Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini

by Greg Annussek

  There was only one problem. When Langguth glanced outside his window, he was horrified to discover that none of the other Ketten were following suit.85 Instead, the decapitated column continued flying straight over the ridge, unscathed, and onward to the target. “The order of the unit was now changed,” General Student noted in retrospect. “The Kette with Skorzeny was now first.”86

  According to Skorzeny, the cause of this misunderstanding was a huge bank of clouds in the area over Tivoli, which had obscured Langguth’s sudden change of plans.87 When Skorzeny’s chain emerged from the mist, its pilots could find no sign of Langguth or the first Kette, which seemed to have vanished into thin air. There being no radio contact between the various chains compounded the mix-up.88 Cut off from the rest of the assault squadron, Langguth was unable to warn the other pilots that he and Berlepsch had taken a detour. (Student later claimed that the pilots of Skorzeny’s chain simply failed to understand the significance of Langguth’s course change.)89

  In any event, the convoy was now flying blind—and without its commander. When the pilot of Skorzeny’s glider, a young lieutenant named Elimar Meyer, shot a glance in the direction of the cabin and asked what they should do, Skorzeny shouted, “We’re taking over the lead!”90

  He could not get a clear view of the ground through the small plastic windows, which were dirty and scratched, so he took out a knife and cut several slits in the canvas fuselage.91 “I decided that the primitive structure of these gliders possessed certain advantages,” he remembered.92 Using various landmarks and geographical features, he was able to keep the convoy on track by giving instructions to Meyer, who then relayed the necessary information to the pilot of the glider’s Henschel tug.93

  A little less than one hour into the flight, Skorzeny looked down and spotted the small town of L’Aquila, the provincial capital of the Abruzzi region.94 This was an indicator that the target was not far off. Soon afterward, he could make out a small dust storm surrounding the trucks of Major Mors’s column.95 They had already passed Assergi and were making their way along the winding road that led to the cable car station.96 The timing was nearly perfect: The two phases of the operation would be carried out simultaneously as planned.97

  Skorzeny could now see the Hotel Imperatore beneath his DFS 230, which was flying at an altitude of approximately 9,843 feet.98 No longer in need of the tug plane, Meyer released the tow cable and allowed the glider to descend slowly toward the 7,000-foothigh plateau. He flew the plane in wide circles as Skorzeny surveyed the ground below. The latter soon spied a small clearing that had been designated as one of the landing zones.

  This was the so-called “meadow” that Skorzeny had seen during his September 8 reconnaissance flight. He had never seen it up close before, and the sight was enough to sicken him. “I felt we were in for it now,” Skorzeny recalled, “because the ‘gently sloping meadow’ was, in point of fact, a steep, indeed precipitous abyss. Triangular in shape, it was much like the platform for a ski jump.”99 It was also strewn with rocks and boulders—features that had not shown up well on the aerial snapshots.100

  Pilot Meyer turned to look at Skorzeny, as if asking him what he should do. For a moment or two Skorzeny did not have an answer. He had to make a split-second decision: Should he abort the mission entirely, or roll the dice and pray that the Luftwaffe pilots could find a way to put the planes on the ground without killing the whole lot of them?

  “Steep approach!” Skorzeny finally shouted, telling the pilot to land as close as possible to the hotel.101 In that moment he had committed himself and the other gliders flying behind him. He knew that they would follow his lead and descend through the thin air into an uncertain fate. Radl was watching from his own glider as Skorzeny’s began to dive. “The blood freezes in my veins,” he remembered. “I’m thinking he’s going to crash.”102

  Skorzeny’s glider came down in a hurry. “The whirring of the wind increased and rose to a howl as we approached the ground,” he recalled. “I saw Lieutenant Meier [sic] loose the parachute brake. There was a violent jolt, a sound of something cracking and shattering. Instinctively I closed my eyes. Then I felt that we had touched earth and, after a final spasm, the glider stood its ground, stock still.”103

  Miraculously, the damaged glider, tilting to one side on its skid, had come to rest about fifty feet from the corner of the hotel (the rear corner on the hotel’s right shoulder).104 It had run over numerous rocks and debris, but these obstacles had served to prevent the craft from overshooting its target.

