Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini

by Greg Annussek

  But a lot more than Victor Emmanuel’s personal security was at stake. It was obvious by this time that the Allies, already fighting their way across Sicily, and the Nazis, who were about to pour into northern Italy, were destined to meet in a head-on collision on the southern border of the Third Reich; and Italy would provide the stage for the clash that threatened to ravage the peninsula.

  Avoiding this scenario was the top priority of the king and the Italian people in general, therefore it was necessary to keep one of the opponents off the field. There was no chance of stopping the Allies, whom the Italians would soon welcome as their protectors. The only other option was to prevent the influx of German troops and armor that Hitler was planning to send into the country. This could only be accomplished by diplomacy or by force (and considering Hitler’s belligerent attitude, the former did not seem to be a viable strategy).

  In the critical days following the coup, however, Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio did nothing to sabotage the progress of Army Group B into northern Italy. Though some of Badoglio’s own generals were advising him to make a clean break with the Nazis at once, before German reinforcements had time to get a foothold, the cautious marshal and his king apparently never gave this idea serious consideration.57 They took great pains, in fact, to avoid action that might conceivably provoke the Nazis, preferring to keep them off balance with pledges of Axis loyalty until the Italian duo could come to an understanding with Hitler or, failing that, secure military support from the West.

  In his own defense, Badoglio later claimed that in the summer of 1943 the Italian military was simply too weak and demoralized to survive a showdown with Hitler. And there was some truth in this. Even on a good day, the Italian armed forces were no match for the dreaded German Wehrmacht, which was far superior in training, equipment, and leadership. To make matters worse, much of the Italian army was stationed in France and the Balkans.

  Although no one can say for certain what would have happened if Badoglio had resisted the Germans by force of arms, one thing soon became clear: By failing to make the attempt, he allowed the Nazis to seize control of the vital alpine passes—the main points of entry on Italy’s mountainous northern borders—and use them to funnel their troops into the peninsula during the crucial month of August and beyond.

  Having been rebuffed by Hitler, the king and Badoglio thought it wise to make their first tentative approach to the Allies near the end of July. The new Italian foreign minister was a seasoned diplomat named Raffaele Guariglia. He arrived in Rome on July 29 from Turkey, where he had formerly served as ambassador, and quickly assumed the initiative in contacting the West. The next day, he went to the Vatican and met with the British minister to the Holy See, Sir D’Arcy Osborne. (As a political entity unto itself, the Vatican possessed its own foreign diplomatic core.) Osborne was sympathetic to Guariglia’s position but replied that he could not be of any help because his security codes were out of date.

  “The British Minister,” Badoglio recalled, “informed us that unfortunately his secret code was very old and almost certainly known to the Germans and that he could not advise us to use it for a secret communication to his Government. The American Chargé d’Affaires replied that he had not got a secret code.”58

  Though not apparent at the time, this incident was an early omen of the tortuous and confused path that Italian negotiations would assume in the tense weeks to follow.

  As July of 1943 passed into history, the European Axis powers settled into what would become an elaborate and dangerous game, the broad outlines of which were established during the week following the Italian coup. Both Hitler and Badoglio recognized the necessary expedient of maintaining their fragile alliance, disguising their mutual antagonism of one another in an effort to buy time. The Germans would use this opportunity to fortify Italy with German troops and to probe further the intentions of their reluctant ally; indeed, some in the Nazi camp still believed that Italy could be seduced or bullied into submission.

  The Italians, meanwhile, would try to exploit this unpredictable interim by negotiating a favorable agreement with the Allies, never knowing whether their covert activities would suddenly be cut short by German intervention or a violent resurgence of the Fascist regime they had so recently banished with the imprisonment of Benito Mussolini.

  Their fear of Hitler was well justified. Though he had been dissuaded from pouncing on the Badoglio government immediately, he still harbored hopes of resurrecting the Fascist regime in Italy and restoring Mussolini to his former glory—that is, if Il Duce could be found and rescued before being handed over to the Allies and vaunted as the war’s most famous POW. This task was in the hands of General Student and Otto Skorzeny, whose progress was monitored closely in the ensuing weeks by an impatient Hitler.

