Such discussions were always private. Hitler still did not speak of the fate of the Jews, except in the most generalized fashion, even among his inner circle. It was a topic which all in his company knew to avoid. To think of criticizing the treatment of the Jews was, of course, anathema. The only time the issue was raised occurred unexpectedly during the two-day visit to the Berghof in late June of Baldur von Schirach, Gauleiter of Vienna, and his wife, Henriette. The daughter of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, Henriette had known Hitler since she was a child. She thought she could speak openly to him. Her husband had, however, fallen from favour somewhat, partly following Hitler’s disapproval of the modern paintings on show in an art exhibition which Schirach had staged in Vienna earlier in the year.153 Henriette told Baldur on the way to Berchtesgaden that she wanted to let Hitler know what she had witnessed recently in Amsterdam, where she had seen a group of Jewish women brutally herded together and deported. An SS man had offered her valuables taken from the Jews at a knock-down price. Her husband told her not to mention it. Hitler’s reactions were unpredictable. And – a typical response at the time – in any case she could not change anything.154
Already during the first day of their visit, 23 June, Schirach had managed to prompt an angry riposte from Hitler with a suggestion that a different policy in the Ukraine might have paid dividends.155 Next afternoon, Hitler was in an irritable mood during the statutory afternoon visit to the Tea House. The atmosphere was icy.156 It remained tense in the evening, when they gathered around the fire in the hall of the Berghof. Henriette was sitting next to Hitler, nervously rubbing her hands, speaking quietly. All at once, Hitler jumped up, marched up and down the room, and fumed: ‘That’s all I need, you coming to me with this sentimental twaddle. What concern are these Jewish women to you?’ The other guests did not know where to look. There was a protracted, embarrassed silence. The logs could be heard crackling in the fireplace.
When Goebbels arrived, he turned the scene to his advantage by playing on Hitler’s aversion to Vienna. Hitler rounded on the hapless Schirach, praising the achievements of Berlin – Goebbels’s domain, of course – and castigating his Gauleiter’s work in Vienna. Beside himself with anger, Hitler said it was a mistake ever to have sent Schirach to Vienna at all, or to have taken the Viennese into the Reich. Schirach offered to resign. ‘That’s not for you to decide. You are staying where you are,’ was Hitler’s response. By then it was four in the morning. Bormann let it be known to the Schirachs that it would be best if they left. They did so without saying their goodbyes, and in high disgrace.157
The week before the Schirach incident, Hitler had finally decided to press ahead with the ‘Citadel’ offensive. His misgivings can only have been increased by Guderian’s reports that the ‘Panther’ tank still had major weaknesses and was not ready for front-line action.158 And in the middle of the month, he was presented with the OKW’s recommendation that ‘Citadel’ should be cancelled. It was now running so late that there was an increasing chance that it would clash with the expected Allied offensive in the Mediterranean. Jodl, just back from leave, agreed that it was dangerous and foolhardy to commit troops to the east in the interests of, at best, a limited success when the chief danger at that time lay elsewhere. Again, the split between the OKW and army leadership came into play. Zeitzler, the army’s Chief of the General Staff, objected to what he regarded as interference. Guderian suspected that Zeitzler’s influence was decisive in persuading Hitler to go ahead.159 At any rate, Hitler rejected the advice of the Wehrmacht’s Operations Staff. Citadel’s opening was scheduled for 3 July, then postponed one last time for two more days.160
Despite Guderian’s warnings, Hitler confidently told Goebbels in late June that the Wehrmacht had not been so strong in the east since 1941, and that if they were to wait ‘for a few more weeks yet’ they would have the new ‘Panthers’ and a good number of the ‘Tiger’, ‘the best tank in the world at present’. He had given up his plans for the Caucasus and Middle East. There could be no dreams of pushing ahead to the Urals. The unreliability of Germany’s allies, especially the Italians, had forced this. If they had held out, the Caucasus would have been occupied and the loss of North Africa would then probably have been avoided. But Hitler thought the Soviet Union would one day collapse through starvation. The east remained for him the ‘decisive front’.161
At the end of June, Hitler returned to the Wolf’s Lair for the beginning of ‘Citadel’. On 1 July, he addressed his commanders. He explained the delay partly by the need to await the panzer reinforcements which, he claimed, now offered for the first time superiority over the Soviets, and partly (if unconvincingly) by the danger of a successful Allied landing in the Mediterranean had the offensive come earlier. The decision to go ahead was determined, he stated, by the need to forestall a Soviet offensive later in the year. A military success would also have a salutary effect on Axis partners, and on morale at home.162 Four days later, the last German offensive in the east was finally launched. It was the beginning of a disastrous month.
