Kesselring was also aware that Hitler was trying to locate his friend the Duce, but apparently Student and Skorzeny tried to keep him out of the loop as much as possible.30 “Even though this harebrained scheme was kept secret from me,” Kesselring later wrote, “naturally I could not fail to get wind of it as all the threads ran together through my hands.”31
If Kesselring’s faith in the new Italian government was misplaced, it also served to show how the dissimulations of the Badoglio regime had managed to divide the German mind. Though the depth of his gullibility was rare among senior commanders, other important Nazis in their turn would also come to harbor illusions about Italian intentions. Even the gloomy Rommel had momentary bursts of optimism. “It is not impossible,” he wrote to his wife on July 30, “that the new Italian Government will continue the fight on our side.”32
The Nazi “cavalry” soon arrived on the scene in the form of the Luftwaffe’s Second Parachute Division, which landed in Rome over the next several days.33 It arrived, incidentally, without the consent of the Italians, who were fobbed off with the assurance that it would soon be transferred to Sicily or southern Italy (an outright lie).34
On the evening of July 28, Radl and the Friedenthal commandos touched down at the small airfield at Pratica di Mare, located about twenty miles south of the capital.35 (They had made a detour to France on July 27 and then flown to Italy the following day.)36 The Friedenthalers, dressed in paratrooper garb or the nearest equivalent, were quartered near the airport for the time being.37 Skorzeny showed up on July 29 and, without going into much detail, informed his men that they would be called upon in the near future to carry out an important operation—an oblique reference to Operation Oak as well as Operation Student.38
As they listened to Skorzeny, the SS men were sweating heavily. “The men are standing in the blazing summer heat of the south,” Radl remembered. “It is hardly bearable. Skorzeny has a swollen lip: a fever blister.”39 The speech was interrupted when one of the commandos fainted.40 Skorzeny became annoyed at this. “If any of you thinks that he cannot participate in this assignment, that he’d rather go home, he should tell me,” he said. “I will send him home right away; we can only use the best, most robust men, who are ready to put their lives at stake. That’s what it’s about.”41
After this pep talk, Skorzeny and Radl drove to Frascati, where they had quarters in one of the villas comprising Kesselring’s GHQ (Student also established his Eleventh Air Corps headquarters there). During the drive, Radl was struck by the pastoral nature of the images passing by his window: trotting donkeys, children playing by the side of the road, women carrying jugs on their shoulders, the colorful wares of the fruit peddlers, and always vineyards—to the left and to the right.
It was only after arriving in Frascati that Radl learned of the existence of Operation Oak. He was stunned. After discussing the matter, both he and Skorzeny agreed that it would be no easy task to discover where Mussolini was being held prisoner. “As for our action,” Skorzeny recalled, “in other words his actual liberation, we did not even dream about it because Zero Hour still seemed to us to be very far off.”42
In the coming days and weeks, the focus of the investigation into the Duce’s disappearance would revolve around Skorzeny and his intelligence-gathering effort in Rome, which is where Mussolini had last been seen. Contrary to later Nazi propaganda, Skorzeny did not single-handedly carry out the mission; instead, it was a group effort from its inception. In addition to General Student, who was technically in charge of Operation Oak, Skorzeny and Radl worked with the general’s intelligence officer (Ic), Captain Gerhard Langguth.*43 On the advice of Himmler, Skorzeny also sought assistance from two local SS Nazis who called the Eternal City their home, namely, Herbert Kappler and Eugen Dollmann.
