Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini

by Greg Annussek

  “It’s not generous to treat me this way,” he said, “it’s not wise, either. It will displease Hitler; he has the strongest feelings of friendship toward me. This business can cause much damage. What are they scared of, anyway? I’m all through politically. I’ve been betrayed. I know now that my political career is finished.”33

  Mussolini eventually simmered down and the two men began to talk. At one point, Maugeri told him that Allied propaganda was advising the Italians that if they wanted the best surrender terms they should expel the Nazis from the peninsula. The Duce seemed to agree. “We must unshackle ourselves from them,” he concurred, nodding. “We’re entitled to tell them that we’ve waged three years of war, that we’ve lost our entire merchant marine and almost all our Navy, that any number of our cities have been completely or partially destroyed. We should tell them they can’t help us now. There is no other course for us.”34 Though Maugeri may not have known it, this was precisely what Mussolini was supposed to have told Hitler face-to-face at the Feltre conference on July 19.

  “Germany is a steel cable,” the Duce explained with a characteristic metaphor, “we Italians are a hemp rope—more elastic, more tensile under pressure. The steel cable snaps with one good pull.”35 “Perhaps, Excellency, we in Italy have attempted things bigger than ourselves,” said Maugeri.36

  “Yes, with the Italians it’s all a question of character,” replied Mussolini, repeating one of his pet themes. “All the other qualities— stamina, sobriety, intelligence—they possess. Character, alone, they lack. It will take years and years of education and these terrible trials they are enduring now.”37 He had long criticized the Italian people for being too soft and artistic, for their lack of the martial qualities their German neighbors to the north possessed.38

  Polito and Pelaghi returned from Ponza—a small, crescent-shaped island only about five miles long—and announced that they had finally found a suitable place to stash Mussolini: a modest dwelling in the village of Santa Maria known to the locals as the House of the Ras.39 It was an ironic choice. In recent times it had served as the prison of the Ras Immiru, an African prince who had been captured by the Italians in 1936 during the Ethiopian war. He had been imprisoned on the island by the Duce.*

  At around 10:00 A.M., Mussolini was taken to Ponza aboard a launch and led to a small, gray-colored house with green shutters.40 “Polito approached me,” he recalled, “and, pointing out a greenishcoloured house half-hidden by big, laid-up fishing boats, said: ‘That is your temporary home.’ Meanwhile, through some unexplained impulse, all the windows and balconies [of the houses in Santa Maria] were suddenly filled with men and women armed with binoculars who were watching the boat as it came ashore. In a flash the whole island knew of our arrival.”41

  Aside from its security risks, the House of the Ras was a far cry from the luxurious villas to which the Duce had become accustomed. According to one report, the furnishings amounted to little more than an iron bedstead (sans bedding), one well-worn and greasy table, and a chair.

  “We didn’t know you were coming to Ponza, Excellency,” explained Sergeant-Major Marini, one of the local carabinieri assigned to keep an eye on the dictator. “I was told barely half an hour ago.”42

  “Don’t worry, sergeant,” Mussolini told the man, who subsequently left on a mission to scrounge up a mattress, sheets, and pillows.43

  It was in these Spartan accommodations that the Duce celebrated his sixtieth birthday on July 29, one day after his arrival on Ponza. He experienced it profoundly alone, if one excludes the presence of guards and other strangers. In honor of the occasion, the great man received a gift of four peaches from the carabinieri. Mussolini agreed to accept the fruit only after receiving assurances from Marini that the inhabitants of the island could spare it.

  “The days were long at Ponza,” remembered the Duce, who was cut off from the outside world and prohibited from reading newspapers or listening to the radio. “At Ponza, I realised the miserable conspiracy which had got rid of me, and I was convinced that all this would lead to capitulation and to my being handed over to the enemy.”44

  * * *

  *Maugeri later distinguished himself in the resistance movement during the German occupation of Rome and in 1946 was elevated to chief of the Naval Staff, the highest post in the Italian navy.

  *Mussolini may also have been thinking of Elba, another small island on which Napoleon had spent time as an exile.

