Meanwhile, Farinacci had arrived. His description of what had happened and his criticism of Mussolini did not endear him to Hitler. Any idea of using him as the figurehead of a German-controlled regime was discarded.193 Hitler spoke individually to his leading henchmen before, in need of a rest after a hectic twenty-four hours, retiring to his rooms to eat alone. He returned for a lengthy conference that evening, attended by thirty-five persons. But the matter was taken no further.194 Next day, he was still determined to act without delay, ‘whatever it might cost’. He preferred ‘generous improvisation’ to ‘systematic work starting too late and allowing things in Italy to become too consolidated’. But Rommel was sceptical about the planned military operations.195 So were Jodl and Kesselring.196 Within a few days, Hitler was forced to concede that any notion of occupying Rome and sending in a raiding party to take the members of the Badoglio government and the Italian royal family captive was both precipitate and wholly impracticable.197 The plans were called off. Hitler’s attention focused now on discovering the whereabouts of the Duce and bringing him into German hands as soon as possible. In the meantime, he left for him in the possession of Kesselring a copy of the collected works of Nietzsche as a sixtieth birthday present. Evidently, he presumed that the Duce, once located, would have the time and inclination to reflect on the ‘will to power’.198
With the Italian crisis still at its height, the disastrous month of July drew to a close amid the heaviest air-raids to date. Between 24 and 30 July, the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, using the release of aluminium strips to blind German radar, unleashed ‘Operation Gomorrha’ – a series of devastating raids on Hamburg, outdoing in death and destruction anything previously experienced in the air-war. Waves of incendiaries whipped up horrific fire-storms, turning the city into a raging inferno, consuming everything and everybody in their path. People suffocated in their thousands in cellars or were burnt to cinders on the streets. An estimated 30,000 people lost their lives; over half a million were left homeless; twenty-four hospitals, fifty-eight churches, and 277 schools lay in ruins; over 50 per cent of the city was completely gutted.199 As usual, Hitler revealed no sense of remorse at any human losses. He was chiefly concerned about the psychological impact. When he was given news that fifty German planes had mined the Humber estuary, he exploded: ‘You can’t tell the German people in this situation: that’s mined; 50 planes have laid mines! That has no effect at all… You only break terror through terror! We have to have counter-attacks. Everything else is rubbish.’200
Hitler mistook the mood of a people with whom he had lost touch. What they wanted, in their vast majority, was less the retaliation that was Hitler’s only thought than proper defence against the terror from the skies and – above all else – an end to the war that was costing them their homes and their lives. SD reports caught rumours of unrest which the police had had to suppress, and spoke – recalling 1918 – of a ‘November mood’ among the population.201 Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann repeatedly requested Hitler to visit the ruins of Germany’s second largest city. But the Führer would not even receive a party of those who had performed outstanding feats in the emergency services.202 Goebbels pleaded for Hitler to speak on the radio, even for only a quarter of an hour. ‘The Führer has not spoken to the public since Heroes’ Memorial Day [21 March],’ Goebbels added. ‘He has disappeared somewhat into the clouds. That’s not good for the practical war effort.’ Hitler agreed to speak – probably later in the week.203 Naturally, nothing came of it. That Hitler would not speak to the people was incomprehensible to Goebbels. ‘At any rate, the unrest among the broad masses has grown to such an extent that only a word from the Führer himself can again clarify matters,’ he ruminated. But Hitler adjudged the current situation ‘as unsuitable as could be imagined’.204 In any case, he remained, as he had been throughout the agony of Hamburg, more taken up with events in Italy.