  * * *

  *Hitler had also threatened to seize the Vatican in the process, but Goebbels and Ribbentrop, among others, apparently talked him out of this rash move.

  *Though Hitler did not know it, he had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt just four months earlier in March 1943. A German general and his accomplice had hidden a timebomb on Hitler’s plane during a flight from Smolensk to the Wolf ’s Lair. The bomb failed to explode.

  *This is a reference to the Grand Council meeting of July 24–25. By giving Mussolini a vote of no confidence, the Fascists paved the way for the Italian coup, which was engineered by the king of Italy in conjunction with the military.

  *In essence, Hitler put all four of his main plans for Italy on hold except for the initial phase of Operation Oak, which concerned the search for Mussolini. Preparations for the remaining three plans were allowed to continue. Hitler decided, at least for the moment, to allow the German troops fighting in Sicily to remain on the island.

  *The creation of Army Group B meant that the command of German forces in Italy was divided between Kesselring and Rommel. Kesselring maintained command over the German forces in central and southern Italy. Rommel retained operational control only of his Army Group B divisions, which eventually were concentrated in the northern part of the country.

  *The uncompromising attitude of Western leaders, which seemed to cast doubt on a collaboration between the Allies and the Italians, was yet another reason why Hitler decided to defer his more aggressive plans for Italy; for without the aid of foreign powers, Italy did not pose an immediate threat.

  TONIGHT NO SLEEP FOR ANYBODY

  At Berlin . . . they had meanwhile mobilized even clairvoyants and astrologers. It was Himmler himself, it would seem, who was inspired to appeal to such “savants.” 1

  —Otto Skorzeny, Skorzeny’s Secret Missions

  LATE ON THE EVENING OF MONDAY, JULY 26, AS HITLER AND HIS lieutenants debated their next move and the new Italian leaders in Rome tried to steady their nerves, Otto Skorzeny and General Kurt Student were huddled in a small office of the Wolf ’s Lair trying to work out the preliminaries of Operation Oak, as the Mussolini search-and-rescue mission was code named. To complicate matters, the two men were also responsible for launching a small Blitzkrieg against Rome and arresting members of the Badoglio regime as well as prominent anti-Fascists in the Italian army. At the time, Hitler was threatening to carry out the latter scheme (dubbed Operation Student) within a matter of days, though he later decided to put it on hold before canceling it altogether.2

  On July 26, Student, who was in Nîmes in southern France, responded to an urgent summons to the Wolf ’s Lair, where he met with Hitler that evening. “I chose you and your paratroopers for a very important assignment,” Hitler told Student, the fifty-three-year-old commander of Germany’s airborne forces. “The Duce was dismissed and arrested by the Italian king.” Badoglio would soon turn traitor, he said, and the German divisions in Sicily and southern Italy would be cut off and trapped by enemy forces as a result. To thwart Badoglio’s plans, Student must immediately transfer a large contingent of paratroopers to Rome and prepare to take over the city. “One of your special assignments,” Hit
ler added, “will be to find and free my friend Mussolini. He shall of course be handed over to the Americans.”3

  For a strike force, Student had at his disposal the Second Parachute Division—an elite force of about 20,000 highly-trained crack troops—which he was planning to transfer to Rome from southern France as soon as possible.4 He intended to use these daredevil soldiers, who were considered among the best in the Third Reich, to capture the Eternal City in the event that Hitler gave the final order for Operation Student (he could also call upon the Third Panzergrenadier Division, a motorized unit that was already in central Italy).

