He was released in a general amnesty in 1928, joined the S.S. two years later and in 1934 became a member of the Death’s Head group of the S.S., whose principal job was the guarding of the concentration camps. His first job in this unit was at Dachau. Thus he spent almost his entire adult life first as a prisoner and then as a jailer. He freely—and even exaggeratedly—testified to his killings both on the stand at Nuremberg and in affidavits for the prosecution. Turned over later to the Poles, he was sentenced to death and in March 1947 hanged at Auschwitz, the scene of his greatest crimes.
* A task which because of the large numbers involved and because of, at the end, armed resistance, could not be completed (as we shall see) until 1943.
* Usually “heart disease” was written down. Kogon, himself in Buchenwald for eight years, gives samples: “… Patient died after prolonged suffering on—at—o’clock. Cause of death: cardiac weakness complicated by pneumonia.” (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, p. 218.) Such formalities were dispensed with at Auschwitz when the massive gassings began. Often the day’s dead were not even counted.
* They were inevitably and regularly dispatched in the gas chambers and replaced by new teams who continued to meet the same fate. The S.S. wanted no survivors to tell tales.
* There was testimony at the Nuremberg trials that the ashes were sometimes sold as fertilizer. One Danzig firm, according to a document offered by the Russian prosecution, constructed an electrically heated tank for making soap out of human fat. Its “recipe” called for “12 pounds of human fat, 10 quarts of water, and 8 ounces to a pound of caustic soda … all boiled for two or three hours and then cooled.”59
* Sometimes they were pulled out before the victims were slain. A secret report of the German warden of the prison at Minsk disclosed that after he had commandeered the services of a Jewish dentist all the Jews “had their gold bridgework, crowns and fillings pulled or broken out. This happens always one to two hours before the special action.” The warden noted that of 516 German and Russian Jews executed at his prison during a six-week period in the spring of 1943, some 336 had the gold yanked from their teeth.65
* Dr. Funk was sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg.
* John Hersey’s novel The Wall, based on the Jewish records, is an epic story of the uprising.
† But not Stroop. He was caught after the war, sentenced to death by an American court at Dachau on March 22, 1947, for the shooting of hostages in Greece, and then extradited to Poland, where he was tried for the slaughter of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. He was again sentenced to death and hanged at the scene of the crime on September 8, 1951.
* Eichmann, according to one of his henchmen, said just before the German collapse that “he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.”70 Probably he never leaped into the grave, laughing or otherwise. He escaped from an American internment camp in 1945. (NOTE: As this book went on press, the government of Israel announced that it had apprehended Eichmann.)
* Not even Germany’s most famous surgeon, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, though he eventually became an anti-Nazi and conspired with the resistance. Sauerbruch sat through a lecture at the Berlin Military Medical Academy in May of 1943 given by two of the most notorious of the doctor-killers, Karl Gebhardt and Fritz Fischer, on the subject of gas gangrene experiments on prisoners. Sauerbruch ‘s only argument on this occasion was that surgery was better than sulfanilamide! Professor Gebhardt was sentenced to death at the so-called “Doctors’ Trial” and hanged on June 2, 1948. Dr. Fischer was given life imprisonment.
* And in which he was condemned to death, and hanged.
* Germany had annexed Alsace after the fall of France in 1940 and the Germans had taken over the University of Strasbourg.
† Professor Dr. Hirt disappeared. As he left Strasbourg he was heard boasting that no one would ever take him alive. Apparently no one has—alive or dead.
* Frau Koch, whose power of life and death over the inmates of Buchenwald was complete, and whose very whim could bring terrible punishment to a prisoner, was sentenced to life imprisonment at the “Buchenwald Trial,” but her sentence was commuted to four years, and she was soon released. On January 15, 1951, a German court sentenced her to life imprisonment for murder. Her husband was sentenced to death by an S.S. court during the war for “excesses” but was given the option of serving on the Russian front. Before he could do this, however, Prince Waldeck, the leader of the S.S. in the district, had him executed. Princess Mafalda, daughter of the King and Queen of Italy and wife of Prince Philip of Hesse, was among those who died at Buchenwald.
* Professor Holzloehner may have had a guilty conscience. Picked up by the British he committed suicide after his first interrogation.
* According to Schellenberg, who was there, the Gestapo never learned that the actual assassins were among the dead in the church. (Schellenberg, The Labyrinth, p. 292.)
* Hanged in Prague in August 1951.
† UNRRA reported on April 2, 1947, that seventeen of them had been found in Bavaria and sent back to their mothers in Czechoslovakia.
* Twenty members of the S.S. detachment were sentenced to death by this court but only two were executed, the remaining eighteen having their sentences commuted to prison terms of from five to twelve years. The commander of the Das Reich Division, S.S. Lieutenant General Heinz Lammerding was condemned to death in absentia. So far as I know he was never found. The actual commander of the detachment at Oradour, Major Otto Dickmann, was killed in action in Normandy a few days later.