Kappler was the police attaché at the German embassy. Though basically a liaison, the blue-eyed, thirty-six-year-old SS major, whose face still showed the dueling scars of his youth, had a background that included training in espionage and security.44 In fact, a large part of his job involved spying on the Italian police.45 His more innocuous interests reportedly included dogs, roses, and Etruscan vases, the last of which he collected.46 He also claimed to have a special fondness for Rome, to which he had been posted in 1939.47 As noted by Skorzeny, who tended to minimize the roles played by others in Operation Oak, Kappler “commanded an organization which would seem able to do us many favors.”48
Dollmann was harder to categorize. The forty-two-year-old was an officer of the Allgemeine (General) SS who had lived in the Italian capital for many years and served as Himmler’s personal spy among Roman high society.49 With his excellent knowledge of Italian, the blond, dapper expatriate was often called upon to act as an interpreter for members of the Axis hierarchy and was present at various important meetings between Hitler and the Duce. He was also reputed to be a confidant of Eva Braun’s.50 What distinguished Dollmann from most of his SS brethren—superficially at least—were his elegant manners, gratuitous literary references, and knowledge and appreciation of culture, Italian and otherwise.51 By all accounts he enjoyed his comfortable life in Rome, had a flair for intrigue, and had cultivated contacts among the politicians and aristocrats of the Eternal City.52
Skorzeny first made contact with Kappler and Dollmann at Frascati on the night of July 27 (the same night that Kesselring had upbraided Skorzeny). “Kesselring had established himself at Frascati, once the summer retreat of Roman princes and cardinals,” Dollmann recalled. “On 27 July, as far as I can remember, I was invited to dine there. I had barely arrived before the Field Marshal [Kesselring] introduced me, with a look of unwonted gravity, to a mountainous man in a fur-lined flying jacket which seemed strangely out of place on such a warm summer evening. The giant with the sabrescarred visage extended a giant hand.”53
At some point that night, Skorzeny closeted Dollmann and Kappler and revealed to his fellow SS men the ambitious plans being dreamed up at the Wolf ’s Lair. “After a few preliminaries,” remembered Dollmann, “Skorzeny solemnly enjoined me and Kappler, whose own duelling scars glowed red with joyful anticipation, not to inform anyone of what he was about to tell us, Mackensen and the embassy staff included . . . Skorzeny soon came to the point: he was there to find the Duce and set him free.”54
Skorzeny also told them about the blitz against Rome (which had not yet been cancelled). Hitler was determined, he explained, to arrest the king of Italy, Badoglio, various officers of the Italian armed forces, and the so-called Fascist turncoats who had voted against Mussolini in the Grand Council of Fascism. The fifty or so intended victims would be rounded up in a complicated series of commando raids, carted off to a nearby airport, and flown back to Germany to meet an uncertain fate.*
Kappler and Dollmann could not have been too shocked by this revelation. Just one day earlier, on July 26, a hysterical Ribbentrop— Hitler’s foreign minister—had contacted the German embassy to demand the immediate arrest of the “wire-pullers” who had orchestrated the Italian coup.55 Kappler, whose entire office at that time consisted of three men and one female secretary, reportedly reacted to Ribbentrop’s instructions with bitter amusement.56
Though they may have kept mum in the presence of Skorzeny, who was acting as an agent and emissary of Hitler, the two SS men were less than happy to learn of Hitler’s big plans. Though Kappler and Dollmann had a natural dislike of one another, they were in agreement that rescuing the Duce and resuscitating the Fascist cause by force was a bad idea.57 In Dollmann’s eyes, Mussolini was merely a political “living corpse.”58
As for Kappler, he was convinced that Fascism was finished and could not be foisted back on the Italian people.59 “He compared the Italians to a child who had been sick after eating some nasty soup,” remembered Friedrich von Plehwe, an official at the embassy, “and so could not be persuaded to swallow the same soup again.”60 But after a few attempts to sway their superiors—Kappler, for instance, flew to see Himmler himself to voice his
objections personally— Kappler and Dollmann reluctantly fell in line with their orders from above and gave what help they could to the burly Austrian.61
Dollmann soon met up with Skorzeny again in Kappler’s office, which the commando chief had practically commandeered. “Once again,” Dollmann later wrote, “it would have been heroic of me if I had told the State Security Bureau’s agent flatly what I thought of his plans for Rome, but I naturally refrained from doing so. I even showed him the location of various ministries and royal palaces on a street map, and pointed out an ill-guarded entrance to the royal palace at the foot of the Quirinal with a tremendous show of secrecy.” 62 According to one member of the German embassy, it was Dollmann and Mackensen who, under pressure from Hitler, actually drew up the list of victims for kidnapping.63
Though Kappler resented Skorzeny’s presence in Rome (which he viewed as an intrusion into his territory) and doubted the wisdom of the latter’s dual mission, he was also a good Nazi and a stickler for orders.64 The shrewd Gestapo sleuth, aided by his Italian-speaking second-in-command, thirty-year-old Erich Priebke, would come to play an important role in the hunt for the Duce.65 Though Kappler did not have a large police force at his disposal, he had made connections among the Italians over the years and presumably knew a few who might be sympathetic to Skorzeny’s cause; and he may also have had Italian operatives on his payroll.66 From the early days of the investigation, he was actively involved in attempting to track down the missing dictator.67 General Student later commented that “throughout the entire course of the search operation Kappler and his efficient intelligence service rendered the best and most valuable help.”68
Such was the motley cast of characters making up the Mussolini task force in Rome. Elsewhere, Hitler was marshaling just about every other resource in the Third Reich’s spy and police agencies. In 1943, a unified Nazi intelligence service did not yet exist. The responsibility for information gathering was divided primarily between two competing organizations: German Military Intelligence, also known as the Abwehr and run by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the foreign intelligence wing of the RSHA. Both these agencies vied with each other for Hitler’s favor, and that was the way the Fuehrer preferred it.
