Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini Page 3

  The two men shook hands. Skorzeny walked to the door, then turned to salute the German warlord before making his exit. Hitler’s gaze had never left him.

  Skorzeny returned to the lobby of the Tea House bewildered by the experience. He could still feel Hitler’s glance upon him, “a glance of unbearable intensity, the glance of a hypnotist.”33 Skorzeny lit a cigarette and greedily inhaled the first few puffs. Before long, Guensche appeared again and told him that Student was waiting to see him.34

  Skorzeny entered a small office and presented himself to General Student, the well-respected commander of Germany’s airborne forces. (German airborne troops belonged to the air force, unlike their counterparts in Britain and the United States, who belonged to the army.) Hitler had charged Student with overseeing the mission to find and rescue Mussolini, which had been dubbed Operation Oak. Skorzeny thought the general had a friendly face, even though it was marred by a deep scar that ran along his forehead (where he had been hit by a sniper’s bullet in 1940).35

  Skorzeny had barely begun to speak when another visitor appeared at the door. It was Heinrich Himmler. A onetime chicken farmer, Himmler was now the dreaded chief of the SS (and therefore Skorzeny’s boss), not to mention one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. After being introduced to Skorzeny, whom he had never met before, Himmler told the two men to be seated. He appeared to be anxious.

  Himmler, his eyes darting behind his trademark pince-nez, proceeded to analyze the political situation in Italy and the events behind Mussolini’s fall from power. The new Italian government, headed by Marshal Pietro Badoglio at the king’s request, had vowed to continue fighting alongside the Nazis. Himmler suspected that Badoglio would betray the Axis at the first opportunity by making a separate peace with the Allies.

  The SS chief began to list a series of Italian misdeeds, showering Skorzeny with names and dates. Though some of those in the Italian camp remained loyal to Germany, Himmler contended, many others were out-and-out traitors. With increasing agitation, he then discussed dozens of Italian notables by name—military men, politicians, and members of the Italian aristocracy—and gave them widely varying grades of reliability. The list was endless. When Skorzeny began to take notes, Himmler flew into a fury.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Himmler cried, throwing a glance at Student in disbelief.36 “These things must all remain top secret. Remember them, for God’s sake!”37 Skorzeny ceased his scribbling.

  “Italy’s defection is certain,” Himmler continued. “The only question is: when will it occur? It may well do so tomorrow.”38 The Italians, Himmler informed them, had already sent envoys to Portugal (a neutral country with foreign diplomats in residence) to start peace talks with the West.* After exhausting the subject with another flurry of names, Himmler began to discuss other matters with Student. Skorzeny checked the time. Seeing that it was almost 11:00 P.M., he decided to telephone his office in Berlin and let his staff know what was happening.

  As he stood in the hallway waiting for his call to go through, Skorzeny lit another cigarette. Himmler appeared almost at once.

  “This is unbelievable!” Himmler shouted at him. “Don’t you have enough willpower to stop smoking? Always these stinking cigarettes! I can see that you’re not the right man for this job!”39 Before Skorzeny could respond, the SS chief had stridden off.

  “A promising beginning,” Skorzeny thought to himself, putting out the cigarette with his heel.40 He wondered whether he had already been fired.

  * * *

  *“Wolf” had been one of Hitler’s nicknames during his younger days.

  *“Anyone coming from the sunny expanses of the surrounding countryside to this encampment in the gloomy East Prussian forest found the atmosphere oppressive,” recalled Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt. The place “reminded one of the fairy tale of the wicked witch.” Schmidt, 239.

  *This statement was untrue, at least during the month of July.

  TREASON IN THE AIR

  The English will take advantage of this, the Russians will cheer, the English will land [on the Italian mainland]; one might say that in Italy treason was always in the air.1

  —Hitler, referring to the Italian coup, July 26, 1943

  SKORZENY MAY NOT HAVE KNOWN IT, BUT THE WOLF’S LAIR HAD BEEN in turmoil during the twenty-four hours preceding his arrival on July 26. The bald truth was that Mussolini’s abrupt fall from power one day earlier had caught Hitler and his military chiefs off guard.

