In the late evening of 25 July 1943, alarming news from Rome suddenly broke into Hitler's headquarters: apparently, the duce of fascism, Benito Mussolini, had resigned as prime minister and had been replaced by Pietro Badoglio, marshal of Italy and former head of general staff. In the following hours, despite the worrying situation on the Russian front, the ‘Italian crisis’ swiftly became the main topic of conversation at the Wolfsschanze as Mussolini's fate remained unknown and confusing reports began to circulate about the latest meeting of the Fascist Grand Council where the duce himself had reportedly received a vote of no confidence. As Goebbels recorded in his diary, the meeting had been requested by Farinacci and other fascist hardliners to force Mussolini into initiating ‘more energetic policies’ to step up Italian resistance against the Allied onslaught,Footnote 1 but the debate had ended up in a violent opposition, led by Ciano and Grandi, against ‘Mussolini, his policies, and his conduct of the war’.Footnote 2 Farinacci himself, Goebbels continued, ‘was involved, but from quite another viewpoint. He had been prevailed upon to criticize Mussolini, but wanted to give the whole attack a Fascist trend. He failed to prevail and thereby did great harm to the Fascist cause.’ The following day, during a meeting on the situation with Ribbentrop, Goering, and Goebbels, Hitler doubted that the duce had resigned voluntarily, conjecturing that the crisis had been provoked by the outcome of the Grand Council ‘where Farinacci had behaved there like a clumsy bear and…had played a role that proved fatal’.Footnote 3 Thus, Hitler continued, after the supreme chamber of the fascist regime ‘had hurled its criticism at the duce, the Crown had entered the picture’ by giving the green light to Badoglio and his anti-German camarilla backed by the Italian Freemasonry and the church.Footnote 4 Despite additional news, however, the whole crisis was still hard to understand from Berlin as Farinacci – now a refugee in Germany – reported that ‘the king acted loyally toward Mussolini and that the duce resigned voluntarily’.Footnote 5 As the German foreign undersecretary, Steengracht von Moyland, summarized to the Japanese ambassador in the afternoon of the 27 July, Berlin ‘was not as yet clear as to what the truth was’. Steengracht, however, denied that the crisis had ‘occurred as a result of Italian dissatisfaction at the result of the talk between Hitler and Mussolini’, adding that ‘as the attitude of the Italian Royal House…it was unthinkable that His Majesty was the cause of the present change’.Footnote 6
On a historiographical level, the proliferation of diaries and memoirs after the war and historical research have greatly expanded our knowledge on how the events unfolded and on the role of the various characters involved in the fall of fascism. While the whole picture has been outlined in its main lines, some aspects, however, remain shrouded in uncertainty.
For instance, the lack of sources and the reticence of the royal house following the events have made the behaviour of the king in the months preceding the coup hard to fathom. As De Felice and others have pointed out, however, despite Victor Emmanuel's later efforts to backdate his decision to overthrow the duce to January 1943,Footnote 7 only the Grand Council vote appears to have had a decisive effect on forcing the king to act.Footnote 8
Furthermore, Mussolini's policy from January to July 1943, particularly in the absence of official records of his meetings with the king and of the last Grand Council session, has always been impervious to assessment. In this regard, Mussolini's writings and statements following his liberation at the hands of the Germans should be regarded with suspicion as they conveyed his resentment towards the king and his need to take into account the complex political environment in the fascist Repubblica Sociale Italiana. Nearly all contemporary sources have outlined his growing apathy and his unusual passivity in facing domestic opposition as well as his strange demeanour during the Council debate which eventually sealed his fate.
Broadly speaking, in shifting their attention onto socio-political conditions which favoured the fall of the fascist regime, Marxist historians have generally underestimated Mussolini's role. In their view, fearing the mass mobilization that followed the strikes in the industrialized northern Italy, the most dissatisfied among fascist leaders, at that time supported by the king, conceived the duce’s removal from power as a way to save the domestic front from collapse.Footnote 9 From this viewpoint, Mussolini's conduct and demeanour before and during the Grand Council were mainly the result of his illness and the tight political situation in which he found himself.Footnote 10 As Ruggero Zangrandi has pointed out, however, Mussolini's illness alone cannot fully explain his apparently irrational conduct even in the face of a deteriorated political situation: his mental disorder and physical stress after Alamein only exacerbated his innate political incoherence. Amid frequent changes of mind, the duce teetered between his will to fight to the bitter end and the wish to sign a separate peace agreement with the Allies. Eventually, counting on Nazi secret weapons, he decided to remain loyal to the Axis. The worsening of the Italian military position, however, along with his hesitations in dealing with the king, Grandi, and other fascist leaders, had so undermined his authority that his efforts to overcome the opposition during the Grand Council proved to be in vain.Footnote 11 Furthermore, as has been further noted from a different point of view, Mussolini's trust in the king's loyalty and his overconfidence after so many years in power led him to underestimate the threats and to dismiss the warnings about an impending coup as annoyances.Footnote 12
William Deakin, on the other hand, in perhaps the first comprehensive effort to understand Mussolini's war policy, has outlined a more coherent profile of the duce’s behaviour. From the second half of 1942, Mussolini found himself placed on the horns of a dilemma: how to convince Hitler to shift the German war effort from the East to the Mediterranean and how to face the Allies' declaration of ‘unconditional surrender’. In this framework, Mussolini had no choice but to endure the Führer’s ‘brutal friendship’. For this reason, his behaviour appeared to be characterized more by indecisiveness rather than incoherence even when he put the Axis under stress by supporting the claims of the Italian general staff and by pressing Hitler to come to terms with the soviets.Footnote 13
Renzo De Felice, in his monumental biography of Mussolini, has significantly modified this interpretation by stressing the strictly political nature of the duce’s war policy in which all the decisions were made, regardless of their military soundness, with a worried eye towards the post-war situation. As his dreams of waging a short war almost independently from Hitler faded away in the snows of Greece, Mussolini's main concern became how to secure an important place for Italy in a German-dominated Europe. As soon as the tide of the war turned against Germany, however, he strived to find a political solution to the conflict by the means of favouring a separate peace agreement with Moscow.Footnote 14 As far as this was concerned, the meeting of the Grand Council acquired a particular meaning for Mussolini as he was well aware of the precariousness of his domestic position. By remaining master of the situation in the Council, he would have bolstered his position with the king and gained precious time to contrive a last-minute break with Berlin.
