Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini Read online

  HITLER’S RAID

  TO SAVE MUSSOLINI

  HITLER’S RAID

  TO SAVE MUSSOLINI

  THE MOST INFAMOUS COMMANDO

  OPERATION OF WORLD WAR II

  Greg Annussek

  Copyright © 2005 by Greg Annussek

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to use the following material:

  From The Interpreter by Eugen Dollmann, published by Hutchinson. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

  From The Goebbels Diaries: 1942–1943 by Joseph Goebbels, copyright 1948 by The Fireside Press, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  From Skorzeny’s Secret Missions by Otto Skorzeny, translated by Jacques LeClercq, copyright 1950, renewed © 1978 by E. P. Dutton. Used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  From Generaloberst Kurt Student und seine Fallschirmjäger: die Erinnerungen des Generaloberst Kurt Student by Kurt Student and Hermann Götzel, copyright 1980 by Podzun-Pallas. Used by permission of Podzun-Pallas.

  Set in 11.5-point Berkeley by the Perseus Books Group

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Annussek, Greg A.

  Hitler’s raid to save Mussolini : the most infamous commando operation of World War II / Greg Annussek.—1st Da Capo Press ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-10: 0-306-81396-3 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-306-81396-2 (alk. paper)

  eBook ISBN: 9780786735716

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Commando operations—Italy. 2. Mussolini, Benito, 1883–1945—Captivity, 1943. 3. Germany. Luftwaffe. Fallschirmjägerdivision, 2— History. I. Title.

  D794.5.A56 2005

  940.54'1245—dc22

  2005012566

  First Da Capo Press paperback edition 2006

  ISBN-13: 978-0-306-81505-8 (pbk.); ISBN-10: 0-306-81505-2 (pbk.)

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  http://www.dacapopress.com

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, or call (800) 255-1514 or (617) 252-5298, or e-mail [email protected].

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MANY THANKS ARE DUE TO MY AGENT EDWARD KNAPPMAN, WHO helped to refine the concept of the book at the outset. I am also indebted to Robert Pigeon, my editor at Da Capo, for his advice on narrative structure as well as his overall enthusiasm for the project.

  Anastasia Schüle, who translated the German and Italian source material into English, went the extra mile by working tirelessly to meet tight deadlines.

  I am also grateful to friends and family who offered their feedback on early drafts of manuscripts and book proposals. This group includes my parents, Robert and Rosarita Annussek, as well as Angel Annussek, Rosa Michnya, Lana Zannoni, Jeffrey Stanley, and David Bourla.

  Mr. Cameron Archer, Director of the Tocal Agricultural Centre (Paterson, NSW, Australia), Mr. Dan Hunt, and Mr. Peter Bardwell were gracious enough to allow me to use several of their photos in this book.

  In the final stages of book production, copyeditor Jennifer Blakebrough-Raeburn made a number of helpful suggestons.

  PROLOGUE

  MUSSOLINI FALLS

  FROM POWER

  Mussolini’s Headquarters in Rome, Italy—July 25, 1943

  CLOSE TO 9:00 A.M. ON A QUIET SUNDAY MORNING, BENITO MUSSOLINI stepped out of the brilliant sunshine and into the austere beauty of the Renaissance-era Palazzo Venezia in the heart of Rome.1 He went up to his second-floor office, a cavernous hall known as the Sala del Mappamondo, and sank into a chair behind his massive desk. If the Italian dictator looked even more pale and haggard than usual on this day, it was not without good reason. The events of the previous evening had left Il Duce with little time for sleep. During a stormy all-night session of the Grand Council of Fascism, the lofty name given to a glorified gang of Mussolini’s political henchmen, a small band of rebellious subordinates had staged a dramatic and unprecedented revolt.

