Italy capitulates
On 3 September, British troops landed on the Italian mainland in Calabria.219 Hitler assumed at first that the landing was a diversionary tactic, and that the main invasion was about to happen in western Europe.220 On 8 September, he then received the news of Italy’s unconditional surrender, which had already happened on 3 September and had initially been kept secret.221
The ‘Führer’ now launched the measures to occupy Italy that had been prepared weeks beforehand. On 9 September, he told a small group including Goebbels, Göring, Ribbentrop, Himmler, Lammers, Bormann, and Eduard Dietl that at the moment they could not ‘afford’ to install the kind of regime they would really like to have; at the present time, they did not want to ‘antagonize’ ‘the Italian people and, above all, the Fascists’. Hitler was indicating that, now that Italy had forfeited its role as Germany’s main ally, he was determined to abandon a cornerstone of his previous Italian policy, the ‘renunciation’ of South Tyrol.222
On 10 September, after a long period of hesitation,223 Hitler commented in a radio broadcast on the situation in Italy. The collapse of his most important ally had long been foreseen. He emphasized the ‘pain I personally felt in view of the historically unique injustice’ that Mussolini had suffered. Apart from that, he said that he was convinced that the ‘military effect of the loss of Italy would be minimal’, as for months Germany had been bearing the brunt of the fight for this country.224 Within a few days German troops had occupied the majority of the Italian mainland, and the Italian forces were disarmed.225 German troops also moved into the Italian occupation zones in the south of France and the Balkans and interned the Italian soldiers. On 20 September, Hitler ordered that, if they were not prepared to continue fighting as allies, they were to be treated as ‘military internees’.226 Thus this group of around 600,000 men were denied the status of prisoners of war. They were interned in camps in the Reich and eastern Europe and subjected to forced labour, most often under deplorable conditions.227
On 9 September, British and American troops landed at Salerno. After bitter fighting the German troops were finally compelled to withdraw. The Wehrmacht now began a war of attrition during which it slowly withdrew northwards from one line of defence to the next.228
In the meantime, on 12 September, a German special commando unit had liberated Mussolini from the mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso, where he was being held captive.229 Two days later, Hitler was able to greet him at the Rastenburg air field. During the following days, in the course of lengthy sessions, he tried to boost the ‘Duce’s’ morale.230 Finally, on 15 September, Mussolini announced the re-founding of the Fascist Party and militia.231 Shortly afterwards, in a radio broadcast from his provisional residence in Munich, he proclaimed the creation of a Republican–Fascist government under his leadership and the continuation of the war alongside Germany.232 On 28 September, a new ‘Fascist–Republican’ government was established at Salo on Lake Garda.233 However, Hitler had little faith in this revival of Fascism. In confidence he told Goebbels that they were now ‘gradually going to have to write off the Duce politically’.234
During the Italian crisis, the situation on the eastern front had become increasingly critical. On 16 August, the Red Army had begun its operation to retake the Donbas in the far south of the front and, a few days later, had captured Kharkov. At the end of August 1943, it had begun another major offensive further north, parallel to Kursk, as well as attacks throughout eastern Ukraine, forcing Army Group South to retreat over the Dnieper. However, the Red Army in pursuit managed to establish several bridgeheads on the west bank235 and, in the middle of September, began another offensive against Army Group Centre, which in the end led to the capture of Smolensk.236
40
With His Back to the Wall
Following Italy’s exit from the Axis, the Wehrmacht had occupied a large part of Italian territory, as well as the Italian occupation zones in France and south-east Europe. Hitler had thus succeeded, at least for the time being, in securing the southern flank of ‘Fortress Europe’. After Italy’s defection, as a precaution, he had military plans prepared for the occupation of Hungary and Romania under the code names ‘Margarethe I’ and ‘Margarethe II’.1
