Читать книгу Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45 - James Holland, James Holland - Страница 25

In his villa at Gargnano overlooking Lake Garda, Benito Mussolini still governed the new Fascist Republic this May, 1944 – on paper, at any rate. He was well aware, however, that he was effectively Hitler’s prisoner, and that despite the resurrection of the Fascist Party under the leadership of its Party Secretary, Alessandro Pavolini, Italy was now, to all intents and purposes, ruled and governed by the Germans.

Mussolini was sixty. He had always been a bull of man: square-jawed, barrel-chested, and with piercing eyes; yet he was thinner now, his face lacking the lustre that had always radiated from him. Italy’s and his own decline had, unsurprisingly, affected him both physically and psychologically.

Following his ‘rescue’ by German SS and Fallschirmjäger troops from Gran Sasso the previous September, his ambition had been at its lowest ebb and he had said as much to Hitler, telling him he did not believe in the possible resurrection of fascism and that he wanted merely to retire quietly. The Führer, however, had swept aside such concerns. ‘Northern Italy will be forced to envy the fate of Poland,’ Hitler had warned him, ‘if you do not accept to give renewed vigour to the alliance between Germany and Italy, by becoming head of the state and of the new government.’57 The following day, Mussolini had reluctantly agreed to do as Hitler asked, although he had been fully aware of what that meant. ‘The Germans will find a way to administer Italy according to their habits,’ he had said, ‘and the only outcome will be the loss of that little respect that Italy still has as a nation.’58 In this instance, he had hit the nail on the head.

There were those in Germany who had believed Hitler had made a mistake in giving the Italians any form of self-rule at all: Kesselring, for one, had felt it would be better for Italy to be treated as an occupied country, and that an Italian government, in whatever form, would be a hindrance to the freedom of action of his troops in the country. Dr Rudolf Rahn, the newly appointed German ambassador, had also agreed with Kesselring. He had recognised that there was little enthusiasm within Italy for a return to fascism, especially after it had dissolved so spectacularly as a political movement after 25 July. Hitler, however, had not wanted to waste valuable German resources carrying out civil administration when there were a number of Italian Fascists willing and ready to carry out his wishes for him. Yet he had been unimpressed with the Fascists who had fled to Germany the previous summer, and quite apart from his fondness for his old friend, had known that Mussolini was the only possible candidate to head up a Neo-Fascist government.

Most of those who now rallied round the Duce were either diehard fanatics or men for whom it had been too dangerous to remain in Italy following Mussolini’s overthrow. Alessandro Pavolini, a charismatic forty-year-old Florentine poet and former editor of the newspaper La Stampa, was something of an intellectual but also an increasingly fanatical Fascist. His drive and determination to see fascism back in Italy had made him the obvious candidate for secretary of the Neo-Fascist Party, the PRF, or Partito Repubblicano Fascista. There were a handful of others from the Fascist hierarchy of the pre-war heydays. Roberto Farinacci, for one: a former party secretary in the 1920s, and the most outspoken of those who had urged Italy to fight alongside Germany to the bitter end. Another was Renato Ricci, founder of the Fascist squadristi, or hit squads, and later head of the Fascist Youth Organisations and Minister of Corporations until fired in February 1943. And there was Guido Buffarini-Guidi, another Fascist of the old school, albeit one who had been previously discredited for a number of frauds.

From this core, a Neo-Fascist government had emerged. Such had been the shortage of able candidates, Pavolini had persuaded Ambassador Rahn to accompany him to Rome back in September to try and recruit others to rally to the cause. As Rahn had suspected, it had proved something of a fool’s errand: most former Fascists had wanted nothing to do with it. This had not overly worried the Germans, who had never had any intention of allowing the new government any real power. However, Rahn had felt there was a need for a competent Minister of War to rally support for the continuation of the war, and in desperation had turned to Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. This sixty-one-year-old marshal had been a successful commander in Ethiopia in the 1930s but after being defeated in North Africa at the hands of the British in 1941, he had resigned and returned to Italy. More soldier than politician, he nonetheless carried both the gravitas and the fame Rahn believed was needed.

Mussolini was back, but although physically his health had greatly improved within a few weeks of his return, he found it hard to rekindle the strutting arrogance of old when Germany was piling one humiliation upon him after another. There had, for example, been no return to Rome. Hitler had refused to allow the seat of government to be centred there; it was, as Kesselring had announced, now an ‘Open City’, and thus supposedly politically neutralised. A good excuse, but one that had scarcely hidden the real reason: that Hitler did not want the Neo-Fascist government getting above itself, which was far more likely had it been based in Italy’s largest and most historic city. Milan had also been rejected for the same reason.