  Sitting by a window in the Campo Imperatore, Benito Mussolini was idling away another uneventful afternoon on the mountain when Skorzeny’s DFS 230 suddenly fell to earth. “It was exactly 2:00 P.M.,” he later remembered, “and I was sitting by the open window with my arms folded when a glider landed a hundred yards from the building. . . . The alarm was sounded. . . . In the meantime, Lieutenant Faiola burst into my room and threatened me: ‘Shut the window and don’t move.’”105

  Though a bit shaken up, the SS commandos immediately began to pour out of the open hatch of the glider, the door of which had been conveniently torn off its hinges during landing.106 Skorzeny followed close behind them with gun in hand.107 Soleti was also swept up in the current. When he exited the glider, he began shouting in Italian, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!”*108

  As Skorzeny dashed toward the back of the hotel, he encountered a dazed-looking Italian guard who stood motionless, apparently paralyzed by the spectacle. Skorzeny simply shouted “Mani in Alto!” (Hands up!) and rushed toward the first door he saw.109 He burst into a room and found a lone soldier working the dials of a radio transmitter. Skorzeny kicked the chair out from under him, knocking the man to the floor. He put the radio out of commission by smashing it with the butt of his submachine gun, conscious that any firing on his part was likely to spark a battle.

  The hotel had now been breached—or so it seemed. Once inside the radio room, Skorzeny looked for an entrance into the rest of the building, but found none. The room was a dead-end. He hurried back outside and began scanning the rear of the building, which was shaped like a semicircle, but he could see no other doors. The preoperation intelligence was apparently so lacking that he had no way of knowing where all the entrances were located.

  Skorzeny ran all the way around the left shoulder of the building and had to scamper over a wall to reach the ground in front of the hotel. The main entrance was now in view, though it was still some distance away. He looked up and saw a face at a window.110 It was the Duce.

  Mussolini was looking down on the Germans from his suite. “At the head of this group was Skorzeny,” he remembered. “The Carabinieri had already got their guns at the ready when I noticed an Italian officer among Skorzeny’s group whom, on approaching nearer, I recognised as General Soleti, of the Metropolitan Police Corps.”111 He began shouting, “Can’t you see? There is an Italian general there. Don’t fire! Everything is all right.”112

  Skorzeny could hardly believe it. The man that he had been chasing for weeks was alive and tantalizingly close to being in his grasp. All the same, he believed that Mussolini would be safer out of the line of fire. “Duce, get away from the window!” Skorzeny shouted.113

  Meanwhile, Radl, whose glider had landed about three hundred feet in front of the hotel, was beginning to run toward the main entrance with his squad.114 He could see Skorzeny and several of his men moving along the front of the building.115 General Soleti was with them.116 One of Radl’s commandos had broken an ankle on the uneven ground and was doing his best to crawl behind the others.

  When Skorzeny reached the main entrance, he found himself face-to-face with two Italian machine-gun emplacements. He and several of his Friedenthal men knocked the guns aside and bullied the crew out of the way. Shouts of “Mani in Alto!” permeated the air as Skorzeny made a beeline for the front door. Italian carabinieri were running this way and that in a state of near panic. “I pushed against the carabinieri who were bunch
ed up in front of the entrance and fought my way against the stream in a not too gentle fashion. I had seen the Duce on the second floor to the right.”117 He bounded up a nearby staircase and burst through a door.

  “The occupant of the room was Benito Mussolini,” Skorzeny remembered, “flanked by two Italian officers whom I lined up against the wall.”118 Only three or four minutes had elapsed since Skorzeny had come crashing down from the sky.119 Another Friedenthaler from Skorzeny’s glider, a Lieutenant Schwerdt, followed Skorzeny into the room and quickly led the officers into the hallway. Two more Germans suddenly appeared at the window, having climbed up the lightning rod on the exterior of the building.120 So far, not a shot had been fired.121

  Skorzeny looked out the window and saw Radl and his team in front of the hotel. “Everything in order here!” Skorzeny yelled to Radl. “Secure below!”122