More recently, however, Mussolini's behaviour has been explained once more as the result of his overconfidence or of his physical and psychical conditions. The duce appears to have taken only a passive or indirect role in determining his own downfall. Amid military failures and growing popular discontent, the head of fascism failed to counter the decay of the regime and, without any other viable option, reduced himself to another ‘changing of the guard’ in the cabinet that simply drew into opposition the leading Fascist figures like Grandi, Ciano, and Bottai. When Ambrosio and the king belatedly decided to remove him from power, after his ultimate failure to convince Hitler that Italy must leave the war, Mussolini remained completely isolated. At the same time, however, he failed to notice the incoming storm as he had become dangerously out of touch with reality.Footnote 15 In this regard, perhaps the most vivid description of Mussolini's alienation has come from Bosworth's biographical work in which the Italian dictator has been depicted much like Dickens's Wilkins Micawber who, despite ‘of being utterly devoid of plans’, obstinately hoped – somehow – ‘that something positive would turn up’.Footnote 16
Other recent interpretations differ from this narrative only slightly, with little effort to recognize a consistent pattern in Mussolini's actions. Consequently, the meeting of the Grand Council that eventually decided his destiny appears as an expedient to ‘exonerate himself from responsibility for Italy's woes' or as an accident that was imposed on him by his political weakness.Footnote 17
Even when the complex evolution of the socio-political background behind the fall of Mussolini has been thoroughly analysed, the explanation of the duce’s course of action remains somewhat simplistic. The progressive collapse of the home front, following the military defeats, led to a growing crisis in the ‘leader follower relationship’ between the duce and his gerarchi. At the same time, the contempt with which Mussolini continued to treat them during the war years, as well as his overconfidence after so many years in power, led him to underestimate the threats and to dismiss the warnings about an impending putsch as nuisances. His agreeing to assemble the Grand Council with absolute certainty of its outcome did not denote, in his mind, ‘an actual or imminent crisis, because whether it met, or not, was ultimately an irrelevance’. After all, the Grand Council was his body, and its last meeting would serve to assert his authority over other fascist leaders as always in the past. Thus, when he opened the session with a self-absolving speech overlooking the issue of the political responsibility for the disastrous military situation, he found himself isolated and, after a disorganized resistance, was forced to yield.Footnote 18
Furthermore, scarce attention has been drawn to the possible connections between the duce’s domestic policy and his contest with Hitler to attempt a separate peace with the Soviet Union. When it has been the case, Mussolini's behaviour towards Hitler has not been explored in depth, or it has been considered the product of his fear and restraint in dealing with the German dictator.Footnote 19
Without doubt, all these interpretations have significantly expanded our knowledge of the economic, social, and political conditions that led to the fall of fascism and prevented the hardliners of the regime from striking back after the royal coup. While the war had greatly enhanced the crisis of the regime, Mussolini did his best to hasten the decay by exasperating his centralized ruling system that hampered an effective functioning of the high command, the cabinet, and other decisional bodies. Nevertheless, when it comes to the details of Mussolini's downfall the overall picture remains elusive.
Why did Mussolini call the Grand Council even though he was not legally obligated to do so? He could have postponed the meeting or resisted any pressure to call it without serious consequences. The constitutive law of the Council gave him sole authority to assemble the meeting. Furthermore, why did he propose to put to vote Dino Grandi's order of the day? Voting had been dismissed as a scorned legacy of liberal Italy. In the past, the Council would meet only to approve unanimous decisions presented by the duce himself.Footnote 20 In contrast, that afternoon he had no agenda and let the discussion develop freely despite having the legal authority to close the session at his discretion. He could have postponed the meeting sine die in view of the late hour as it was suggested by the secretary of the fascist party, Carlo Scorza. In that moment, Grandi was far from having obtained a clear majority and Mussolini could have rallied behind him the hesitant members in the following hours. Moreover, Mussolini knew in advance what was in store for him. Scorza and Grandi himself had briefed him on the substance of the order of the day that envisaged, albeit not explicitly, the end of his dictatorship by reactivating the collegial organs of the state.Footnote 21 Therefore, it appears clear that the duce needed that vote. It remains to be ascertained for what political purposes.
