Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini

by Greg Annussek

  To varying degrees, Hitler and the Duce both employed violence for the purpose of silencing potential enemies and achieving their political ends. Admittedly, Mussolini never sank to the depths of villainy occupied by Hitler or Stalin, and he had a well-known habit of making threats that he never dreamed of carrying out. “Except occasionally in the years after 1943,” observed Paolo Monelli, an Italian historian who worked as a journalist during the Fascist era, “Mussolini was never characterized by the cruelty and callousness of the typical tyrant; he was insensitive rather than cruel, mischievous rather than evil, cynical rather than wicked, and chiefly with the people whom he had decided were his enemies.”76

  On the other hand, though he occasionally tried to distance himself from the criminal acts carried out on his behalf, the Duce was not the benevolent blowhard that some of his defenders made him out to be. Opponents of the Fascist regime, for instance, were often beaten with cudgels, sometimes severely, forced to drink castor oil, or sentenced to years of exile. The Duce also made it known that he wanted certain men killed.77 If his crimes paled in comparison to those of his German counterpart, this was slim consolation to thousands of Italians, Jews, Ethiopians, and Greeks who found themselves on the wrong side of Mussolini’s domestic policies or unprovoked foreign wars.

  Both dictators also understood the value of propaganda and the importance of politics as theater. Both had studied and praised a book by Gustave Le Bon called The Crowd, which discusses the nature of mass psychology, and compelling oratory was given a central place in their respective bids for power.78 They also believed that the very personality of a charismatic leader could be a crucial factor in the success of a political movement. This point was brought home dramatically during the summer of 1943 when the Fascist Party collapsed overnight in the absence of the Duce. It can even be argued that Hitler’s attempt to rescue his fallen Italian partner was, at least in part, an effort to resurrect what both men viewed as the sacrosanct idea of the absolute ruler.

  Some of the more incidental details of their lives coincided as well. Both men were approximately the same height. Mussolini stood five feet six inches, and Hitler was only slightly taller.79 They also suffered from mysterious, possibly stress-related health problems during the last few years of their lives. The Duce was plagued by a recurring duodenal ulcer for much of his adult life (it first surfaced in 1925), but the dramatic decline in his health during 1942 and 1943 has never been fully explained and may have been a severe case of nervous strain.80

  Hitler’s health, which had been good for most of his life, began to fail in 1943 just as the tide turned in the war.81 The cause of Hitler’s trembling extremities and foot dragging may well have been stress, as some of his doctors at the time believed. Undiagnosed Parkinson’s disease could also help to explain some of his symptoms.

  Each man carried on a long-term affair with a much younger woman. Hitler enjoyed the company of the innocuous but steadfastly loyal Eva Braun, although the relationship was kept hidden from the public until after Hitler’s death. Mussolini, who was married and had fathered several children, carried on a stormy affair with the more flamboyant Claretta Petacci. Both men later died in the company of their mistresses, each of whom made a conscious decision to share the fate of her lover.

  Hitler and the Duce were solitary souls who lived almost exclusively for the exercise of their personal power and the goal of national greatness, as they defined it. During their careers, the personalities of the two dictators were lost in and obscured by the outrageous propaganda that they employed to gain and hold power.

  Over time, Hitler succeeded in convincing himself that he was the human embodiment of the German state, the infallible Messiah without whom Germany could not achieve true greatness. “Supported by his excellent propaganda,” wrote Marshal Albert Kesselring, Hitler’s top commander in Italy during the summer of 1943, “he really did become the idol of the masses. Small wonder that he gradually came to believe that he was unique and irreplaceable, that his destiny was to devote himself to Germany’s greatness and her security for all time to come.”82

  In similar fashion, Mussolini was billed as a modern incarnation of the ancient Caesars, an all-knowing scholar-warrior who worked tirelessly to elevate Italy’s position in the world at the expense of his personal comforts.*83 The Duce liked to perpetuate the notion that he was a man of culture and learning, and had a tendency to exaggerate his own erudition.84 When the University of Rome gave Mussolini an honorary law degree in 1924, for instance, he insisted on writing a thesis paper, titled “Introduction to Machiavelli.”85 As was true of Hitler, the Duce’s infallibility was a cornerstone of his personality cult.

