evil.” The masters themselves fulfilled their historic mission and danced around fires on Midsummer’s Night, honoring the laws of nature, art, and the idea of greatness, and seeking relaxation from the burdens of history in the Strength-Through-Joy mass hotels on the Channel Islands, on the fjords of Norway, or in the Crimea, to the accompaniment of jolly folklore and operetta music. In moments of depression, Hitler would speak of how far off the realization of his visions was, 100 or 200 years; “like Moses” he would see “the Promised Land only in the distance.”
The series of setbacks from the summer of 1943 on pushed the dream even further off. After the failure of the great offensive against the Russian lines near Kursk, the Russians surprisingly went over to the attack in the middle of July, and with apparently inexhaustible reserves threw back the desperately fighting German troops. In the southern sector the ratio of the forces was one to seven, in the north and center army groups about one to four. In addition an army of partisans supported the Soviet offensive by carefully co-ordinated actions. In the course of August alone, for example, they destroyed the railroad tracks in the German rear area in 12,000 places. Early in August the Red Army retook Orel, some three weeks later Kharkov, on September 25 Smolensk, and then the Donets Basin. By mid-October they were at the gates of Kiev.
Meanwhile, the situation in the Mediterranean was also deteriorating. Despite all the encouragements and concessions by the Germans, by the beginning of the spring it had become all too clear that Italy was on the verge of collapse. Mussolini, a tired and sick man, had lost more and more of his power and had become a gesticulating marionette, totally lacking in conviction, tugged from all sides by the contesting parties. In the middle of April he had met Hitler in Salzburg. His entourage had been pressing him to speak up boldly and tell his Axis partner that Italy would continue the war only under certain conditions. In particular, he was to repeat his demand that peace be concluded in the East—a stipulation he had vainly made several weeks before. But once again he succumbed to Hitler’s torrent of words. On arrival the Duce had seemed “like a broken old man,” Hitler summed up the conference. But four days later, when leaving for home again, he had seemed “in fine fettle, eager for action.”
Three months later, on July 19, 1943, the increasingly critical situation brought the two men together in Feltre in northern Italy. For meanwhile the Allies had conquered Tunis and Bizerte. They had taken captive the African forces, which against Rommel’s advice had been reinforced to 250,000 men, and in mid-July had launched their blow against the “soft-underbelly” of the Axis by opening a second front in Sicily. Mussolini now hoped to be released from the alliance and to make Hitler see that it was also in the German interest for Italy to drop out of the war so that the Wehrmacht could concentrate on defending the line of the Alps. But again Hitler would not even listen to arguments. Instead, he tried to convince Mussolini, who had come to the meeting with his generals, that Italy must hold out. For three hours he talked away in German at Mussolini, without calling upon the interpreter at all. The Duce looked pale and seemed not to be concentrating. In fact he was far more concerned with the reports of the first sizable air raid on Rome than with Hitler’s portentous perspectives. Hitler’s one idea, persistently varied but recurring in every phrase and every sentence, was that the only choice was to fight and win or go down to doom. “If anyone tells me that our tasks can be left to another generation, I reply that this is not the case. No one can say that the future generation will be a generation of giants. Germany took thirty years to recover; Rome never rose again. This is the voice of History.”92
But Mussolini merely kept silent. The call of history to which he had been so susceptible a|l his life, seemed no more able to rouse him out of his apathy than the instinct for self-preservation. He remained passive in the following days also, after his return to Rome, although, like everyone else, he sensed that the ground was shaking underfoot and that his fall was impending. Although he knew there was a scheme afoot to strip him of his powers and replace him by a triumvirate of prominent Fascists, he did not prevent the meeting of the Grand Council on the night of July 24. At the last moment one of his followers called upon him to smash the plot; he told the man to shut up. Mutely, with an air of astonishment, he listened to the passionate ten-hour arraignment of himself. The following evening he was arrested. Not a hand was lifted to help him. Noiselessly, after so many paroxysms and theatrical excitements, he and Fascism vanished from public life. Marshal Badoglio, appointed head of government, dissolved the Fascist party and relieved the functionaries of their position.