  The Germans were not oblivious to the potential for political intrigue in Italy; indeed, Hitler had become increasingly suspicious of the Italian royal house in recent months as the Axis army in North Africa crumbled and an Allied invasion of Italy loomed large. The German dictator had railed for years about the dangers posed by the king and the court circle—he had a lifelong contempt for the bourgeois and upper classes in general—whom he portrayed collectively as an aristocratic fifth column.*2 The Nazis also worried about Mussolini’s failing health, which seemed to threaten the stability of the Fascist regime in Italy.

  “One has to be on the watch like a spider in its web,” Hitler had remarked dramatically just two months earlier. “Thank God I’ve always had a pretty good nose for everything so that I can generally smell things out before they happen.”3

  But despite increased vigilance, the timing of the Duce’s sudden overthrow by the king came as a bitter surprise to the Germans. When it came to Italy, Hitler depended for information on his menon-the-spot in Rome, who consisted primarily of diplomats at the German embassy and agents working for the Third Reich’s police and intelligence services. They had been caught napping.4 The German ambassador to Rome, Hans Georg von Mackensen (the son of a famous field marshal), had badly misjudged the state of affairs in the capital. Not only did the ambassador and his subordinates fail to anticipate the royal machinations behind the coup; they were also grossly ignorant of lesser schemes being hatched by Mussolini’s cronies in the Grand Council of Fascism.

  It is ironic that on July 25, the day the Duce was arrested at the king’s villa, Mackensen had informed his superiors in Germany that Mussolini had the political situation in Rome under control. The Nazis received his optimistic analysis at about the same time they learned of the Italian coup. “Von Mackensen’s report reached its destination just as Benito Mussolini became a prisoner of his King and Emperor,” recalled Eugen Dollmann, an SS man who was with Mackensen when the latter sent off his report. “The German Foreign Minister [Ribbentrop] was wild with fury when he heard the news.”5

  Hitler was juggling other developing crises on the war front around the time of the Duce’s fall, the latest in a series of military disasters and demoralizing reverses for the European Axis powers. Though most of Europe remained firmly in Hitler’s grip by July, when Il Duce was arrested, the Allies were beginning to press hard around the edges.

  Stalin’s armies were hotly contesting Germany’s newly conquered Lebensraum, or living space, in the East. Things had begun to unravel there for the Germans early in the year. The Battle of Stalingrad, one of the most brutal episodes of the war, had finally ended in February 1943. It was Germany’s most devastating defeat to date. When the dust cleared, several hundred thousand Axis soldiers, casualties of Hitler’s muddle-headed no-retreat policy, had been killed or captured by the Russians. Stalingrad was a major psychological turning point in the war, not to mention a grave loss to the Reich of much-needed manpower.

  An even larger catastrophe (if that were possible) soon followed on the southern front. In May that year, the Anglo-Americans were victorious in the arid deserts of North Africa, scene of earlier exploits by Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox. The Allied success in Africa deprived the Axis of 250,000 Italian and German soldiers, who had surrendered with Mussolini’s reluctant blessing, and prepared the way for a July 10 invasion of Sicily.6 “After their covering positions in Africa had been removed,” recalled General Siegfried Westphal, a high-ranking officer in the Italian th
eater, “the southern flank of the ‘Fortress Germany’ was exposed, and an assault could be made on the ‘soft under-belly’ of Europe, as Churchill called it.”7 Axis misfortune in the Mediterranean also stiffened the resolve of Italians in high places who were contemplating the ouster of the Duce.

