The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  I’ll go right into the Vatican. Do you think the Vatican embarrasses me? We’ll take that over right away … The entire diplomatic corps are in there … That rabble … We’ll get that bunch of swine out of there … Later we can make apologies …

  That night also Hitler gave orders to secure the Alpine passes, both between Italy and Germany and between Italy and France. Some eight German divisions from France and southern Germany were hastily assembled for this purpose and established as Army Group? under the command of the energetic Rommel. Had the Italians, as Goebbels noted in his diary, blown the Alpine tunnels and bridges, the German forces in Italy, some of them already heavily engaged in Sicily by Eisenhower’s armies, would have been cut off from their source of supplies. They could not have held out for long.

  But the Italians could not suddenly turn on the Germans overnight. Badoglio had first to establish contact with the Allies to see if he could get an armistice and Allied support against the Wehrmacht divisions. Hitler had been correct in assuming that that was exactly what Badoglio would do, but he had no inkling it would take as long as it did. Indeed, this assumption dominated the discussion at a war conference at the Fuehrer’s headquarters on July 27 attended by most of the bigwigs in the Nazi government and armed forces, among them Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Rommel and the new Commander in Chief of the Navy, Admiral Karl Doenitz—who had succeeded Grand Admiral Raeder in January, when the latter had fallen from favor.* Most of the generals, led by Rommel, urged caution, arguing that any contemplated action in Italy be carefully prepared and well thought out. Hitler wanted to move at once even though it meant withdrawing key panzer divisions from the Eastern front, where the Russians had just launched (July 15) their first summer offensive of the war. For once the generals seem to have had their way and Hitler was persuaded to withhold action. In the meantime as many German troops as could be rounded up would be rushed over the Alps into Italy. Goebbels took a dim view of the hesitancy of the generals.

  They don’t take into account [he wrote in his diary after the war powwow] what the enemy is going to do. Undoubtedly the English won’t wait a week while we consider and prepare for action.

  He and Hitler need not have worried. The Allies waited not a week, but six weeks. By then Hitler had his plans and the forces to carry them out ready.

  In his feverish mind he had in fact hastily conceived the plans by the time the war conference on July 27 convened. There were four of them: (1) Operation Eiche (“Oak”) provided for the rescue of Mussolini either by the Navy, if he were located on an island, or by Luftwaffe parachutists, if he were found on the mainland; (2) Operation Student called for the sudden occupation of Rome and the restoration of Mussolini’s government there; (3) Operation Schwarz (“Black”) was the code name for the military occupation of all of Italy; (4) Operation Achse (“Axis”) envisaged the capture or destruction of the Italian fleet. Later the last two operations were combined under the code name of “Axis.”

  Two events early in September 1943 set the Fuehrer’s plans in operation. On September 3 Allied troops landed on the boot of southern Italy, and on September 8 public announcement was made of the armistice (secretly signed on September 3) between Italy and the Western Powers.

  Hitler had flown to Zaporozhe in the Ukraine that day to try to restore the sagging German front, but, according to Goebbels, he had been seized “by a queer feeling of unrest” and had returned that evening to Rastenburg headquarters in East Prussia, where the news awaited him that his principal ally had deserted. Though he had expected it and prepared for it, the actual timing took him by surprise and for several hours there was great confusion at headquarters. The Germans had first learned of the Italian armistice from a BBC broadcast from London, and when Jodl put through a call from Rastenburg to Field Marshal Kesselring at Frascati, near Rome, to ask if it were true the commander of the German armies in southern Italy confessed that it was news to him. However, Kesselring, whose headquarters that morning had been destroyed by an Allied bombing and who was preoccupied with rounding up troops to meet a new Allied landing somewhere on the west coast, was able to get out the code word “Axis,” which set in motion the plans to disarm the Italian Army and occupy the country.

