months and now refashioned under the code-name ‘Axis’, were issued.207
Under the pressure of the events in Italy, Hitler had finally made one overdue move at home. For months, egged on by Goebbels, he had expressed his dissatisfaction with the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, whom he contemptuously regarded as ‘old and worn-out’.208 But he could think of no alternative. He continued to defer any decision until the toppling of Mussolini concentrated his mind, persuading him that the time had come to stiffen the grip on the home front and eliminate any prospect of poor morale turning into subversive action. The man he could depend upon to do this was close at hand.
On 20 August he appointed Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler as the new Reich Minister of the Interior. The appointment amounted to Hitler’s tacit recognition that his authority at home now rested on police repression, not the adulation of the masses he had once enjoyed.209 To save face, as usual, Frick was allowed to remain a Reich Minister and ‘kicked upstairs’ — seemingly given an important new post, replacing Neurath (who had not functioned in the post since September 1941) as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Even here, to ensure that Frick’s powers remained nominal, State Secretary Karl Hermann Frank was given a new title of State Minister for Bohemia and Moravia and enhanced authority.210
On 3 September the first British troops crossed the Straits of Messina to Italy, landing at Reggio di Calabria. That same day, the Italians secretly signed their armistice with the Allies which became public knowledge five days later.211
On 8 September Hitler had flown for the second time within a fortnight to Army Group South’s headquarters at Zaporozhye, on the lower Dnieper north of the Sea of Azov, to confer with Manstein about the increasingly critical situation on the southern flank of the eastern front. It was to be the last time he set foot on territory captured from the Soviet Union. A few days earlier, following Soviet breakthroughs, he had been forced to authorize withdrawal from the Donets Basin — so important for its rich coal deposits — and from the Kuban bridgehead over the Straits of Kerch, the gateway to the Crimea. Now the Red Army had breached the thin seam which had knitted together Kluge’s and Manstein’s Army Groups and was pouring through the gap. Retreat was the only possible course of action.212
Hitler found a tense atmosphere at the Wolf’s Lair on his return. What he had long anticipated — despite reassuring noises to the contrary from Kesselring, and from the German Embassy in Rome — was reality. British and American newspapers had that morning, 8 September, carried reports that the capitulation of the Italian army was imminent. By the afternoon, the news was hardening. At 6p.m. that evening the stories were confirmed by the BBC in London.213 Once again, Nazi leaders were summoned to Fuhrer Headquarters for a crisis- meeting next day.214 The unseasonably cold, wet weather provided a fitting backdrop.215 Partly from spite, partly because he might know too much and prove dangerous, Hitler had Prince Philip of Hesse, the King of Italy’s son-in-law, who had been at FHQ for some weeks, promptly arrested and deposited in Gestapo Headquarters in Konigsberg.216 The order had meanwhile been given to set ‘Operation Axis’ in motion. ‘The Fuhrer,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘is determined to make a
The BBC’s premature announcement gave the OKW’s Operations Staff a head start. Sixteen German divisions had been moved to the Italian mainland by this time. The battle-hardened SS units withdrawn from the eastern front in late July and early August and troops withdrawn from Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia were in position to take control in central Italy. By 10 September, Rome was in German hands. Italian troops were disarmed. Small pockets of resistance were ruthlessly put down; one division that held out until 22 September ended with 6,000 dead. Over 650,000 soldiers entered German captivity. Only the bulk of the small navy and ineffective air-force escaped and were given over to the Allies. Within a few days Italy was occupied by its former Axis partner.218
Hours after the Italian capitulation, the Allies had landed in the Gulf of Salerno, thirty miles or so south-east of Naples. The dogged German resistance they encountered for a week before reinforcements enabled them to break out of their threatened beachhead — linking forces with troops from Montgomery’s 8th Army advancing northwards from Reggio di Calabria, and entering Naples on 1 October — was an indicator of what was in store for the Allies during the coming months as the Wehrmacht made them fight for every mile of their northward progression.