  In the West, where the war was being fought on the seas and in the skies, the Axis was faring little better. The Battle of the Atlantic, a deadly cat-and-mouse game that pitted German submarines against Allied cargo ships and their defenders, had turned sharply in the Allies’ favor by spring. Hitler’s only choice was the temporary withdrawal of his once-dreaded U-boats from the North Atlantic, an action that allowed thousands of merchant vessels to cross from the United States to Britain that summer.8 From the Axis point of view, the situation was unacceptable and presented more than just a setback. “We had,” Admiral Karl Doenitz, chief of the German navy, concluded in retrospect, “lost the Battle of the Atlantic.”9

  For the urban populace of Germany, 1943 was the year the Allies brought the war home to the Third Reich with a vengeance by stepping up their bombing campaigns against major German cities. Taking off from their bases in Britain, which began to resemble an enormous aircraft carrier, Allied bombers flew endless sorties into Germany during the first half of the year (and beyond).*10 The Casablanca Conference, an Allied summit attended by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in January, had officially sanctioned the use of carpet-bombing to destroy strategic targets and undermine the morale of the German people.11 Confident of ultimate victory, the Allied leaders at Casablanca also formally pronounced the endgame: They would accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender” from Germany, Italy, and Japan.12

  Though Hitler was far from finished—the Russians would not win the race for Berlin until April 1945—the stress of the war had begun to take its toll on the fifty-four-year-old German dictator by the time of Mussolini’s fall. Early in 1943, for instance, Hitler noticed trembling in his left arm and leg.13 His attempts to control these chronic tremors, which grew worse despite treatment, gave rise to new mannerisms: He would cross his right hand over his left and push his foot against any stationary object that happened to be nearby.14 At about the same time, Hitler developed a slight limp and had to drag his left foot behind him as he walked.15

  Though he did not smoke or drink alcohol, the abstemious dictator was a hypochondriac who found it difficult to function during these increasingly dark days without frequent doses of various drugs, vitamins, glucose injections, hormones, and more exotic concoctions.16 His personal physician, a certified quack known as Professor (Theodor) Morell, maintained a vast pharmacopoeia in the Wolf ’s Lair for this purpose and became indispensable to Hitler and other members of his staff.17 The ministrations of the inept professor, who sometimes used his gullible master as a guinea pig for the testing of new drugs, may very well have contributed to Hitler’s deterioration.*18 (Between 1941 and 1945, Morell gave Hitler a staggering number of medications and supposedly therapeutic preparations: seventy-seven in all.)19

  Infrequent visitors to the Wolf ’s Lair were often shocked by Hitler’s decline. On July 7, 1943, just a few weeks before Mussolini’s fall, Wernher von Braun, who was the architect of Germany’s rocket program, arrived at the compound for a meeting. “Hitler’s physical appearance was frightening,” recalled Braun, who instinctively linked Hitler’s failing health to the recent downturn in the war. “I had last seen him in 1939. He looked tired but still radiated an almost magic strength. His eyes had something diabolical in them, but his face was pale, and he looked like a beaten man.”20

  Or, as Rommel put it succinctly to his wife at the end of July 1943: “Sometimes you feel that he’s no longer quite normal.”21

  Hitler and the Germans learned of the Italian coup a few hours after it took place on July 25, though deceptive measures taken by the Badoglio government continued to obscure the details for weeks to come. The first indications of trouble south of the Alps had surfaced during the afternoon Fuehrer Conference at the Wolf ’s Lair.

  As it happened, part of this conference, which began in the late morning, coincided with the meeting between Mussolini and the Japanese ambassador, Shinrokuro Hidaka, at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. The same afternoon that the Duce was complaining to Hidaka about Italy’s lack of military resources, Hitler was sitting in a conference room of the Wolf ’s Lair enduring yet another round of depressing status reports. One of these revealed a serious shortage of reserves on the eastern front, where Germany and Russia had been locked in a titanic struggle for more than two years.