  For a day or two the situation of the German forces in central and south Italy was extremely critical. Five Italian divisions faced two German divisions in the vicinity of Rome. If the powerful Allied invasion fleet which had appeared off Naples on September 8 moved north and landed near the capital and was reinforced by parachutists seizing the nearby airfields, as Kesselring and his staff at first expected, the course of the war in Italy would have taken a different turn than it did and final disaster might have overtaken the Third Reich a year earlier than happened. Kesselring later contended that on the evening of the eighth Hitler and OKW “wrote off” his entire force of eight divisions as irretrievably lost.5 Two days later Hitler told Goebbels that southern Italy was lost and that a new line would have to be established north of Rome in the Apennines.

  But the Allied Command did not take advantage of its complete command of the sea, which permitted it to make landings almost anywhere on both coasts of Italy, nor did it exploit its overwhelming air superiority, as the Germans had feared. Moreover, no effort seems to have been made by Eisenhower’s Command to try to utilize the large Italian forces in conjunction with its own, especially the five Italian divisions in the vicinity of Rome. Had Eisenhower done so—at least such was the contention of both Kesselring and his chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, later—the predicament of the Germans would have become hopeless. It was simply beyond their powers, they declared, to fight off Montgomery’s army advancing up the peninsula from the “boot,” throw back General Mark Clark’s invasion force, wherever it landed, and deal with the large Italian armed formations in their midst and in their rear.*6

  Both generals breathed a sigh of relief when the American Fifth Army landed not near Rome but south of Naples, at Salerno, and when the Allied parachutists failed to appear over the Rome airfields. Their relief was all the greater when the Italian divisions surrendered almost without firing a shot and were disarmed. It meant that the Germans could easily hold Rome and, for the time being, even Naples. This gave them possession of two thirds of Italy, including the industrial north, whose factories were put to work turning out arms for Germany. Almost miraculously Hitler had received a new lease on life.*

  Italy’s withdrawal from the war had embittered him. It was, he told Goebbels, who had again been summoned to Rastenburg, “a gigantic example of swinishness.” Moreover, the overthrow of Mussolini made him apprehensive of his own position. “The Fuehrer,” Goebbels noted in his diary on September 11, “invoked final measures to preclude similar developments with us once and for all.”

  In his broadcast to the nation on the evening of September 10, which Goebbels had persuaded him to make only after much pleading—“The people are entitled to a word of encouragement and solace from the Fuehrer in this difficult crisis,” the Propaganda Minister told him—Hitler spoke somewhat defiantly on the subject:

  Hope of finding traitors here rests on complete ignorance of the character of the National Socialist State; a belief that they can bring about a July 25 in Germany rests on a fundamental illusion as to my personal position, as well as to the attitude of my political collaborators and my field marshals, admirals and generals.

  Actually, as we shall see, there were a few German generals and a handful of former political collaborators who were beginning once more, as the military setbacks mounted, to harbor treasonable thoughts, which, when the next July rolled around, would be translated into an act more violent but less successful than that carried out against Mussolini.

  One of Hitler’s measures to quash any incipient treason was to order all German princes discharged from the Wehrmacht. Prince Philip of Hesse, the former messenger boy of the Fuehrer to Mussolini, who had been hanging around headquarters, was arrested and turned over to the tend
er mercies of the Gestapo. His wife, Princess Mafalda, the daughter of the King of Italy, was also arrested and, with her husband, incarcerated in a concentration camp. The King of Italy, like the kings of Norway and Greece, had escaped the clutches of Hitler, who took what revenge he could by arresting his daughter.*

  For several weeks the Fuehrer’s daily military conferences had devoted a great deal of time to a problem that burned in Hitler’s mind: the rescue of Mussolini. “Operation Oak,” it will be remembered, was the code name for this plan, and in the records of the conferences at headquarters Mussolini was always referred to as “the valuable object.” Most of the generals and even Goebbels doubted whether the former Duce was any longer a very valuable object, but Hitler still thought so and insisted on his liberation.

  He not only wanted to do a favor to his old friend, for whom he still felt a personal affection. He also had it in mind to set up Mussolini as head of a new Fascist government in northern Italy, which would relieve the Germans of having to administer the territory and help safeguard his long lines of supply and communication against an unfriendly populace from whose midst troublesome partisans were now beginning to emerge.