  The paratroopers could also be used, in concert with the German navy if necessary, to snatch Mussolini from captivity on land or at sea, assuming the Duce could be found. Skorzeny persuaded Student to supplement this force with a few dozen men from the Friedenthal Battalion, Skorzeny’s fledgling SS commando outfit in Berlin. The two men decided to fly to Rome early the next morning to begin the search. “As for the rest,” Student added, “we shall see when we get there.”5

  After taking leave of Student, Skorzeny telephoned his secondin-command at the Friedenthal Battalion, thirty-one-year-old Lieutenant Karl Radl, sometime after 11:00 P.M.6 “We are charged with an important mission,” Skorzeny told him. “We leave tomorrow morning. I cannot give you more exact details over the telephone. Besides, I myself must think the thing over. I will call you later. For the moment, here are the earliest orders: tonight no sleep for anybody . . . have all the trucks ready because we must pick up equipment . . . I am taking along fifty men with me, our best men, that is all those who can more or less speak Italian . . . everything must be done by five in the morning . . . as soon as I have more details, I will call you back.”7

  Hunkered down in the Tea House of the Wolf ’s Lair, Skorzeny spent the next several hours drinking black coffee and brainstorming what supplies and equipment he thought might be required for the nebulous assignment, which was still little more than wishful thinking on the part of Hitler. As the night wore on, Skorzeny relayed his frequent last-minute requests to an increasingly frantic Radl, who was responsible for organizing the effort in Berlin and making certain that the men and equipment lifted off at dawn.

  It was a tall order for Radl, who still had no idea what the mission was really about. All he knew was that Skorzeny was sending him instructions every half an hour and he was having difficulty keeping up.8 Aside from gathering a mountain of equipment— guns, explosives, and such—he was told to select forty commandos from Friedenthal.9 In addition, he was instructed to bring ten intelligence officers from Amt VI (Department Six) of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the Third Reich’s mammoth police and spy organization. 10 Amt VI was the foreign intelligence branch of the RSHA—roughly equivalent to the American CIA, though the latter did not exist by that name at the time—and these ten men had been assigned to Skorzeny to aid in the search for the Duce.11

  To conceal the fact that a special SS unit was being sent to Rome, which would be sure to arouse the suspicions of the Italians, Skorzeny told Radl to dress the men in German paratrooper garb and make sure that they carried bogus IDs.12 This device would allow Skorzeny’s men to blend in with Student’s parachute troops, who would be arriving in Rome at the same time (and whose presence would not be kept secret from the Italians). Each of the Friedenthalers was also required to bring a set of civilian clothes.13

  Some of Skorzeny’s requests were stranger than others. For one thing, he told Radl to order all the commandos and other SS men to dye their hair black before departing Berlin.14 Presumably, this odd instruction was designed to allow Skorzeny’s agents to move around Rome in their civilian clothes and pass themselves off as Romans. Skorzeny later chalked up the idea to Himmler.15 Radl thought the hair-dye order was ridiculous and decided to ignore it on his own responsibility, though he did bring the dye with him on the plane, just to be on the safe side.16 For unknown reasons, Radl was also asked to scrounge up a couple of monk’s robes and pack them with the other gear.17

  Early on the morning of July 27, Skorzeny and Student boarded a twin-engine Heinkel 111 for the flight to Rome.18 At the helm was flying ace Captain Heinrich Gerlach, Student’s personal pilot.*19 Skorzeny had also donned a disguise for the duration of the mission: He was planning to pose as Student’s aide-de-camp. As the latter was a general in the air force and Skorzeny was a captain in the Waffen SS, this decision necessitated an impromptu wardrobe change. They were unable to find the proper Luftwaffe uniform on such short notice, so Skorzeny squeezed into a badly fitting flight suit. “I was forced to don a flier’s suit which was much too small for me,” recalled Skorzeny, who was six feet four inches tall, “and a Luftwaffe cap was crammed down on my head.”20

  After flying for several hours, the Heinkel crossed the majestic Apennine Mountains in central Italy—an area that would take on special significance for the duo in the weeks to come—then dropped down to an altitude of nine hundred feet to avoid detection by Allied planes (another poignant reminder of how the balance of military power in the region was beginning to change in favor of the Western powers). At 1:30 P.M. on Tuesday, the Heinkel touched down at an airport on the outskirts of the city, having made the 1,000-mile trip in about five and a half hours.