  One after another, several of the Duce’s top lieutenants criticized the weary fifty-nine-year-old despot and his disastrous conduct of the war. “You have imposed a dictatorship on Italy,” declared Dino Grandi, the ringleader of the bunch. “You have destroyed the spirit of our Armed Forces. . . . For years when selecting someone from among several candidates for an important post, you have invariably selected the worst.”2 With such a frank airing of grievances, it was no wonder that some of the conspirators had stuffed hand grenades into their briefcases as a precaution against arrest.3

  They need not have worried. Long depressed in spirit and suffering from severe stomach pains, Mussolini listened impassively to the growing chorus of dissent without making a move to silence his detractors. The exhausting ten-hour meeting broke up at 2:40 A.M. on Sunday, but not before a majority of council members had voted in favor of the so-called Grandi Agenda.4 This ominous resolution proposed to abolish the Duce’s personal one-man rule and transfer his most important powers, such as control of the armed forces, to King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, who had remained on the throne largely as a figurehead during the life of the Fascist regime. To the dictator’s chagrin, one of the men who voted against him that night was none other than Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s playboy son-in-law and onetime foreign minister.

  The Duce had concluded the meeting with a bitter announcement: “You have provoked a crisis of the Régime.”5 And yet, to all appearances, he did not seem overly concerned by this flagrant insurrection on the part of his Fascist brethren. Undaunted, he had shown up promptly for work a few hours later to resume his stewardship of the broken-down Italian Empire. “As I had regularly done for the last twenty-one years,” he wrote afterward, “I settled down to my working day—the last!”6 As Mussolini well knew, the Grand Council was merely an advisory board, a bit of democratic window dressing that in his mind did not count for much.

  Moreover, he also doubted the mettle of his Fascist flunkies, some of whom had already expressed a desire to retract the votes they had cast just a few hours earlier. “Too late,” the Duce had said over the telephone that morning in response to one such entreaty.7 Not long before the Grand Council meeting, he had neatly summed up his view of the yes-men with which he had often chosen to surround himself.8 “Believe me . . . these Grand Council members,” the dictator had remarked to his chief of police, “are of low, very low intelligence, wobbly in their convictions, and without much courage. These people live in someone else’s shadow: if the source of light should disappear, they too would be cast back into the darkness from whence they came.”9

  Though his star had dimmed in recent months, Mussolini could assure himself that he was still the brightest object in the murky constellation of Italian politics. The shadow men may have turned their knives on the modern-day Caesar, but the Duce felt only pricks: irritating perhaps, but not fatal. Nevertheless, he planned to visit the king later in the day to discuss the vote and its implications.

  At 1:00 P.M., Mussolini received a visit at the Palazzo Venezia from the Japanese ambassador, Shinrokuro Hidaka. The Du
ce spent an hour giving Hidaka an account of his recent war conference with Hitler, which had taken place just six days earlier. The immediate crisis, then and now, was the Allied invasion of Sicily. This large mountainous island, which had once provided the setting for legendary battles among the ancient Greeks, was the scene of desperate fighting between the Axis and the Western alliance.

  The Anglo-Americans had made their landings on the island on July 10 (among them was a gung-ho American general named George Patton) and were quickly overwhelming most of its German and Italian defenders, the latter offering only a token resistance. An invasion of the Italian mainland could not be far off, and Mussolini knew that he would be helpless to stop it. It was this dilemma, and its inevitable effect on his political viability, that had been eating away at him in recent months and aggravating his longstanding— and somewhat mysterious—health problems.

  During his conference with Hitler, he had hoped that the Germans would agree to send reinforcements and supplies to shore up the defense of Sicily—and to bolster the Duce’s own domestic political standing—but substantial aid was not immediately forthcoming. The Nazis’ resources were already stretched to the limit, and Hitler was having grave doubts about the Italian will to fight. In the intervening days, Mussolini decided to take a harder line with his German ally, and he wanted fellow Axis partner Japan to back his position.