  *Ponza had a long history as a penal colony, as did Ventotene.

  HITLER TAKES CONTROL

  Again and again in the situation conferences he insisted that everything must be done to locate the missing Duce. He declared that Mussolini’s fate was a nightmare that weighed on him day and night.1

  —Albert Speer on Hitler’s obsession with finding Mussolini

  DURING EARLY AUGUST, AS THE NOT-SO-SECRET SEARCH FOR MUSSOLINI was getting underway in Rome, the two Axis powers continued to eye one another warily from their respective bases in Rome and East Prussia. The challenge for each side lay in pursuing its own clandestine agenda without provoking the open hostility of the other. Neither the Nazis nor the Italians were ready to throw off their masks and reveal their true intentions. Whether they liked it or not, the two estranged allies were stuck with each other.

  But their relationship had been transformed. The once-dreaded Rome-Berlin Axis, which at its height seemed tantalizingly close to vanquishing its powerful foes, was beginning to deteriorate into a complicated game of mutual deception and Machiavellian intrigue that neither country could afford to lose.

  The Badoglio regime was beginning to worry that the endgame was already upon them. In Rome, Hitler’s agents were sniffing around under the very walls of the capital in an effort to find out what had really happened to Mussolini. In northern Italy, large numbers of German troops were swarming into the country through the Brenner Pass without the formal authorization of the new government, which did its best to look the other way; indeed, by the end of the first week of August, approximately 30,000 German soldiers had crossed into Italy.2

  These soldiers arrived ostensibly as comrades, of course, and for the most part did not take aggressive action toward their Italian counterparts. Nevertheless, in a provocative touch of propaganda, some of the Germans had the words “Viva il Duce” brazenly scrawled across their helmets.3 The current administration, actively engaged as it was in erasing Mussolini’s legacy, could hardly have viewed the Germans’ defiance as an encouraging sign.

  Having failed to make contact with the Allies through the Vatican in late July, Raffaele Guariglia, the Italian foreign minister, took another step on the long road toward peace. On August 2, he sent an envoy named Lanza D’Ajeta, a member of the Italian embassy to the Holy See, to Lisbon in neutral Portugal to make contact with the Allies via their representatives in the city. Despite Italy’s poor bargaining position, Badoglio (as well as the king) remained confident that he or his diplomatic emissaries could talk the Anglo-Americans down from their rigid “unconditional surrender” stance.*4

  His optimism was misplaced. This fact, coupled with the regime’s natural tendency to vacillate, threatened to drag out the peace process for a lot longer than anyone could have imagined. For one thing, when D’Ajeta left for Lisbon he was not given the authority to conduct negotiations with the Allies; he could merely inform them of Italy’s desire to detach itself from the Nazis. “D’Ayeta [sic] never from start to finish made any mention of peace terms,” Churchill informed Roosevelt after this contact, “and his whole story . . . was no more than a plea that we should save Italy from the Germans as well as from herself, and do it as quickly as possible.”5

  With Hitler’s troops breathing down their necks, the king and Badoglio were apparently in no hurry to switch sides in the war. Though the truth of the matter is not entirely clear, it seems that the two men were stalling for time in the vain hope that Hitler would have a change of heart and allow Italy to withdraw peaceably from the Ax
is.6

  Churchill, for one, was prepared to cut the Italians a little slack. “Badoglio admits he is going to double-cross someone,” Churchill wrote on August 7 to Anthony Eden, his foreign secretary, “but his interests and the mood of the Italian people make it more likely Hitler will be the one to be tricked. Allowance should be made for the difficulties of his position.”7

  Meanwhile, halfway across Europe, Hitler continued to pace the hallways of the Wolf ’s Lair in East Prussia. Playing the waiting game was proving almost as difficult for him as it was for the Italians. The restless dictator had not entirely given up the idea of kidnapping Badoglio and the royal family and then occupying Rome by force, thereby engineering a political revolution that would ensure Italy’s loyalty. He clearly relished the idea—partly for personal reasons and partly because he believed it could work—and almost seemed to find therapeutic value in repeatedly threatening to carry it out.

