by Geert Mak
The war in Italy began on 10 July, 1943 with a landing on Sicily. It was the first time – with the exception of an ill-fated ‘trial invasion’ at Dieppe on 19 August, 1942 – that Allied troops returned to the European continent. In early September new landings followed, at the Strait of Messina, at Taranto in the south-east and at Salerno, not far from Naples. To speed up the sluggish advance a fifth landing took place in late January 1944, at Anzio, just south of Rome. That was not a success: the Allied troops captured a bridgehead of a few square kilometres in size, but could go no further. ‘You feel,’ the war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote from Anzio, ‘pretty much like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery.’
Opening this Southern European front had pretty much been Winston Churchill's idea. The Americans were in favour of a much shorter route to Berlin, by way of the Channel, Paris and Cologne, but in 1943 their armies were not yet ready for an operation of that magnitude. At first glance, moving from North Africa through Italy to Trieste, Vienna, Prague and then Berlin did indeed seem like a vast detour. But in any case, the Italian Front was needed to keep as many German troops as possible occupied in Southern Europe and provide relief for the embattled Soviets. The British and Americans wanted at all costs to prevent a situation like that of spring 1918, when exhausted Russia had suddenly declared a cease-fire and German troops were able to swing back and reinforce the Western Front. That would have been a disaster.
Churchill also had reasons of his own for this remarkable detour. As early as 1942 he was one of the very few to take into account the shape of post-war Europe. In his view, the Soviet Union absolutely had to be kept out of Europe. Therefore, the war was ultimately to be fought in Eastern Europe, not in the West. By taking the Italian-Austrian route, the Allied armies would not only defeat the Germans but also cut off the advancing Soviet troops. Furthermore, he expected no major problems in taking Italy. He viewed it as the soft underbelly of the Third Reich, a country with an unstable regime, easily waltzed through by the Allies. As far as the regime went, Churchill was right. But the waltzing was an altogether different story.
By spring 1943, Mussolini's political movement had lost its sparkle. Committed Fascists were to be found only among young people and the middle class. The party was severely divided and sorely compromised, the country was suffering from a famine, Mussolini himself was distracted by illnesses and love affairs. The entire Italian elite – the monarchists, the clerics, the entrepreneurs, the army, the police – was sick and tired of the war. In March 1943 massive strikes had already been held in Turin, Milan and elsewhere in northern Italy; after the February Strike in Amsterdam, these were the first major workers’ shutdowns in Nazi-Fascist Europe.
The success of the Allied landing on Sicily – on the ‘impregnable’ island of Lampedusa where, the story has it, only one Allied soldier was injured: bitten by a donkey – was the last straw. In the early hours of 25 July, 1943, in the claustrophobic Sala del Pappagallo (Hall of the Parrot) in Rome's Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini was dethroned by the Great Fascist Council. The next day King Victor Emanuel III had him arrested and replaced as prime minister by the old field marshal, Pietro Badoglio. Mussolini was sent into exile at a ski resort near Gran Sasso in Abruzzo, close to L'Aquila, to what he called ‘the highest prison in the world’.
Suddenly Italy had a new, anti-Fascist government, and it all happened more quickly than even the most fervent optimists had dared to hope. The news was almost too good to believe, and the Allies were taken by surprise. They had never paid much attention to indications of a possible coup; as a result, valuable weeks were lost negotiating a ceasefire. The Italians hoped to remain neutral, the Allies insisted on Italian support as the price for the ‘passage back’, as Churchill put it. There are even photographs of the American general, Maxwell Taylor, during a personal visit to Rome on 7 September, 1943, where he had gone to prepare for an airborne landing. (A scene as preposterous, for example, as a photograph would be of Montgomery walking calmly through Amsterdam in 1944.) The operation was called off when the paratroopers were already in the planes. The Allies were afraid to run the risk. They considered the Italian government too divided and too hesitant. The only ones who reacted decisively were the Germans: their troops came rushing over the Brenner Pass into Italy by the tens of thousands.