By pointing out how Mussolini counted on success in the Grand Council to strengthen his position with the king, De Felice has underscored the duce’s bellicosity despite evidence of his unusual apathy during that fateful night. The image of a pugnacious duce fits well into the framework of De Felice's interpretation to corroborate the thesis that Mussolini, after the inconclusive meeting with Hitler at Feltre on 19 July, had resolved to break off from Germany. Consequently, De Felice has paid only cursory attention to the last meeting, on the morning of 25 July, between Mussolini and the Japanese ambassador, Shinrokuro Hidaka, during which he made a last effort to co-ordinate his actions with Tokyo to induce Hitler to arrive at a settlement with Russia. A few days before the Grand Council, Mussolini had remained silent when his foreign undersecretary, Giuseppe Bastianini, counselled him to investigate opportunities for future contacts with the western Allies but, apart from this particular point, there is still limited evidence to support De Felice's hypothesis.
In contrast, and similarly to Deakin, James Burgwyn has more recently argued that the meeting with Hidaka was an important step in Mussolini's calculations soon after the Grand Council. Having convinced himself of the purely advisory nature of the vote, the duce planned to use it for leverage in Berlin: after having obtained Japanese support, he ‘would undertake a more energetic approach to Hitler…to cease hostilities on the Eastern Front’.Footnote 22 In that case, with the German military power predictably reoriented towards the Anglo-Americans, he would have been able to nullify the last Grand Council vote.Footnote 23 Thus, Mussolini's last move as prime minister a few hours before being removed from office by the king would appear much more consistent with his previous policy. Consequently, by viewing the meeting with Hidaka as a last-minute expedient, as a contingency plan after the defeat in Council, Burgwyn and Deakin have paid less attention to the reasons behind the duce’s decision to assemble the Council as well as to his unusual conduct during the meeting.
Perhaps, as we will see below, there would be some ground to integrate these interpretations. In his desperate struggle to talk Hitler round to making a compromise peace with Russia, Mussolini needed to provide him with unquestionable proof of how awful the situation had become for the regime in Italy and for himself. The vote in the Grand Council would have provided that evidence.
I
The Axis military situation in mid-October 1942 appeared promising. German armies were fighting their way into the Caucasus while Stalingrad, despite ferocious Soviet resistance, seemed about to fall. In Africa, less than 100 miles separated Rommel from the Suez Canal.
In Rome, however, there was ground for concern. After the Allied setback at Dieppe and the German successes in Russia, Italian intelligence and military circles feared the Allies might strike back in the Mediterranean to ease pressure on the Soviet Union.Footnote 24 Mussolini himself perceived these dangers better than Hitler and his close collaborators.Footnote 25 Not surprisingly, on 23 October, the duce appeared to share little of Goering's confidence in the ultimate victory of the Axis.Footnote 26 The Alamein line appeared solid – Mussolini reasoned – but the fortunes of war might soon turn against the Tripartite. With aircraft from Malta and Allied submarines wreaking havoc on Italian supply lanes, any further offensive towards the Canal was to be ruled out. In addition, due to the strength of the Gaullist movement, Vichy resistance against an Allied assault in North Africa would be a mere façade, thus endangering the Italo-German lines of communications in Egypt. To fend off the foreseeable British offensive at Alamein, Mussolini concluded, Axis had to regain air superiority in the Mediterranean as soon as possible.
That night, the thunder of the guns along the Alamein line intensified his fears and, in a matter of weeks, Montgomery's breakthrough and ‘Operation Torch’ restored the initiative to the Allies. Then, from the second half of 1942, the duce found himself forced to face the problem of how to convince Hitler to shift the German war effort from the East to the Mediterranean while preparing himself to defend Italy from the incoming Allied onslaught.Footnote 27 Apparently, the German invasion of the Soviet Union had met with immediate approval from Mussolini as devious opportunism and flawed political calculations had led him to follow Hitler's trail.Footnote 28 Despite his ideological hatred of Bolshevism, however, he had initially regarded with lack of spirit the Nazi attack against the Soviet Union because it would upset a conceived rapprochement with Moscow to elude the British economic blockade.Footnote 29 As Ulrich von Hassell,Footnote 30 former ambassador in Rome and leading anti-Hitlerite conspirator, wrote in his diary, Mussolini had already conveyed his fears to Hitler in August 1941 during his brief sojourn at the Wolfsschanze. Long after his fall, Mussolini himself recalled with his German doctor, Zachariae, his early opposition to the Russian campaign.Footnote 31 As a matter of comparison, on 24 September 1941 Ciano recalled in his diary how Mussolini felt worried about the rumours regarding his alleged pessimism during his last meeting with Hitler.Footnote 32 The duce, in fact, had conveyed to his son-in-law his fears on the Russian campaign since the middle of JulyFootnote 33 and dampened his first enthusiasm very soon. During the autumn of 1941, having read alarming reports by his foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, and the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri, the head of fascism began to watch with keen interest Japanese efforts to mediate between Berlin and Moscow.Footnote 34 Still believing in an Axis victory in Russia, he relied upon a German weakening for a better post-war settlement but his eyes remained fixed on the Mediterranean as the decisive theatre of the war. The Japanese diplomatic push, however, soon ran aground against the rocks of Hitler's obduracy and waned around the outset of the German offensive scheduled for the spring–summer 1942.Footnote 35
