Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini

by Greg Annussek

  Ciano, who was still married to the Duce’s daughter Edda, had fled to Germany in late August in the naïve hope that the Nazis would facilitate the next leg of his journey to Spain. But Hitler despised Mussolini’s son-in-law, as did most of the Nazi hierarchy, and Ciano’s ill-advised plans to publish a tell-all book helped to seal his fate. “Ciano intends to write his memoirs,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “The Fuehrer rightly suspects that such memoirs can only be written in a manner derogatory to us, for otherwise he could not dispose of them in the international market. There is therefore no thought of authorizing Ciano to leave the Reich; he will remain in our custody.”23

  But when Hitler demanded that Ciano and the others pay with their heads, the Duce hesitated.24 Weary and physically unwell, he was no longer the blustering dictator of former days, and he had no enthusiasm for enacting an Italian version of Hitler’s infamous Night of the Long Knives. The notion of signing Ciano’s death warrant was particularly troubling to Mussolini, but Hitler remained unmoved by arguments concerning family ties.

  In the outlaw world of the Nazis, Mussolini’s lack of bloodlust was interpreted as a sign of weakness. “The Duce has not drawn the moral conclusions from Italy’s catastrophe that the Fuehrer had expected of him,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “He was naturally overjoyed to see the Fuehrer and to be fully at liberty again. But 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 worldwide revolutionary and insurrectionist.”25 As for Goebbels, he believed that Ciano should be executed and Edda “whipped.”26

  Hitler got another knock on the head when the Duce expressed a desire to retire from public life and return to Rocca delle Caminate, his country estate in the Romagna, to avoid an outbreak of civil war in Italy.27 But Hitler quickly vetoed this option, telling his friend that such a development would reflect badly on Germany and undermine the legitimacy of the new Fascist state that Hitler was planning to establish in German-occupied Italy.28 Mussolini eventually acquiesced to Hitler’s wishes, perhaps in the hope that he could protect his countrymen from Nazi brutality.

  Ultimately, both men were disappointed by their reunion at the Wolf ’s Lair in September, and by their newest incarnation of the Axis. Mussolini’s attitude gave Hitler little hope that he could expect much from the resurrection of the Italian dictator. “We may consider him absolutely disillusioned concerning the Duce’s personality,” wrote Goebbels about his boss, though he added that there was “no actual quarrel.”29 Goebbels, it should be said, was jealous of Mussolini’s bond with Hitler and took a certain degree of pleasure in watching the Duce’s stock fall in Hitler’s eyes.30 In the final analysis, Mussolini was “nothing but an Italian,” Goebbels huffed, “and can’t get away from that heritage.”31

  Hitler’s disappointment ran deep. “Belief in Fascist Italy as a pillar of the Nietzschean paradise had been part of his psychological structure,” according to the Axis expert Elizabeth Wiskemann. “He was now forced to admit that a major pretence of his life had been nonsense, that Italy had been no better in this war than in the last, and that Mussolini was excessively Italian. His Mentor, his twin- Superman for twenty-one years, was a perfectly ordinary man.”32

  There was something ironic about this revelation. Though the rescue of the Duce had given the German public something to feel good about, that same event seems to have disillusioned Hitler in private.

  As for Mussolini, his regrets were already etched on his face. “The resurrected dictator looked old, tired and wan,” recalled the SS man Eugen Dollmann, who saw the Duce on September 27, “and only his eyes retained their old Palazzo Venezia fire. . . . I congratulated him on his release from the Gran Sasso and reassumption [sic] of power, but he dismissed my remarks with a gesture of resignation and the light in his eyes grew dim.”33 Rachele Mussolini later wrote that “after July, 1943, Benito Mussolini, my husband, thought that his star had completely faded; from that time he spoke of himself solely as ‘Mussolini defunto,’ or the late Mussolini. He greatly feared German intentions for the future of Italy and was conscious that as head of the Italian Social Republic he was merely protecting the Italians from German revenge.”34