This increase in the territory directly controlled by Germany in late summer 1943 led to an increase in repression throughout its sphere of influence. Not only in Italy, but a few months later in France, and, during spring 1944, finally in Hungary as well, radical indigenous forces came to the fore under German protection and became willing assistants in implementing German policies, employing terror above all in the process. Hitler’s regime thus acquired accomplices whose fates were tied irrevocably to that of their German masters. In the course of this radicalization of their occupation policy and their relationship with their allies, the Germans managed, once again, to extend their systematic murder of the Jews to several new areas. From Hitler’s point of view, a further increase in mass murder and terror appeared to be the most effective means of preventing the German ‘bloc’ from disintegrating. By implicating indigenous forces in this terror regime he could compel the absolute ‘loyalty’ of his remaining allies. His personal interventions in the further development of Jewish policy were motivated not only by his vitriolic anti-Semitism and destructive impulses, they were also intended to secure the survival of his regime. In other words, he was less concerned about dragging his arch-enemies down with him to what was now almost inevitable destruction, than that their violent deaths should serve to extend the period of his rule. Thus, by continuing to murder the Jews in the last phase of the war, Hitler was not least pursuing political goals. It was precisely those four states that successfully resisted the most extreme form of German Jewish policy (Badoglio’s Italy, Romania, Finland, and Bulgaria)2 that managed, between September 1943 and 1944, to escape from their alliance with Germany by securing separate armistices. This inevitably confirmed the German government in its determination not to make any compromises in their Jewish policy.
On Hitler’s orders, the ‘Social Republic of Italy’, proclaimed by Mussolini on 15 September, whose government was based at Salo on Lake Garda, was to be supervised by a Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich, the envoy Rudolf Rahn.3 In addition, a German military government, branches of various economic agencies, and an SS and police apparatus were established. Thus, the Social Republic was firmly under Germany’s thumb. The Italian troops remained interned, Italian civilians were deported to Germany as forced labour, and a strike movement, which had spread through northern Italy from August onwards, was suppressed with the aid of Fascist forces. Hitler intervened personally and, in March 1944, ordered that 20 per cent of the striking workers be immediately deported to Germany and placed at the disposal of the SS as forced labour.4 However, the order was then withdrawn and, instead, 1,200 alleged ring leaders were deported to concentration camps in Germany.5 In addition, the occupiers used terror to combat the partisan movement that was now springing up everywhere in opposition to the new Fascist republic.6
Above all, however, the Reich Security Head Office was now determined ruthlessly to deport the over 33,000 Jews living in this part of the country.7 The first stage was the deportation of the Jews in Rome. In October 1943, Ribbentrop told the Foreign Ministry that ‘in accordance with a Führer directive, the 8,000 Jews living in Rome are to be moved to Mauthausen (upper Danube) as hostages’.8 This Führer directive eventually led on 16 October to a round-up in the Italian capital that the majority of Rome’s Jews managed to evade; even so, more than 1,000 of them were deported to Auschwitz. Up to the end of 1944 a total of 6,000 Jews from Italy arrived there. They were initially deported by Germans, but by the beginning of the following year the Italian authorities were also assisting. Thus, the Fascist state was drawn into complicity in murder with the Third Reich. After the Wehrmacht moved into the Italian-occupied zones in Greece, Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, and the Dodecanese (a group of islands in the eastern Aegean in Italy
’s possession since 1912), around 10,000 Jews were deported during 1944 from these territories to Auschwitz and murdered there.9
When German troops moved into the Italian-occupied zone in the south of France, on 8 September, following the Italian–Allied armistice, German special units immediately began to pursue the Jews who had hitherto been living there in safety.10 They concentrated above all on Nice, where between 20,000 and 25,000 Jews, mostly refugees, were living. However, without the support of the French authorities, in three months the special units managed to catch only a small proportion of them, deporting 800 to the camp in Drancy.11
However, the removal of the Italian occupation regime in the south of France, which had been established in 1940, provided the security police with the opportunity of radicalizing Jewish persecution throughout the whole of France. Since August 1943, the Gestapo had been increasingly getting the French police to arrest Jews throughout the country for alleged breaches of France’s anti-Semitic laws, and then deporting them.12 However, the French authorities were not prepared to take part in systematic and comprehensive persecution of French Jews. The political preconditions had to be created for this stance to change.