Although Hitler was not unprepared for the fall of Mussolini, he nevertheless was deeply affected. The Italian dictator was the only statesman for whom he had felt a measure of personal attachment. He was even more disturbed by the political consequences of the event, especially the all too obvious “parallels with Germany,” which according to the reports of the political police the public was well aware of. Significantly, he refused to make a speech, but he ordered massive measures to prevent disturbances. Then he whipped up a plan for the freeing of Mussolini (Operation Oak), the military occupation of Italy (Operation Black), and the arrest of Badoglio and the King, with the aim of restoring the Fascist regime (Operation Student). At the evening conference of July 25 he rejected Jodi’s proposal that they wait for more exact reports:
There can be no doubt about one thing: in their treachery they will announce that they are going to stick with us; that is perfectly obvious. But that is an act of treachery, for they won’t stick with us…. Sure that what’s- his-name [Badoglio] declared right away that the war would be continued, but that changes nothing. They have to do that, it’s what treachery does. But we’ll go on playing the same game, with everything prepared to take possession of that whole crew like a flash, to clean up the whole riff-raff. Tomorrow I’m going to send a man down there who’ll give the commander of the Third Armored Grenadiers Division orders to drive straight into Rome with a special group and immediately arrest the whole government, the King, the whole lot, especially the Crown Prince, get our hands on that rabble, especially Badoglio and the rest of the crew. Then you’ll see they’ll turn limp as a rag, and in two or three days there’ll be another overthrow of the government.93
Later that evening, while he was redistributing the troops in the Italian theater and arranging for reinforcements, Hitler felt an impulse to occupy the Vatican also: “Especially the whole Diplomatic Corps in there,” he commented. He thrust aside all objections: “I don’t give a hang. That rabble is there; we’ll get all those swine out. Later we can apologize.” He finally dropped the idea. Nevertheless, he managed to send in enough additional troops so that when Badoglio shortly afterward arranged an armistice with the Allies the Germans were able to overwhelm the numerically superior Italian forces and occupy all the key positions in the country.
The arrested dictator was moved about for a few days, until a German commando squad liberated him from a mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso. Spiritlessly he let himself be reinstalled in power; he saw that it only meant a different form of imprisonment. In October he had to cede Trieste, Istria, South Tyrol, Trient, and Laibach to Germany; he put up with it without emotion. All he really wanted was to return to the Romagna, his native soil. His thoughts revolved around death. For a woman admirer who asked him for his autograph during this period, he wrote on a picture:
These events did not weaken Hitler’s determination; on the contrary. The personal weaknesses, halfway measures, and treacheries he encountered only fed his sense of distance from humankind and produced that grand tragic aura he associated with historical importance. During the years of his rise he had derived his greatest certainties from the periods of crisis. Now, too, his faith in himself increased with every setback; it was part of his fundamentally pessimistic sense of life that he drew strength and vindication from the disasters. “Hitherto every worsening of the situation has ultimately meant an improvement for us,” he told his generals. Part of the effect he went on having upon his entourage, upon the skeptical military men and the wavering functionaries, undoubtedly sprang from this conviction that flew in the face of all reality. Eyewitnesses have described how from the autumn of 1943 on he moved through the dark backdrop of the bunker at the Fuhrer’s headquarters surrounded by a wall of silence and misanthropy, and more than one person who saw him had the impression “of a man whose life was slowly ebbing away.”94 But all have emphasized his undiminished magnetism, which he still possessed in strangest contrast to his outward appearance. We may have to discount this account to some extent: those who report it, after all, have to justify their own passivity at a time when there was less and less excuse for it. But no matter how much we subtract, there remains the remarkable phenomenon of energy multiplied by disaster.
The arguments he could still muster were comparatively weak. He preferred to point back to the period of struggle, which he now stylized into the great parable of the triumph of will and tenacity. Then he would speak of the miraculous “secret weapons” with which he was going to retaliate for the Allied terror raids on Germany. He