  On July 5, the German army had launched a massive new offensive in the Kursk region—it was referred to as the Citadel plan— involving 500,000 men and thousands of tanks. The attack had made little progress, so little, in fact, that the Russians were emboldened to launch an offensive of their own in mid-July.22

  “Operation Citadel was more than a battle lost,” recalled General Walter Warlimont, “it handed the Russians the initiative and we never recovered it again right up to the end of the war.”23 On the day of his arrest, Mussolini gave an explanation to Hidaka: “It is urgently necessary that Germany and Russia stop making war on one another. It’s not that Germany does not want to help us, but she is so bogged down on the eastern front as to be unable to send us any help.”24

  Hitler’s mind was also grappling that afternoon with his old nemesis, the English (those “arrogant islanders”), whom he had failed to subdue in 1940.25 The previous evening (Saturday), while Mussolini was facing a rebellion in the Fascist Grand Council, the Allies had staged a major bombing raid against Hamburg, Germany’s secondlargest city.26 It was the violent herald of a devastating, multistage air attack dubbed Operation Gomorrah. The explicit aim of the operation, as specified by Bomber Command, was to destroy the city.27

  This goal was nearly accomplished. Two days later, on July 27, another air raid on Hamburg ignited an enormous sea of fire that prompted the Hamburg Fire Department to coin the term Feuersturm, or firestorm.28 The inferno reached temperatures of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, killing tens of thousands and destroying eight square miles of the city—an area about half the size of Manhattan.29 Some of the German victims were roasted alive within the confines of bomb shelters; others were trapped in the melting asphalt of city streets before succumbing.30

  But on July 25, the true horrors of Hamburg lay in the future. At about 1:30 P.M., Hitler was arguing with an officer from the air force about how Germany, with its ever-shrinking resources, should respond to the Saturday-night bombing and similar outrages. Having withdrawn their submarines from the North Atlantic, the Nazis were contemplating a scheme that involved laying mines in English coastal waters (via airplane) in an attempt to disrupt Allied supply lines. But with Hamburg weighing on his mind, Hitler was in the mood for more violent means of retaliation. The conversation was taken down verbatim by Wolf ’s Lair stenographers.*

  “I have already told you, when we discussed this a few days ago, that terror can only be broken by terror,” Hitler said to Colonel Eckard Christian. “One has to counter-attack, everything else is nonsense. In my opinion all this mining is worthless, it gives no lift to our people and it doesn’t affect those people over there either. . . . In my opinion we should use our planes for attacking them directly, especially since they are putting so many planes into the air.”31

  As on many other occasions during the war, Hitler’s first instinct was to strike with overwhelming force. But in 1943, the deadly whims of the German warlord were constrained by shortages of men and machines. Christian gently pressed the point—the Luftwaffe simply did not have enough bombers available to carry out largescale raids against England. At least the mine-laying operation, he argued, would have an “indirect” effect on the enemy.32

  “Terror can only be broken by terror,” Hitler repeated firmly. “We can only stop this business if we get at the people over there. Otherwise our own people will gradually go crazy. . . . It is going t
o work only if we attack their cities systematically. But all the time I am told things like ‘We couldn’t find that place’ or ‘We don’t have enough planes’; but then it turns out we do have enough to do something else . . . the usual excuse I get to hear is, ‘We can’t find it.’ You can’t find London! A God-damned shame!”33

  But Germany simply did not have enough planes available, Christian said.

  “That’s not true,” Hitler countered. “The important thing is to make them feel something. It seems to me that if there are 50 bombers over the center of Munich it is quite enough; not a single person can sleep that night. At any rate, it is better for you to put 50 of our planes over a city like that than to drop mines. That’s a lot of tripe!”34

  The Luftwaffe officer continued to argue his point, but Hitler had heard enough.

  “Instead of monkeying around,” Hitler replied, “let’s attack, get ready here, and pick out a target—it doesn’t matter what target. We can’t go on this way. Eventually the German people will go nuts. . . . Terror can only be broken by terror, and in no other way.”35

  When Hitler learned that the Allies had lost only twelve bombers during the Hamburg raid, he asked Christian to determine exactly the points at which they had been shot down.* Christian’s response revealed that bombers were not the only commodity in short supply in the Germany of 1943:

  “Yes,” Christian said, “but that takes longer now because we don’t allocate any gas for that. They just send people out with bicycles.”36

  “That has to be done,” said Hitler, who suddenly sounded like a scolding headmaster, “or else you won’t be able to make a report. You’ll have to send them out with bicycles.”37

  Such were the exigencies competing for German attention on the day Mussolini walked into a trap at the king’s villa in Rome.