The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (197 page)

F
OR THREE SUCCESSIVE WAR YEARS
when summer came, it had been the Germans who had launched the great offensives on the continent of Europe. Now in 1943 the tables turned.

With the capture in early May of that year of the Axis forces in
Tunisia
, all that remained of a once mighty army in
North Africa
, it was obvious that General Eisenhower’s Anglo–American armies would next turn on
Italy
itself. This was the kind of nightmare which had haunted Mussolini in September of 1939 and which had made him delay Italy’s entry into the war until neighboring France had been conquered by the Germans and the British Expeditionary Force driven across the Channel. The nightmare now returned, but this time it was rapidly turning into reality.

Mussolini himself was ill and disillusioned; and he was frightened. Defeatism was rife among his people and in the armed forces. There had been mass strikes in the industrial cities of
Milan
and
Turin,
where the hungry workers had demonstrated for “bread, peace and freedom.” The discredited and corrupt Fascist regime itself was fast crumbling, and when Count Ciano at the beginning of the year was relieved as Foreign Minister and sent to the
Vatican
as ambassador the Germans suspected that he had gone there to try to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, as
Antonescu
, the Rumanian dictator, was already urging.

For several months Mussolini had been bombarding Hitler with appeals to make peace with Stalin, so that his armies could be withdrawn to the West to make a common defense with the Italians against the growing threat of the Anglo–American forces in the
Mediterranean
and of those which he believed were assembling in England for a cross-Channel invasion. The time had come again, Hitler realized, for a meeting with Mussolini in order to buck up his sagging partner and to put him straight. This was arranged for April 7, 1943, at
Salzburg
, and though the Duce arrived determined to have his way—or at least his say—at last, he once more succumbed to the Fuehrer’s torrents of words. Hitler later described his success to Goebbels, who jotted it down in his diary.

But in point of fact Mussolini was not ready for the events which now followed in quick succession. The Allied conquest of
Tunisia
in May was followed by the successful Anglo–American landings in
Sicily
on July 10. The Italians had little stomach for battle in their own homeland. Reports soon reached Hitler that the
Italian Army
was “in a state of collapse,” as he put it to his advisers at OKW.

Once again he summoned Mussolini to discuss the matter, the meeting taking place on July 19 at Feltre in northern Italy. This, incidentally, was the thirteenth conference of the two dictators and it followed the pattern of the most recent ones. Hitler did all the talking, Mussolini all the listening—for three hours before lunch and for two hours after it. Without much success the fanatical German leader tried to rekindle the sunken spirits of his ailing friend and ally. They must continue the fight on all fronts. Their tasks could not be left “to another generation.” The “voice of history” was still beckoning them. Sicily and Italy proper could be held if the Italians fought. There would be more German reinforcements to help them. A new U-boat would soon be in operation and would deal the British a “
Stalingrad
.”

Despite Hitler’s promises and boasts the atmosphere, Dr. Schmidt found, was most depressing. Mussolini was so overwrought that he could no longer follow his friend’s tirades and at the end asked Schmidt to furnish him with his notes. The Duce’s despair worsened when during the meeting reports came in of the first heavy daylight Allied air attack on
Rome
.
³

Benito Mussolini, tired and senile though he was only going on sixty, he who had strutted so arrogantly across Europe’s stage for two decades, was at the end of his rope. When he returned to Rome he found much worse than the aftermath of the first heavy bombing. He faced revolt from some of his closest henchmen in the Fascist Party hierarchy, even from his son-in-law, Ciano. And behind it there was a plot among a wider circle that reached to the King to overthrow him.

The rebellious Fascist leaders, led by Dino Grandi,
Giuseppe Bottai
and Ciano, demanded the convocation of the Fascist Grand Council, which had not met since December 1939 and which had always been a rubberstamp
body completely dominated by the Duce. It convened on the night of July 24–25, 1943, and Mussolini for the first time in his career as dictator found himself the target of violent criticism for the disaster into which he had led the country. By a vote of 19 to 8, a resolution was carried demanding the restoration of a constitutional monarchy with a democratic Parliament. It also called for the full command of the armed forces to be restored to the King.

The Fascist rebels, with the possible exception of Grandi, do not appear to have had any idea of going further than this. But there was a second and wider plot of certain generals and the King, which was now sprung. Mussolini himself apparently felt that he had weathered the storm—after all, decisions in Italy were not made by a majority vote in the Grand Council but by the Duce—and he was taken completely by surprise when on the evening of July 25 he was summoned to the royal palace by the King, summarily dismissed from office and carted off under arrest in an ambulance to a police station.
^*

So fell, ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-sounding man of the twentieth century who had known how to profit from its confusions and despair, but who underneath the gaudy façade was made largely of sawdust. As a person he was not unintelligent. He had read widely in history and thought he understood its lessons. But as dictator he had made the fatal mistake of seeking to make a martial, imperial Great Power of a country which lacked the industrial resources to become one and whose people, unlike the Germans, were too civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted by such false ambitions. The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism. They had merely suffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and Mussolini toward the end seems to have realized this. But like all dictators he was carried away by power, which, as it inevitably must, corrupted him, corroding his mind and poisoning his judgment. This led him to his second fatal mistake of tying his fortunes and those of Italy to the Third Reich. When the bell began to toll for Hitler’s Germany it began to toll for Mussolini’s Italy, and as the summer of 1943 came the Italian leader heard it. But there was nothing he could do to escape his fate. By now he was a prisoner of Hitler.

Not a gun was fired—not even by the Fascist militia—to save him. Not a voice was raised in his defense. No one seemed to mind the humiliating nature of his departure—being hauled away from the King’s presence to jail in an ambulance. On the contrary, there was general rejoicing at his
fall. Fascism itself collapsed as easily as its founder.
Marshal Pietro Badoglio
formed a nonparty government of generals and civil servants, the Fascist Party was dissolved, Fascists were removed from key posts and anti-Fascists released from prison.

   The reaction at Hitler’s headquarters to the news of Mussolini’s fall may be imagined, though it need not be—for voluminous secret records abound as to what it was.
⁴
It was one of deep shock. Certain parallels were immediately evident even to the Nazi mind, and the danger that a terrible precedent might have been set in Rome greatly troubled Dr. Goebbels, who was summoned posthaste to Rastenburg headquarters on July 26. The Propaganda Minister’s first thought, we learn from his diary, was how to explain the overthrow of Mussolini to the German people. “What are we to tell them, anyway?” he asked himself, and he decided that for the moment they were to be told only that the Duce had resigned “for reasons of health.”

Hitler, however, Goebbels added, did not think the danger was very imminent in Germany. The Propaganda Minister finally assured himself that the German people would not “regard the crisis in Rome as a precedent.”

Though the Fuehrer had observed the signs of cracking in Mussolini at their meeting but a fortnight before, he was taken completely by surprise when the news from Rome began to trickle in to headquarters on the afternoon of July 25. The first word was merely that the Fascist Grand Council had met, and Hitler wondered why. “What’s the use of councils like that?” he asked. “What do they do except jabber?”

That evening his worst fears were confirmed. “The Duce has resigned,” he announced to his astounded military advisers at a conference that began at 9:30
P.M.
“Badoglio, our most bitter enemy, has taken over the government.”

For one of the last times of the war Hitler reacted to the news with that ice-cold judgment which he had displayed in crises in earlier and more successful days. When General Jodl urged that they wait for more complete reports from Rome, Hitler cut him short.

That was Hitler’s first thought: to seize those who had overthrown Mussolini and restore the Duce to power.

Hitler turned to the OKW Chief of Operations.