III
Bombardment from Soviet heavy artillery just before the offensive began gave a clear indication that the Red Army had been alerted to the timing of ‘Citadel.’163 At least 2, 700 Soviet tanks had been brought in to defend Kursk. They faced a similar number of German tanks. The mightiest tank battle in history raged for over a week.164 At first both Model and Manstein made good inroads, if with heavy losses. The Luftwaffe also had initial successes. But Guderian proved correct in his warnings of the deficiencies of the ‘Panther’. Most broke down. Few remained in action after a week. Man-stein’s drive was hindered rather than helped by the tank in which such high hopes had been placed. The ninety Porsche ‘Tiger’ tanks deployed by Model also revealed major battlefield weaknesses. They had no machine-guns, so were ill-equipped for close-range fighting. They were unable, therefore, to neutralize the enemy.165 In the middle of the month, the Soviets launched their own offensive against the German bulge around Orel to the north of the ‘Citadel’ battlefields, effectively to Model’s rear. Though Manstein was still advancing, the northern part of the pincer was now endangered.
On 13 July, Hitler summoned Manstein and Kluge, the two Army Group Commanders, to assess the situation. Manstein was for continuing. Kluge stated that Model’s army could not carry on. Reluctantly, Hitler brought ‘Citadel’ to a premature end.166 The Soviet losses were greater. But ‘Citadel’ had signally failed in its objectives. Guderian summed up: ‘By the failure of “Citadel” we had suffered a decisive defeat. The armoured formations, reformed and re-equipped with so much effort, had lost heavily both in men and in equipment and would now be unemployable for a long time to come.’167 Warlimont’s view was similar: ‘Operation Citadel was more than a battle lost; it handed the Russians the initiative and we never recovered it again right up to the end of the war.’168
Equally dire events were unfolding in the Mediterranean. Overnight from 9 – 10 July, reports came in of an armada of ships carrying large Allied assault forces from North Africa to Sicily. A landing had been expected. Hitler, as we noted, had thought Sardinia the most likely destination. The precise timing now caught him unawares. The German troops in Sicily – only two divisions – were too few in number to hold the entire coast. Defence relied heavily upon Italian forces. Allied air superiority was soon all too evident. And alarming news came in of Italian soldiers casting away their weapons and fleeing. Though heavy fighting continued throughout July, within two days it was plain that the Allied landing had been successful.169 Kesselring reported on 13 July that Sicily ‘could not be held with German forces alone’. Two days later, Jodl went further and declared that ‘as far as can be foreseen Sicily cannot be held’170 A meeting with Mussolini was urgent. On 18 July Hitler left his East Prussian headquarters for the Berghof. Early the following day he flew to see Mussolini in Feltre, near Belluno, in northern Italy.171 It was to prove the last time he set foot on Italian soil.