Remarkably enough, despite the frenetic urgency of the crisis meetings following Mussolini’s deposition, the major military decisions had, in fact, been postponed or were left unimplemented. The flurry of activity had produced little. The war council to which his acolytes had been summoned post haste from all over the Reich had left matters in the air. The spontaneous ‘decisions’ taken in the lengthy military briefings – amid outbursts of menacing invective towards the Badoglio ‘clique’ – came in the main to nothing, or were toned down in the light of calmer professional judgement. Badoglio’s protestations that Italy’s commitment to the war was unchanged meant that Germany had to move cautiously. Wiser counsels had prevailed over Hitler’s impulsive urge to occupy Rome and depose the government. And though Hitler had still rejected any evacuation of Sicily, insistent that the enemy should not set foot on the Italian mainland, Kesselring had taken steps to prepare the ground for what proved a brilliantly planned evacuation on the night of 11 – 12 August, catching the Allies by surprise and allowing 40,000 German and 62,000 Italian troops, with their equipment, to escape to safety. The last German troops in Sicily were finally given the order to undertake a fighting withdrawal to the mainland on 17 August.205 The split command between Kesselring in the south and Rommel in the north of Italy had been left in place.206 But as August drew on, suspicions mounted that it would not be long before the Italians defected. And at the end of the month, directives for action in the event of an Italian defection, in the drawer for months and now refashioned under the code-name ‘Axis’, were issued.207
Under the pressure of the events in Italy, Hitler had finally made one overdue move at home. For months, egged on by Goebbels, he had expressed his dissatisfaction with the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, whom he contemptuously regarded as ‘old and worn-out’.208 But he could think of no alternative. He continued to defer any decision until the toppling of Mussolini concentrated his mind, persuading him that the time had come to stiffen the grip on the home front and eliminate any prospect of poor morale turning into subversive action. The man he could depend upon to do this was close at hand.
On 20 August he appointed Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as the new Reich Minister of the Interior. The appointment amounted to Hitler’s tacit recognition that his authority at home now rested on police repression, not the adulation of the masses he had once enjoyed.209 To save face, as usual, Frick was allowed to remain a Reich Minister and ‘kicked upstairs’ – seemingly given an important new post, replacing Neurath (who had not functioned in the post since September 1941) as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Even here, to ensure that Frick’s powers remained nominal, State Secretary Karl Hermann Frank was given a new title of State Minister for Bohemia and Moravia and enhanced authority.210
On 3 September the first British troops crossed the Straits of Messina to Italy, landing at Reggio di Calabria. That same day, the Italians secretly signed their armistice with the Allies which became public knowledge five days later.211
On 8 September Hitler had flown for the second time within a fortnight to Army Group South’s headquarters at Zaporozhye, on the lower Dnieper north of the Sea of Azov, to confer with Manstein about the increasingly critical situation on the southern flank of the eastern front. It was to be the last time he set foot on territory captured from the Soviet Union. A few days earlier, following Soviet breakthroughs, he had been forced to authorize withdrawal from the Donets Basin – so important for its rich coal deposits – and from the Kuban bridgehead over the Straits of Kerch, the gateway to the Crimea. Now the Red Army had breached the thin seam which had knitted together Kluge’s and Manstein’s Army Groups and was pouring through the gap. Retreat was the only possible course of action.212
Hitler found a tense atmosphere at the Wolf’s Lair on his return. What he had long anticipated – despite reassuring noises to the contrary from Kesselring, and from the German Embassy in Rome – was reality. British and American newspapers had that morning, 8 September, carried reports that the capitulation of the Italian army was imminent. By the afternoon, the news was ha
rdening. At 6p.m. that evening the stories were confirmed by the BBC in London.213 Once again, Nazi leaders were summoned to Führer Headquarters for a crisis-meeting next day.214 The unseasonably cold, wet weather provided a fitting backdrop.215 Partly from spite, partly because he might know too much and prove dangerous, Hitler had Prince Philip of Hesse, the King of Italy’s son-in-law, who had been at FHQ for some weeks, promptly arrested and deposited in Gestapo Headquarters in Königsberg.216 The order had meanwhile been given to set ‘Operation Axis’ in motion. ‘The Führer,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘is determined to make a tabula rasa in Italy.’217
The BBC’s premature announcement gave the OKW’s Operations Staff a head start. Sixteen German divisions had been moved to the Italian mainland by this time. The battle-hardened SS units withdrawn from the eastern front in late July and early August and troops withdrawn from Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia were in position to take control in central Italy. By 10 September, Rome was in German hands. Italian troops were disarmed. Small pockets of resistance were ruthlessly put down; one division that held out until 22 September ended with 6,000 dead. Over 650,000 soldiers entered German captivity. Only the bulk of the small navy and ineffective air-force escaped and were given over to the Allies. Within a few days Italy was occupied by its former Axis partner.218
Hours after the Italian capitulation, the Allies had landed in the Gulf of Salerno, thirty miles or so south-east of Naples. The dogged German resistance they encountered for a week before reinforcements enabled them to break out of their threatened beachhead – linking forces with troops from Montgomery’s 8th Army advancing northwards from Reggio di Calabria, and entering Naples on 1 October – was an indicator of what was in store for the Allies during the coming months as the Wehrmacht made them fight for every mile of their northward progression.
