The Grand Council’s vote played right into the hands of the leading military men, whose dissatisfaction with the war prompted them to get the King to dismiss Mussolini (as he was constitutionally entitled to do, since Mussolini’s formal position was still that of Prime Minister), and have him arrested the very next day. There was no resistance, and the now ex-dictator was carried off to prison without any serious protest. Only one Fascist zealot is known to have committed suicide on hearing the news. As Mussolini’s successor, the monarch appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio to lead a new government. The Fascist Party more or less fell to pieces under the impact of these dramatic events, and was swiftly declared illegal. Badoglio and the King assured the Germans that Italy would stay in the war, and as a token of goodwill, or perhaps a recognition of the inevitable, the new government allowed them to take over key Alpine passes and other significant positions and begin pouring large numbers of troops and equipment into the peninsula. While the Germans withdrew their forces from Corsica and Sardinia, they also used the troops they had extricated from Sicily to start preparations to defend the southern part of the mainland. Amidst a rapidly disintegrating situation, Badoglio began secretly negotiating an armistice with the Allies, which he signed on 3 September 1943. The same day, Allied troops landed in Calabria, in Italy’s far south, and then on 9 September 1943 at Salerno, further up the coast. On the previous day, 8 September 1943, the Italian government announced its surrender to the Allies. Badoglio, the King and the government fled south, into Allied protection. Ordinary Germans at home were reported as expressing their disappointment that the Italian leaders had not been captured and hanged. Neither the Italian army nor the Italian government had any instructions for the million or more Italian troops still under arms.
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Faced with battle-hardened German troops taking up positions all over the peninsula, Italian soldiers flung down their weapons, threw off their uniforms, or simply surrendered. Only a few units tried to resist, most notably on the Italian-controlled island of Cephalonia, off the Greek coast, where fighting went on for a week and ended with the German occupiers executing more than 6,000 Italian soldiers and sailors, shooting almost all the Italian officers in batches over a four-hour period of cold-blooded carnage. Half a million Italian servicemen were lucky enough to find themselves in areas already under Allied control. They were disarmed and eventually sent home. But 650,000 Italian soldiers were seized by the German military as prisoners of war, and then deported to Germany as forced labourers in December 1943. Their situation was far from enviable. Goebbels declared that the Italians were ‘a Gypsy people gone to pot’. Hitler thought they were utterly decadent. Many Germans were bitter at what they regarded as Italy’s betrayal of the Axis, which they compared with similar events in the First World War, when Italy had also changed sides. The Security Service of the SS reported that there are
marked
feelings of hatred in all parts of the Reich and all strata of the population
against
one people, namely
the
Italians. Basically people don’t hold the enmity of our real opponents against them. It is felt to be a matter of fate. But people can never forgive the Italians for the fact that after they have gone to great lengths to assure us through their chosen representatives of their friendship, they have now betrayed us so ‘despicably’ a second time. The
hatred
against the Italian people springs from the most profound feelings.
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The German authorities treated the Italians particularly harshly, exacting from them a severe revenge for Italy’s repudiation of the German alliance. In terms of food rations and general treatment they were placed on the same footing as Soviet workers. At the Krupp factory in Essen, the average weight loss of the Italian prisoner-of-war workers was 9 kilograms in the first three months of 1944; some lost as much as 22 kilos. Death rates were higher than for any other group except Soviet workers.
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Up to 50,000 Italian prisoners of war died in these conditions. At seventy-seven deaths per thousand, this was five times the death rate of British prisoners of war; it was, indeed, the highest death rate of all western prisoners of war in Germany.
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In Italy itself, the Germans’ outrage at the defection of the Italians found expression in numerous acts of gratuitous vandalism and vengeance. On 26 September 1943, after encountering some minor resistance as they marched into Naples, German troops poured kerosene over the shelves of the university library and set it alight, destroying 50,000 books and manuscripts, many of them irreplaceable. Two days later, while the library was still burning, German soldiers discovered 80,000 more books and manuscripts from various archives deposited for safe keeping in Nola and set them alight, along with the contents of the Civic Museum, including forty-five paintings. The German military commander of Italy, the air force Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, hurriedly organized the evacuation of art treasures from museums in Florence and other cities likely to become battlegrounds if the Allies succeeded in advancing up the peninsula. Soldiers and SS men took jewellery, furs and silver from palaces and country houses, or occupied them as billets, turfing out the owners. The Marchesa Origo, an Anglo-American woman married to an Italian aristocrat, arriving at her villa after the occupying German troops had retreated, described the scene that greeted her eyes:
The Germans have stolen everything that took their fancy, blankets, clothes, shoes and toys, as well, of course, as anything valuable or eatable, and have deliberately destroyed much of sentimental or personal value . . . In the dining room the table is still laid, and there are traces of a drunken repast: empty wine-bottles and smashed glasses lie beside a number of my summer hats (which presumably have been tried on), together with boot-trees, toys, overturned furniture and W.C. paper . . . The lavatory is filled to the brim with filth, and decaying meat, lying on every table, adds to the foul smell. There are innumerable flies. In our bedroom, too, it is the same.
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Her experience, suffering from the indifference of tired and exhausted German troops, many of whom had earlier fought on the Eastern Front, was typical of many Italian property-owners at this time.
In political terms, the Germans did not stand idly by. In September 1943 the deposed dictator Mussolini had been taken on the new government’s orders first of all to the island of Ponza, then to another island, and finally to an isolated ski hotel in the Apennine mountains of central Italy. Depressed and ill, he tried on one occasion to kill himself. In the meantime, Hitler had begun organizing a search and rescue operation, determined that his ally should not fall into Anglo-American hands, with all the possibilities for bad publicity and embarrassing revelations that this might entail. He was aware of the fact that, as the SS Security Service was reporting, many Germans thought that, if Mussolini’s regime could collapse overnight, then so too could Hitler’s. The Italian dictator’s mystique somehow had to be restored. And something had to be done to dampen the disastrous effects of his overthrow on popular morale in Germany, where, it was reported at the end of July, people were regarding it as another turning-point in the war, and the majority were now depressed and saw ‘no real way out any more’.