  It was another oppressively hot day in Rome. When Skorzeny stepped out of the plane, the blast of Mediterranean heat that greeted him prompted him to reconsider his tight-fitting costume. “As I alighted from the plane,” he remembered, “I wanted to take off my fur-lined flying suit; but at the last moment I recalled that I was a Luftwaffe officer as yet without a uniform. A Waffen SS as aide-decamp to a general in command of airborne troops would certainly have puzzled everybody.”21

  After landing, he and Student made the short drive to Frascati, an ancient hill town lying on the northern slopes of the Alban Hills about ten miles southeast of Rome.22 Throughout the centuries, this small and picturesque suburb, famous for its vineyards and locally produced white wine as well as for the beautiful patrician villas scattered on its hillsides, had attracted Roman emperors, popes, and medieval princes. In the summer of 1943 it was home to Marshal Albert Kesselring’s command center, the GHQ for German troops in Italy: Oberbefehlshaber Sued (Headquarters, Commander in Chief South), or OB SUED. For the next six weeks it would also serve as a sort of covert headquarters for Operation Oak.

  That night, Student and his new “adjutant” probed Kesselring and his staff to determine whether they had heard any rumors regarding the whereabouts of the missing dictator.

  Kesselring, who generally had a good relationship with the Italians (he had worked closely with them for more than a year and a half), professed to have no inside knowledge of the events of July 25 or the fate of Mussolini.23 Skorzeny was interested to learn that one of the marshal’s officers had recently broached the subject of Il Duce with a general in the Italian army. The latter had claimed, on his word of honor no less, that neither he nor any other Italian commander had knowledge of Mussolini’s location.

  For Skorzeny, this was an assertion that stretched the boundaries of plausibility. “It remains to be seen whether this statement is reliable,” he said, unaware that Kesselring was standing directly behind him.24

  “As for me,” Kesselring said angrily, “I trust in it implicitly. I have no reason to doubt the word of honor of an Italian general. You would do better, Captain Skorzeny, to maintain a like attitude in the future.”25

  Skorzeny could feel his face grow red with embarrassment. “From then on to the end of the evening,” he later wrote, “I scarcely opened my mouth.”26

  Like other Nazi VIPs, Kesselring had made an appearance at the Wolf ’s Lair in the aftermath of the coup. But as noted earlier, the fiftyseven-year-old Luftwaffe commander did not share the Fuehrer’s deep concern over the turn of events in Italy. “Kesselring was favorably impressed,” Goebbels had huffed in his diary. “He believes Badoglio actually intends to continue the war with all the military means at It
aly’s disposal. Very evidently Kesselring fell for a wellstaged show.”27

  Hitler concurred. Frustrated by the naïveté of his key men in Italy, he ordered Skorzeny to keep his mission secret from Kesselring as well as the German diplomats in Rome. “You must consider this the most absolute of secrets,” Hitler had said, referring to Operation Oak. “As for the military command of our troops in Italy [i.e., Kesselring] and the German Embassy in Rome, both must remain in ignorance of everything; they have a completely false conception of the situation and they would only act counter to our interests.”28 Hitler gave Student a similar lecture about the importance of secrecy.29

  As it happened, Hitler’s pessimism on this subject was largely justified. Practically all of the Fuehrer’s “point men” in the Italian capital—from Marshal Kesselring to Ambassador Mackensen and his military attaché, General Enno von Rintelen (the military liaison at the embassy)—believed Badoglio’s claim that Italy would remain loyal to the Axis. Hitler’s secrecy order reflected yet another layer of deception. He was not only trying to keep his diabolical plans for Italy a secret from Badoglio but also attempting to withhold knowledge of these schemes from some of his men on the spot in Rome, whom he did not fully trust.

  But the secret was not a well-kept one. By the end of July, just about every German of note in Rome knew of Hitler’s plans, at least in general terms. In fact, Kesselring and Rintelen had been brought into Operation Student almost from the beginning because General Student needed their help in carrying out Hitler’s ambitious plan to arrest Victor Emmanuel and other ringleaders of the Italian coup. Both men were opposed to the kidnapping plot and did whatever they could, using various indirect methods, to throw obstacles in Student’s way.*