It was plain to the German leadership, however, that it would be even more difficult, in the new situation, for the armed forces to cope with the mounting pressures on both the eastern and the southern fronts.219 Goebbels saw the need looming to seek peace with either the Soviet Union or the western Allies. He suggested the time had come to sound out Stalin. Ribbentrop took the same line. He had tentative feelers put out to see whether the Soviet dictator would bite.220 But Hitler dismissed the idea. If anything, he said, he preferred to look for an arrangement with Britain — conceivably open to one. But, as always, he would not consider negotiating from a position of weakness. In the absence of the decisive military success he needed, which was receding ever more into the far distance, any hope of persuading him to consider an approach other than the remorseless continuation of the struggle was bound to be illusory.221
At least Goebbels, backed by Goring, successfully this time pleaded with Hitler to speak to the German people. To the last minute before recording the broadcast, on 10 September, Hitler showed his reluctance. He wanted to delay, to see how things turned out. Goebbels went through the text with him line by line. Eventually, he got the Fuhrer to the microphone. The speech itself — largely confined to unstinting praise for Mussolini, condemnation of Badoglio and his supporters, the claim that the ‘treachery’ had been foreseen and every necessary step taken, and a call to maintain confidence and sustain the fight — had nothing of substance to offer, other than a hint at coming retaliation for the bombing of German cities.222 But Goebbels was satisfied. Reports suggested the speech had gone down well, and helped revive morale.223 He had, he said, achieved the main purpose of his visit to FHQ. He thought Hitler was relieved to get the speech off his chest after such a long time. And he wrung out of him a promise to speak soon in the Sportpalast to open the Winter Aid campaign. He thought he could give him back the taste for coming ‘directly in contact with the people’.224 Once more, he would be disappointed.
As far as the situation in Italy itself was concerned, Hitler was at this time resigned to losing any hold over the south of the country. His intention was to withdraw to the Apennines, long foreseen by the OKH Operations Staff as the favoured line of defence. However, he worried about the Allies advancing from Italy through the Balkans. By autumn, this concern was to persuade him to change his mind and defend Italy much further to the south. A consequence was to tie down forces desperately needed elsewhere.225
The Wehrmacht’s rapid successes in taking hold of Italy so speedily provided some relief. Hitler’s spirits then soared temporarily when the stunning news came through on the evening of 12 September that Mussolini, whose whereabouts had been recently discovered, had been freed from his captors in a ski hotel on the highest mountain in the Abruzzi through an extraordinarily daring raid by parachutists and SS-men carried in by glider and led by the Austrian SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Otto Skorzeny.226 The euphoria did not last long. Hitler greeted the ex-Duce warmly when Mussolini, no longer the preening dictator but looking haggard and dressed soberly in a dark suit and black overcoat, was brought to Rastenburg on 14 September. But Mussolini, bereft of the trappings of power, was a broken man. The series of private talks they had left Hitler ‘extraordinarily disappointed’.227 Three days later, Mussolini was dispatched to Munich to begin forming his new regime.228 By the end of September he had set up his reconstituted Fascist ‘Repubblica di Salo’ in northern Italy, a repressive, brutish police state run by a combination of cruelty, corruption, and thuggery — but operating unmistakably under the auspices of German masters.229 The one-time bombastic dictator of Italy was now plainly no more than Hitler’s tame puppet, and living on borrowed time.
As autumn progressed, the situation on the eastern front predictably worsened. Even in private in late September, speaking only to Goebbels (allowed to join the Fuhrer’s morning walk with his Alsatian, Blondi), Hitler had been remarkably optimistic. He was confident that the rapid withdrawal to the Dnieper would be successful and leave defences that would be impenetrable over the winter. The shortening of the front by some 350 kilometres would at the same time release troops for a floating reserve of thirty-four divisions, capable of being rushed at short notice to whichever front most needed them.230
Hitler’s optimism was soon shown to be utterly misplaced. The redeployment of troops to Italy weakened the chances of staving off the Soviet offensive. And the failure to erect the ‘eastern wall’ of fortifications along the Dnieper during the two years that it had been in German hands now proved costly. The speed of the Soviet advance gave no opportunity to construct any solid defence line.231 By the end of September the Red Army