Nevertheless, a few days before Alamein,Footnote 36 the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Hiroshi Oshima, had conveyed to Alfieri that Tokyo was going to bring forward another proposal for mediation. The following reversal of fortunes in Russia and Africa thus gave new wind to the Japanese initiative. As Ernst von Weizsäcker set down in his memoirs,Footnote 37 the Italian ambassador in Berlin and his Japanese colleague began co-ordinating their efforts while the offices of the Gaimusho were closely scrutinizing still unconfirmed rumours about peace talks between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.Footnote 38
In this context, the hasty retreat of the ‘desert fox’ from Alamein urged Mussolini to act in person. On 6 November, he said to the German military attaché, Enno von Rintelen, that peace feelers towards the Soviet Union should be put out soon and that he would broach the question with Hitler himself.Footnote 39 On the same day, the duce examined a confidential report brought to him by Alberto Pirelli, an industrial tycoon and his close confidant, who confirmed Japanese efforts to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough. Furthermore, Pirelli's report underscored how peace on the Eastern Front was the main concern of all the important political figures with which he himself had come in contact during his last trip throughout Europe. Although Pirelli judged it unlikely that peace could be at hand before a serious soviet setback, Mussolini emphasized the need to make every effort to achieve it considering that Stalin himself might be willing to reach a compromise that would spare Russia from further losses.Footnote 40
In the following days, however, due to the worsening of the situation in Africa as well as to his physical condition,Footnote 41 Mussolini aborted his planned trip to Germany but made sure that his message would reach the Reichskanzlei without misunderstanding. In his public speech before the Chamber, on 2 December, he delivered a violent attack on Churchill and Roosevelt but carefully avoided mentioning Stalin.Footnote 42 In addition, while apparently justifying the reasons behind Hitler's decision to invade the USSR back in 1941, Mussolini openly acknowledged Russian fierce resistance in defending their homeland. Thus, as noted by von Hassel in his diary, his speech had a vast echo, especially when he observed that ‘the war was now attaining such gigantic proportions that…even territorial questions lost their significance’.Footnote 43 A few days later, Mussolini addressed the issue with Goering himself, stating that peace with the Soviet Union had to be attained soon or otherwise the Eastern Front should be secured by adopting a proper defensive strategy.Footnote 44 The Mediterranean should be regarded as the decisive front on which to exert the maximum effort. After all, he concluded, Britain remained the Axis's primary enemy. Probably encouraged by Goering's sympathetic stance, the duce personally set down his instructions for Ciano and Cavallero, head of general staff, in view of the forthcoming meeting with Hitler scheduled for 18 December. Once in Germany, however, the duce’s son-in-law found no room to negotiate and proved unable to defend himself against the barrage of Hitler's objections.Footnote 45
In the meanwhile, ever since the Allied offensive in Africa and the bombing campaign against the Italian mainland, the Italian political situation began to deteriorate as rumours about Mussolini's health coupled with those about his possible removal from office. On his brief return from Dalmatia in early November, the Italian diplomat Egidio Ortona, for example, found Rome in utter chaos and virtually defenceless against a coup attempt.Footnote 46 In their diaries, both Pirelli and Caviglia, marshal of Italy and First World War hero, recorded rumours about the schemes of various leading figures – Ciano and Grandi among them – to overthrow Mussolini.Footnote 47 The war, in fact, had actually accelerated the crisis of the regime by bolstering Mussolini's tendency to centralize the power in his hands through the marginalization of the Grand Council of fascism and the cabinet and, on the other hand, to rule through bureaucracy and technical advisers leaving the major fascist characters on the edge.Footnote 48
From another point of view, the fascist party proved itself unable to cope with the realities of the war and to bolster the morale of the populace. As the ‘parallel war’ ended in disaster and continuous military failures produced a growing subordination to the Germans, the disillusionment with the duce’s leadership began to spread rapidly. The bombing campaign against the Italian cities, however, more than military defeats or the economic crisis was the largest single contributory factor in the collapse of Italian morale.Footnote 49 As has been outlined, since the autumn of 1942, the population became a hostage of the war, caught between pounding air attacks and Allied propaganda that encouraged the people to revolt against the regime.Footnote 50
Growing in intensity, protests were often led by women who experienced the war's deprivations more severely.Footnote 51 In the aftermath of the bombings of Genoa in October and November, for example, protests were not aimed just at the regime's inefficiencies or its inability to defend the populace from the raids but started to question, more or less explicitly, the duce’s leadership as well. A clear sign of the alienation from the regime were the industrial workers' strikes in March 1943, which were sparked by the consequences of the Allied attacks on Turin.Footnote 52
As has been properly observed, however, mass resentment and war-weariness did not mean, for the moment, that anti-fascist attitude had become widespread or that anger could easily evolve in an outright revolt against the regime.Footnote 53 In a series of reports to the cabinet, Anthony Eden, from his point of view, well summarized the ebb and flow of Italian morale as it was perceived in London.Footnote 54 In November, in noting that confusion ruled in the Italian camp and that it was ‘possible that moderate fascists might be willing to conclude a separate peace’, the foreign secretary judged scarcely conceivable that the bulk of the fascist party or the Germans ‘would allow Grandi or any other group of Italians to treat with the Allies’. As Eden had previously outlined in October, since the start of the war the duce had lost much of his popularity but the essential prerequisites for a fascist meltdown, ‘the emergence of an alternative leader’ and the ‘impotence on the part of the Germans to control the situation’, were – for the moment – only potential.
