Rommel abandoned Cyrenaica. The Eighth Army returned to Tobruk on November 13. Benghazi changed hands, for the fifth time in the war, a week afterward. Mussolini and Bastico, the Italian commander in Africa, gave Rommel permission to withdraw from the rest of Libya. The British entered Tripoli on January 23, 1943. A day later they liberated the Giado concentration camp. Of the three thousand Jews who’d been imprisoned there, nearly one in five had died of hunger or typhus.10
Reacting to the Torch landings, Hitler immediately scuttled the 1940 armistice with Vichy. Ten German and six Italian divisions invaded the hitherto unoccupied remnant of France. German fighter planes, then troop transports, landed in Tunisia. Fifty thousand German soldiers and nearly twenty thousand Italians were in the last Axis foothold in Africa by the end of 1942. Larger numbers followed.
Torch was not the second front that Stalin had hoped for, but every German division sent to France or Tunisia was one that could not be deployed on the eastern front. After Torch, Hitler sent hundreds of warplanes from the southern end of the Soviet front to the Mediterranean. Just days later, the Soviet counterattack at Stalingrad trapped the German army of a quarter million men in the city. The Germans had lost control of the sky, even as their troops depended on supplies brought by air.11 The ninety thousand Germans still alive in Stalingrad surrendered on February 2, 1943. “Stalingrad” became the name for a much larger shift: Hitler’s dream of Russian conquest had come undone. All along the eastern front, the Red Army was pushing forward. Seven months had passed since Rommel reached El Alamein, confidently expecting to burst through the Middle East and meet German armies coming south from Russia into Persia. The war had utterly changed shape.
ONE OF THE early flights from Germany to Tunisia brought the blond, pale SS commander Walther Rauff. Rauff’s special operations command had pulled out of Athens after Rommel’s failed attempt to break through at Alam Halfa. Now it had employment, and quadrupled in size. The SS, in its mix of cruelty and self-deceit, expected Rauff to recruit collaborators who would set off a rebellion in Morocco and Algeria, and then to murder the 270,000 Jews of those countries and the 66,000 Jews of Tunisia. The occupation of Tunisia, though, was as much a retreat as an invasion, the attempt of a defeated army to hold a shrinking redoubt in Africa. The plan for a revolt in Allied-held Morocco and Algeria came to nothing.
Constrained, Rauff nonetheless implemented as much of the Nazi program against Jews as he could. Field Marshal Kesselring wanted Jews as slave laborers, so Rauff took Jewish leaders hostage in order to round up five thousand Jews for forced labor in camps near the front lines. He imposed fines of tens of millions of francs on the Jewish community, on the pretext that the local Jews were part of “international Jewry,” which was supposedly responsible for Allied bombing. Local Fascists conducted pogroms with German encouragement. German soldiers preyed on Jewish women. A few Jewish leaders were deported to death camps in Europe. Others went into hiding. Some of them, like some of the Jews who escaped labor camps, were hidden by Tunisian Arabs.
The larger SS plan was to deport all of Tunisia’s Jews to the death factories in Europe. But with shipping to Europe under constant attack, Rauff could not carry out the intention. In Tunisia, the logistical breakdown and military collapse foiled the machinery of mass murder.12
In March, Rommel launched one more counterattack against Montgomery’s army. Rommel planned on surprise; Montgomery knew the offensive was coming and defeated it. Rommel left Africa for sick leave. The Axis army in Tunisia gradually shrank to an enclave around the city of Tunis. Rauff and his men flew out on May 9. Four days later, a quarter million Axis soldiers surrendered.13 Africa was liberated.
FOR TWO YEARS, Gustave Bertrand’s underground Command Post Cadix had continued operating in the Vichy-ruled piece of France—intercepting German police, Abwehr, and SS messages, and secretly transmitting information to England. The code words “The harvest is good,” sent from London to Bertrand on the eve of Operation Torch, were the signal to shut down.
Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski fled the Nazis for the third time. (Polish mathematician Jerzy Rozycki, the other member of the codebreaking trio, had died in a shipwreck months before on his way back from Cadix’s substation in Algeria.) Rejewski and Zygalski moved from safe house to safe house, then followed a smuggler across the Pyrenees to Spain. There they were jailed, along with many other escapees. Months later, freed by the efforts of the Polish Red Cross, they traveled to Portugal. From a tiny harbor, a fishing boat took them to a British warship.