28
THE FALL OF MUSSOLINI
FOR THREE SUCCESSIVE WAR YEARS when summer came, it had been the Germans who had launched the great offensives on the continent of Europe. Now in 1943 the tables turned.
With the capture in early May of that year of the Axis forces in Tunisia, all that remained of a once mighty army in North Africa, it was obvious that General Eisenhower’s Anglo–American armies would next turn on Italy itself. This was the kind of nightmare which had haunted Mussolini in September of 1939 and which had made him delay Italy’s entry into the war until neighboring France had been conquered by the Germans and the British Expeditionary Force driven across the Channel. The nightmare now returned, but this time it was rapidly turning into reality.
Mussolini himself was ill and disillusioned; and he was frightened. Defeatism was rife among his people and in the armed forces. There had been mass strikes in the industrial cities of Milan and Turin, where the hungry workers had demonstrated for “bread, peace and freedom.” The discredited and corrupt Fascist regime itself was fast crumbling, and when Count Ciano at the beginning of the year was relieved as Foreign Minister and sent to the Vatican as ambassador the Germans suspected that he had gone there to try to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, as Antonescu, the Rumanian dictator, was already urging.
For several months Mussolini had been bombarding Hitler with appeals to make peace with Stalin, so that his armies could be withdrawn to the West to make a common defense with the Italians against the growing threat of the Anglo–American forces in the Mediterranean and of those which he believed were assembling in England for a cross-Channel invasion. The time had come again, Hitler realized, for a meeting with Mussolini in order to buck up his sagging partner and to put him straight. This was arranged for April 7, 1943, at Salzburg, and though the Duce arrived determined to have his way—or at least his say—at last, he once more succumbed to the Fuehrer’s torrents of words. Hitler later described his success to Goebbels, who jotted it down in his diary.
By putting every ounce of energy into the effort, he succeeded in pushing Mussolini back on the rails … The Duce underwent a complete change … When he got out of the train on his arrival, the Fuehrer thought, he looked like a broken old man; when he left [after four days] he was in high fettle, ready for any deed.1
But in point o
f fact Mussolini was not ready for the events which now followed in quick succession. The Allied conquest of Tunisia in May was followed by the successful Anglo–American landings in Sicily on July 10. The Italians had little stomach for battle in their own homeland. Reports soon reached Hitler that the Italian Army was “in a state of collapse,” as he put it to his advisers at OKW.
Only barbaric measures [Hitler told a war council on July 17] like those applied by Stalin in 1941 or by the French in 1917 can help to save the nation. A sort of tribunal or court-martial should be set up in Italy to remove undesirable elements.2
Once again he summoned Mussolini to discuss the matter, the meeting taking place on July 19 at Feltre in northern Italy. This, incidentally, was the thirteenth conference of the two dictators and it followed the pattern of the most recent ones. Hitler did all the talking, Mussolini all the listening—for three hours before lunch and for two hours after it. Without much success the fanatical German leader tried to rekindle the sunken spirits of his ailing friend and ally. They must continue the fight on all fronts. Their tasks could not be left “to another generation.” The “voice of history” was still beckoning them. Sicily and Italy proper could be held if the Italians fought. There would be more German reinforcements to help them. A new U-boat would soon be in operation and would deal the British a “Stalingrad.”
Despite Hitler’s promises and boasts the atmosphere, Dr. Schmidt found, was most depressing. Mussolini was so overwrought that he could no longer follow his friend’s tirades and at the end asked Schmidt to furnish him with his notes. The Duce’s despair worsened when during the meeting reports came in of the first heavy daylight Allied air attack on Rome.3
Benito Mussolini, tired and senile though he was only going on sixty, he who had strutted so arrogantly across Europe’s stage for two decades, was at the end of his rope. When he returned to Rome he found much worse than the aftermath of the first heavy bombing. He faced revolt from some of his closest henchmen in the Fascist Party hierarchy, even from his son-in-law, Ciano. And behind it there was a plot among a wider circle that reached to the King to overthrow him.
The rebellious Fascist leaders, led by Dino Grandi, Giuseppe Bottai and Ciano, demanded the convocation of the Fascist Grand Council, which had not met since December 1939 and which had always been a rubberstamp body completely dominated by the Duce. It convened on the night of July 24–25, 1943, and Mussolini for the first time in his career as dictator found himself the target of violent criticism for the disaster into which he had led the country. By a vote of 19 to 8, a resolution was carried demanding the restoration of a constitutional monarchy with a democratic Parliament. It also called for the full command of the armed forces to be restored to the King.