  While all this was going on, more DFS 230s were dropping out of the sky from almost every direction and skidding to a halt in the small field around the Campo Imperatore. Several of the gliders literally appeared out of nowhere from the center of low-lying clouds—surely a frightening sight—before making their landings and disgorging small squads of German paratroopers.123 Some of these soldiers began to take up positions around the outside of the building. Others stormed the upper cable car station and the underground passage between the station and the hotel. Lieutenant Berlepsch was among the new arrivals (apparently his glider chain had swung round and rejoined the convoy).124

  Most of the gliders managed to land safely, but one of them was not so fortunate.* “Next, suddenly,” Skorzeny remembered, “I saw Glider 8, caught in a gust; to my horror it took off from its plane while the plane was still circling, and plummeted like a stone to crash into bits on a heap of rubble.”125 Radl, who by this time had joined Skorzeny in Mussolini’s suite, looked out the window and saw survivors crawling on the ground near the downed glider.

  Skorzeny then heard the sound of shots being fired in the distance.** 126 Worried that the Italians were beginning to recover from their paralysis, he stepped into the hallway on the second floor and demanded to speak to someone in charge. “The carabinieri now had to be disarmed as quickly as possible.”127 Within minutes, the Italians formally surrendered the Hotel Imperatore, putting an official end to the raid.

  With two of his men guarding the door, Skorzeny took advantage of the brief respite to say a few words to Mussolini.

  “Duce,” he said dramatically, “the Führer has sent me to set you free.”128

  Mussolini, who was never one to overlook an historic moment, replied by saying, “I knew my friend Adolf Hitler would not abandon me.”129

  Overall, the Gran Sasso raid had been carried off in spectacular fashion.*** Casualties had been minimal. The ten paratroopers in the glider that had crashed were taken to the hotel and treated by German and Italian medics.130 Their injuries were not life-threatening.131

  “We had undoubtedly been extremely lucky,” Skorzeny recollected.132 At the cable car station in the valley, skirmishes between German and Italian troops had resulted in several minor casualties among the latter.* 133 But both ends of the cable car were now in German hands and they were operable.

  The dramatic glider landings and the presence of General Soleti had no doubt come as a great surprise to the Italians and may very well have helped to undermine any thoughts of resistance. But there was another factor at work of which the Germans had no knowledge. Earlier that afternoon at about 1:30 P.M.—just half an hour before the arrival of the first glider—a mysterious telegram was sent from German-occupied Rome to Police Inspector Giuseppe Gueli, Mussolini’s chief jailer on the mountain: “Recommend to Inspector General Gueli maximum prudence.”134 It was signed by Carmine Senise, Badoglio’s chief of police.135

  It was a puzzling and cryptic message, and its meaning has never been fully explained. It is possible that Badoglio and other Italians in high places, fearing German reprisals of one sort or another, were reluctant to interfere with Hitler’s plans to rescue the Duce. In any event, the telegram’s air of caution provided Gueli with the “out” he was looking for. Shortly after Skorzeny’s glider landed, Gueli reportedly gave the order not to open fire on the Germans.136 He later explained to Lieutenant Faiola, another of Mussolini’s captors, that the Senise telegram gave them the authority to surrender the Duce to the Nazis.137

  The speedy submission of the Italians did nothing to detract from the performance of the Luftwaffe glider pilots. “All but one of the gliders landed smoothly,” Student later wrote.

  Considering the extremely difficult terrain it was quite a special accomplishment. The pilots released the tug ropes at an altitude of 3,000m [9,843 feet]. While they were gliding, the sight of the hotel was sometimes obscured by cumulus clouds. Only as they were almost right above the destination were they able to realize that one of the two places to land, determined with the help of the aerial pictures, was a steep slope. The pilots who were supposed to land there tore their gliders around and landed on a tiny surface close by. One of the gliders was forced to land on a spot where no smooth landing was possible and crashed. And still, the pilot was able to land in a way that all the passengers, though more or less wounded, stayed alive.138

  By mid-afternoon, Skorzeny and the paratroopers on the Gran Sasso were congratulating themselves on the success of their mission, which was practically finished. All that remained was to transport Mussolini back to Pratica di Mare airfield and put him on a plane bound for Germany. But in this seemingly minor detail arose one of the most hair-raising moments in the story of Operation Oak.

