Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini Read online

  In the early evening of July 25, as Mussolini’s captors began the task of blotting out Fascism and consolidating their control over the country, they did so in an atmosphere of grim suspense. How would the Nazis react, they wondered nervously, to the sudden disappearance of the Duce—stalwart supporter of Germany and Hitler’s personal friend?

  * * *

  *Cassandra is a figure from Greek mythology known for making accurate predictions that no one believed.

  *The carabinieri, a military organization, and polizia, the civil police, were the two primary law-enforcement agencies in Italy.

  *No one knows for certain what was actually said during the meeting between Mussolini and King Victor Emmanuel of Italy. The above account is pieced together from the contrasting versions later provided by the participants; both accounts are considered suspect to some degree by historians.

  INTO THE WOLF’S LAIR

  Mussolini must be rescued, and speedily, otherwise they will deliver him up to the Allies.1

  —Hitler, speaking in the Wolf’s Lair on July 26, 1943

  THE LARGE FIGURE OF CAPTAIN OTTO SKORZENY WAS A CONSPICUOUS presence in the surprisingly comfortable lobby of the Tea House, a spacious room furnished with several armchairs and a few tables. The Tea House was part of the Wolfsschanze, or Wolf ’s Lair, Hitler’s military headquarters in the forests of East Prussia.* The stocky, six-foot-four Skorzeny was accompanied by five other German officers whom he had never met before—three lieutenant colonels and two majors from various branches of the military.2 Like Skorzeny, they were all leaders of special units. They all out-ranked him.

  The six men had converged on the Wolf ’s Lair from various parts of war-torn Europe. Having been urgently summoned without explanation, they now milled around the lobby. Skorzeny stared down at the looped-wool carpet covering the floor.3 The thirty-fiveyear-old felt slightly uneasy in the rarified atmosphere of his surroundings. The Wolf ’s Lair, as he well knew, was the inner sanctum of the German High Command. From this isolated and heavily guarded complex, Hitler and his war chiefs struggled to manage the conflagration they had unleashed on the world almost four years earlier, but now it was gradually imploding on Germany itself.

  The pleasant décor of the Tea House did little to ease Skorzeny’s ill-defined anxiety. When one of the other officers mispronounced his name, Skorzeny, who was known for his cool head, reacted with the impulsiveness to which he was occasionally prone.

  “It’s not so very difficult,” he snapped. “All you have to do is break it up: Skor-zay-ny—it’s quite simple!”4 It was, in fact, an odd name for a captain in the Waffen SS, the so-called politically elite branch of Germany’s fighting forces. The response of the offending officer has not been recorded, but it is easy to imagine his quick apology and perhaps a faint smile betraying Skorzeny’s remark as a transparent show of nerves.

  It was Monday evening, July 26—one day after Mussolini’s sudden disappearance from the Italian scene. Skorzeny and his fellow officers had no knowledge of the Italian coup d’état. Official announcements in Germany indicated that the Duce had resigned from office for reasons of poor health.5 Italy’s new government had publicly pledged to continue the war at Germany’s side.

  Skorzeny had nearly missed the mysterious summons altogether; indeed, for much of the day, he had been happily incommunicado. In the afternoon, Skorzeny had donned civilian clothes and visited the lounge of the Hotel Eden in Berlin, about 350 miles west of the Wolf ’s Lair.6 He sipped ersatz coffee (an “indefinable brew”) with a friend who taught at the University of Vienna (a professor who apparently had been untouched by the Nazi purges of the university system).7 When he finally decided to check in with his office at the Friedenthal Battalion, the commando outfit he had created just several months earlier, he learned over the phone that his staff had been desperately trying to reach him for hours.

  “You are summoned to the Führer’s headquarters, Chief,” his secretary told him excitedly.8 Her sense of urgency was understandable: Skorzeny had never before been called to the Wolf ’s Lair. Like most Germans, in or out of the military, he was not even privy to its secret location. He knew only that it was located somewhere in East Prussia.