Rather, the new seat of government was now based around the tiny town of Salò, on the western banks of Lake Garda in the foothills of the Alps. Government offices were to be established in towns all along the lake. With fuel scarce and only narrow roads connecting them, effective government had been deliberately made harder. Moreover, by setting up in Salò, a small and insignificant place of little note, the prestige of the new government was undermined from the outset.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the new government’s sphere of control had also become increasingly depleted. Quite apart from land already lost to the Allies, the Brenner Pass and the Ljubljana Gap – the two main access routes from Greater Germany into Italy – had been annexed into the Reich, in what was yet another stinging blow to Mussolini’s power and prestige. The first now became an area known as the Alpine Approaches, incorporating the Tyrol – the Dolomites and towns of Bolzano, Belluno and Trento. The second was the Adriatic Coastland, which consisted of an area that spread through north-east Italy – including Trieste, Fiume, and Istria – and into Croatia. As in other areas of the Greater Reich, two Gauleiters – military governors – were appointed, Franz Hofer for the Alpine Approaches, and Dr Friedrich Rainer for the Adriatic Coastland. Both were confirmed Nazis, and ruled as such. The Italian legal system there was abolished and all Italians in those areas came directly under German military law. It was not lost on Mussolini that the annexed areas were more or less those that had been taken from Austria at the end of the First World War.

There were still further disappointments for the man Hitler had once looked up to as a role model. One of the Duce’s first jobs had been to order Renato Ricci to re-form the Fascist militia, which now became the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana, or GNR, and which would work alongside the Carabinieri, the military-based police force, as a means of enforcing fascism once more. Yet although political militias were a useful means of imposing a regime’s will, Mussolini knew that for him to regain any kind of reputation, he needed an army, a New Army, with which Italy could once more rise from the ashes.

It was, of course, never to be. The first blow came following Marshal Graziani’s visit to Germany in early October 1943, where it had quickly become clear that there was considerable distrust amongst many of the German High Command of Mussolini and Graziani’s plans. ‘The only Italian Army that will not be treacherous,’ Feldmarschall Keitel had noted, ‘is one that does not exist.’59 And anyway, they had already decided that able-bodied Italian men would be more useful as labourers, while those Italians who did want to fight willingly were encouraged to join the German armed forces instead – and did so: by May 1944, there were more than 200,000 Italian soldiers serving directly under the Germans. Even leading Fascists were against the New Army; both Pavolini and Ricci had been against it, as they distrusted Graziani and feared he might then use such a force against them.

Hitler, however, had agreed to the raising of a mere four Italian divisions, which he believed would be useful, not as front-line troops, but as guardians along the coast and behind the lines. He had also eventually agreed to release 12,000 former officers and NCOs from camps in Germany, but the rest of Mussolini’s New Army had to come from entirely new recruits and from those who had returned home but had not been interned by the Germans. Dampened but undeterred, he issued a conscription order for all those born in the years 1923, 1924 and 1925 and started a major propaganda effort to draw in volunteers. By the beginning of 1944, some 50,000 young men had responded to Mussolini’s call to arms – but a mere four divisions was small fry indeed compared to the fifty-six divisions eradicated by the Germans following the armistice.

The reality was that Mussolini had fallen a long, long way – from more than twenty years of absolute power to almost no power at all. Everything he tried to do was blocked or watered down, not only by the Germans but also by the Neo-Fascists. Most of the leaders of the new Fascist Party had been previously sacked by the Duce – Pavolini included – and although they openly professed their unswerving loyalty towards him, it had become apparent, over the eight months of the RSI’s – Repubblica Sociale Italiana’s – existence, that Mussolini and the Neo-Fascists were singing from different ideological hymn sheets, and not just over the formation and handling of the New Army.