At the end of 1943, Hitler once again made a massive personal intervention in the French situation. Marshall Pétain, the French President, was planning a constitutional reform, according to which the French National Assembly, which had not met since 1940, would appoint his successor. Via Ribbentrop, Hitler informed Pétain that this was ruled out. Moreover, the French government would have to be reshuffled in accordance with Germany’s views, the Vichy civil service had to be purged, and future French legislation would be subject to a German veto.13 In fact, at the beginning of 1944, the Laval government was substantially reshuffled under considerable German pressure, and degraded into becoming merely an executive arm of the occupying power.14 This had a direct impact on the persecution of the Jews. From now onwards, under instructions from the security police, the French police increasingly took part in arresting French Jews in the provinces.15 On 14 April 1944, the commander of the security police in France, Helmut Knochen, ordered the arrest of all Jews irrespective of their citizenship, with the exception of those living in ‘mixed marriages’. During the four months before the deportations stopped in August 1944, more than 6,000 people were deported.16
The fact that the Nazi empire had begun to crumble on its southern flank, while the eastern front was in retreat and a landing was expected in western Europe, encouraged resistance in the north.17 Thus, during the summer of 1943, acts of sabotage, strikes, and disturbances began to proliferate in Denmark. In August Hitler decided to declare martial law there.18 In view of this, the Reich Plenipotentiary, Werner Best, a former Reich Security Head Office official, decided that the best solution would be to allow the situation to deteriorate in a controlled fashion, in order to justify abandoning the previous cooperation with the Danish government. Then, in line with the general tightening of German occupation policy in Europe, the occupation administration should be transformed into a police regime under his leadership.19 He thus proposed to his superiors in the Foreign Ministry that the Danish Jews be deported,20 in order to demonstrate the general change in German policy towards Denmark.
Best’s proposal coincided with the announcement of the Italian armistice, and Hitler’s consent to the transformation of the Danish occupation into a police regime coincided with the period when the ‘Führer’ was implementing measures to occupy Italy and its occupation zones. These measures, in turn, were motivated by his desire to eliminate once and for all the pernicious ‘Jewish influence’ prevalent there. However, it soon became clear that the preparations for the deportation of the Danish Jews could not be kept secret, and that Best did not have the numbers of police troops required to carry out the arrests ‘at a stroke’. Meanwhile, he had become convinced that he did not need a dramatic event such as an anti-Jewish ‘action’ in order to be able to transform the occupation regime.21 After he had failed to convince the German leadership of his misgivings,22 and with the planned arrests threatening to turn into a fiasco, Best decided to leak the timing.23 The flight of the great majority of Jews living in Denmark to Sweden, made possible through a remarkable rescue operation mounted by the Danish population, seemed to him the preferable option.24 Thus he claimed to the Foreign Ministry that the flight of the Jews had been a success, as, one way or the other, Denmark had been ‘dejewified’.25
Hitler (also Ribbentrop and Himmler) did not regard Best as having sabotaged their Jewish policy, but, in the end, accepted it. Although it contradicted Hitler’s radical ideas about the ‘annihilation’ of the European Jews, during this phase of the war Jewish persecution had become for him, above all, a function of occupation and alliance policy. The collaboration of indigenous forces in the countries under German control in this matter was intended to increase the resilience of his ‘Fortress Europe’. If an occupation regime in a small country like Denmark could, as an exception, be stabilized by allowing the flight of a few thousand Jews then this was evidently acceptable.
Power struggles
In the meantime, Hitler made a number of changes in the regime’s power structure. On 20 August 1943, he appointed Himmler as the new Interior Minister; his predecessor, Wilhelm Frick, whom Hitler had long regarded as burnt out, was given the insignificant, and purely ceremonial, post of Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.26 Appointing Himmler a minister was intended further to strengthen his authority as the central figure in the apparatus of repression; at the same time, it was a sign that the internal administration of the state was now finally under the control of the Party.