In England, Rejewski and Zygalski were assigned to work for a Polish signals battalion, breaking relatively easy SS ciphers. The two Poles were told that their time in Vichy disqualified them to work at GCHQ. Dilly Knox had died; Denniston had been shunted out of Bletchley Park. Alan Turing was still there, but it’s likely that a nameless official turned down Rejewski and Zygalski without ever checking if anyone at Bletchley Park knew their names. Once again, bureaucratic caution cost Britain the services of the quiet geniuses who first broke Enigma.14
WITH ROMMEL’S RETREAT from Egypt, the danger of a Nazi conquest of Palestine vanished. For the half million or more Jews in Palestine, the sense of relief lasted less than three weeks before being swept away by horror.
First came a statement from the Jewish Agency: “authoritative and reliable sources,” it said, reported that the Nazi regime was engaged in the “systematic extermination” of the Jews of Poland and of other countries who had been deported there. Two days later, corroboration came from Washington. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, announced that half the Jews in occupied Europe had already been murdered. The State Department, he said, had released documents confirming this.
No longer were the news items from Europe unsubstantiated rumor; no longer were they local atrocities. Denial was impossible.15
The Jewish community in Palestine had an immensely complicated relationship with European Jewry. Most Palestinian Jews were Zionists; they saw themselves as a vanguard building an independent Jewish life. In their own eyes, they had taken control of their fate, unlike Jews elsewhere. Now they were orphaned—as a community and, for a great many who’d left families behind in Europe, as individual sons and daughters. They were awash with guilt for surviving, and for not believing the earlier reports.
The fading of the Nazi threat to Palestine virtually ended the covert collaboration between the Palmah and the Special Operations Executive. The British organization did not need to build a resistance in a country that would not be occupied. In reality, far more Palestinian Jews enlisted in the British army than in the Palmah, despite British reluctance to send the recruits to combat units.16
It was the Eighth Army of the British Empire that saved Palestinian Jews from genocide, not for their sakes but as an incidental side effect of preventing an Axis conquest of the Middle East. Perhaps for that very reason, the legend of Masada on the Carmel and the Palmah’s readiness for resistance lived on. Especially in the face of the news from Europe, it preserved the idea that a small group of people could carve out a role in their own history. It defied despair.
ON THE FAR side of the world, in Hollywood, German Jewish émigré filmmaker Billy Wilder directed a movie in early 1943 called Five Graves to Cairo. Pieces of desert in Arizona and California served as the scenery of the North African battlefield. The film takes place in June 1942. In it, Erwin Rommel, advancing into Egypt, stays for a night at a tiny desert hotel. A British soldier hiding there, John Bramble, overhears Rommel boasting to captured British officers that he will be in Cairo in six days. “I have my reservations at Shepheard’s Hotel,” Rommel says. Bramble learns that before the war, Rommel had come to Egypt in the guise of an archaeologist. His expedition hid military supplies at five supposed excavations on the way to the Nile. Bramble escapes with this information, and Rommel’s supply dumps are destroyed just as he reaches El Alamein.17
The film succeeded because everyone who listened
to radio news or saw newsreels knew the riddle on which it was based: Rommel was the mastermind of desert warfare, yet he’d been defeated at El Alamein because he’d stretched his supply line past the breaking point. Surely, Wilder suggested, there had to be some secret that explained Rommel’s overconfidence, some secret that explained why he’d been mistaken.
Wilder’s fantasy answer was wrong; the Germans had never expected to fight in North Africa, and Rommel had never paid enough attention to logistics. But there was a secret that explained Rommel’s overconfidence and what went wrong: the overheard message from Cairo that Egypt was his for the taking, and the sudden silence of his superb source.
ON JULY 10, 1943, the British Eighth Army and the US Seventh Army landed on the Italian island of Sicily. For the first time, the ground war had come to the soil of an Axis power. Germany had already begun moving divisions into Italy and Italian-occupied territories. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel commanded the operation.