On 8 September the Italian capitulation was officially announced at last, but by then the Wehrmacht had northern and central Italy firmly in its grasp. The next day, the king, the army chiefs of staff and the government fled in panic to Brindisi, leaving behind no instructions for their troops. They abandoned Rome, the army and the rest of the country to the enemy. The drama on Kefallonia can also be traced in part to this irresponsible flight: it took almost a month for the Italian government to officially declare war on Germany. Meanwhile the Germans treated all armed Italians as fifth columnists. The Italians never forgave their king: in 1946 they voted overwhelmingly to abolish the monarchy.
In the chaotic days of September 1943, an airborne SS commando unit performed a unique stunt: using a few small planes, they freed Mussolini from his mountain prison. The soldiers guarding Il Duce did nothing to stop them: they had not heard from Rome for days. A week later, in Munich, Mussolini had recovered sufficiently to issue a call for revenge: ‘Only blood can cancel so humiliating a page from the history of the patria!’ Hitler gave him permission to set up his own government in the northern town of Salò, but he was never more than a marionette. Alongside the war proper, a civil conflict arose among the Italians themselves that would last until the end of the war: a struggle between Fascists and anti-Fascists, between the diehard supporters of the former regime and the partisans in the mountains and working-class neigh-bourhoods.
In the mud with the American infantrymen, Ernie Pyle noticed little of all these political squabbles. ‘It's nothing but the weather and the lay of the land and the weather,’ he noted on 14 December, 1943. ‘If there were no German fighting troops in Italy, if there were merely German engineers to blow the bridges in the passes, if never a shot were fired at all, our northward march would still be slow.’
The Germans had thrown up their first major line of defence, the Gustav Line, straight across the mountains between Naples and Rome, with Monte Cassino as the vital corridor. Later they withdrew to the Gothic Line, which ran between Siena and Arezzo. After that, almost until the end of the war, they held a third line, the Alpine Line, close to the Austrian border.
Cassino today is a city without a heart or a memory, one of those piles of apartment complexes one comes across all over Europe, one of those places where a catastrophe must have taken place somewhere between 1939–45. In those days, this attractive, friendly Italian city had the misfortune of forming the gateway to Rome and the north of the country. On 19 May, 1944, when the Allies had finally broken through after months of fighting, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune described Cassino as a ghost town full of corpses and smoking ruins, ‘more grim than a Calvinist conception of Hell’.
Martha Gellhorn counted no fewer than twenty different nationalities fighting together against the Germans all over Italy, and that is reflected in the gravestones of the war cemeteries around modern-day Cassino. Beneath the neatly clipped lawns lie thousands of young men from Poland, Britain, America, India, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Italy, Germany and France. Flags wave, visitors and family come and go, these dead boys want for nothing, save their lives.
Cassino is a bitter place, a monument to waffling politicians and timid generals, the kinds of leaders who never pay for their own mistakes. That payment was reserved for the young men who lie here. Rome was finally liberated on 5 June, 1944. It could have happened nine months earlier. But the effect of that delay, and of Monte Cassino and those confused September days of 1943, extends much further: because of it, no iron padlock was put in place between the Soviet Union and Europe. On the contrary, an iron curtain was drawn across Europe itself. Churchill's vision did not come to fruition, but his n
ightmare did come true.
Until autumn 1942 the war seemed to be going well for the Axis powers. Japan had conquered Malaysia, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, the German troops moved through Russia almost with the nonchalance of tourists. But from early 1943 the cards seemed to have been reshuffled: Japan's offensive in the Pacific ground to a halt at Guadalcanal, the German 6th Army was destroyed at Stalingrad, Rommel suffered one defeat after the other in North Africa. In July 1943, the greatest tank battle in history was waged at Kursk. For a whole week, 6,000 tanks, more than 20,000 pieces of artillery and 1.5 million soldiers fought on a muddy plain more than fifty kilometres wide. Then the Germans pulled back. Their troops were needed in the West, to head off the Allied invasion of Italy.