  But once the layers of myth were stripped away—and perhaps they never could be—it was surprisingly difficult to get a grip on the two human beings hidden behind the elaborately constructed personas. Each man was known to wax eloquently about his concern for the “masses,” the destiny of which he controlled by fiat, but neither had close friends or exhibited the ability to connect with those around him. Each was essentially unknowable.

  Though he was a one-dimensional personality, Hitler remained an enigma to the men who worked with him. General Alfred Jodl, one of Hitler’s key advisors, spoke for many in the Fuehrer’s entourage when he tackled this subject after the war. “To this very day,” Jodl wrote on March 10, 1946, about seven months before his execution at Nuremberg, “I do not know what he thought or knew or really wanted.”86 Ribbentrop sounded a similar note: “His whole character was indescribably aloof. . . . Although millions adored Adolf Hitler, he was a lonely man. Just as I never made close contact with him, so it was with others; I met no one who was close to him—perhaps Göring was the sole exception.”87

  “With the madman’s knowledge of how to excite,” wrote Elizabeth Wiskemann, author of one of the few book-length studies of the two Axis dictators, “Hitler combined the madman’s—or the superman’s—inability to communicate normally with others as individuals: he either mesmerized or frightened them or perhaps did both these things.”88

  The inscrutability of Mussolini was also well known. “No one understands him,” wrote fellow Fascist Fernando Mezzasoma, attempting to describe the paradoxical nature of Il Duce. “By turns shrewd and innocent, brutal and gentle, vindictive and forgiving, great and petty, he is the most complicated and contradictory man I have ever known. He cannot be explained.”89

  As Ciano himself was once forced to admit: “[E]ven I, who am constantly at his side, often find it extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible, to tell what he is really thinking and feeling.”90 The Italian dictator openly admitted that he had never had any real friends (he seems to have considered this fact a virtue), and may have even encouraged the perception of his own aloofness in the belief that great men can never be fully comprehended by inferior minds.91

  In contrast to the rigid figure of Hitler, who stuck stubbornly to his own views and pursued a fairly consistent, though repellent, set of goals for twenty years, Mussolini was more chameleon-like and could shift his allegiances and positions as the circumstances warranted. The real man, Denis Mack Smith believed, “was hidden by a succession of poses, many or all of which reveal aspects of his character. The frequent changes of opinion do not necessarily mean that he was an intellectual light-weight, but rather that he placed little value on ideas. He appeared to adopt opinions merely because they fitted some new attitude or would help his career.”92

  The bond between Hitler and Mussolini, which both men referred to as a “friendship,” was yet another enigma that even insiders found difficult to unravel. Though the association may have defied explanation, almost no one close to either dictator could deny the existence of an unusual and somewhat dysfunctional relationship between the two men. It is true that Hitler occasionally made fun of the Duce behind his back, entertaining his cronies with an imitation of Mussolini’s flamboyant gestures; the Duce, for his part, thought that Hitler used rouge to make his cheeks l
ook more lifelike.93

  But though Hitler had little regard for the Italians as a whole, whom he considered lazy and incompetent, there was general agreement among the Fuehrer’s entourage that he maintained a strange and enduring affection for Mussolini.94 This steadfast loyalty, which seemed to increase when Mussolini was overthrown in July 1943, was all the more surprising considering the Duce’s mixed feelings about Hitler and Italy’s dubious value as a military ally.

  To some extent, Hitler’s bond with Mussolini may have been rooted in nostalgia and historical precedent. The Duce’s Fascist revolution had made a powerful impact on Hitler during the Kampfzeit, the early years of struggle when his own prospects seemed less than brilliant.95 Hitler considered Mussolini a political pioneer, and he made numerous comments during his career, often in private, that reflected the importance of the Duce’s movement and the indebtedness that Hitler felt towards him.