Around the same time in Rome, many foreign observers reached similar conclusionsFootnote 55 while Grandi poignantly noted with Bottai, the fascist minister of education, the erratic and ineffectual nature of the contacts by disillusioned fascist leaders who found themselves incapable of developing a coherent strategy of opposition.Footnote 56 At all events, as rumours continued to spread, the worsening of the situation urged Badoglio to inform the British, through the Special Operations Executive (SOE), of his willingness ‘at the right moment, to take over and establish a military government’.Footnote 57
Lacking the support of the Royal House, discontent and half plots could barely shake the ‘divide and conquer’ system of Mussolini's personal ruling strategy. The head of fascism, on the other hand, could not allow the situation to remain unchecked for long. His speech before the Chamber had been the first step to reaffirm his mastery on the Italian political scene as well as to dispel rumours about his shaky health. The second step was the dismissal of Cavallero, followed, in early February, by an extensive cabinet reshuffle, in which even Ciano lost his position as foreign minister. Without doubt, the manoeuvre aimed at effacing from Mussolini the stains of recent military failures and restating the firmness of his power. Nevertheless, it also marked a subtle but considerable change in his attitude towards Germany: he continued nurturing the image of himself as the sole guarantor for Italy's loyalty to the Axis but he began sending out clearer signals about the consequences for himself – and for the fascist regime – of a German refusal to adopt a ‘Mediterranean strategy’.
Thus, as the Allied offensive mounted in the following months, the duce progressively stiffened his stance in his relationship with the Germans by manifestly endorsing the wave of anti-German feelings rising from the ranks of the Italian army and from diplomatic circles.
II
In this context, it is worth noting that the dismissal of the pro-German Cavallero had been decided right after Ciano's failure to win Hitler overFootnote 58 and that Mussolini himself apparently welcomed Ambrosio's intention of ‘putting his foot down with the Germans’ as soon as he was appointed as the new chief of staff.Footnote 59
Furthermore, in a revealing speech delivered on 3 January 1943, a few days before the public announcement of Ambrosio's promotion, Mussolini returned to the Mediterranean theme criticizing the German ‘continental mentality’ and cautiously underscoring the need for a more close comradeship with the German troops.Footnote 60 Around the same time, in another speech addressed to the cabinet, though confident of victory he admitted plainly that the military situation had become difficult.Footnote 61 Conversely, on a diplomatic level, in his instructions to Alfieri on 16 February, he stressed the need to take a firm but loyal stance in his relations with the Germans.Footnote 62
There were, as we can see, enough signals to make the warning bell ring in Berlin. On 24 February, Ribbentrop himself went to Rome officially to deliver a message to Mussolini in which the Führer underscored the need to continue the struggle to the very end. On that occasion, as Deakin has pointed out, trying his best to show himself confident of the final Axis success, the duce limited himself to counselling a defensive strategy on the Eastern Front in exchange for a grandiose offensive in Africa.Footnote 63 His arrogance, in fact, disguised his fears regarding the Mediterranean theatre and in pressing for the strengthening of the Tunisian bridgehead he hoped to remind the Germans of the precarious basis of his domestic power. Summarizing the outcome of Ribbentrop's mission, Goebbels noted indeed that Mussolini had appeared to be ‘willing to take an energetic hand, both in the political and the military sector’ but that it was doubtful ‘whether he will be successful’ since he ‘doesn't actually have so much power as it would appear’.Footnote 64 The loss of Tunisia, which – Goebbels concluded – Mussolini wished to defend at all costs ‘for reasons of domestic politics’, would be a heavy blow to fascism. Just days before Ribbentrop's visit, in a forty-five-minute interview with the German correspondent Heymann, Mussolini himself confessed that he had been forced to dismiss the ministers because of their ‘clique building’ but that he did not foresee any danger for the regime, at least as long as Tunis remained in Axis hands.Footnote 65 From that moment, the battle for Tunisia and the extent of German support to Italy became key elements in bolstering his side in the strategic controversy with Hitler as he began to endorse Ambrosio's demands for supplies and aircraft.
Points of friction with the Germans were numerous indeed. In Yugoslavia, Italian and German interests collided from almost the outset of the occupation and intertwined with different approaches towards the insurgents. While the Wehrmacht aimed at strengthening Pavelić’s hideous regime, the Italians – loath to sacrifice their occupied areas to the logic of counterinsurgency – indulged in maintaining their contacts with Četniks and often hampered German operations. When Italian power in the region waned, frictions with the Wehrmacht increased as well as mutual distrust. Ambrosio, who had a long history of feuds with the Germans as former chief of the Italian Second Army in Yugoslavia, struggled to preserve Italian influence and his pro-Četnik policy while skirmishing with Berlin to repatriate as many units as possible to defend the Italian mainland.Footnote 66
In regards the Mediterranean theatre, the Italian chief of staff, with Mussolini's support, tried to limit the presence of Wehrmacht units on Italian soil and demanded that German aid would come mainly in the form of supplies and materiel, in particular fuel and aircraft. The Italian navy appeared reluctant to commit its last assets to covering convoys and moving into dangerous waters without proper air cover. Consequently, Ambrosio and the duce delayed German pressure to employ Italian destroyers to supply the Tunisian bridgehead and foiled any attempt to place naval operations in the hands of the Kriegsmarine.Footnote 67
On a diplomatic level, the new undersecretary for foreign affairs, Giuseppe Bastianini, did his part in causing further annoyance in Berlin by promoting the idea of an inter-Axis conference to define the war aims and the post-war European order. With Hungarians and Romanians badly shaken after Stalingrad, the envisaged conference would have set the scene for a dangerous critique of German strategy.