It was plain to the German leadership, however, that it would be even more difficult, in the new situation, for the armed forces to cope with the mounting pressures on both the eastern and the southern fronts.219 Goebbels saw the need looming to seek peace with either the Soviet Union or the western Allies. He suggested the time had come to sound out Stalin. Ribbentrop took the same line. He had tentative feelers put out to see whether the Soviet dictator would bite.220 But Hitler dismissed the idea. If anything, he said, he preferred to look for an arrangement with Britain – conceivably open to one. But, as always, he would not consider negotiating from a position of weakness. In the absence of the decisive military success he needed, which was receding ever more into the far distance, any hope of persuading him to consider an approach other than the remorseless continuation of the struggle was bound to be illusory.221
At least Goebbels, backed by Göring, successfully this time pleaded with Hitler to speak to the German people. To the last minute before recording the broadcast, on 10 September, Hitler showed his reluctance. He wanted to delay, to see how things turned out. Goebbels went through the text with him line by line. Eventually, he got the Führer to the microphone. The speech itself – largely confined to unstinting praise for Mussolini, condemnation of Badoglio and his supporters, the claim that the ‘treachery’ had been foreseen and every necessary step taken, and a call to maintain confidence and sustain the fight – had nothing of substance to offer, other than a hint at coming retaliation for the bombing of German cities.222 But Goebbels was satisfied. Reports suggested the speech had gone down well, and helped revive morale.223 He had, he said, achieved the main purpose of his visit to FHQ. He thought Hitler was relieved to get the speech off his chest after such a long time. And he wrung out of him a promise to speak soon in the Sportpalast to open the Winter Aid campaign. He thought he could give him back the taste for coming ‘directly in contact with the people’.224 Once more, he would be disappointed.
As far as the situation in Italy itself was concerned, Hitler was at this time resigned to losing any hold over the south of the country. His intention was to withdraw to the Apennines, long foreseen by the OKH Operations Staff as the favoured line of defence. However, he worried about the Allies advancing from Italy through the Balkans. By autumn, this concern was to persuade him to change his mind and defend Italy much further to the south. A consequence was to tie down forces desperately needed elsewhere.225
The Wehrmacht’s rapid successes in taking hold of Italy so speedily provided some relief. Hitler’s spirits then soared temporarily when the stunning news came through on the evening of 12 September that Mussolini, whose whereabouts had been recently discovered, had been freed from his captors in a ski hotel on the highest mountain in the Abruzzi through an extraordinarily daring raid by parachutists and SS-men carried in by glider and led by the Austrian SS-Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny.226 The euphoria did not last long. Hitler greeted the ex-Duce warmly when Mussolini, no longer the preening dictator but looking haggard and dressed soberly in a dark suit and black overcoat, was brought to Rastenburg on 14 September. But Mussolini, bereft of the trappings of power, was a broken man. The series of private talks they had left Hitler ‘extraordinarily disappointed’.227 Three days later, Mussolini was dispatched to Munich to begin forming his new regime.228 By the end of September he had set up his reconstituted Fascist ‘Repubblica di Salo’ in northern Italy, a repressive, brutish police state run by a combination of cruelty, corruption, and thuggery – but operating unmistakably under the auspices of German masters.229 The one-time bombastic dictator of Italy was now plainly no more than Hitler’s tame puppet, and living on borrowed time.