Aft
er landing at Treviso, Hitler and Mussolini travelled in the Duce’s train to a station near Feltre, and then still had an hour’s drive in open-top cars in the sweltering heat until they reached the villa chosen for the meeting, which began at noon. No sooner had Hitler begun to speak than news came in of a heavy air-raid on Rome, the first the city had suffered, causing panic among the population and encouraging the recognition that the Fascist regime was on the verge of collapse. Hitler spoke non-stop for two hours. Mussolini, tired and unwell, could not follow all that he was saying. The Duce’s entourage understood little or nothing. In any case, the speech was devoid of substantive proposals. It amounted to no more than a battery of propaganda, aimed at bolstering the Duce’s faltering morale and preventing Italy agreeing a separate peace. It was embarrassingly thin to some of those present. Hitler avoided putting the concrete proposals wanted by his military staff for a unified command structure of the Axis forces in Sicily. Mussolini disgusted his own military advisers by his feebleness. He commented subsequently that he had felt his own willpower ebbing away as Hitler spoke. After the speech Hitler spoke privately over lunch with Mussolini, telling him that Germany had improved U-boats in preparation along with secret weapons capable of razing London to the ground within a week. Then it was time for the tedious journey back to Treviso aerodrome. Hitler’s generals thought the visit had been a wasted effort. Hitler himself – convinced still of the power of his own rhetoric – probably thought he had once more succeeded in stirring Mussolini’s fighting spirits.172 He was soon disabused. On the very evening after the Feltre talks, he was shown an intelligence report sent on by Himmler that a coup d’état was being planned to replace Mussolini by Marshal Pietro Badoglio.173
During the course of Saturday, 24 July, reports started to come in that the Fascist Grand Council had been summoned for the first time since early in the war. It looked as if the Fascist old guard were going to press Mussolini to lay down some of his accumulated offices of state in order to devote more energy to the war effort.174 Probably, this is what Mussolini himself thought. He may also have been looking for a pretext to break with Germany. Mussolini’s ill-health perhaps combined with an over-confidence that he would ultimately have little difficulty in manipulating the Grand Council. Whatever the reasons, the way he responded to his increasingly strident critics at the meeting was strangely apathetic, dulled, and supine. The Council began its deliberations at 5p.m. that evening. These lasted in all for ten hours, culminating in an astonishing vote of nineteen to seven to request the King to seek a policy more capable of saving Italy from destruction.175 Even then the Duce did not fully see the danger. He went to see the King – about whom he had far fewer doubts than did Hitler – later that morning, unaware of what was to befall him. During Mussolini’s audience, the King abruptly interrupted him, announcing that, since the war appeared lost and army morale was collapsing, Marshal Badoglio would take over his offices as prime minister. As a stunned Duce left the royal chambers the police, who for weeks had had plans for his arrest, put them into effect. Mussolini was bundled into a waiting ambulance and, accompanied by several members of the carabinieri, driven off at speed to house arrest, temporarily on the Mediterranean island of Ponza. He was told the island had entertained some famous prisoners in the past – among them Nero’s mother, a sixth-century Pope, and in later times a Grand Master of the Freemasons.176
While Hitler was holding his regular military briefing at midday on 25 July, what was filtering through from Rome still amounted to little more than rumours. Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison at FHQ, passed on the news that Roberto Farinacci, the radical Fascist boss of Cremona and former Party Secretary, had been behind the summoning of the Grand Council. Hitler remarked that Farinacci was lucky he had done it in Italy, not in Germany. He would have had him immediately picked up by Himmler. ‘What’ll come out of it, anyway?’ he asked. ‘Twaddle’ was his own answer.177 The meeting – and especially its outcome – can only have reinforced his satisfaction at never allowing a Nazi Party Senate to come into existence.
By the time of the evening military briefing in the Führer Headquarters, the sensational news from Italy had broken, though there was still not complete clarity. Almost the entire session was taken up with the implications. Since Italy had not pulled out of the war, plans to occupy the country in such an event – code-named ‘Alarich’ – could not be put into operation. But in a highly agitated mood, Hitler demanded immediate action to occupy Rome and depose the new regime. He denounced what had taken place as ‘naked treachery’, describing Badoglio as ‘our grimmest enemy’.178 He still had belief in Mussolini – so long as he was propped up by German arms. Presuming the Duce still at liberty, he wanted him brought straight away to Germany. He was confident that in that event the situation could still be remedied. He fumed that he would send troops to Rome the next day to arrest the ‘rabble’ – the entire government, the King, the Crown Prince, Badoglio, the ‘whole bunch’. In two or three days there would then be another coup.179 He had Göring – ‘ice-cold in the most serious crises’, as he had repeatedly stated at midday, the Reich Marshal’s failings as head of the Luftwaffe temporarily forgotten – telephoned and told him to come as quickly as he could to the Wolf’s Lair.180 Rommel was located in Salonika and summoned to present himself without delay. Hitler intended to put him in overall command in Italy.181 He wanted Himmler contacted.182 Goebbels, too, was telephoned and told to leave straight away for East Prussia. The situation, Goebbels acknowledged, was ‘extraordinarily critical.’183 Ribbentrop, still not recovered from a chest infection, was ordered up from Fuschl, his residence in the Salzkammergut near Salzburg.184 Soon after midnight, Hitler met his military leaders for the third time in little over twelve hours, frantically improvising details of the evacuation from Sicily and the planned occupation of Rome, together with the seizure of the members of the new Italian government.185
At ten o’clock that morning, 26 July, Hitler met Goebbels and Göring, just arrived in FHQ. Ribbentrop joined them half an hour later. Goebbels had already been exchanging views on the situation with Himmler and Bormann. It was still only possible to guess at what had happened. But Goebbels was close to the mark in his own assumptions about how the coup had taken place. How a regime that had been in power for twenty-one years could be overthrown so quickly from within gave him pause for thought.186 Could something similar take place closer to home? Hitler gave his own interpretation of the situation. He presumed that Mussolini had been forced out of power. Whether he was still alive was not known, but he would certainly be unfree. Hitler saw the forces of Italian freemasonry – banned by Mussolini but still at work behind the scenes – behind the plot. Ultimately, he claimed, the coup was directed at Germany since Badoglio would certainly come to an arrangement with the British and Americans to take Italy out of the war. The British would now look for the best moment for a landing in Italy – perhaps in Genoa in order to cut off German troops in the south. Military precautions to anticipate such a move had to be taken.