In that context, two letters dated 9 and 26 March,Footnote 68 whose main theme revolved around the need to secure the Russian front in order to regain the initiative in the Mediterranean, marked the renewal of Mussolini's effort to persuade Hitler. Peace with Russia, Mussolini reasoned in the last of them, could be at hand, or at least a solid ‘eastern wall’ would suffice to keep the Red Army at arm's length. It was useless to fight against the ‘Russian vastness’ while the real danger for the Axis was coming from the west. This time, the head of fascism might have nurtured some hope of overcoming Hitler's obduracy. As the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Alfieri, had emphasized, many Germans saw Mussolini as the sole man capable of reasoning with Hitler. In that sense, most German officials in the Wolfsschanze had quietly applauded his missives. Therefore, in the last of his letters the duce closed his reasoning with a warning: left alone in the Mediterranean, Italian resistance could not last for long. The stage was set for the decisive showdown with Hitler.
As in the previous December, however, and despite Mussolini's personal effort,Footnote 69 at the congress held at Klessheim, between 7 and 10 April, Italian hopes shattered against German wilfulness. As Ribbentrop tersely reminded Bastianini during their preliminary meeting, there was no chance for political solutions in the east: having dispelled the ghosts of Stalingrad, Hitler would not be diverted from dealing the soviets a decisive blow.Footnote 70 A vague declaration about post-war collaboration among nations under Axis supervision was the only result that the Italians were able to carry home from Klessheim. His apparent confidence after the conference notwithstanding, the blow for Mussolini's hopes had been hard.Footnote 71
Therefore, continuing to support Ambrosio's compelling demands was his immediate choice to counter – with scant hope of success – the increasing Allied pressure. To make Hitler ponder, however, the sole option left to him was to continue playing on the precariousness of his domestic position. In this regard, before leaving Klessheim, by warning the Führer that he had no successor who could lead the fascism in his stead he meant to underscore his irreplaceable role in the survival of the Axis.Footnote 72
At the same time, in skirmishing with the Germans along with his chief of staff, Mussolini could not escalate the tension up to a breaking point as he grasped how the end of the Axis might seal his own political fate. This explains his apparent calm after Klessheim and why his conduct, on the other hand, often left Ambrosio and Bastianini annoyed and bewildered.Footnote 73
De Felice himself, though observing the political nature of Mussolini's actions, has underscored the incoherence of this policy that prevented the duce from engaging in a productive relationship with the Germans during the last weeks of his power.Footnote 74 Indeed, his apparent inconstancy and incomprehensible isolation in which he closed himself paved the ground for his eventual removal from office as discouragement grew through the ranks of the ruling class and the military. Nevertheless, his incoherence appears less evident if we consider that his actions were always taken with his eyes fixed on Hitler's reactions in a vain hope to force him to ponder over the consequences of a fascist collapse. In this regard, Goebbels's remarks are revealing: ‘The Duce is really our only completely dependable support in Italy. As long as he is in control we need have no fear.’Footnote 75 Somewhat paradoxically, however, far from forcing the Germans to revise their grand strategy, Mussolini's actions spurred Hitler into planning, behind his back, the occupation of Italy in case of need.Footnote 76
Thus, with the clock ticking after the loss of Tunisia and the successful Allied landing in Sicily, the duce had to conceive a last and desperate effort to reopen the question of the Russian front.
III
On 16 July, a disturbing telegram arrived in the Gaimusho from the Japanese minister in Madrid, Yachichiro Suma. The Italian ambassador, Paulucci di Calboli, speaking in ‘strict secrecy’ on behalf of Mussolini, had revealed that Italy was on the verge of collapse since, without effective and immediate aid from Germany, ‘Italy would have no options’ but to fight single-handedly. Germany, as Paulucci added, had always ‘thought too little of the Mediterranean, and this was a great mistake. Even now she did not realize and launched out on a big offensive at Kursk, forsaking Italy in her plight.’ In the impossibility for Japan to strike at once at Russia, Paulucci concluded, Tokyo and Berlin ‘should make a serious effort to win Russia over’ by proposing a concrete peace offer based on the status quo ante.Footnote 77
Some days later, finding it hard to understand why the Italians had chosen such an indirect way of addressing such an important matter, the Japanese foreign secretary, Mamoru Shigemitsu, urged Hidaka in Rome to request an immediate meeting with the head of fascism. Nevertheless, strangely enough, in those days Mussolini left Bastianini to deal with Hidaka and avoided meeting him until the morning of 25 July.
