it to the last breath.’124
Speaking to Goebbels on 6 May in Berlin, where he had come to attend the state funeral of SA-Chief Viktor Lutze (who had been killed in a car accident), Hitler accepted that the situation in Tunis was ‘fairly hopeless’. The inability to get supplies to the troops meant there was no way out. Goebbels summarized the way Hitler was thinking: ‘When you think that 150,000 of our best young people are still in Tunis, you rapidly get an idea of the catastrophe threatening us there. It’ll be on the scale of Stalingrad, and certainly also produce the harshest criticism among the German people.’125 But when he spoke the next day to the Reichs — and Gauleiter, Hitler never mentioned Tunis, making no reference at all to the latest news that Allied troops had penetrated as far as the outskirts of the city and that the harbour was already in British hands.126
Axis troops were, in fact, by then giving themselves up in droves. Within a week, on 13 May, almost a quarter of a million of them — the largest number taken so far by the Allies, around half of them German, the remainder Italian — surrendered. Only about 800 managed to escape.127 North Africa was lost. The catastrophe left the Italian Axis partner reeling. For Mussolini, the writing was on the wall. But for Hitler, too, the defeat was nothing short of calamitous. One short step across the Straits of Sicily by the Allies would mean that the fortress of Europe was breached through its southern underbelly.
In the Atlantic, meanwhile, the battle was in reality lost, even if it took some months for this to become fully apparent. The resignation on 30 January 1943 as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Grand-Admiral Raeder, exponent of what Hitler had come to recognize as an outmoded naval strategy based upon a big surface battle fleet, and his replacement by Karl Donitz, protagonist of the U-boat, had signalled an important shift in priorities.128 Hitler told his Gauleiter on 7 May that the U-boat was the weapon to cut through the arteries of the enemy. This weapon was, in his view, at the very beginning of its development. He expected great things of it.129 At the end of the month, he told Donitz: ‘There can be no question of easing up on the U-boat war. The Atlantic is my western approach
Hitler’s greatest worry, once Tunis had fallen, was the condition of his longest-standing ally. Immediately after the fall of Tunis, the Wehrmacht High Command’s Operations Staff had outlined — probably at Hitler’s request — a scenario ‘should Italy withdraw from the war’. It posited the likelihood of the Allies forcing their way on to the European continent through the unstable and weakly defended Balkans. Hitler, in part it seems misled by a false lead given by British intelligence, which had deliberately planted disinformation on a corpse left floating off the Spanish coast,133 disagreed with his own staff and with Mussolini in thinking an Allied landing would be attempted not in Sicily, but in Sardinia. Contingency plans were made to move forces from both the western and eastern fronts to the Mediterranean, and to put Rommel — now largely restored to health — in command in Italy should an Italian collapse take place.134
By the time he heard a report on the situation in Italy in mid-May from Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von Neurath, son of the former Foreign Minister, and one-time Foreign Office liaison to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, Hitler was deeply gloomy. He thought the monarchists and aristocracy had sabotaged the war-effort in Italy from the beginning. He blamed them for preventing an Italian declaration of solidarity with Germany in 1939. If such a declaration had been forthcoming, he asserted, the British would not have hastened to sign the Guarantee for Poland, the French would not have gone along in their wake, and the war would not have broken out.135 He thought there was no longer the will in Italy to transport troops to Sicily to defend against an Allied landing. Whatever the Duce’s personal strength of will — and Hitler continued to detach him from his savage criticism of the Italians — it was being sabotaged.136
There was a big question mark, he thought, over Mussolini’s health — he had suffered from a stomach ulcer since September of the previous year — and his age, now approaching sixty, told against him. Hitler was sure that the reactionary forces associated with the King, Victor Emmanuel III — whose nominal powers as head of state had nevertheless still left him as the focus of a potential alternative source of loyalty — would triumph over the revolutionary forces of Fascism. A collapse had to be reckoned with.137 Plans must be made to defend the Mediterranean without Italy.138 How this was to be done with an offensive imminent in the east and no troops to spare, he did not say.
Hitler had intended around this time to move back to Vinnitsa. But the postponement of ‘Citadel’, the precarious situation in the Mediterranean, and problems with his own health made him decide suddenly to return from a short stay at the Wolf’s Lair to the Obersalzberg.139 He remained there until the end of June. During his weeks in the Bavarian Alps, the Ruhr district, Germany’s industrial heartland, continued to suffer devastation from the skies. In May there had been spectacular attacks on the big dams that supplied the area’s water. Had they been sustained, the damage done would have been incalculable. As it was, the dams could be repaired. Since the ‘dam-buster’ raids, the major cities of Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Bochum, Dortmund, and Wuppertal-Barmen had been laid waste in intensive night bombardment. The inadequacy of the air-defences was all too apparent. Hitler continued to vent his bile on Goring and the Luftwaffe.140 But his own powerlessness to do anything about it was exposed. Goebbels at least showed his face, touring the bombed-out cities, speaking at a memorial service in his home town of Elberfeld, and at a big rally in Dortmund.141 Hitler stayed in his alpine idyll. The Propaganda Minister thought a visit by the Fuhrer pyschologically important for the population of the Ruhr. Though Goebbels had been impressed by the positive response he had encountered during his staged tour, more realistic impressions of morale provided in SD reports painted a different picture. Anger at the regime’s failure to protect them was widespread. The ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting had almost disappeared. Hostile remarks about the regime, and about Hitler personally, were commonplace.142
Hitler promised Goebbels towards the end of June that he would pay an extended visit to the devastated area. It was to take place ‘the next week, or the week after that’. Hitler knew only too well that this was out of the question. He had by then scheduled the beginning of ‘Citadel’ for the first week in July. And he expected the Allied landing off the Italian coast at any time. The human suffering of the Ruhr population had, ultimately, little meaning for him. ‘As regrettable as the personal losses are,’ he told Goebbels, ‘they have unfortunately to be taken on board in the interest of a superior war-effort
While on the Obersalzberg, Hitler was chiefly preoccupied with the prospect of an imminent invasion by the Allies in the south, and the approaching ‘Citadel’ offensive in the east.
He still thought that the Allied landing would come in Sardinia. Sicily was in his view secure enough, and could be held. (Since most of the island’s defenders were Italian, Hitler must have been either less confident than he seemed, or have amended his normally scathing assessment of the Italian armed forces.) He was determined not to retreat from Italy. There would be no withdrawal as far as the Po Valley, even were the Italians to pull out of the war. It was the first rule of the German conduct of war to fight away from the homeland. He thought the Italians more likely to give in bit by bit in deals with the enemy than to capitulate outright. His confidence in Mussolini had finally evaporated. It would be different, he thought, were the Duce still young and fit. But he was old and worn out. The royal family could not be trusted an inch. And — he added a characteristic last reflection — the Jews had not been done away with
As the war had turned remorselessly against Germany, the beleaguered Fuhrer had reverted ever more to