With the Duce’s life possibly hanging in the balance, it seems that no methods of inquiry were off-limits—even those of the more mystical variety. In their desperation to produce results for Hitler, the Nazis began rounding up psychics, astrologers, and other experts in the supernatural arts. “At Berlin . . . they had meanwhile mobilized even clairvoyants and astrologers,” Skorzeny remembered. “It was Himmler himself, it would seem, who was inspired to appeal to such ‘savants.’”69
There was only one problem: Many of these experts had been arrested and thrown into concentration camps by Hitler years earlier for practicing their craft! The crackdown occurred in 1941 shortly after a bizarre incident involving Rudolf Hess, the deputy leader of the Nazi Party. In May that year, Hess had made a mysterious and unauthorized solo flight to Britain (he bailed out over Scotland), presumably to broker a peace between Germany and England. The effort failed and Hess was subsequently arrested.
The Nazis believed that he had made the ill-advised flight on the advice of an astrologer. “After the Hess affair,” remembered SS intelligence officer Wilhelm Hoettl, “a nation-wide witch hunt had been carried out on Hitler’s orders and most of the soothsayers, clairvoyants and fortune tellers in the country had been incarcerated in concentration camps. Himmler therefore had to comb his own camps [after the Italian coup] before he could gather together his team of astrologers and magicians.”70
Walter Schellenberg, who was chief of foreign intelligence for the SS during the summer of 1943, later described the Nazis’ dilemma. “At the beginning of August,” he recalled, “Hitler gave instructions for the liberation of Mussolini from his place of internment. But we had not the faintest inkling of where he was. Therefore, Himmler summoned some of the practitioners of the ‘occult sciences’ arrested after the flight of Hess to Great Britain, and had them closeted in a Wannsee country house. These quacks were given orders to find out the whereabouts of Mussolini. (This, incidentally, cost my department a considerable amount of money, for the ‘scientists’ had an insatiable appetite for good food, good drinks and good tobacco.)”71
In addition to the so-called Wannsee group, the German astrologer Wilhelm Wulff was also tapped for detective duty. According to Wulff, who was a free man at the time, two officials from the Gestapo came knocking on his door on July 28. “Thank God I’ve found you,” one of them exclaimed. “I’ve been looking for you for days.” Wulff was then whisked off to Berlin and presented to SS General Arthur Nebe, the head of the Criminal Police. The astrologer thought he was being placed under arrest (yet again), but it turned out that Nebe “was chiefly interested in discovering where Mussolini was being kept.” Wulff was unfazed. “Indian astrology,” he later wrote, “offers a method for making calculations of this kind. I myself had used it in a previous case in my practice.”72
The psychics were thus set to work on the case. As shall be seen later, the information they conjured up turned out to be remarkably, if improbably, accurate.
Meanwhile, back in Rome, Skorzeny and his agents were forced to rely on more down-to-earth methods of investigation. Their options, however, were limited by the unusual nature of their enterprise. “This search,” Student later wrote, “turned out to be very difficult.”73 Because Operation Oak was ostensibly a covert mission, and diplomatic relations between the two Axis powers being precarious at best, strong-arm tactics were largely forbidden.