  Skorzeny needed to go to Berlin’s Tempelhof airport right away, she told him, where a special plane had been sent to fetch him. To save time, he decided to go directly to the airport, but he told Lieutenant Karl Radl, his thirty-one-year-old aide de camp, to pack a bag for him and meet him there. “You have no idea what all this is about?” he asked his secretary.9 But she had no clue.

  A little after 5:00 P.M., Skorzeny was hastening eastward across Germany as the sole passenger of a Junkers 52. Large and box-like, the three-engine cargo plane resembled a winged corrugated-tin shed. Now a workhorse of the Nazi war machine, it ferried troops and equipment to and from the far-flung German dominions. It had received its baptism of fire during the Spanish Civil War, when Ju 52s in the service of General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists dropped thousands of tons of bombs on Republican forces and Spanish civilians.10

  Skorzeny’s Ju 52 was a modified VIP plane equipped with a small bar. The young officer downed two glasses of cognac while contemplating what awaited him at Hitler’s headquarters: Had he been summoned to the Wolf ’s Lair to report on the progress of his fledgling commando unit? It seemed unlikely to him that any of his ongoing operations warranted such a high-level invitation. While Skorzeny was changing into his uniform at the airport, he and Radl had discussed the strange goings-on in Italy; but neither man saw a definite connection between this piece of news and Skorzeny’s flight into the great unknown.11

  Soon after take-off, Skorzeny discovered that Radl had slipped a map of Germany into his briefcase. He decided to make use of it. Before long, he was sitting next to the pilot and eagerly tracing the flight path of the sluggish Ju 52 as it approached its destination. In a few hours, the plane had traveled about 320 miles and was nearing Masuria, a low-lying region of East Prussia known for its forests and large lakes.12

  The area possessed significance for Skorzeny. Decades earlier, during World War I, the German army had scored a spectacular victory over the Russians at the nearby village of Tannenberg. Like many Germans of his generation, Skorzeny could recite the history of World War I with the same zeal that his American counterparts reserved for baseball trivia. Germany’s bitter defeat in that conflict and the harsh peace terms imposed by the Versailles Treaty had not only dominated the German psyche for much of the interwar period but also paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power.

  As dusk descended, the Ju 52 finally touched down at Rastenburg airfield, just southwest of Hitler’s HQ. Skorzeny stepped off the plane and approached a shiny black Mercedes parked in front of the airport’s hut-like office, where a sergeant was awaiting his arrival. The car would take Skorzeny on the last leg of his journey to the Wolf ’s Lair, which was located about five miles east of Rastenburg (modern-day Kêtrzyn in northeastern Poland). Built in anticipation of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis’ massive invasion of Russia in 1941, this dreary compound was Hitler’s home (with numerous interruptions) between June 1941 and the fall of 1944.

  Nestled in a swampy forest of fir and pine trees, the sprawling headquarters did not look impressive from a distance.13 Visitors had to pass through several security zones and checkpoints before reaching the nerve center known as Sperrkreis I (Restricted Zone I), where Hitler’s personal bunker was located as well as lodgings for some of his closest aides. Access to Sperrkreis I, as opposed to other sections of the headquarters, was limited to a select few.

  Shortly after leaving the airfield, Skorzeny’s car approached the first concrete barrier. The officer in charge asked to see his I.D. and the special pass issued to him at the airport. Skorzeny signed the register, the barrier swung open, and the car proceeded. The road narrowed and crossed railroad tracks. When the Mercedes arrived at the second checkpoint, Skorzeny presented his papers to another guard. After making a
telephone call, the officer asked Skorzeny who had sent for him. Skorzeny said he did not know.

  He had been summoned by the German General Staff, the guard informed Skorzeny, whose curiosity was growing. “What the deuce did they want of me at headquarters?” he wondered silently.14 After traveling a final few yards, the Mercedes passed through a portal and entered the grounds of Sperrkreis I. For Skorzeny, the place was the holiest of holies.

