspected treason when so many of his underwater craft were ambushed and destroyed before they could even approach the Allied convoys. He quickly learned that it was not treason but radar which was causing the disastrous losses. In the three months of February, March and April they had amounted to exactly fifty vessels; in May alone, thirty-seven U-boats were sunk. This was a rate of loss which the German Navy could not long sustain, and before the end of May Doenitz, on his own authority, withdrew all submarines from the North Atlantic.

They returned in September but in the last four months of the year sank only sixty-seven Allied vessels against the loss of sixty-four more submarines—a ratio which spelled the doom of U-boat warfare and definitely settled the Battle of the Atlantic. In 1917 in the First World War, when her armies had become stalled, Germany’s submarines had almost brought Britain to her knees. They were threatening to accomplish this in 1942, when Hitler’s armies in Russia and North Africa had also been stopped, and when the United States and Great Britain were straining themselves not only to halt the drive of the Japanese in Southeast
Asia
but to assemble
men and arms and supplies for the invasion of Hitler’s European empire in the West.

Their failure to seriously disrupt the North
Atlantic
shipping lanes during 1943 was a bigger disaster than was realized at Hitler’s headquarters, depressing though the actual news was.
^*
For it was during the twelve months of that crucial year that the vast stocks of weapons and supplies were ferried almost unmolested across the Atlantic which made the assault of Fortress Europe possible in the following year.

And it was during that period too that the horrors of modern war were brought home to the German people—brought home to them on their own doorsteps. The public knew little of how the
U-boats
were doing. And though the news from Russia, the
Mediterranean
and Italy grew increasingly bad, it dealt after all with events that were transpiring hundreds or thousands of miles distant from the homeland. But the bombs from the British planes by night and the American planes by day were now beginning to destroy a German’s home, and the office or factory where he worked.

Hitler himself declined ever to visit a bombed-out city; it was a duty which seemed simply too painful for him to endure. Goebbels was much distressed at this, complaining that he was being flooded with letters “asking why the Fuehrer does not visit the distressed air areas and why Goering isn’t to be seen anywhere.” The Propaganda Minister’s diary authoritatively describes the growing damage to German cities and industries from the air.

Although considerable damage was done to specific German war plants, especially to those turning out fighter planes, ball bearings, naval ships, steel, and fuel for the new jets, and to the vital rocket experimental station at Peenemunde on which Hitler had set such high hopes,
^*
and though rail and canal transport were continually disrupted, over-all German armament production was not materially reduced during the stepped-up Anglo–American bombings of 1943. This was partly due to the increased output of factories in the occupied zones—above all, those in Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium and northern Italy, which escaped bombing.

The greatest damage inflicted by the Anglo–American air forces, as Goebbels makes clear in his diary, was to the homes and the morale of the German people. In the first war years they had been buoyed up, as this writer remembers, by the lurid reports of what Luftwaffe bombing had done to the enemy, especially to the British. They were sure it would help bring the war to an early—and victorious—end. Now, in 1943, they themselves began to bear the full brunt of air warfare far more devastating than any the Luftwaffe had dealt to others, even to the populace of London in 1940–41. The German people endured it as bravely and as stoically as the British people had done. But after four years of war it was all the more a severe strain, and it is not surprising that as 1943 approached its end, with all its blasted hopes in Russia, in
North Africa
and in Italy, and with their own cities from one end of the Reich to the other being pulverized
from the air, the German people began to despair and to realize that this was the beginning of the end that could only spell their defeat.

“Toward the end of 1943 at the latest,” the now unemployed General
Halder
would later write, “it had become unmistakably clear that the war was militarily lost.”
⁹

General
Jodl
, in a gloomy off-the-record lecture to the Nazi gauleiters in Munich on November 7, 1943—the eve of the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch—did not go quite so far. But the picture he painted of the situation at the beginning of the fifth year of the war was dark enough.

The state of German morale as the result of the defeats and the bombings of 1943 was vividly described by this authoritative source, who on this occasion was speaking for the Fuehrer.