After that summer the Axis powers suffered only defeats. From mid-1943 the Berlin papers were filled with the death notices of fallen soldiers and officers. Starting in 1944 there were so many names to report that they were all swept together into one huge daily combined advertisement under the rubric ‘a hero's death’. Life in the city was increasingly disrupted by the bombardments: by mid-1943 more than a quarter of the population of Berlin had been evacuated to the countryside. Just as in 1918, the streets were filled with war invalids, boys on crutches, men missing an arm or a leg. In autumn 1943 one even began to hear jokes about the approaching defeat: ‘What are you going to do after the war?’ ‘I'm going to take the bike and tour the borders of Germany.’ ‘And what are you going to do after lunch?’
The Gestapo's relative leniency towards ‘normal’ Germans had evaporated. Starting in March 1942, every form of defeatism was punishable by law. In Berlin alone in the first three months of 1943, fifty-one Germans were sentenced to death for listening to enemy radio broadcasts or expressing ‘hostile’ opinions. In the Flossenburg penal camp in Bavaria at least 30,000 German convicts were killed, including the renowned Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Hans Oster, the Abwehr officer who had passed along the German plans for the invasion of the Netherlands. Ninety executions a day was not an abnormal tally at Flossenburg.
That malaise spread to the army units as well. Wolf Jobst Siedler, who fought in Italy, heard soldiers shout to each other: ‘Enjoy the war, peace is going to be terrible.’ In the field hospital where he ended up in late 1944, the wounded soldiers listened openly to swing music on the British radio.
On several occasions, elements within the Wehrmacht, along with certain key figures from the German churches, the former union movement and trade and industry, seemed on the brink of open revolt. As early as May 1942 contact had been established between the British government and the resistance group surrounding Bonhoeffer and his Bekennende Kirche. On 20 July, 1944, an attempt was made on Hitler's life. Wehrmacht officer Claus von Stauffenberg concealed a time bomb in his attaché case, took it into a staff meeting at the Wolfsschanze, placed the case under the table and left the room. Under normal circumstances, the force of the explosion that came a few minutes later would have killed everyone in the room. But the meeting had been moved at the last moment from the command bunker to a lighter barrack, and the number of victims remained limited. Hitler himself escaped with a torn uniform, punctured eardrums and a few scrapes and burns. It dawned on him only gradually that this attack had been meant as the starting sign for a general uprising against his regime. His rage and suspicion were uncontrollable.
For the Nazis, meanwhile, the war had become a ‘sacred struggle’ on behalf of Europe against the Bolshevik monster. In Berlin's Sportpalast on 18 February, 1943, immediately after the fall of Stalingrad, Goebbels had declared ‘total war’. His speech was interrupted hundreds of times by cheering, singing and thundering applause, and the hall went wild at his final words: ‘Now, Germans, rise up – and the storm breaks loose!’
In actual fact, Goebbels’ speech was a desperate move: the situation had deteriorated so far that the German people had to be prepared psychologically for hard times. As Goebbels vouchsafed to his diary, he and his old companion-in-arms Göring had a long, private discussion on 2 March, 1943. Both were worried about Hitler's mental stability, and about the chaotic situation within Nazi headquarters. The Führer, both of them felt, had ‘aged fifteen years in the three and a half that the war has lasted’. Ribbentrop had failed completely as minister of foreign affairs: he had not made a single attempt to arrive at a modus vivendi with Britain. However, at the same time, Göring said, the Nazi command could not permit itself any sign of weakness. ‘With regard to the Jewish question in particular, we have gone too far ever to get out.’
Chapter FORTY-ONE
Rome
ROME. THESE ARE THE DAYS OF THE GREAT SUMMER HEATWAVE. THE local youth stands fomenting its own discontent on Campo dei Fiori till late into the night, across Piazza Navona saunter the beanpole families of Swedish schoolteachers, between the two squares the city is white with table linen. Above the ochre houses of the old working-class neighbour-hood of Trastevere, the church bells strike their tinny strokes, year after year.