  The Italian Social Republic was the name of the Duce’s new neo-Fascist regime, which came into being that September. Because nobody knew exactly when Rome might fall to the Allies, Mussolini’s government was established on the western shore of Lake Garda near Salò in northern Italy—Lake Garda being almost equidistant between Milan and Venice.35 It was also believed that the Duce’s presence in Rome might prove to be too politically explosive in light of the anti-Fascist feeling in the city. Historians later dubbed the new regime the Salò Republic, but by any name it was a puppet kingdom created under the aegis of the Nazis. Though Mussolini was its nominal leader, Hitler and the Germans pulled most of the strings. During the remainder of his life, the Duce never again saw the Eternal City.36

  Under pressure from Hitler, Mussolini convened a kangaroo court in January 1944 at Verona to dispense summary justice to Ciano and five other Fascists who had cast their votes against the Italian dictator during the Grand Council meeting several months earlier.37 (Altogether, nineteen men had voted against Mussolini on the evening of July 24–25, but most of them, including Dino Grandi, had escaped the grasp of the Nazis. At Verona, thirteen of them were sentenced to death in absentia.)

  Ciano’s wanderings came to an end at Fort Procolo, a few miles outside Verona in northern Italy, where he and four other defendants were shot by a firing squad (the sixth was given a long prison sentence). As a sign of contempt, the men were shot in the back, but Ciano managed to turn around at the last moment to face his executioners.38 Edda, who had begged her father to spare her husband’s life, was crushed by Galeazzo’s death and nearly had a nervous breakdown.*

  During his second incarnation as dictator, Mussolini found a home at the Villa Feltrinelli in the small town of Gargnano on Lake Garda.39 He was “virtually a prisoner” of the Germans, according to the Italian historian Paolo Monelli.40 Hitler’s SS troops guarded the villa day and night and followed the Duce almost everywhere he went. They were ostensibly there to protect his person, but they also spied on him and even monitored his telephone calls. (Mussolini liked to refer to General Karl Wolff, commander of the SS in Italy, as his jailer.)41 Further complicating matters, the Villa Feltrinelli was noisy and crowded. The house was practically overflowing with the Duce’s sizable family, which included his wife, children, daughters-in-law (who fought with each other), and several grandchildren.

  Mussolini found domestic life suffocating and began to spend more and more of his time at his nearby office, the Villa delle Orsoline. He also devoted an increasing amount of time to his philosophical ruminations and left the business of state largely to his various Fascist ministers. To some of those around him, the Duce seemed to be out of touch with the real world. “He lives by dreams, in dreams, and through dreams,” observed Fernando Mezzasoma, a young Fascist who grew close to Mussolini during the Salò Republic years. “He has not the least contact with reality, he lives and functions in a world which he constructs for himself, a completely fantastic world; he lives outside time.”42

  The Duce’s mistress, Claretta Petacci, and her family were installed on a nearby estate. However, under pressure from his wife, Mussolini did not visit Claretta as often as he might have wished. He found other ways to occupy his time, such as badmouthing the Nazis behind their backs, playing Beethoven or Verdi on his violin (in his less-than-graceful, machismo style), reading Plato and Goethe, and complaining about his insomnia and other health problems.

  “He was an old man,” wrote the historian Martin Clark, “defeated in life, wasted by sickness, abandoned by his daughter, surrounded by a squabbling family, bullied by the
Germans, without friends and without hope. Still, he deserved his fate. He was an arrogant bully, and he had miscalculated.”43

  His gloom could only have deepened as he watched a bitter civil war flare up behind the German lines. “Mussolini’s bid for a Fascist revival plunged Italy into the horrors of civil war,” Churchill later wrote. “In the weeks following the September Armistice, officers and men of the Italian Army stationed in German-occupied Northern Italy and patriots from the towns and countryside began to form partisan units and to operate against the Germans and against their compatriots who still adhered to the Duce.”44

  The 80,000 or so Partisans (more than half of whom had joined the Communist-controlled Garibaldi brigades) did everything they could to make life harder for Mussolini and the Nazis.45 They employed the standard tricks of the trade: assassinations, sabotage, and surprise attacks.46 The Germans responded by launching vicious attacks of their own against Partisans and civilians alike, sometimes setting entire villages aflame.*