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Mussolini’s location was not hard to find - it was revealed by intercepted radio traffic. The hotel was staffed with a large force of armed military police. But they were under instructions to act with extreme caution, and in any case the occupation of Italy by the Germans made them extremely unwilling to offend the peninsula’s new rulers. The way seemed open for a rescue operation.
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On 12 September 1943, after carrying out air reconnaissance of the area, an SS commando unit consisting of paratroopers led by Otto Skorzeny, an Austrian SS officer, flew silently over the peak on gliders and parachuted down to the hotel, leaving the planes to crash into the nearby mountains. In five minutes they had overrun the complex without firing a shot. Skorzeny found Mussolini and announced he had been sent by Hitler. Clearing a landing-strip on a small, sloping meadow in front of the hotel, the commandos called up a small Stork reconnaissance and liaison aircraft, which was able to land at very low speeds: Mussolini was bundled in and taken first to Rome and thence to Hitler’s field headquarters at Rastenburg. Hitler was disappointed when he was confronted by an obviously broken man. But he persuaded the former Italian dictator to set up a puppet regime in northern Italy, based in the town of Salò. Here, prompted by the Nazis, he had five of the leading Fascists who had voted against him on the Grand Council, including his son-in-law and former Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, tried for treason and executed. His regime soon degenerated into a morass of violence, corruption and terror. Meanwhile, Skorzeny’s daring exploit cheered people up in Germany, as indeed it had been intended to. It showed, people were reported as saying, that Germany was still capable of getting out of a tricky situation by improvising in grand style.
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II
The German takeover and the establishment of the puppet Fascist regime at Salò plunged Italy’s 43,000 Jews, of whom 34,000 were located in the German zone, into a crisis far worse than they had so far experienced. They had been subjected to considerable official discrimination by the Fascist regime since the introduction of racial laws in 1938 along the lines of the Nuremberg Laws in Germany. Yet antisemitism had never been very intense or widespread in Italy. In Greece, southern France and Croatia, indeed, the Italian army had gone to some lengths to protect Jews from murder and deportation. Now such protection was no longer possible. To begin with, the Germans concentrated on robbery. Shortly after the German occupation of Rome, the SS Security Service chief in the Italian capital, Herbert Kappler, ordered the Jewish community to deliver 50 kilos of gold within thirty-six hours. If they did this, he assured the community leaders, they would not be deported. And indeed, although Himmler had already telephoned Kappler on 12 September 1943 to tell him to organize the deportation of the Italian Jews, the Security Service boss himself was of the opinion that the Italian police posed a far greater security threat, and intended if possible to devote his own rather limited manpower to dealing with them first. While the Jewish community leaders gathered the gold, delivering it to Kappler for transportation to the Reich Security Head Office in Berlin on 7 October 1943, Alfred Rosenberg’s staff arrived in the city and began loading the contents of the community’s library onto two railway wagons for transportation to Germany. This open robbery caused widespread alarm amongst Rome’s Jews, who were aghast at the impunity with which it was carried out. It did not seem to bode well for their own safety. Soon, indeed, fifty-four Jews were murdered by SS troops in the far north, in the area of Lake Maggiore, and deportations began from Merano and Trieste. And on 6 October 1943, Theodor Dannecker arrived in Rome with an armed escort, under orders from Berlin to override Kappler and organize the arrest and transport of the Jews to Auschwitz for extermination.
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His arrival caused considerable concern among the leading German officials in Rome. The acting representative of the German Foreign Office, Eitel Möllhausen, and the head of the German armed forces in the area, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, joined forces with Kappler to press the Foreign Office in Berlin to use the Jews on fortification work instead of being ‘liquidated’, as Möllhausen incautiously put it in a telegram sent to Berlin on 6 October 1943. Moreover, the newly appointed German Ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizs̈cker, warned the Foreign Office that Pope Pius XII, under whose windows, as it were, the deportation was to take place, might issue a public protest; in order to avoid this, he too advised that it might be preferable to employ the Jews on labour projects in Italy instead. Hitler’s reaction was not slow in coming. On 9 October 1943 the Foreign Office told Möllhausen in no uncertain terms that Ribbentrop insisted, ‘on the basis of a Leader instruction’, the Jews of Rome were to be taken away and he was to ‘keep out of all questions concerning Jews’, which were the business of the SS.
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This effectively squashed the opposition. With the support of regular German troops, Dannecker’s SS men arrested 1,259 Roman Jews on 16 October 1943, including 200 children under the age of ten. The majority of those arrested were women. After releasing twenty-nine of the prisoners because they were not Italian, or they were ‘mixed-race’ or married to non-Jews, Dannecker shipped them off to Auschwitz. Fifteen of them survived the war. Many other Jews went into hiding, assisted by non-Jewish Italians who were outraged by the action. Several thousand Jews found refuge in the Vatican and in monasteries and convents in other parts of Rome, but the predicted public protest from the Pope did not materialize; it might have given a lead to Italians and caused the Germans to stop their action for fear of arousing public opposition. But the Pope was nervous that an outright condemnation might endanger the position of the Church or even, indeed, the Vatican itself. An article that subsequently appeared in the official Vatican organ, the
Roman Observer
, praising the Pope for his attempts to mitigate the suffering caused by the war was cast in such vague and general terms that, as Weizsäcker noted, very few people indeed would interpret it as a reference to the Jewish question at all.
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