  “Don’t suppose that events in Italy had no influence on us,” Hitler remarked to his cronies one evening in July 1941. “The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt. The march on Rome, in 1922, was one of the turning-points of history. The mere fact that anything of the sort could be attempted, and could succeed, gave us an impetus.”96 Mussolini’s rise to power was nothing less than a “heroic epic,” Hitler said on another occasion: “It always warms my heart to think of it.”97

  Mussolini’s having beaten out the Communists for political control of Italy also made Hitler warm all over. “We ought to be grateful to the Duce for having dispelled this danger from Europe,” he reflected in 1941, shortly after launching Operation Barbarossa, his massive invasion of Stalinist Russia. “That’s a service he has rendered that must never be forgotten. Mussolini is a man made to the measure of the centuries. His place in history is reserved for him.”98 The Duce had started his political career as a socialist—and then abandoned this position when it became untenable—but this was a sin for which Hitler could forgive him.*99

  To Hitler, Mussolini was that rarest of birds: a world leader on his own level. He viewed him as “the only man to whom he could talk on something like equal terms,” according to Denis Mack Smith, “and, perhaps for that reason, as one of the few people whom he genuinely liked.”100 In other words, Hitler viewed the Duce as a fellow Nietzschean Superman. “This is a curious thing: Mussolini, with such few resources, was yet the one man whom Hitler genuinely accepted as an equal,” wrote the historian A.J.P. Taylor. “And the only one whom Hitler genuinely took seriously.”101

  Hitler, who had a tendency to romanticize the classical world, believed that the Duce was just the man to bridge the gap between a mediocre modern Italy and the glory of the ancient Roman Empire. “As I walked with him in the gardens of the Villa Borghese,” Hitler once confided to his intimates, “I could easily compare his profile with that of the Roman busts, and I realised he was one of the Caesars. There’s no doubt at all that Mussolini is the heir of the great men of that period.”102 As for Italian Fascism itself, it was “a spontaneous return to the traditions of ancient Rome.”103

  Yet there was always an intangible element in Hitler’s feelings toward the Duce—a depth of emotion—that exceeded political calculations and seemed to puzzle just about everyone. “The Führer actually adored my husband,” observed Rachele Mussolini, not without justification, “and when he spoke of Benito, to either his own supporters or the Duce’s, the tears welled in his eyes. Ciano noticed this during a conversation. My husband noticed, too, that Hitler was on the brink of weeping when he left Italy [after a visit] in May, 1938.”104

  At times, even Mussolini seemed perplexed and embarrassed by Hitler’s weepy effusiveness. “The man is hysterical,” the Duce complained to one of his ministers during an Axis summit in 1941 after one of Italy’s misguided military adventures. “When he told me that no one had lived through and shared my anguish more intensely than he had there were tears in his eyes. All that is an exaggeration.”105

  But Hitler was nonetheless aware that his alliance with Italy was more of a burden than an asset.106 “The Axis must face the fact that it is saddled with Italy,” Hitler admitted in May 1943, a few months before the Italian coup.107 Near the end of his life, Hitler even reckoned that his partnership with Mussolini had helped bring about the defeat of the Third Reich.

  “Judging events coldly,” Hitler reflected early in 1945, “leaving aside all sentimentality, I have to admit that my unyielding friendship for Italy, and for the Duce, could be added to the list of my mistakes. It is visible that the Italian alliance rendered more service to the enemy than to ourselves. . . . It will have contributed, if we do not win in spite of everything, to making us lose the war. . . . My attachment to the person of the Duce has not changed . . . but I regret not having listened to reason which imposed on me a brutal friendship in regard to Italy.”108

  Yet through it all, Hitler generally spoke of Mussolini with admiration and warmth, even when the newsreel cameras and microphones were turned off. “The Duce himself is my equal,” Hitler said just a few months before his death. “He may perhaps even be my superior from the point of view of his ambitions for his people.”109

  Mussolini’s feelings toward Hitler were more complicated; they tended to evolve over time and to reflect the Duce’s political aims and the changing fortunes of the two dictators. During the early part of the 1930s, for instance, Mussolini expressed his contempt for the upstart Hitler and the harebrained racial policies he espoused. But the Duce also believed that he could exploit the German dictator (and his admiration for his Italian counterpart), either by manipulating the West’s fear of Germany or by forging an outright alliance with Hitler.