  If nothing else, a turnabout in Italy might help to lift the sagging spirits of the German people. Some of them, Goebbels noted around this time, were “almost in a state of panic.”8 But despite the PR guru’s pleas, Hitler refused to console them: The crisis in Italy had presented him with a riddle.

  “It is hardly possible for me to speak to the German people now,” Hitler confided to one of his top military men. “I am not in a position to express my views on the Italian question. If I should do so in an approving manner, I would lend support to the circles who are even now preparing for treachery. Nor can I speak out against the present Government of Italy, for well-known military reasons. However, I cannot ignore the problem of Italy either, since that would be interpreted as a sign of internal and external weakness. As soon as the Italian question has been clarified one way or the other, I shall be in a much better position to address the German people.”9

  But “clarification” was no simple matter. Throughout August, the so-called Italian question and the rescue of Mussolini continued to dominate Hitler’s psyche during his regular military conferences at the Wolf ’s Lair. “After the Italian Chief of State was overthrown and vanished without a trace,” Albert Speer recalled, “Hitler seemed to be inspired with a kind of Nibelungen loyalty. Again and again in the situation conferences he insisted that everything must be done to locate the missing Duce. He declared that Mussolini’s fate was a nightmare that weighed on him day and night.”*10

  Fortunately for him, the Mussolini task force in Rome had already begun to make progress. After reaching out to one of his Italian contacts, Herbert Kappler, the Gestapo man at the German embassy, learned that the Duce had been taken to the carabinieri cadet barracks in Via Legnano on the evening of July 25.

  “Among the Italian officials whom our police attaché frequented,” Skorzeny explained, “was a captain of Carabinieri or militarized police who in the depths of his heart was perhaps still a supporter of the Fascist regime. In the course of a conversation, this man dropped a valuable hint: apparently the Duce had been conveyed by ambulance . . . to the Carabinieri barracks. Checking this information, we found it to be correct; we actually contrived to learn in what part of the building and on what floor the prisoner had been interned.”11 The bad news was that Mussolini had already been moved by the time they received the tip.

  But even before this revelation, chance had come to their rescue. Within days of the Duce’s disappearance, the Nazis had managed to turn up two German eyewitnesses with corroborating stories. One man, a Luftwaffe engineer named Dessauer, had apparently spotted a heavily guarded convoy of cars passing through Gaeta on the evening Mussolini was handed over to Admiral Maugeri and placed aboard the corvette Persefone. This bit of news was consistent with the testimony of a petty officer in the German navy who said that he had seen the Duce boarding a vessel in Gaeta.12

  According to notes made by Admiral Doenitz, who was a frequent visitor at the Wolf ’s Lair during the period of Mussolini’s captivity, after learning of these promising developments Hitler began to take an active hand in the investigation. (He had already demanded that he be kept personally informed of all the latest leads.)13 When Doenitz arrived at Fuehrer Headquarters in early August for conferences, he found that Hitler had temporarily put aside other pressing matters of state so that he could interrogate potential witnesses. The first of these was Dessauer, whom General Student had flown all the way to Rastenburg so that the Fuehrer could examine him personally.

  “In the afternoon, Aviation-Engineer Dessauer has a conference with the Fuehrer,” Doenitz noted on August 2.* “He reports that a column of cars, heavily guarded by Carabinieri, was sighted but the Duce himself was not seen.” This was presumably the same convoy that bore Mussolini from the carabinieri cadet barracks in Rome to the Costanzo Ciano Wharf in Gaeta on the night of July 27–28. By the end of the day Hitler ordered the appearance of the navy witness. “During the evening session, the order is given to immediately bring Petty Officer Laurich unobtrusively from Gaeta to Headquarters via Berlin. He was mentioned by Dessauer as an additional witness.” Hitler had even zeroed in on a potential target. “Furthermore, it is directed that operation ‘Eiche’ [Oak] be limited to Ventotene Island.”14

  Ventotene. This was the point at which the search for the Duce began to veer off target. At the same moment that Hitler was interviewing Dessauer, Mussolini was idling away the hours at the House of the Ras on Ponza (about twenty-five miles from Ventotene). The ultimate source of the Ventotene lead—as Hitler must have been told—was Petty Officer Laurich.15 The latter, who worked at a German navy signals base at Gaeta, had received the tip from an Italian naval officer with whom he had become friendly.16 Laurich himself did not meet with Hitler until several days later.