The previous November, while the Germans and Allies were still fighting south of the Gustav Line, Pavolini had called the Neo-Fascists together to Verona, where a new ‘manifesto’ had been thrashed out. Mussolini had chosen to remain absent, yet despite his marked nonappearance the Neo-Fascists had, during a highly charged gathering, agreed in principle to holding elections, restoring the power of the judiciary, allowing freedom of the press, and a number of other measures. None of these things had since happened, however. Rather, it was following the Congress at Verona that Pavolini, in particular, had insisted on revenge for those Fascists who had ‘betrayed’ Italy and Mussolini the previous July. Most of the nineteen members of the Fascist Grand Council who had voted against Mussolini had since gone to ground, but six had been arrested and flung into jail, including Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and former Foreign Minister, who had been extradited, at Pavolini’s behest, from Germany. Rather than restoring the rights of the judiciary, an ‘Extraordinary Special Tribunal’ had been set up, overseeing a sham trial in which the six were accused on trumped-up charges of treason. They were, of course, found guilty, and rather than being given any chance to appeal, all but one – and Ciano included – were hurriedly executed by a cack-handed firing squad who made a complete mess of their task early the following morning. The executions had been carried out swiftly so as to limit the Duce’s opportunity to intervene.

Mussolini could – and should – have stopped the executions at the very least, but he had been warned that it would damage his standing with Hitler if he interfered. He at first dithered and then let it happen, just as he had allowed the Neo-Fascists to arrest other former Fascists, four generals, and several admirals. The admirals had also been executed without mercy.

So much of the key to fascism’s success in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s had been the spectacle it offered: the rallies, the speeches, the songs and the marches, and in this regard Mussolini had always been a particularly visible leader. How different it was now in the early summer of 1944. The Duce had barely been seen in public for months, instead cosseting himself away at the Villa Feltrinelli in Gargnano; but he had not been idle, nor had he entirely lost his political verve.

Mussolini’s political life had really begun as a journalist and as a socialist before he had broken away from the party, and it was to these roots that he had now returned. Since becoming head of the RSI his journalistic output had been extraordinary, and although he had not restarted his old paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, he had opened a new press agency, Corrispondenza Repubblicana, for which he wrote a large number of uncredited articles. Most of his pieces focused on Socializzazione – or socialisation – as he called it. Not for nothing had he insisted on calling the new republic the Socialist Republic of Italy – just about the only concession he had gained from Hitler. Neo-fascism, he believed, was merely the political structure through which his brand of socialism could best be implemented – a brand that still valued the notion of a nation state and the heroism of Italians. Yes, the war was surely lost, despite Hitler’s talk of secret weapons; but he still believed there could yet be a new revolution in Italy, and indeed across all of Europe, one that united those who mistrusted communism – a movement that was growing in Italy – and which loathed, as Mussolini did, the middle classes, the bourgeoisie. He began to see a future where Europe was united, and whereby a bridge could be made that linked the ideology of socialism and fascism together. This renewed political passion gave him hope. Mussolini was not completely beaten yet.

From the moment the Duce had lost his virginity to an elderly prostitute at the age of seventeen, he had maintained a voracious sexual appetite that had not dimmed over time. He had slept with hundreds of women, but although he remained married to his wife, Rachele, he had also always kept at least one principal mistress. This honour now belonged to Claretta Petacci, twenty-eight years his junior, and the daughter of a Vatican doctor.

There was another young woman who played an important part in his life. Elena Curti was twenty-one, intelligent, and highly vivacious, and one of Mussolini’s few trusted confidantes. There was, however, nothing sexual in their relationship. Rather, Elena was his illegitimate daughter, the offspring of another of the Duce’s favourite mistresses, Angela Curti Cucciati.

Elena had been born in 1922, soon after Mussolini had become prime minister. However, in a sense her origins date back to the birth of fascism, to the turbulent years immediately following the First World War when an embittered Italy struggled to come to terms with failure and its hollow victory in the war. The emerging fascist movement, led by Mussolini, had repeatedly clashed with the growing number of socialists. During a fight in Milan, a communist school teacher had been killed and all the Fascists involved flung into prison. One of these was the man Elena had grown up calling her father. Her mother had then contacted Mussolini, who at the time had been editor of Popolo d’Italia, and had asked for his help in trying to get her husband out of prison. How much Mussolini had been able to help is uncertain – probably not much, because he soon began an affair with Elena’s mother. Signor Curti had not been released from prison until after Elena had been conceived.