  At first glance, he thought Sperrkreis I resembled an “old park,” although one surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence.15 Small buildings and huts were scattered about the grounds in no discernable pattern, connected only by winding, tree-lined paths. He noticed the green carpet of grass blanketing the rooftops and what appeared to be small trees taking root there. (This was the handiwork of a Stuttgart landscaping company, which had installed artificial trees and moss on the tops of the buildings.)16

  Camouflage nets strung high in the trees provided a canopy that blocked the sunlight and deepened the primordial gloom.* The rooftop lawns and camouflage screens were designed to make the compound invisible to enemy bombers flying overhead. Dozens of antiaircraft (AA) guns and a series of surface bunkers, their walls several yards thick, also served to protect Hitler and his staff from air attack.

  It was almost dark when the Mercedes pulled up in front of the Tea House, a single-story building composed of two wings linked by a covered passageway. Skorzeny was escorted into the lobby of the right wing, where events were about to take an unexpected turn.

  Lieutenant Otto Guensche, an officer from the Wolf ’s Lair, entered the room to make a startling announcement to Skorzeny and the other men: “Gentlemen,” he said, “I am about to take you into the Führer’s presence.”17 The six officers could scarcely believe they had actually been summoned to meet with Adolf Hitler himself!

  At first, Skorzeny thought his ears had deceived him. “Then an unreasonable fear almost swept my legs from under me,” he recalled, making no attempt to disguise his awe. “In a few moments, for the first time in my life, I was to stand in the presence of Adolf Hitler, Führer of Greater Germany and Supreme Commander of the German Armed Forces! Talk about your surprises.”18

  Skorzeny had seen Hitler twice before—but from afar. The first time, in Berlin, had been 1936 at the Olympic Games, where Jesse Owens made a mockery of the Fuehrer’s racial theories by winning four gold medals. Two years later, perched on a scaffolding with some workmen, Skorzeny had witnessed Hitler’s triumphant entry into Vienna after the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria. Like many Austrians, Skorzeny had delighted in Hitler’s bloodless coup.

  Lieutenant Guensche, Hitler’s SS adjutant, led the six men out of the Tea House and into a nearby wooden building; here, Skorzeny found himself in another lobby that resembled the first. Guensche opened a door and the six men filed into a large room of twenty feet by thirty feet. It was infused by an aura of power. In his heightened state of awareness, Skorzeny took note of every detail: the “monumental” fireplace, the large wooden table covered with maps, a row of pencils lined up neatly on a desk.19 He also noticed a painting by Albrecht Dürer, Bouquet of Violets, in a shiny silver frame. Almost certainly part of a cache of looted artwork used to decorate the Wolf ’s Lair, this delicate still-life from the hand of Germany’s most famous Renaissance artist (he was one of Hitler’s personal favorites) must have seemed incongruous in the bowels of GHQ.

  “I was just musing,” Skorzeny remembered, “so this is where the great decisions of our epoch are worked out, when a door facing us opened.”20 The bodies of the six men stiffened as Hitler entered the room. He was wearing a gray officer’s jacket, a white shirt, and a black tie. Two medals earned during World War I—the Iron Cross and the Wound Badge—were visible on the left side of Hitler’s simple uniform, which lacked the insignia of rank. After taking a few steps, the dictator raised his arm in the characteristic salute so familiar to the men from photos and newsreel footage.

  Starting at the far right of the line, Guensche presented the officers, each of whom gave a brief summary of his career. As the lowestranking soldier in the group, Skorzeny stood at the opposite end, patiently waiting his turn. Though the reason for the interview remained obscure, the commando leader was eager to make a favorable impression. To this end, Skorzeny, who was not without ambition, began to master his emotions.

  A few moments later, Skorzeny stood face-to-face with Adolf Hitler. His notorious blue-gray eyes, alive with diabolical energy, seemed to pin the commando chief to the wall.21 After a brief bow, Skorzeny listed some basic facts about himself: his birthplace (Vienna), education (he had an engineering degree), and military career, including his present duty as commander of the Friedenthal Battalion. As Hitler looked upward at the giant, he could not help but notice the large dueling scar that ran down the left side of Skorzeny’s face.

  Hitler stepped back and gazed down the line.

  Which of them, he wanted to know, was familiar with Italy?

  None replied but Skorzeny.