In the early 1980s I came here often. Of the dozens of grocers’ shops and vegetable stalls I remember from those years, one remains. Mario with his seven stray cats and his echoing voice, the king of our little street, moved away long ago. Americans live in his house now. Of the once innumerable clothes lines flapping with laundry, only two are left; from all the surrounding streets, they have disappeared completely. Around the fountain on Piazza Santa Maria, the flirting and sighing takes place in every European language.
The Germans and Pope Pius XII declared Rome an ‘open city’, a city that was to be sheltered from war. Yet every day German tanks and trucks rolled through its streets on their way to the southern front lines, and every day the 3rd SS Police Battalion marched ostentatiously through the old city. On 23 March, 1944, partisans detonated a powerful bomb in the Via Rasella during that daily parade. Thirty-two SS troops were killed, many times that number were wounded.
The reprisal came the next day. Close to the catacombs, in a cave at Fosse Ardeatine, 320 political prisoners were executed: truckload after truckload, they were pulled down, made to kneel, then shot in the back of the head.
The victims now lie in 320 sarcophagi beneath a monumental slab of stone, the space of two tennis courts full of marble and artificial flowers. After they were finished, the Germans blew up the entrance to the cave, but a shepherd had heard the shooting. The local priest, who had been warned, smelled the odour of rotting corpses, prayed and gave the victims ‘provisional absolution’. On 26 March, Pius XII – who wrongly believed the attack to have been the work of communists – wrote in the Osservatore Romano: ‘On the one hand 32 victims, and on the other 320 persons sacrificed for the guilty parties who escaped arrest’; as though the partisans, not the Germans, had been responsible for this massacre.
The Vatican had been warned as soon as the bodies were found. It did nothing. Family members came to bring flowers, the Germans blocked the entrance to the cave once more, and one of the priests, Don Ferdinando Georgi, was arrested. Still, the Bishop of Rome said nothing, not even when one of his own flock was involved.
The role of the Holy See in the Second World War was later the subject of heated discussion, and that is understandable. The twenty-year reign of Eugenio Pacelli was indeed marked by major contradictions. An ascetic, he lived on little more than a piece of bread and a glass of warm milk each day, but at the same time he surrounded himself with great pomp and strict norms. His piety was beyond all doubt, but archives and other sources paint a picture of an anti-Semite, a hater of communists, and a cynical opportunist. He sent out internal directives to help Jews, he played an important role behind the scenes in stopping the deportations from Hungary and Bulgaria, but he was also a sly negotiator who, to keep from compromising his own secular power, avoided all conflicts with the Nazi regime.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Gitta Sereny spoke at length with a number of the former policymakers from the notorious Berlin vil
la at Tiergartenstrasse 4. They told her – and this was later confirmed by court documents – that they had begun as early as 1939 in conferring with certain church leaders concerning their ‘euthanasia’ campaign. Before the campaign had even begun, the Nazis wanted to know whether the Church would actively oppose it. That turned out not to be the case. Sereny: ‘According to all the information currently available to us – obtained officially or non-officially, by hook or by crook, from real or defrocked priests – it can be absolutely ruled out that the Church, which according to some has the “best intelligence network in the world”, was ignorant of the case at hand.’
Something similar took place in France. The occasional bishop openly opposed the persecution of the Jews, but when Marshal Pétain asked the Pope in so many words for his ‘advice’ – read, approval – concerning a series of anti-Semitic measures, two members of the Vatican staff – including Giovanni Batista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI – replied that there could be ‘no objection’ to the measures, as long as they were carried out ‘avec justice et charité’.
In Italy it was later often claimed that Pius XII saved tens of thousands of Jews by ordering all cloisters to open their doors to them. And from 1943 there were indeed impressive rescue operations carried out at the local level, but no clear leadership ever came from the Vatican.
The most striking incident took place on Saturday, 16 October, 1943, when a few SS battalions drove into Rome's old ghetto and held a mass razzia for the first time. More than 1,000 Jewish men, women and children were taken to the Collegio Militare, only a few hundred metres from St Peter's. The Pope heard about the round-up right away, from an acquaintance, during his morning prayers. Any number of trucks carrying terrified Jewish children drove almost literally past his window.