  By August 1, Admiral Doenitz was reporting to Hitler that the Navy believed it had spotted Mussolini on the island of Ventotene. By the middle of August Himmler’s sleuths were sure the Duce was on another island, Maddalena, near the northern tip of Sardinia. Elaborate plans were made to descend upon the island with destroyers and parachutists, but before they could be carried out Mussolini had again been moved. According to a secret clause of the armistice agreement he was to be turned over to the Allies, but for some reason Badoglio delayed in doing this and early in September the “valuable object” was spirited away to a hotel on top of the Gran Sasso d’Italia, the highest range in the Abruzzi Apennines, which could be reached only by a funicular railway.

  The Germans soon learned of his whereabouts, made an aerial reconnaissance of the mountaintop and decided that glider troops could probably make a landing, overcome the carabinieri guards and make away with the Duce in a small Fieseler-Storch plane. This daring plan was carried out on September 13 under the leadership of another one of Himmler’s resourceful S.S. intellectual roughnecks, an Austrian by the name of Otto Skorzeny, who will appear again toward the very end of this narrative in another daredevil exploit.* Virtually kidnaping an Italian general, whom he packed into his glider, Skorzeny landed his airborne force a hundred yards from the mountaintop hotel, where he espied the Duce looking out hopefully from a second-story window. Most of the carabinieri, at the sight of German troops, took to the hills, and the few who didn’t were dissuaded by Skorzeny and Mussolini from making use of their arms, the S.S. leader yelling at them not to fire on an Italian general—he pushed his captive officer to the front of his ranks—and the Duce shouting from his window, as one eyewitness remembered, “Don’t shoot, anybody! Don’t shed any blood!” And not a drop was shed.

  Within a few minutes the overjoyed Fascist leader, who had sworn he would kill himself rather than fall into Allied hands and be exhibited, as he later wrote, in Madison Square Garden in New York,† was bundled into a tiny Fieseler-Storch plane and after a perilous take-off from a small rock-strewn meadow below the hotel flown to Rome and from there, the same evening, to Vienna in a Luftwaffe transport aircraft.7

  Though Mussolini was grateful for his rescue and embraced Hitler warmly when they met a couple of days later at Rastenburg, he was by now a broken man, the old fires within him turned to ashes, and much to Hitler’s disappointment he showed little stomach for reviving the Fascist regime in German-occupied Italy. The Fuehrer made no attempt to hide his disillusionment with his old Italian friend in a long talk with Goebbels toward the end of September.

  The Duce [Goebbels confided to his diary after the talk] has not drawn the moral conclusions from Italy’s catastrophe that the Fuehrer had expected of him … The Fuehrer expected that the first thing the Duce would do would be to wreak full vengeance on his betrayers. But he gave no such indication and thereby showed his real limitations. He is not a revolutionary like the Fuehrer or Stalin. He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks the broad qualities of a world-wide revolutionary and insurrectionist.

  Hitler and Goebbels were also incensed that Mussolini had had a reconciliation with Ciano and seemed to be under the thumb of his daughter, Edda, who was Ciano’s wife—both of them had found refuge in Munich.‡ They thought he should have had Ciano immediately executed and Edda, as Goebbels put it, whipped.* They objected to Mussolini’s putting Ciano—“that poisoned mushroom,” Goebbels called him—in the forefront of the new Fascist Republican Party.

  For Hitler had insisted that the Duce immediately create such a party, and on September 15, at the Fuehrer’s prodding, Mussolini proclaimed the new Italian Social Republic.

  It never amounted to anything. Mussolini’s heart was not in it. Perhaps he retained enough sense of reality to see that he was now merely a puppet of Hitler, that he and his “Fascist Republican Government” had no power except what the Fuehrer gave them in Germany’s interests and that the Italian people would never again accept him and Fascism.