  “I was there twice before the war,” he said. “I rode by motorcycle as far as Naples.”22

  Hitler said nothing. Instead he immediately posed a second question to the six men.

  “What,” Hitler asked, “do you think of Italy?”23

  A pause. It was a strange question to ask about Germany’s comrade-in-arms. The sheer vagueness of it probably made the officers wary. Responding in turn, most of them simply regurgitated phrases from Hitler’s formidable propaganda machine: Italy was Germany’s partner in the Axis, an ideological ally, and so forth.

  Skorzeny, it appears, decided to gamble. The drift of Hitler’s questions and the mysterious happenings in Italy prompted him to take a tack different from that of his fellows. What did he have to lose?

  “I am an Austrian, Führer,” Skorzeny replied.24 Hitler continued to stare at the hulking captain, but the latter said nothing more.

  This pithy response was probably a touch of drama on Skorzeny’s part. His shorthand expression was meant to reflect the traditional enmity that existed between Austria and Italy, which had sharpened since World War I. As a loser in the conflict, Austria had been obliged to hand over a large chunk of territory to the Italians in 1919. The socalled South Tyrol (or Alto Adige, as the Italians referred to it) was home to some 200,000 German-speaking ex-Austrians.25

  “Indeed,” Skorzeny explained in retrospect, “I had always judged this answer sufficient to expose my point of view, for any good Austrian must suffer deeply at the loss of the South Tyrol, the most beautiful region we ever possessed.”26 As he was aware, Hitler was himself an Austrian in origin—not to mention an irrepressible gambler in politics and war.

  Without another word, Hitler told the officers that they were dismissed. “As for you, Captain Skorzeny, you will stay. I have to talk to you.”27

  The two men were now alone. Skorzeny’s impromptu strategy had apparently paid off; yet because the dictator had divulged nothing during the group interview, the captain was unaware of what was required of him. As they faced each other, Skorzeny, who was taller than Hitler by several inches, noticed that the Fuehrer had a slight stoop.

  “I have a mission of the highest importance for you,” Hitler began. “Yesterday Mussolini, my friend and our loyal partner in the struggle, was betrayed by his king and arrested by his own compatriots. Now I cannot and will not abandon the greatest of Italians in his hour of peril.”28 Mussolini was nothing less than a modern-day Caesar, he told Skorzeny, but the leaders who had taken his place could not be trusted. With the Duce out of the way, the new Italian government (the Badoglio regime) could soon be expected to switch sides in the war.

  Hitler grew more animated as he spoke, his hands slicing through the air with short, compact gestures.29 “But I shall not go back on my word: Mussolini must be rescued, and speedily, otherwise they will deliver him up to the Allies. I therefore entrust you with this mission; its successful outcome will be of incalculable bearing upon the de
velopment of future military operations. If, as I ask you, you bend every effort and face every risk to attain your goal, then you will succeed!”30 For the duration of the mission, Hitler said, Skorzeny would be placed under the orders of General Kurt Student of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, who was scheduled to fly to Rome as soon as possible with a contingent of crack paratroopers.

  Hitler had in mind an undercover operation—one that must be kept secret not only from the Italians but also from most of Skorzeny’s fellow Germans. “There is one more essential point,” Hitler explained. “You must consider this the most absolute of secrets. Outside of yourself, only five persons are to be in our confidence.” Even Marshal Albert Kesselring, the top German commander in Italy, and Hitler’s diplomats at the embassy in Rome were to be kept in the dark. Hitler gave Skorzeny a warning: “[These men] have a completely false conception of the situation and they would only act counter to our interests.”31 As shall be seen later, Hitler was quickly losing faith in the German officers and diplomats based in the Eternal City, who, he believed, had become too cozy with the Italians.

  Not surprisingly, Skorzeny was receptive to the Hitler mystique. “The more the Führer spoke,” he later admitted, “the stronger I felt his hold upon me. His words seemed so persuasive that, at the moment, I did not even question the success of our enterprise.”32 Hitler’s voice had filled with emotion, Skorzeny noticed, when he spoke of his friendship with Mussolini.