Elena had grown up knowing none of this, however, although she had witnessed her parents’ marriage disintegrate. ‘My father [Signor Curti] had a tendency towards violence,’ she says. ‘My mother used to tell me he was a bad man. She put great fear into me.’ Aged eight, she was abducted by Curti and kept locked up with a distant relative in Mantova, far from her home in Milan. After five months, she was sent away to the Convent of the Ursuline Sisters in Milan. ‘I remember I hadn’t even gone through the doors,’ says Elena, ‘but I was standing in the magnificent Bramante courtyard and I was greeted by a tiny nun with shining blue-green eyes. She listened to my story and then said, “So now you know what real suffering is like.”’ Only later did she discover that her mother had turned to Mussolini for help – help that had resulted in Elena being taken from both parents and placed in the convent instead. But it had been a happy place for her. With the love and security shown her by the nuns, she had blossomed both artistically and academically.

It was when she came of age at eighteen that her mother had taken her to Rome to meet Mussolini and that she finally learnt the truth. Understandably, this was deeply traumatic for her, although having slowly but surely come to terms with her dramatically changed circumstances, she began to feel rather proud of her true parentage. Nor did Mussolini forget her; rather, he continued to help both her and her mother. Whilst at university, following the establishment of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, Elena began to work for the new government.

Until the spring of 1944, Elena had been living in a requisitioned hotel in Maderno, a few miles north of Salò, and working as a secretary in the Ministry of Popular Culture. Now a favourite not only of her father, Mussolini, but also of a number of the young officers and officials of the new republic, she was enjoying life and the attention she was being given.

She had a new job, too, as the ‘Eyes of Mussolini Within the Party’. Every fortnight, a car would collect her and take her to see Mussolini in his villa, and she would tell him frankly about what she had observed in the intervening two weeks, as well as the general state of morale.

In this new role there were also other assignments for the Duce. It was in early May that Elena was contacted by an Italian Air Force officer named Virgilio Pallottelli Corinaldesi. ‘The Duce has sent me,’ he told her. ‘He’s charged me with a secret mission and you must accompany me. A couple,’ he explained, ‘does not get noticed so easily.’ Intrigued, Elena did as she was asked. Their task was to go to Gorizia on the Yugoslav border to gauge the political and military climate there, even though this was now part of the Greater Reich. Mussolini had been told that Italian officers and officials there were working with the enemy – the Yugoslavian Communists – and he wanted them to find out the truth and report back.

It was no easy task getting there. They were given a car, a considerable luxury by that time, but they were repeatedly harassed by enemy aircraft, and time and again had to stop and hurl themselves on to the roadside. Elena was surprised by the number of ruined bridges and abandoned fields she saw as they travelled across northern Italy. Once they had to ford a river because the bridge had been destroyed. Despite this and several punctures along the way, they made it to Gorizia, where they found little evidence of any Italian collusion with the Yugoslavs.

‘And when I got back to Maderno,’ says Elena, ‘I did not go straight to Mussolini but visited him as usual when I always did. He asked what I had been up to and I told him, “A friend of yours visited me, and together we went to Gorizia.” And all he said was, “Ah yes, Corinaldesi is an intelligent young man.” But it had been an adventure. The risk involved, the fact that we were on a secret mission for the Duce. I was young, and it was all very exciting.’

Despite the awe in which she held her father, Elena was all too aware that Mussolini was now an isolated figure. ‘Italians thought that he was separate from the government,’ she says. ‘That was the way I saw it too. He used to refer to himself as a prisoner on this accursed lake.’

He was, however, living in something of a gilded cage. The Villa Feltrinelli in Gargnano had belonged to a wealthy Milanese business family before being requisitioned. Overlooking the beautiful Lake Garda, with the mountains rising behind, it had over thirty sumptuously decorated rooms. A curving driveway and a number of carefully positioned trees hid the house from the road. German SS – rather than Italian – troops guarded the gateway, while further SS men patrolled the grounds and stood sentinel at other posts around the property. All servants and any visitors were vetted and checked by the SD – the Sicherheitsdienst – while even the Duce’s housekeeper was German. All telephones were tapped. Mussolini could say or do almost nothing within the villa without the Germans knowing about it.

Responsible for these draconian measures and for placing Mussolini there in the first place was General of the Waffen-SS and Highest SS and Police Führer in Italy, Karl Wolff, a smooth-talking charmer and highly intelligent senior Nazi. There were supposed to be four principal Germans running the show in Italy. First, there was Kesselring who, as Commander-in-Chief of Italy, was the most powerful man in the Axis-controlled half of the country, and to whom all others were subordinate. Immediately under him there was the German ambassador to the RSI, Rudolf Rahn, who, Iago-like, hovered over the Duce as his political ‘adviser’, a euphemism if ever there was one. Then there was General Rudolf Toussaint, ‘Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht to the Italian Fascist Government’. And finally there was the aptly named Wolff.