  He never returned to Rome. He set himself up at an isolated spot in the extreme north—at Rocca delle Caminate, near Gargnano, on the shores of Lake Garda, where he was closely guarded by a special detachment of the S.S. Leibstandarte. To this beautiful lake resort Sepp Dietrich, the veteran S.S. tough, who was detached from his reeling 1st S.S. Armored Corps in Russia for the purpose—such were the goings on in the Third Reich—escorted Mussolini’s notorious mistress, Clara Petacci. With his true love once more in his arms, the fallen dictator seemed to care for little else in life. Goebbels, who had had not one mistress but many, professed to be shocked.

  The personal conduct of the Duce with his girl friend [Goebbels noted in his diary on November 9], whom Sepp Dietrich had to bring to him, is cause for much misgiving.

  A few days before, Goebbels had noted that Hitler had begun “to write off the Duce politically.” But not before, it should be added, the Fuehrer forced him to “cede” Trieste, Istria and the South Tyrol to Germany with the understanding that Venice would be added later on. Now no humiliation was spared this once proud tyrant. Hitler brought pressure on him to arrest his son-in-law, Ciano, in November, and to have him executed in the jail at Verona on January 11, 1944.†

  By the early autumn of 1943, Adolf Hitler could well claim to have mastered the gravest threats to the Third Reich. The fall of Mussolini and the unconditional surrender of the Badoglio government in Italy might easily have led, as Hitler and his generals for a few crucial weeks feared, to exposing the southern borders of Germany to direct Allied attack and opening the way—from northern Italy—into the weakly held Balkans in the very rear of the German armies fighting for their lives in southern Russia. The meek departure of the Duce from the seat of power in Rome was a severe blow to the Fuehrer’s prestige both at home and abroad, as was the consequent destruction of the Axis alliance. Yet within a couple of months Hitler, by a daring stroke, had restored Mussolini—at least in the eyes of the world. The Italian areas of occupation in the Balkans, in Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania, were secured against Allied attack, which OKW had expected any day that late summer; the Italian forces there, amounting to several divisions, surrendered meekly and were made prisoners of war. And instead of having to write off Kesselring’s forces, as he had first done, and retreating to northern Italy, the Fuehrer had the satisfaction of seeing the Field Marshal’s armies digging in south of Rome, where they easily halted the advance of the Anglo–American-French troops up the peninsula. There was no disputing that Hitler’s fortunes in the south had been considerably restored by his daring and resourcefulness and by the prowess of his troops.

  Elsewhere, though, his fortunes continued to fall.

  On July 5, 1943, he had launched what was to prove his last great offensive of the war against the Russians. The flower o
f the German Army—some 500,000 men with no less than seventeen panzer divisions outfitted with the new heavy Tiger tanks—was hurled against a large Russian salient west of Kursk. This was “Operation Citadel” and Hitler believed it would not only entrap the best of the Russian armies, one million strong—the very forces which had driven the Germans from Stalingrad and the Don the winter before—but enable him to push back to the Don and perhaps even to the Volga and swing up from the southeast to capture Moscow.

  It led to a decisive defeat. The Russians were prepared for it. By July 22, the panzers having lost half of their tanks, the Germans were brought to a complete halt and started to fall back. So confident of their strength were the Russians that without waiting for the outcome of the offensive they launched one of their own against the German salient at Orel, north of Kursk, in the middle of July, quickly penetrating the front. This was the first Russian summer offensive of the war and from this moment on the Red armies never lost the initiative. On August 4 they pushed the Germans out of Orel, which had been the southern hinge of the German drive to capture Moscow in December 1941.

  Now the Soviet offensive spread along the entire front. Kharkov fell on August 23. A month later, on September 25, three hundred miles to the northwest, the Germans were driven out of Smolensk, from which city they, like the Grande Armée, had set out so confidently in the first months of the Russian campaign on the high road to Moscow. By the end of September Hitler’s hard-pressed armies in the south had fallen back to the line of the Dnieper and a defensive line they had established from Zaporozhe at the bend of the river south to the Sea of Azov. The industrial Donets basin had been lost and the German Seventeenth Army in the Crimea was in danger of being cut off.