In the gilded offices of Rome, a tangle of plots grew. At the Palazzo Venezia, overlooking the Altar of the Fatherland and the avenue leading to the Colosseum, the ruling body of the Fascist Party, the Grand Council, met on the night of July 24 for the first time since the war started. After midnight, the leaders of the party voted 19–7 to take the role of military commander in chief from Mussolini and give it back to King Vittorio Emanuele.
Galeazzo Ciano voted against his father-in-law. For years he had worshipped and doubted the Duce. Far too late, Ciano decided in favor of his doubt.
The next afternoon, Mussolini went for his usual biweekly meeting with the king. Vittorio Emanuele told Mussolini that he’d become the “most hated man in Italy,” deposed him as the head of government, and appointed Pietro Badoglio in his place. When Mussolini stepped outside, he was arrested. Badoglio’s government surrendered to the Allies on September 3, the same day Allied troops began landing at the southern tip of mainland Italy.
Badoglio and the king utterly mishandled the aftermath. Rommel’s forces seized control of nearly all of Italy and took over four hundred thousand Italian soldiers prisoner. Badoglio and Vittorio Emanuele fled Rome for the Allied-held south. The SS began rounding up Italian Jews and sending them to Auschwitz. Libyan Jews who’d been held in Italy were sent to Bergen-Belsen. The Germans freed Mussolini and installed him as the head of a puppet republic in the German-occupied part of Italy.
Ciano was imprisoned and tried for treason. On January 11, outside the gates of Verona, he was tied to a chair, his back facing the firing squad to deny him any honor in death, and executed. He was forty years old. He’d once been seen as Mussolini’s heir. His wife, Edda, smuggled his diaries to Switzerland.18
LASZLO ALMASY HAD left Africa in the summer of 1942. He’d come down with amoebic dysentery, possibly during the daring, futile expedition to take the inept Eppler and Sandstede to the Nile. After treatment in Athens, he returned to Budapest, where he wrote and published a memoir of his time with Rommel. Censorship removed details but left his poetic riffs about the desert. His lover of seven years, Hans Entholt, who’d been serving in North Africa, was killed by a landmine during the retreat from El Alamein. After that news, he wrote, “everything has seemed banal, empty and sad.” He was forty-seven years old.
In March 1944, to prevent Hungary from signing a separate peace with the Soviet Union, Germany occupied the country and installed a lackey as prime minister. Sometime during that autumn or winter, as the SS rounded up Hungarian Jews, Almasy provided hiding places for four of them. Two were the wife and son of a craftsman who’d been deported to Auschwitz; before the war the man had done some work for Almasy. Two were the wife and son of a Jew who’d won Olympic medals for Hungary in fencing decades earlier.19
The contradiction between Almasy’s views and the exceptions he made for people he knew isn’t unique: In the abstract, he supported a racist ideology. Looking at individual human beings, he ignored the ideology. As with everything else he did, though, Almasy performed the drama of his life on a tightrope, alone, above the crowd: he risked his life for the Nazis; he risked his life to save Jews.
BRITISH GENERALS HAD long since given up on getting Hermione Ranfurly out of the Middle East. Instead, they wanted her to run their offices. She flew to Baghdad, where Jumbo Wilson now commanded the Tenth Army, to become his secretary. When the “tall, immensely fat” general, who looked “exactly like an elephant… standing on its hind legs,” got promoted to commander in chief, Middle East, Ranfurly moved back to Cairo with him. In November 1943, Air Marshal Tedder told her he’d received word: her husband Dan had escaped during the chaos in Italy and was now hiding in the mountains in the Nazi-occupied north of that country.
A few days after, General Eisenhower visited Cairo. His aide asked Ranfurly to join a dinner with the general and his staff. She was seated next to Eisenhower, who spent the whole evening speaking to the woman on his other side, his secretary, driver, and alleged mistress, Kay Summersby. When Eisenhower finally turned in Ranfurly’s direction, the countess asked if he knew Bonner Fellers, “the American attaché we all liked.”
Eisenhower answered, “Any friend of Bonner Fellers is no friend of mine,” and turned his back.