Yet, Mussolini's move had touched a raw nerve as, after Alamein, Tokyo had become increasingly worried about the Mediterranean theatre of operations and Hidaka himself had been appointed as ambassador in Rome as a further sign of Japanese intention of better co-ordinating its mediation for a peace on the Eastern Front with Italy.Footnote 78 Moreover, Mussolini was well aware that Oshima, in Berlin, was anxious to contact Hitler before the Germans could launch their scheduled offensive at Kursk.Footnote 79
In the meanwhile, the duce was continuing his psychological contest with Hitler. On 1 July, against the latter's will, he received the Romanian deputy premier, Antonescu, with whom he agreed to promote the long-debated inter-Axis conference after having promised to urge the Führer to use ‘every political weapon’ in the conduct of the war.Footnote 80 Mussolini's true hopes, in fact, rested as before on securing a Nazi–Soviet settlement like what had emerged in his last speech before the Allied onslaught on Sicily when he proclaimed himself confident that the Axis would repeal the incoming invasion. ‘Maybe then’, he added, ‘whoever until now has let himself be slaughtered all to the good of the Anglo-Saxon plutocracy will realize that the game is not worth the candle.’Footnote 81 Though implied, the message for Stalin could not have been clearer. Then, when the Allied Operation Husky hit Sicilian soil and the Italian political situation began to crumble under his feet, Mussolini was left with no options but to try swaying Hitler with a desperate and unambiguous sign of his distress.
This helps explaining why, having instructed Paulucci to alert the Japanese after the Allies had taken a firm foot on Italian soil, he agreed to meet the Grand Council as requested, in the afternoon of 16 July, by a small number of fascist leaders led by Farinacci and Scorza.Footnote 82 The emerging of a strong opposition in this meeting, if not a vote of no confidence, was to be his last measure to scare the Reichskanzler with the impending collapse of fascism and to give an edge to the Japanese in their peace efforts. The purely advisory nature of the Grand Council would have provided an ideal terrain for a manoeuvre of this kind. In this regard, it is worth noting that an attempt, made in those days by Rotigliano and sixty-one other senators, to assemble the senate to discuss the war policy was promptly foiled by the duce who urged the senate president, Suardo, to reject the proposal.Footnote 83
To arrange his ploy better, however, Mussolini needed a last showdown with Hitler. On the one hand, a last-minute meeting would reveal how, among his close collaborators, the dissatisfaction with the German conduct of the war had reached boiling point. On the other, as argued by De Felice, if Mussolini failed to convince Hitler, the predictable German obduracy would have provided a further element to lay the blame on them for an eventual breakup of the Axis.Footnote 84
A few days before meeting Hitler, the Italian dictator had seemingly given in to Bastianini's pressure to put out peace feelers towards the British in utter secrecy. Consequently, an Italian banker with a Vatican passport, Giovanni Fummi, former agent of the Morgan Bank in Italy, was to establish contact with the British ambassador in Portugal.Footnote 85 Mussolini, however, knew all too well that the Allied formula of unconditional surrender had left Italy with no room to negotiate.
Therefore, when the two dictators met at Feltre, on 19 July, Mussolini left Bastianini, Alfieri, and Ambrosio on the forefront as the preliminary meetings deteriorated in tense exchanges between Italian and German delegates.Footnote 86 Wishing to preserve his image of being the only reliable asset the Germans could rely upon in Italy, the duce barely controlled himself, leaving Hitler to convert the main conference in an angry and boring monologue. Disgruntled, Alfieri and Bastianini, led by Ambrosio, tried to urge an apparently spiritless Mussolini into broaching with the Führer the idea of an Italian release from the Axis. ‘But what would Hitler's attitude be?’, Mussolini replied to them wearily, ‘can you believe that he would allow us to retain our freedom of action?’.Footnote 87 Then, after a last meeting with Hitler without interpreters, Mussolini left Feltre ostensibly buying into German vacuous assurances of help. Upon his return in Rome, however, his first political action was to summon the Grand Council for the afternoon of 24 July.Footnote 88
In the morning of 22 July, while Bastianini entertained Hidaka,Footnote 89 officially to report on the outcome of Feltre, Mussolini met the king. According to Victor Emmanuel's aid de camp, General Puntoni, the sovereign tried to pressure the duce into relinquishing his power but ‘it was as if [he] had spoken to the wind’.Footnote 90 Mussolini, on the other hand, remembered how that day he and the king simply agreed on the necessity of putting the Germans in a quandary.Footnote 91 As De Felice has deftly argued, these memories should be regarded as suspicious or insufficient. The more credible version of what happened between the king and the dictator was perhaps provided by Badoglio who recalled that Victor Emmanuel agreed, that morning, to give the duce three months to contrive an Italian withdrawal from the Axis.Footnote 92 Badoglio's version, in addition, has never been contradicted by the Italian monarchy in following years. Moreover, had the king acted as Puntoni recalled, Mussolini's apparent calm before the Grand Council would have resulted in being all but incomprehensible. Had he doubted Victor Emmanuel's ostensible backing, the duce would have postponed or cancelled the Grand Council or, at least, would have prepared proper countermeasures to face Grandi's opposition by composing, at least, an order of the day of his own. Despite the frequent warnings that he was receiving from disparate sources, including his wife, regarding a possible coup against him,Footnote 93 the duce maintained his manifest serenity even after having received a copy of Grandi's order of the day.