  “Please tell Tokyo urgently,” Mussolini told Hidaka, “of my decision to send a note to Berlin on Wednesday that will say that if Germany does not furnish all the war material Italy has requested, we will be forced to declare that we can no longer fulfill our duties within the alliance. I ask that the Japanese ambassador in Berlin support my request very forcefully. Unfortunately, this is the situation, and Berlin must understand. In order to fight, one must have weapons.”10 Three years after plunging Italy into World War II at Hitler’s urging, the Duce was scrambling to stave off the inevitable.

  After his meeting with the Japanese diplomat, Mussolini departed the Palazzo Venezia and drove through the working-class district of San Lorenzo, which had been badly damaged during a recent Allied bombing raid. The Italians, it must be said, had never wanted Mussolini’s war—despite the ubiquitous presence of such unequivocal slogans as “Mussolini is always right”—and when the conflict finally arrived on their doorstep they privately cursed his decision to throw in his lot with the detested Nazis, whose racial policies they had always abhorred.11

  As Mussolini stepped out of his car, he was greeted with several obligatory salutes from the weary men and women who were still sifting through the rubble.12 Or as he remembered it: “I was at once surrounded by a crowd of the victims, who cheered me.”13 He returned the favor by instructing General Enzo Galbiati, who had accompanied him, to empty his wallet and distribute money to the people.14 (Mussolini did not generally carry cash.)15

  He seems to have taken some pride in his reception that afternoon among the ruins of Roman neighborhoods, which would not be surprising.16 The solitary dictator had always derived more gratification from his rapport with the masses, real or imaginary, than from the intimacy of personal relationships.

  It was a particularly steamy summer in Rome that year, and by mid-afternoon on Sunday the city was beginning to wilt under the Mediterranean sun.17 “An oppressive and sultry heat burdened the souls of men,” remembered Mussolini, a onetime journalist who in his younger days had fancied himself a novelist, “and pressed down from a motionless sky on the city of Rome.”18 At 3:00 P.M. he pulled up to the Villa Torlonia, his comfortable estate in nearby Frascati, where, bearing a bowl of soup and Cassandra-like prophecies, his wife, Rachele, awaited him.*19

  “I had my usual breakfast,” he recalled, “and spent an hour chatting with Rachele in the little music room. My wife was more than depressed, and her fears that something was going to happen were very great.”20 The suspicious Rachele begged her husband to cancel his meeting with the king, whom she distrusted, but the Duce shrugged off her warnings.21 He had nothing to fear from Victor Emmanuel, he told her.22 The king was a friend.23

  Mussolini had no inkling that his friend the king, in league with a cabal of Italian generals, was the prime mover of a separate conspiracy designed to topple the dictator from power and sweep away his twenty-year-old Fascist regime. To the king’s mind, the Grand Council vote was simply a convenient pretext for springing his own trap, which was far more extreme than anything envisaged by most of the Duce’s minions in the Gran Consiglio, who wished to provide the country with new leadership without committing political suicide by destroying Fascism altogether.24 Mussolini’s last-minute request to call on the royal residence had upset the timing of the coup d’état, which was scheduled to occur the following day. But the king and his men decided to accommodate the Duce, who unknowingly hastened his own exit from the stage.

  At about 5:00 P.M., Mussolini’s Alfa Romeo passed through the iron gates of the Villa Savoia, Victor Emmanuel’s residence on the outskirts of the capital.25 The Duce, who was dressed in a dark-bluesuit and black felt hat, saw members of the carabinieri, the Italian military police, standing here and there on the grounds.*26 Others were hiding behind the king’s shrubbery, unseen by the dictator.27 But the presence of armed guards was not out of the ordinary and failed to pique his curiosity. Mussolini thus walked into the heart of the spider’s web without the slightest trace of foreboding.28

  As he approached the villa, he saw Victor Emmanuel waiting for him on the steps. The diminutive king—he was about five feet tall—was wearing a gaudy marshal’s uniform.29 After a brief exchange about the hot weather, the Duce followed Victor Emmanuel into a drawing room where the two men could be alone.30 Mussolini began to describe the Grand Council meeting, minimizing the importance of the vote as well as its legal ramifications, when the king cut him short.31