  For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Germans rejected the most obvious option—namely, to send the Duce down to the valley via the cable car and then onward to Rome under the protection of Major Mors’s battalion. Skorzeny later claimed that traveling overland with Mussolini would have been too risky, presumably because of the possibility that Italian troops in the area might stage some sort of ambush.139 It is also conceivable, though unlikely, that the Germans were fearful of interference on the part of angry civilians who were hostile to the Duce.140

  Before the raid, General Student had decided that Mussolini was to be flown back to Pratica di Mare in a Fieseler 156 Storch (Stork) aircraft.141 The Stork was a lightweight (one-ton), slow-moving two-seater that could take off and land in tight spaces. Its long, stalk-like landing gear featured heavy-duty shock absorbers that allowed the plane to hit the ground fairly hard during touchdown. The Stork was also known to have some unusual properties. Under the right wind conditions, this gravity-defying aircraft could almost hover in mid-air like a helicopter.142 According to Student’s plan, a second Stork would be used to transport Skorzeny, who would then rendezvous with the Duce at Pratica and escort him to Germany.143

  Captain Heinrich Gerlach, General Student’s personal pilot, was given the job of chauffeuring Mussolini. (Gerlach was the pilot who flew Student and Skorzeny from the Wolf ’s Lair to Rome on the morning of July 27, two days after the Italian coup.) On the day of the raid, while Skorzeny was bounding into the Campo Imperatore and the gliders were diving through the clouds, Gerlach was flying circles over the mountaintop. Once the Duce had been freed and the hotel secured—the Germans hung sheets out of the windows to signal their success—Gerlach was faced with a decision: He could attempt to land his Stork on the plateau near the hotel as the gliders had done, or he could land in the valley below. A skilled pilot, Gerlach chose the former option “in spite of the obvious difficulties” (as Student put it).144

  To everyone’s amazement, the thirty-year-old Gerlach landed the Stork almost perfectly, making use of a headwind and bringing the plane down on an incline to help decelerate the craft.145 But this feat was overshadowed shortly thereafter when Skorzeny dropped an unexpected bombshell. He told the flyer that he, Skorzeny, had decided to accompany Gerlach and Mussolini during their journey to Rome. Skorzeny’s Stork had landed in the valley near the lower cable car station
, but had damaged its undercarriage in the process.146

  Gerlach was flabbergasted by the request. The mountainous terrain and the thin air would make the takeoff tricky enough without the added burden of Skorzeny’s stocky, six-foot-four-inch frame. The stunned pilot flat-out refused to do it.

  Skorzeny later tried to justify his seemingly absurd demand. “Suppose the take-off resulted in a catastrophe,” Skorzeny reasoned, “my supreme consolation could only be to blow out my brains. How could I ever face Hitler to announce that my mission had succeeded but that Mussolini had died shortly after being freed? And as there remained no other possibility of conveying the Duce securely to Rome, I preferred to share the dangers of this flight, though my presence in the plane could not but increase them.”*147

  Needless to say, this was a somewhat paradoxical position. But Skorzeny could be persuasive when he needed to be, and eventually Gerlach acquiesced, adding angrily that if anything went wrong during takeoff it was not his responsibility. “In spite of huge doubts,” Student later wrote, “Gerlach finally let himself be talked round and agreed. Then Gerlach and Skorzeny together convinced Mussolini.”148

  The Duce, himself a pilot, showed no enthusiasm for the Stork flight—with or without Skorzeny—but ultimately consented to it.149 All he asked was that he be allowed to return to Rocca delle Caminate, his country estate in the Romagna.150 As was seen earlier, he had made the same request to Badoglio shortly after being arrested. But again Mussolini was to be denied. Skorzeny had orders to take the exdictator straight to Germany after a brief layover at Pratica, where the two men would change planes. Skorzeny sweetened the pill by informing him that his wife and their two teenage children were already en route to Munich. They had been “liberated” from Rocca delle Caminate that same afternoon by Skorzeny’s SS commandos.