  Over time, Mussolini became impressed with Germany’s military might and what he viewed as the powerful personality of the Fuehrer. The Duce, who was wont to say that Italy had too many guitar players and not enough warriors, was instinctively drawn to strength, which Hitler exuded in spades.110

  “Nothing about Hitler aroused his Italian co-dictator’s envy more than his soldiers,” observed Eugen Dollmann, who as an interpreter had observed the two men together on numerous occasions, “and this was the fatal origin of their curious friendship, which was based on a truly Freudian mixture of love and hatred. Everything the Fuhrer had—Stukas, tanks, submarines, countless divisions, paratroops, elite corps—the Duce wanted too, heedless of his limited resources and the total lack of interest and enthusiasm evinced by the overwhelming majority of his people.”111 Once World War II had broken out, Mussolini was also fascinated by Hitler’s military successes, “the only successes that Mussolini really values and desires,” according to Ciano.112

  For the Duce, this political love affair, which he viewed as a “marriage of convenience” according to Rachele, began to turn sour fairly quickly.113 Mussolini naturally considered himself the senior of the two statesmen, the “dean of dictators,” as Ciano put it.114 He was willing to concede Germany’s superiority in military affairs but believed that his experience and opinions were also an important asset of the Rome-Berlin alliance.

  “A number of people who knew them both,” wrote Denis Mack Smith, “including some Germans, have testified that they thought Mussolini the more interesting personality—the more intelligent, even—and certainly less unattractive; so his conceit was not entirely unfounded.”*115

  But it was Hitler who dominated the policy of the Axis, just as he dominated the proceedings at the numerous summit meetings held between the two men. “We were never treated like partners, but always as slaves,” remembered Ciano. “Every move took place without our knowledge; even the most fundamental decisions were communicated to us after they had been carried out.”116 The Duce was continually irritated by Hitler’s failure to consult him on important matters concerning the Axis; indeed, he notified the Italian dictator of his plans only when it was too late for Mussolini to influence them.

  “Hitler showed surprising loyalty to Mussolini,” wrote Alan Bullock
, an expert on Hitler, “but it never extended to trusting him.”117 Hitler was constantly worried that the Duce and Ciano, the latter of whom Hitler detested, would inform the enemy of his intentions— as they sometimes did. In this regard, Hitler once exhibited a rare display of humor: “[E]very memorandum I wrote to the Duce immediately reached England. Therefore I only wrote things I absolutely wanted to get to England. That was the best way to get something through to England quickly.”**118

  But even when it became clear that Hitler was “dragging us into an adventure,” as Ciano phrased it, Mussolini found it impossible to break away.119 There was an irrational element in his attraction to Hitler that even the Italian dictator’s son-in-law had difficulty understanding. The Duce was “fascinated by Hitler,” Ciano confided to his diary in 1940, “a fascination which involves something deeply rooted in his nature: action.”120

  This strange fascination—a potent mixture of envy, respect, and fear—helps to explain the docility that Mussolini exhibited in Hitler’s presence: a docility that was all the more surprising in light of the respect that the Duce commanded among the Italians. When in his own element, Mussolini could be a forceful personality, exhibiting the same sort of magnetism for which Hitler was famous. He could dominate his own Fascist subordinates at will, and was known to make his ministers run from the door of his office, the Sala del Mappamondo, to his desk, a distance of some twenty yards.121