The Fascist rebels, with the possible exception of Grandi, do not appear to have had any idea of going further than this. But there was a second and wider plot of certain generals and the King, which was now sprung. Mussolini himself apparently felt that he had weathered the storm—after all, decisions in Italy were not made by a majority vote in the Grand Council but by the Duce—and he was taken completely by surprise when on the evening of July 25 he was summoned to the royal palace by the King, summarily dismissed from office and carted off under arrest in an ambulance to a police station.*
So fell, ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-sounding man of the twentieth century who had known how to profit from its confusions and despair, but who underneath the gaudy façade was made largely of sawdust. As a person he was not unintelligent. He had read widely in history and thought he understood its lessons. But as dictator he had made the fatal mistake of seeking to make a martial, imperial Great Power of a country which lacked the industrial resources to become one and whose people, unlike the Germans, were too civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted by such false ambitions. The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism. They had merely suffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and Mussolini toward the end seems to have realized this. But like all dictators he was carried away by power, which, as it inevitably must, corrupted him, corroding his mind and poisoning his judgment. This led him to his second fatal mistake of tying his fortunes and those of Italy to the Third Reich. When the bell began to toll for Hitler’s Germany it began to toll for Mussolini’s Italy, and as the summer of 1943 came the Italian leader heard it. But there was nothing he could do to escape his fate. By now he was a prisoner of Hitler.
Not a gun was fired—not even by the Fascist militia—to save him. Not a voice was raised in his defense. No one seemed to mind the humiliating nature of his departure—being hauled away from the King’s presence to jail in an ambulance. On the contrary, there was general rejoicing at his fall. Fascism itself collapsed as easily as its founder. Marshal Pietro Badoglio formed a nonparty government of generals and civil servants, the Fascist Party was dissolved, Fascists were removed from key posts and anti-Fascists released from prison.
The reaction at Hitler’s headquarters to the news of Mussolini’s fall may be imagined, though it need not be—for voluminous secret records abound as to what it was.4 It was one of deep shock. Certain parallels were immediately evident even to the Nazi mind, and the danger that a terrible precedent might have been set in Rome greatly troubled Dr. Goebbels, who was summoned posthaste to Rastenburg headquarters on July 26. The Propaganda Minister’s first thought, we learn from his diary, was how to explain the overthrow of Mussolini to the German people. “What are we to tell them, anyway?” he asked himself, and he decided that for the moment they were to be told only that the Duce had resigned “for reasons of health.”
Knowledge of these events [he wrote in his diary] might conceivably encourage some subversive elements in Germany to think they could put over the same thing here that Badoglio and his henchmen accomplished in Rome. The Fuehrer ordered Himmler to see to it that most severe police measures be applied in case such a danger seemed imminent here.
Hitler, however, Goebbels added, did not think the danger was very imminent in Germany. The Propaganda Minister finally assured himself that the German people would not “regard the crisis in Rome as a precedent.”
Though the Fuehrer had observed the signs of cracking in Mussolini at their meeting but a fortnight before, he was taken completely by surprise when the news from Rome began to trickle in to headquarters on the afternoon of July 25. The first word was merely that the Fascist Grand Council had met, and Hitler wondered why. “What’s the use of councils like that?” he asked. “What do they do except jabber?”
That evening his worst fears were confirmed. “The Duce has resigned,” he announced to his astounded military advisers at a conference that began at 9:30 P.M. “Badoglio, our most bitter enemy, has taken over the government.”
For one of the last times of the war Hitler reacted to the news with that ice-cold judgment which he had displayed in crises in earlier and more successful days. When General Jodl urged that they wait for more complete reports from Rome, Hitler cut him short.
Certainly [he said], but still we have to plan ahead. Undoubtedly in their treachery they will proclaim that they will remain loyal to us, but that is treachery. Of course they won’t remain loyal … Although that so-and-so [Badoglio] declared immediately that the war would be continued, that won’t make any difference. They have to say that, but it remains treason. We’ll play the same game while preparing everything to take over the whole crew with one stroke, to capture all that riffraff.
That was Hitler’s first thought: to seize those who had overthrown Mussolini and restore the Duce to power.
Tomorrow [he went on] I’ll send a man down there with orders for the commander of the Third Panzergrenadier Division to the effect that he must drive into Rome with a special detail and arrest the whole government, the King and the whole bunch right away. First of all, to arrest the Crown Prince and to take over the whole gang, especially Badoglio and that entire crew. Then watch them cave
in, and in two or three days there’ll be another coup.
Hitler turned to the OKW Chief of Operations.
HITLER: Jodl, work out the orders … telling them to drive into Rome with their assault guns … and to arrest the government, the King, and the whole crew. I want the Crown Prince above all.
KEITEL: He is more important than the old man.
BODENSCHATZ [a general of the Luftwaffe]: That has to be organized so that they can be packed into a plane and flown away.
HITLER: Right into a plane and off with them.
BODENSCHATZ: Don’t let the Bambino get lost at the airfield.
At a later conference shortly after midnight the question was raised as to what to do with the Vatican. Hitler answered it.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 158