Hitler explained, too, his intention of transferring a parachute division, currently based in southern France, to Rome as part of the move to occupy the city. The King, Badoglio, and the members of the new government would be arrested and flown to Germany. Once they were in German hands, things would be different. Possibly Farinacci, who had escaped arrest by fleeing to the German embassy, and was now en route to FHQ, could be made head of a puppet government if Mussolini himself could not be rescued. Hitler saw the Vatican, too, as deeply implicated in the plot to oust Mussolini. In the military briefing just after midnight he had talked wildly of occupying the Vatican and ‘getting out the whole lot of swine’.187 Goebbels and Ribbentrop dissuaded him from such rash action, certain to have damaging international repercussions. Hitler still pressed for rapid action to capture the new Italian government. Rommel, who by then had also arrived in FHQ and was earmarked for supreme command in Italy, opposed the improvised, high-risk, panicky response. He
favoured a carefully prepared action; but that would probably take some eight days to put into place.188 The meeting ended with the way through the crisis still unclear.
By this time, reports were coming in of anti-fascist demonstrations on the streets of Rome. There were evident signs, too, of marked unease and uncertainty among the German population. Nazi supporters were shocked at Mussolini’s overthrow. Illegal opposition groups saw a ray of hope. The notion that something similar could take place in Germany ‘can be heard constantly’, according to the SD’s soundings of popular opinion: ‘the idea that the form of government thought in the Reich to be unshakable could in Germany, too, suddenly be altered, is very widespread.’189 Goebbels’s propaganda machine faced problems. As Goebbels recognized, he could not tell the truth that ‘it was a matter of a far-reaching organizational and ideological crisis of Fascism, perhaps even of its liquidation’. Knowledge of what was happening in Italy ‘could in certain circumstances incite some subversive elements in Germany who perhaps believed they could contrive the same with us that Badoglio and company have contrived in Rome’. Hitler did not think there was much danger of that. But he commissioned Himmler just the same to suppress any indications with maximum ruth-lessness.190
The midday military conference was again taken up with the issue of moving troops to Italy to secure above all the north of the country, and with the hastily devised scheme to capture the Badoglio government.191 Field-Marshal von Kluge, who had flown in from Army Group Centre – desperately trying to hold the Soviet offensive in the Orel bulge, to the north of Kursk – was abruptly told of the implications of the events in Italy for the eastern front. Hitler said he needed the crack Waffen-SS divisions currently assigned to Manstein in the south of the eastern front to be transferred immediately to Italy. That meant Kluge giving up some of his forces to reinforce Manstein’s weakened front. Kluge forcefully pointed out, though to no avail, that this would make defence in the Orel region impossible. But the positions on the Dnieper being prepared for an orderly retreat by his troops to be taken up before winter were far from ready. What he was being asked to do, protested Kluge, was to undertake ‘an absolutely overhasty evacuation’. ‘Even so, Herr Feldmarshall: we are not master here of our own decisions,’ rejoined Hitler.192 Kluge was left with no choice.