In terms of domestic politics, Himmler’s appointment marked the end of the influence of the ‘Committee of Three’, the alliance of the powerful heads of Hitler’s most important chancelleries, Lammers, Keitel, and Bormann. Bormann was the only one who managed to retain his position of power under the new circumstances, and indeed, if anything, to extend it. The particular position of trust that he enjoyed with Hitler is reflected in his appointment as ‘Secretary to the Führer’ in April 1943. The new title makes it clear that Bormann, even apart from his position as head of the Party Chancellery, had the right to pass on ‘Führer directives and opinions to leading and senior figures of the state, as well as to state agencies, on behalf of the Führer’.27 As a result, Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, lost influence, as from now on he rarely met Hitler and, on occasions, had to wait weeks for an interview.28 In his new post of Interior Minister Himmler refrained from carrying out a comprehensive reform of the administrative structure, which many, particularly in the Party, were hoping for and had anticipated. Speculation that Himmler might use his new position to subordinate the Gauleiters in their role as Reich Defence Commissioners (who were already subject to ‘official supervision’ by the Reich Interior Minister) unequivocally to the authority of the Reich [i.e the state] also proved incorrect.29 Himmler was acting cautiously and no doubt realized that Hitler was not prepared to support far-reaching administrative reorganization during the war. As a result, right up until the end of the regime, the Party’s ‘territorial princes’ remained in an intermediate position politically between Party and state and this, in many respects, unclear status, requiring frequent decisions by the ‘Führer’, had the effect of strengthening Bormann’s position.
Apart from Himmler’s appointment, the second major change in the regime with which Hitler responded to the crisis in the summer of 1943 was the increase in Speer’s authority in the armaments sector. From June 1943 onwards, Speer had been trying to take over the Reich Economics Ministry’s responsibility for the production of consumer goods, which made up over 50 per cent of Germany’s total production. To achieve this he had secured the cooperation of Hans Kehrl, the official in the Economics Ministry responsible for industry.30
At the beginning of September, Hitler signed a Führer edict ‘concerning the concentration of the war economy’,31 and, by the en
d of October, the responsibilities of Speer’s ministry had been reorganized and its title changed from ‘Ministry for Weapons and Munitions’ to ‘Ministry for Armaments and War Production’. A new planning office, ‘Central Planning’, was established under Kehrl with extensive powers,32 and the responsibility for industries producing consumer goods, hitherto exercised by the Reich Economics Ministry, was transferred to Speer’s system of rings and committees.33
While Goebbels considered that his own plans for ‘making the war total’ were being realized through these measures, and he backed the ‘organizational genius’ Speer,34 the Armaments Minister made an alliance with the other beneficiary of the summer 1943 crisis, Heinrich Himmler.35 This became clear at the Reichsleiters’ and Gauleiters’ conference in Posen on 6 October, where Speer gave a tough warning to the Gauleiters not to continue obstructing his total war measures, in particular the extensive closing down of factories geared to civilian production. He referred specifically to the arrangement he had made the previous day for the SD to provide him with the requisite information about the production of goods that were not essential to the war effort. He announced that, if necessary and with Himmler’s support, he would intervene ruthlessly in their Gaus.36 The meeting was marked by Himmler using the opportunity, as the new Interior Minister, to talk ‘quite openly’ about the murder of the Jews. He also specifically justified the systematic murder of Jewish children, since he did not want them to grow up as ‘avengers’.
In a comment, meant ironically, Himmler drew a parallel between the forced closing down of production in the Warsaw ghetto after the crushing of the April uprising and the closure programme Speer had been referring to. This powerful demonstration of the collaboration between Speer and Himmler made it clear that Speer’s warning to the Gauleiters was not simply an empty threat.37 The Gauleiters were furious about Speer’s statements and the added weight given to them by Himmler’s comments, and complained to Hitler via Bormann. They claimed Speer had threatened them with police intervention and concentration camp.38
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