  “My dear Duce, it can’t go on any longer,” the king said. “Italy is in pieces. Army morale has reached the bottom and the soldiers don’t want to fight any longer. The Alpine regiments have a song saying that they are through fighting Mussolini’s war.”32 In what must have been a surreal and uncomfortable moment for the Duce, the king recited the chorus (“Down with Mussolini, murderer of the Alpini”) as the dictator listened in silence.33

  “Surely you have no illusions,” he continued, “as to how Italians feel about you at this moment. You are the most hated man in Italy; you have not a single friend left, except for me. You need not worry about your personal security. I shall see to that. I have decided that the man of the hour is Marshal Badoglio.”34

  The name cut Mussolini to the quick. Pietro Badoglio was a former chief of Comando Supremo (the Italian High Command) who had been sacked by the Duce in 1940 after Italy had suffered its biggest military humiliation of the war. The two men were considered enemies. Yet the king was now telling Mussolini that he had selected the old soldier to be the head of a new Italian government. “He will form a cabinet of career officials,” Victor Emmanuel added, “in order to rule the country and go on with the war. Six months from now we shall see.”35

  The Duce seemed crushed by the blow, according to the king. “Then my ruin is complete,” the dictator muttered, lowering himself into a chair.36 “I’m sorry,” said the king, who had developed a genuine admiration for Mussolini over the years, “but the solution couldn’t have been otherwise, I’m sorry.”37 When the Duce had recovered his composure, he voiced some mild protest, then added: “I am perfectly aware that the people hate me. I admitted as much last night before the Grand Council. No one can govern for so long and impose so many sacrifices without incurring more or less bitter resentment.”38

  The meeting had lasted a mere twenty minutes.39 At 5:20 P.M., Victor Emmanuel, whose monarchy had collaborated closely with the Fascist regime for two decades, escorted Mussolini to the door.40 The two men shook hands. “His face was livid,” the Duce later observed wryly, “and he seemed even shorter than usual, as if he had shrunk.”41

  But the bigge
st surprise was yet to come. As he walked to his car, the unsuspecting Mussolini was placed under arrest by a captain of the carabinieri and bundled into a waiting ambulance, which sped off at high speed with its bewildered cargo. The strutting dictator of Fascist Italy was now a prisoner of his own people.*

  Once Mussolini had been spirited away to a secret location, the king and his fellow conspirators proceeded to round up some of the leading Fascists in Rome, dismantling what remained of the Duce’s political regime in the process. Despite what he told Mussolini in the Villa Savoia, the king had no intention of allowing Italy to bloody itself any further in the war. When the time was ripe, Victor Emmanuel was prepared to break away from the Axis and seek the mercy of the Allies. The ex-Duce might prove to be a valuable peace offering to the would-be invaders of Italian shores.

  Though Mussolini and his followers were neutralized without much fuss in the days immediately following the coup, the possibility of German interference posed a far greater danger to the king’s new government. The regime change was bound to be viewed with malevolence by Hitler, who was known to call the Duce his friend and who also harbored a deep distrust of the monarchy and its attitude toward the war (and not without good reason).

  An Italian surrender, should such an event occur, could prove catastrophic for the Nazis, who were counting on their Mediterranean partner to help defend the southern front against the Allies. If the Italians suddenly threw open their gates to the enemy, the Germans feared that British and American forces might make a dash up the peninsula and launch an assault on the Third Reich itself, which was already engaged in a desperate struggle against the gargantuan Russian army in the East.

  To avoid German reprisals, the king was planning to conceal his peace offensive from Hitler while reaffirming Italy’s commitment to the Axis. Such dissimulations were conceived as a temporary measure designed to keep the Nazis at bay long enough for the Italians to enter into covert negotiations for a promise of military support from the Allies. But therein lay the rub. Until such time as it secured a deal with the enemy, the new Italian regime would have to rely on its wits if it was to forestall a possible attack by the Germans.