  The last Axis summit took place at the Wolf ’s Lair on July 20, 1944, just hours after an assassin’s bomb had nearly killed Hitler.** The two dictators spent part of the time rehashing the usual issues, according to Eugen Dollmann, who was present for the bizarre tea party. “The only new feature,” he observed, “was that there had at last been a putsch against Hitler in his own Reich, and that the Italians need no longer suffer taunts about 25 July and 8 September in silence.”47

  The scene became more interesting when an argument erupted among some of Hitler’s top lieutenants—Goering, Doenitz, and Ribbentrop—who began to squabble over the Third Reich’s military failures and point fingers at one another.48 Mussolini listened silently as all this was going on, crumbling a piece of cake with his fingers and creating tiny sculptures with the remains.49

  Hitler also remained mum, apparently pondering his close call with death. Then he proclaimed: “Never have I felt more strongly that providence is at my side—indeed, the miracle of a few hours ago has convinced me more than ever that I am destined for even greater things and shall lead the German people to the greatest victory in its history.”50

  Though a ghost of his former self by that time, the Duce mustered a nostalgic response. “I must say you are right, Führer,” he said. “Our position is bad, one might almost say desperate, but what has happened here today gives me new courage. After the miracle that has occurred here in this room today it is inconceivable that our cause should meet with misfortune.”51

  When the meeting had ended and the two men said their goodbyes at the train station, Hitler looked Mussolini in the eye for what seemed like an eternity and reaffirmed his friendship.52 “I know that I can count on you,” Hitler told him, “and I beg you to believe me when I say that I look on you as my best and possibly only friend I have in the world.”53 When the Duce’s back was turned, Hitler reportedly drew aside Rudolf Rahn, the German ambassador to Fascist Italy, and told him to keep an eye on Mussolini—but it is not clear whether this cryptic aside was made in a spirit of distrust or affection.54

  “One pale and ageing man [Hitler] . . . extended his left hand to another pale and ageing man,” remembered Dollmann. “The two incongruous friends gazed deep into each other’s eyes once more, as in the days of their glory, but the light in those eyes was extinguished, almost as though they guessed that this was their last meeting.”55

  They met their ends the following year. By the spring of 1945, Mussolini’s kingdom in northern Italy was beginning to shrink rapidly under the pressure of the Allied advance and the increasing activity of Italian irregulars. Hitler sent his last message to the Duce on April 24, informing him that “the struggle for existence or non-existence has reached its climax.”56 Shortly afterward, Mussolini and Claretta Petacci were captured by Partisans at a roadblock outside the village of Dongo (in the region of Lake Como).57 He was disguised as a German soldier at the time, wearing an army overcoat, helmet, and dark sunglasses.58 On April 28, the Duce of Fascism and his lover were shot dead by the side of a road near the hamlet of Mezzegra on the western shores of Como.59

  The executions were conducted without fanfare or the semblance of a trial. The corpses were transported to Milan, where they were abused by the crowd and hung by their heels from a rafter in the Piazzale Loreto along with the dead bodies of several other captured Fascists.60 The setting for this spectacle was strangely fitting: Milan was the city in which Mussolini had proclaimed the Axis almost ten years earlier.*

  As the Duce dangled from a rope in Milan, Hitler was living in an underground bunker in Berlin. He had left the Wolf ’s Lair for good in November 1944;61 in January 1945, he ordered that it be destroyed, but German engineers did not have enough explosives to finish the job.**62 Half mad, his body nearly paralyzed from nervous tension and crazy drug cocktails, Hitler was still clinging to his center of power when he was informed of Mussolini’s demise.