As autumn progressed, the situation on the eastern front predictably worsened. Even in private in late September, speaking only to Goebbels (allowed to join the Führer’s morning walk with his Alsatian, Blondi), Hitler had been remarkably optimistic. He was confident that the rapid withdrawal to the Dnieper would be successful and leave defences that would be impenetrable over the winter. The shortening of the front by some 350 kilometres would at the same time release troops for a floating reserve of thirty-four divisions, capable of being rushed at short notice to whichever front most needed them.230
Hitler’s optimism was soon shown to be utterly misplaced. The redeployment of troops to Italy weakened the chances of staving off the Soviet offensive. And the failure to erect the ‘eastern wall’ of fortifications along the Dnieper during the two years that it had been in German hands now proved costly. The speed of the Soviet advance gave no opportunity to construct any solid defence line.231 By the end of September the Red Army had been able to cross the Dnieper and establish important bridgeheads on the west banks of the great river. The German bridgehead at Zaporozhye was lost in early October. By then, the Wehrmacht had been pushed back about 150 miles along the southern front. German and Romanian troops were also cut off on the Crimea, which Hitler refused to evacuate fearing, as of old, the opportunities it would give for air-attacks on Romanian oil-fields, and concerned about the message it would send to Turkey and Bulgaria. By the end of the month, the Red Army had pushed so far over the big bend of the Dnieper in the south that any notion of the Germans holding their intended defensive line was purely fanciful. To the north, the largest Soviet city in German hands, Kiev, was recaptured on 5 – 6 November. Manstein wanted to make the attempt to retake it. For Hitler, the lower Dnieper and the Crimea were more important. Control of the lower Dnieper held the key to the protection of the manganese ores of Nikopol, vital for the German steel industry. And should the Red Army again control the Crimea, the Romanian oil-fields would once more be threatened from the air.232 But, whatever Hitler’s thirst for new military successes, the reality was that by the end of 1943, the limitless granaries of the Ukraine and the industrial heartlands of the northern Caucasus, seen by Hitler on so many occasions as vital to the war effort (as well as the source of future German prosperity in the ‘New Order’), were irredeemably lost.233
IV
Not lost, however, was the war against the Jews – in Hitler’s eyes, the authors of the entire world conflagration. As we noted, Hitler had agreed in June
to Himmler’s wish to complete the ‘evacuation’ of the Polish Jews. By autumn 1943, ‘Aktion Reinhard’ was terminated: in the region of 1½ million Jews had been killed in the gas chambers of extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka in eastern Poland.234 The SS leadership were now pressing hard for the extension of the ‘Final Solution’ to all remaining corners of the Nazi Imperium – even those where the deportations were likely to have diplomatic repercussions. Among these were Denmark and Italy.
The Nazi authorities were well aware that any move against Danish Jews was likely to result in public protests and sour relations with the occupying power. There was little antisemitism in the land. The tiny Jewish minority was fully integrated into Danish society. An attack on the Jews would be seen widely as an assault on Danish citizens. Even so, the SS leadership decided in summer that the time was ripe. Werner Best, the Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark, pressed for action to be taken. In September, Hitler complied with his request to have the Danish Jews deported, dismissing Ribbentrop’s anxieties about a possible general strike and other civil disobedience. Though these did not materialize, the round-up of Danish Jews was a resounding failure. Several hundred – under ten per cent of the Jewish population – were captured and deported to Theresienstadt. Most escaped. Countless Danish citizens helped the overwhelming majority of their Jewish countrymen – in all 7,900 persons, including a few hundred non-Jewish marital partners – to flee across the Sound to safety in neutral Sweden in the most remarkable rescue action of the war.235