  Soon Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, jumped on the Ventotene bandwagon. On August 5, Doenitz got word from the Wolf ’s Lair that “according to additional information from the Reichsfuehrer SS [Himmler], only the island V. needs to be considered for operation ‘Eiche.’”17 It is not clear what led Himmler to this conclusion.

  Oddly enough, though, Ventotene and Ponza were both roughly consistent with the information produced by Himmler’s psychics. The German astrologer Wilhelm Wulff declared in late July that the Duce was located somewhere southeast of Rome and within seventy-five miles of the capital. The Wannsee group, according to Walter Schellenberg, was even more precise: a so-called Master of the Sidereal Pendulum determined that Mussolini was being held on an island to the west of Naples, but did not, of course, specify which island.

  Though Ventotene was essentially a red herring—and may well have been a plant by SIM, the Italian Military Intelligence Service—the island continued to capture the Nazi imagination for days to come.18

  Even as he was chasing the Duce’s shadow, Hitler continued to spar with his subordinates regarding the reliability of the Badoglio regime, the intentions of which were still the subject of some debate among the Nazis. To his credit, Hitler never seriously doubted his instinctive belief that Badoglio was planning to double-cross him, even though close advisors such as Jodl and Doenitz occasionally softened their views on the new government.

  “At the [afternoon] Fuehrer conference Lt. General Jodl reports that the Italians have completely ceased resistance to our measures,” Doenitz noted on August 3. Jodl was apparently noting that the Italians were not doing much to impede the German infiltration of northern Italy. Hitler seemed unmoved: “During the discussion of the possible reasons for this, the Fuehrer advances the theory that they may just be biding their time in order to come to terms with the Anglo-Saxons before an open break with Germany. Jodl and [Doenitz] suggest that the Italians may feel helpless and therefore want to rely more on us again. It remains to be seen what the actual situation is.”19

  But Hitler, who at the moment had no solid evidence either of Mussolini’s whereabouts or of Badoglio’s treachery, was not yet ready to strike. “Operations ‘Achse,’ ‘Eiche’ and ‘Schwarz’ are not to be undertaken yet,” wrote Doenitz.20 This meant that the rescu
e of the Duce was put on hold for the moment, as well as Hitler’s plans to take over Italy by force, though preparations for both of these operations were allowed to continue.21

  The Nazis’ paralyzing predicament around this time was summed up concisely by Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of OKW (German High Command), in a letter to his wife. Aside from the devastating Hamburg bombing, Keitel wrote on August 3, “there is not much to report: there is a state of flux and we can only wait and see what will happen with the new developments in Italy. Badoglio has reassured us that they will go on fighting, and that it was only on this condition that he accepted office. Nobody knows where Mussolini is.”22

  Keitel’s last sentence was not entirely true, of course. The Nazis thought they had a pretty good idea of where the Duce was: namely, Ventotene Island. In fact, on August 6, Himmler caused a minor panic at the Wolf ’s Lair by announcing that the Italians were preparing to evacuate Mussolini from Ventotene aboard a destroyer. The news sent Hitler into a tizzy and immediately sparked a long-distance debate between himself and Doenitz about how to prevent such a move without coming to blows with their Italian allies and breaking the Axis wide open.

  Doenitz, who spent much of August shuttling back and forth between Berlin and the Wolf ’s Lair, was at his office in Berlin when he learned of the development at 1:45 P.M. on August 6. “The Admiral at the Fuehrer’s Headquarters,” he noted, “reports that the Reichsfuehrer SS [Himmler] has sent information that the Italians are holding a destroyer in readiness for removal of the ‘valuable object’ in case of an emergency.”23 The “valuable object” was a codename for the Duce.