Rome was not yet hostile territory, and Hitler meant to keep it that way for as long as it served his interests. Therefore, despite the high importance attached to their task, Skorzeny and his men did not have the luxury of resorting to the uglier methods associated with the SS. They could not, for instance, barge into government offices, rifle through filing cabinets, and rough up officials to extract the necessary information.
A variety of more subtle techniques were required. One approach involved playing upon old loyalties. Surely, Skorzeny believed, there were some individuals in the Italian army or civil administration who still harbored sympathy for the Duce. These men—soldiers, officials, and bureaucrats—had to be surreptitiously contacted and gently probed for information. If fidelity to the Fascist cause failed as an incentive, bribery could also be used to loosen lips. Skorzeny brought about 5,000 pounds in forged British bank notes to Rome for the purpose of paying informers.74 These phony bills were no doubt viewed as the real thing by those who received them in exchange for useful scraps of information. The Nazis also monitored Italian radio transmissions, listening for unusual messages or a revealing slip of the tongue.
As Skorzeny and his men hunted for clues in Rome, they had ample opportunity to gauge the mood of the city. What they observed there was enough to give Hitler, who still harbored dreams of a Fascist revival, a severe case of heartburn. Within days of the Italian coup, nearly all traces of Fascism had been eradicated.
Back on July 25, the day of Mussolini’s arrest, the king of Italy and Badoglio had both taken to the airwaves to break the news of the regime change to the Italian people. At around 11:00 P.M. (Rome time), Victor Emmanuel electrified the nation by announcing that he had accepted the resignation of the Duce and his entire cabinet. About twenty minutes later, Badoglio’s voice crackled over the radio: “Italians! On the demand of His Majesty the King-Emperor, I have assumed the military government of the country with full powers. The war will continue. Italy, bruised, her provinces invaded, and her cities ruined, will retain her faith in her given word [i.e., her word to the Nazis], jealous of her ancient traditions.”75
That evening a wave of popular feeling rippled through Rome and the country at large.76 People sang songs in the streets and wept openly with joy, declaring that the end of Fascism had come and cursing the name of Mussolini.77 Much like Hitler, most Italians believed that the coup
was a prelude to peace. Though Badoglio had said that Italy would remain loyal to Hitler and continue to make war against the Allies, the ebullient Romans did not seem to take notice.
Next day, people poured through the streets of the capital to rejoice, ransacking the offices of Fascist organizations and, in some isolated incidents, roughing up former Party officials who were not wise enough to steer clear of the celebrations. “A car went down the Via Nazionale dragging a bust of Mussolini on a chain behind it,” recalled Friedrich von Plehwe, “and boys battered it with sticks to the accompaniment of shouts of joy. A tram bore the legend E finito il carnevale tragico (‘The tragic carnival is over’).”78
“The streets in the centre of the city milled with excited, jubilant crowds,” remembered an Italian journalist, “there was a feeling of relief, almost of light-headedness, at finding a life they had forgotten, and an ingenuous hope that better times would be here almost at once. People tried the experiment of shouting curses at Mussolini and Fascism out loud and found to their satisfaction that nothing happened to them.”79 Similar scenes took place in other cities throughout the country.
There was little physical violence.80 Much of the people’s anger was directed towards the symbols of the old regime. Literally thousands of busts and photographs of the Duce were torn down and destroyed in the wake of the coup, as were Fascist ensigns and other physical reminders of Mussolini’s reign. By the time Skorzeny and Radl arrived on the scene, many shop windows already bore photographs of the new heroes of the moment, King Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio.81
But the people’s jubilation began to fade almost as quickly. When Badoglio took over the government, many ordinary Italians expected a quick end to the war. “How peace could be achieved,” Badoglio recalled, “was never considered, nobody stopped to consider; people did not argue about it; they took it for granted.”82 To their deep disappointment, the new regime, which worried constantly about threats from within and without, continued to emphasize its commitment to Hitler during the month of August and occasionally outdid the Fascists when it came to using repressive measures.83
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