The ex-attaché stamped himself in people’s memories. Eisenhower had not forgotten his falling out with Fellers in the Philippines. Ranfurly hadn’t forgotten his instinctive willingness to help find her missing husband. The man was a master at making friends, and enemies.
The next morning Eisenhower’s aide called Ranfurly again. Eisenhower thought he’d been rude and invited her to dine with him that evening. Ranfurly declined, saying she already had plans. “An awful lie,” she wrote. “I had no date tonight.”
From Cairo, she followed Wilson to his next posting, in Algiers. She’d now been married for five years. For three of them, her husband had been in captivity or in hiding behind the lines. In May 1944 a cable came for Wilson from General Alexander at Allied headquarters in Italy. “Dan Ranfurly arrived here this afternoon,” it said. Wilson left it for her on her desk, then came into her office and watched her read it over and over.
She stood on a runway late in the afternoon and watched a small two-engine plane touch down. Her eyes misted; she couldn’t see him get off the plane. “Suddenly, his arms were around me,” she wrote the next day. “Heaven—is being together.”20
AFTER ITALY, ROMMEL’S next assignment was in France. From January 1944, he was in command of preparing for the expected Allied landings on the northern coast. He had no idea where the Americans and British planned to land. “I know nothing for certain about the enemy,” he was quoted as saying.
The Allies, on the other hand, knew a great deal about German defenses, and not just from German radio traffic. Japanese emissaries in Berlin were unknowingly generous. The Japanese ambassador, Hiroshi Oshima, visited the Atlantic Wall—the German defenses on the French coast—near the end of 1943. He radioed home a detailed description, enciphered in Purple, and deciphered in Washington.
The Japanese military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Ito Seiichi, also inspected the coastal defenses, and sent a thirty-two-part radiogram to Tokyo. Seiichi couldn’t know that in 1942, John Tiltman had figured out how the code used by Japanese military attachés worked. The attachés’ formal style had made his work easier. Each message contained the words “I have the honor to report to Your Excellency that…” Bletchley Park recruited some young classics scholars from Cambridge and gave them an intensive, five-month course in Japanese. They took over mastering the Japanese military attaché code, and in early 1944 decoded Seiichi’s precise report.
Not to be left out, the Japanese naval attaché toured the Atlantic defenses in May 1944. A joint British-American effort had just broken his cipher. Rommel, he told Tokyo and the Allied eavesdroppers, planned to “destroy the enemy near the coast, without allowing them to penetrate any considerable distance inland.”21
German intelligence was so poor that Rommel was at home, celebrating
his wife’s birthday, on D-Day, June 6. By the time his chief of staff phoned him, one hundred thousand Allied troops had already landed at Normandy. Eisenhower was in command of all Allied forces, Montgomery of the ground forces. Africa had been their training ground; they were no longer amateurs. Rommel’s plans collapsed the first day. His confidence followed. In conversations, he talked about the need for a separate peace with Britain and the United States, even an alliance with them against the Soviet Union.
On July 17, while he was on an inspection tour of the front, a British warplane strafed his car. Rommel suffered a fractured skull. He was in a coma in a hospital on July 20, when the attempt by army officers to assassinate Hitler and take power failed.
Rommel slowly recuperated, first in hospitals, then at home. Meanwhile, the Gestapo rounded up and tortured suspects in the botched coup. On October 14, two generals came to Rommel’s home. Conspirators had named him as part of the plot, they said. They gave him a choice: take poison they’d brought for the purpose, or stand trial and be executed. The choice was a product of the long-running propaganda promotion of Rommel. It would have looked bad for Hitler to admit that his most celebrated general had turned against him. Rommel said good-bye to his wife and son, and swallowed the poison.
A state funeral was held. Rommel’s “heart attack,” it was said, was a result of his injuries. After the war, the real cause of death would emerge. Historians would find evidence of Rommel’s despair and his fantasy of a separate peace—but would cast doubt on his connection to the attempted coup. Yet the story of Rommel as part of the conspiracy to save Germany from Hitler would live on. It was the essential final chapter in the legend of Rommel as the chivalrous enemy on the playing field of war, who fought for Germany yet somehow was unstained by fighting for Hitler and Nazism.22
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