With the king allegedly covering his back, he had much more to fear from Farinacci's schemes to replace him with the Germans' blessings.Footnote 94 To outmanoeuvre Farinacci and to strengthen his ploy, Mussolini had to underscore his crucial role for the Axis's survival. Consequently, when the doors of the ‘parrot room’ in Palazzo Venezia closed behind him, he opened the Grand Council with a long speech in which he criticized the military and openly acknowledged that the Germans had done their best to support the Italian war effort.Footnote 95
As if these words were not challenging enough, the head of fascism surprisingly left his audience free to ponder and draw their own conclusions. With these premises, as Grandi announced his order of the day the debate rapidly turned against the duce who ignored the counsels to adjourn the session. According to Scorza, during a short break late in the night, Mussolini promised to support the order of the day that Scorza himself had prepared to counter Grandi's resolution. Indeed, when the Council resumed its works, the duce warned that voting Grandi's document could spell the end of the regime but did little to aid the secretary of the party in winning over the assembly. On the contrary, once Bottai and Grandi had countered Scorza's argumentations Mussolini suddenly decided to put to vote Grandi's order of the day and, in leaving the room after nineteen of the twenty-eight members of the Council had voted with Grandi, he sternly announced that the vote would undermine the fascist regime.Footnote 96
Apart from Grandi, Bottai, Ciano, and obviously Mussolini, few of the members of the Council had grasped the true stakes and consequences associated with Grandi's resolution.Footnote 97 Therefore, Mussolini's apparent apathy was crucial in deciding the outcome of the vote. Had he formally endorsed the party's resolution as sought by Scorza, the support that Grandi had gathered during the interval would have vanished.Footnote 98
At this point, Mussolini's demeanour would result in being anything but comprehensible if we forget that he needed that vote for his manoeuvre against Hitler. In that sense, on his way home late at night, he had a revealing conversation with Scorza: ‘I did not consider it appropriate’, the duce said, ‘to inform the Council of my plans because…I convinced myself that, if I did, the Germans would know in detail, tomorrow morning or even tonight, what actually happened during the Council. That would probably have had incalculable pernicious effects.’Footnote 99 Furthermore, when Scorza, still puzzled by these words, enquired why Mussolini did not endorse the party's order of the day as he had promised: ‘very simple’, Mussolini answered, ‘If I had adopted your order of the day, everybody would have voted it. In that case, the opposition would not have come out in the open…that was what I wanted.’Footnote 100
The duce, on the other hand, was well aware that Grandi's resolution would bring the king into play. Although not entirely confident about Victor Emmanuel's loyalty, Mussolini was hoping that the gains would be worth the risks of triggering a government crisis: ‘In there’, he said to Scorza in driving along the Quirinale, the royal residence, ‘they don't love us, but the king is a loyal soldier.’Footnote 101
Determined to run the calculated risk of a king's betrayal, Mussolini spent the following hours completing his strategy. Once back at work early in the morning, he let Mackensen know that he was determined to counter the outcome of the Council.Footnote 102 A few hours later, he finally summoned Hidaka to Palazzo Venezia.
Once before him, ‘speaking with an air of gravity and frankness’, the duce commenced by saying ‘that the war between Germany and the Soviet Union should stop’.Footnote 103 The Italian war potential was modest and, without German aid, ‘it would be impossible to hold off and beat back the enemy’. Nearly echoing Paulucci's words to Suma, Mussolini remembered how ‘from the start he had told Germany to concentrate on the British and Americans’ and had ‘stressed that for this purpose she should make up her mind to return the Ukraine to Russia’. If Germany ‘set her mind to it’, the duce thought that ‘she could extricate herself on the 1939 line’. After all, ‘the Russians themselves were hard put to it’ since their losses had been heavy, and relations with Britain and America ‘were not on a sound basis’. Time – concluded Mussolini – ‘is not on our side’ and in order ‘to win this war, the Japanese government should prevail upon Germany and should, acting in conjunction with Italy, get her to abandon hostilities against the Soviet Russia’. He himself intended to address the matter with Hitler in a categorical manner but urged Hidaka to inform Tojo as soon as possible.
At this point, it has to be stressed that far from being occasional, as Bastianini ambiguously recalled in his memories,Footnote 104 the meeting with Hidaka had been perfectly timed. Hidaka himself was surprised at having been summoned on Sunday and right after an exceptionally long session of the Grand Council.Footnote 105
According to De Felice, surprised by the vote in the Council, Mussolini contrived a hasty plan to solve the crisis. The meeting with Hidaka was the first step to prepare himself to face the king in the afternoon. As a second step, Mussolini conceived to leave the military ministries and to appoint Grandi as foreign minister in a vast cabinet reshuffle. In this manner, by co-opting the leader of the opposition who boasted well-known contacts with the Allies, Mussolini hoped to persuade Victor Emmanuel into granting him the necessary time to arrange an Italian release from the Axis. There is much truth in De Felice's interpretation. It has to be underscored more than once, however, that the political crisis had been deliberately provoked by the duce who manoeuvred to let Grandi collect the strongest opposition possible around him. The appointment of Grandi, the most pro-British among the fascist leaders, as foreign minister would have had the same impact on the Germans as the vote of no confidence in the Council. It was meant to be another tool in Mussolini's personal gamble with Hitler. After all, the duce was sure that the king could not afford to remove from office the sole man allegedly capable of dealing with Hitler and to negotiate a withdrawal from the Axis short of an immediate war with Nazi Germany.
He was wrong. Pressed by the military, Victor Emmanuel had finally decided to replace him with Badoglio and to embark on the perilous adventure of negotiating the surrender of Italy behind the backs of the Germans. In the afternoon of 25 July, in the courtyard of Villa Savoia, a squad of Carabinieri placed Mussolini under arrest. It was the end of a dark period of Italian history. Another tragic one was about to unfold.