  “Hitler had heard of Mussolini’s shameful death,” remembered Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s secretaries. “I think someone had even shown him the photos of the naked bodies hanging head downwards in the main square of Milan. ‘I will not fall into the enemy’s hands either dead or alive. When I’m dead, my body is to be burned so that no one can ever find it,’ Hitler decreed.”***63

  On April 30, Hitler and Eva Braun, who had taken marriage vows the previous day, took their own lives. Goebbels, who had stayed by Hitler’s side until the bitter end, also chose death rather than face the tender mercies of the Russians, who were already fighting in the streets of Berlin. (Admiral Doenitz inherited the leadership of the Third Reich, albeit briefly.)

  During the Saló years, Mussolini expressed the gratitude he felt at being rescued from the Gran Sasso. “The Greek philosopher, Thales,” wrote the Duce, making one of his beloved scholarly references, “thanked the gods for creating him a man and not a beast, a male and not a female, a Greek and not a barbarian. I thank the gods for having spared me the farce of a vociferous trial in Madison Square, New York—to which I should infinitely prefer a regular hanging in the Tower of London.”64

  In what may have been a moment of greater honesty, Mussolini also admitted privately in the months before his death that he and Hitler had succumbed to their own illusions like a pair of madmen.65

  After the Gran Sasso raid, Skorzeny enjoyed a special status in the eyes of Hitler and was often entrusted with special missions that the German dictator considered especially important. “Throughout his military career,” wrote William H. McRaven, a U.S. Navy Seal, “Skorzeny used tactical deception and acts of extreme bravado to throw the enemy off guard and gain an advantage.”66 Though not all his efforts were successful, he managed to score several more coups before war’s end that increased his notoriety.

  One of Skorzeny’s most well-known exploits during World War II took place during the Battle of the Bulge, which was sparked by a surprise German offensive that Hitler launched in the West in December 1944. The primary attack force consisted of conventional army units. But, in one of his final brainstorms, Hitler instructed Skorzeny to send a group of commandos behind enemy lines dressed as American soldiers (Operation Greif). After receiving months of training, dozens of these bogus GIs were set loose in Allied territory, where they proceeded to commit acts of sabotage by misdirecting road traffic, snipping telephone lines, and generally creating havoc. Although Skorzeny’s commandos did little actual damage, their presence caused a mass panic that was out of all proportion to their numbers.

  During this period, Allied soldiers had difficulty distinguishing friend from foe and had to subject one another to endless crossexaminations. In the furor, authentic GIs were swept up and arrested on the suspicion of being Nazi spies. The privileges of rank offered little protection. An American general by the name of Bruce Clark was arrested by overzealous MPs and detained for five hours.

  As a result of Operation Greif, “a half-million GI’s played cat and mouse with each other each time they met on the road,” recall
ed General Omar Bradley, a three-star general who was repeatedly stopped at Allied roadblocks and given the third-degree. “Three times I was ordered to prove my identity by cautious GI’s. The first time by identifying Springfield as the capital of Illinois (my questioner held out for Chicago); the second time by locating the guard between the center and tackle on a line of scrimmage; the third time by naming the then current spouse of a blonde named Betty Grable.”67

  If that were not enough, the idea soon took hold in the Allied psyche that Skorzeny was planning to seize Eisenhower himself. As a result of these concerns, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces was practically put under house arrest by his own security men.

  “Security officers,” recalled Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s secretary, “immediately turned headquarters compound [at Versailles] into a virtual fortress. Barbed wire appeared. Several tanks moved in. The normal guard was doubled, trebled, quadrupled. The pass system became a strict matter of life and death, instead of the old formality. The sound of a car exhaust was enough to halt work in every office, to start a flurry of telephone calls to our office, to inquire if the Boss were alright.”68

  Hitler’s offensive ultimately failed. But by the end of the war, Skorzeny had become something of a legend. When he finally surrendered in May 1945, the Allied press reports betrayed a grudging fascination with the boastful Austrian. “A rather handsome man,” wrote a New York Times reporter, “despite a scar stretching from his left ear to his chin, he smilingly disclaimed credit for heading a mission to murder members of the Allied High Command last winter . . . and declared that if any German soldiers operated behind the American lines in American uniform it was something that somebody else, not he, had cooked up.”69