In reality, however, Kesselring tended to meddle little in specifically civilian or political affairs, especially while he had the military campaign to run. Rather, the day-today governing of Italy was left to Ambassador Rahn and Wolff, whose power was so complete and expertly executed that General Toussaint’s authority was continually and increasingly undermined. Both men, with Kesselring’s blessing, made sure the authority of not only Mussolini but also the Neo-Fascist government was kept to a minimum, and that every decision made by the RSI was carefully monitored. As Rahn had pointed out to Kesselring in October 1943, ‘the government consists of men who are willy-nilly bound to Germany, and above all, if need be, we have the means of intervening. In addition, we have delegates in each Ministry, whose task is precisely to bring our wishes before the Ministries.’60

It was Wolff, however, who ran the police and security forces for all Axis-controlled Italy. There were SS police and SD units throughout northern Italy. Sub-units of the SD included the Gestapo and the Security Police – or Sipo* – but there were also in Italy units of the military counter-intelligence and espionage service, the Abwehr. Under Wolff’s command and control were a large number of SS police troops, Wehrmacht – German army – units, and also the 140,000 members of Ricci’s Fascist militia, the GNR. With these highly visible and intimidating forces at his fingertips, it is no surprise that Wolff ’s authority and power in Italy should have been so obvious. It says much about Wolff ’s position that it was to him that Mussolini had turned just hours before his son-in-law had been due to be executed. ‘What would you do in my position?’ the Duce had asked him. Wolff had told him he should remain firm. To do otherwise, he suggested, would do much harm to his reputation with the Führer.

13 May 1944 was Wolff ’s forty-fourth birthday. Thin-lipped, and with a wide, receding forehead, and pale, grey eyes, he nonetheless had a genial, humorous-looking face that enhanced his natural charm. After serving as an infantry officer in the First World War, Wolff studied law, later ran his own advertising agency, and then joined the Nazis and SS in 1931. He rose steadily through the SS hierarchy, becoming an increasingly close confidant to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS. From June 1939 he had been Himmler’s Chief of Staff and representative in Hitler’s military headquarters, a post he still officially held, despite his move to Italy, and despite incurring Himmler’s wrath in February the previous year for divorcing his wife and marrying Countess Ingeborg Maria von Bernstorff; at least he and the Duce had a love of women in common. By the autumn, however, Himmler had forgiven his friend and approved the elevated title of ‘Highest SS Chief’ rather than just ‘Higher SS Chief’ – a distinction shared by only one other SS supremo, General Prützmann, who held the same post in the Ukraine.

Wolff ’s HQ in Italy was just a few miles south of Gargnano in Fasano, another small town on the banks of Lake Garda. The interior of the villa was noticeably calm and tasteful. Opulent carpets lined the corridors; plain-clothed young women – SS secretaries – discreetly passed by before disappearing into a different room. Wolff ’s own office was filled with comfortable chairs, a small table, and a well-stocked cocktail cabinet. Works of art hung on the walls, while the room glowed with soft, subtly positioned lighting. Wolff himself spoke with a gentle, yet husky voice. Like that other Nazi ‘charmer’, General Reinhard Heydrich, Wolff understood the benefits of winning others over, of putting people at ease and becoming a trusted confidant.

Wolff was also prepared to take risks. Just three days before, on 10 May, the Highest SS and Police Chief in Italy, wearing a civilian suit, had had an audience with Pope Pius XII at the Vatican, in which he had asked for the Pontiff ’s help in making contact with the Allies with a view to opening peace negotiations. Although no one had witnessed the conversation, there were a number of people – including Germans – who had helped set up the meeting, and were aware of Wolff’s reasons for wanting the audience.

Little came of the talks, but Wolff had begun playing a dangerous game, making peace feelers – however tentative – without higher authority. His motivation, however, had been simple. He had begun to doubt that Germany could win the war, but hoped it could in some way dictate the peace that would follow. So Wolff, the arch-Machiavel, wanted to find a way out – a way in which Germany could end the war while there was still a chance of bargaining. The battle had only just begun again on the ground, but one of the most powerful men in Italy hoped words, rather than more bullets and bombs, might end the bloodshed. And if that was the case, he might have a chance of surviving the judgement day that would inevitably follow.

* Both Gestapo and Sipo are abbreviations: the former for Geheime Staatspolizei, the German secret state police; the latter for Sicherheitspolizei, the Nazi security police.