EPILOGUE

THE AFTERMATH

THE RESCUE OF MUSSOLINI—WHICH WAS NATURALLY VIEWED AS A jailbreak by the Allies and the Badoglio regime—became an instant and enduring classic in the annals of special operations and surprised a war-weary world, most of which had no inkling as to the depths of Machiavellian intrigue that were animating the European Axis powers during the summer of 1943. Even today, despite its being one of the most dramatic stories of World War II, the dissolution of the Rome-Berlin alliance remains one of the lesser-known chapters of the war, at least in the popular mind.

One day after the Gran Sasso operation, the Nazis broadcast the news of the Duce’s rescue in a matter-of-fact statement that highlighted the role played by Skorzeny and the SS. “Members of the armed SS Guards and Secret Security Service,” read the announcement as reported by the New York Times, “aided by members of parachute troops, today carried out an undertaking for liberation of the Duce. The coup de main was a success. Mussolini is at liberty and his delivery to the Anglo-American Allies, which was agreed [sic] by the Badoglio government, has been frustrated.”1

Though Hitler deeply regretted the Italian surrender, he could console himself with having saved the Duce’s skin and given a sorely needed boost to German morale.² More important, he had reinforced Italy with enough German troops during August to defend the peninsula for some time to come. “Taken with the German success in occupying the greater part of Italy and holding the Allies well south of Rome,” wrote Hitler’s biographer Alan Bullock, “the restoration of Mussolini could be presented as a triumphant ending to the crisis which had threatened in the summer [of 1943] to leave the southern frontiers of the Reich directly exposed to Allied attack.”3

Nazi-controlled Paris radio predicted ominously, though overoptimistically, that the Duce’s liberation would pave the way for a resurgence of Fascism in Italy: “Mussolini is now free to take Italy in hand again and lead her along the road from which Badoglio tried to make her swerve, free to take vengeance for insults that have soiled the Italian flag, free at last to take a stand again with his army on the European side. Italy has again found her leader.”⁴ Japan, Hitler’s Axis ally in the Far East, offered its hearty congratulations. “The whole Japanese nation,” its information bureau informed the world, “was overwhelmed with joy” at the news of the Duce’s rescue.⁵

The story was naturally viewed with more cynicism by the Allied press, which was quick to point out that the Nazis had little else to crow about. “The serio-comic thriller—‘The Rescue and Liberation of Benito Mussolini’—was told, retold and heavily embroidered today by the German radio,” read an article in the New York Times on September 14, “which turned with apparent delight to this new subject after weeks of labored explanations of Nazi defeats in Tunisia, Russia, Sicily, and Italy.”⁶

The same article noted dryly that the Germans had made friendship a central theme in their propaganda: “A feature of Berlin’s story earlier in the day was that the kidnapping of Mussolini from his Italian guards was made possible through the personal friendship and Fascist brotherhood of Adolf Hitler, who, in his speech Friday [September 10], waxed heavily sentimental over the former dictator of Italy. The German propagandists said it was understood that ‘Hitler himself prepared the plan for freeing his friend’ and gave the orders for carrying it out.”⁷

There is no evidence that Hitler helped to develop the Gran Sasso operation, but he certainly lit a fire under the would-be rescuers and followed the ups and downs of Operation Oak with intense interest. The article continued: “One of the first acts of Mussolini, they said, was to telephone Hitler. They added that it was ‘difficult to express in words the feelings which animated Hitler and Il Duce during this historic conversation.’”8

It fell to Winston Churchill to explain how the big fish had gotten away. “We had every reason to believe that Mussolini was being kept under a strong guard at a secure place,” he told the House of Commons on September 21, “and certainly it was very much to the interests of the Badoglio Government to see that he did not escape. Mussolini has himself been reported to have declared that he believed that he was being delivered to the Allies. This was certainly the intention, and is what would have taken place but for circumstances entirely beyond our control.”⁹

Churchill, who never underestimated the importance of propaganda and had employed it to great effect during the darker years of the war, was also inclined to tip his hat: “But the stroke was one of great daring, and conducted with a heavy force. It certainly shows there are many possibilities of this kind open in modern war. . . . The Carabinieri guards had orders to shoot Mussolini if there was any attempt to rescue him, but they failed in their duty, having regard to the considerable German force which descended upon them from the air, and would undoubtedly have held them responsible for his health and safety. So much for that.”¹⁰

The Nazis hailed Skorzeny as the star of Operation Oak, a role that suited the cocky Austrian to a tee. With Hitler’s blessing, he took to the German airwaves shortly after the rescue operation and announced to the world that he was the man who had liberated Mussolini. The newly promoted major was also draped with prestigious medals and decorations. He received the Knight’s Cross from Hitler and the Air Force Medal in Gold from Goering.¹¹ The Duce presented him with the Order of the Hundred Musketeers.¹² (Radl, Skorzeny’s deputy, was promoted to captain.)¹³

“The Gran Sasso raid naturally transformed this unknown Captain [Skorzeny] into the hero of the hour,” recalled Wilhelm Hoettl, an SS intelligence officer who had helped plan the Cianos’ escape in August. “But he has to thank Dr. Goebbels for the fact that his fame has spread so far and survived so long. For propaganda purposes Goebbels was greatly in need of some German success and Skorzeny was to provide a mighty dramatic one.”14

Goebbels himself was ecstatic. “The liberation of the Duce is the great sensation at home and abroad,” he wrote in his diary a few days after the raid. “Even upon the enemy the effect of the melodramatic deliverance is enormous . . . the entire German people . . . are profoundly happy.”¹⁵ He added: “There has hardly been a military event during the entire war that has so deeply stirred the emotions and evoked such human interest. We are able to celebrate a firstclass moral victory.”¹⁶

But not everyone was in the mood to rejoice. As Skorzeny was enjoying his new celebrity status, General Student and Major Harold Mors were stewing. They believed that Skorzeny and his SS commandos were hogging all the credit for what they maintained was essentially a Luftwaffe operation—one that was planned and executed by German airborne forces. As they saw it, the simple fact that Skorzeny and Radl had landed on the Gran Sasso before any of the paratroopers—contrary to the prepared plan—had allowed the SS to grab the Duce as well as the glory.

Though just about everyone who played a role in Operation Oak received honors of one sort or another—including Herbert Kappler, Mors, Gerlach, Meyer (Skorzeny’s glider pilot), and many of the Luftwaffe officers and pilots who participated in the rescue— it was Skorzeny who received the lion’s share of the credit.* According to Student, Mussolini never even bothered to thank him or the paratroopers for their role in the operation.¹⁷

“It sounded more or less as if Skorzeny and his SS-commando performed this sensational mission by themselves,” remembered Student, who received the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross about two weeks after the rescue (he had already earned a Knight’s Cross earlier in the war).¹⁸ When Mors attempted to lodge an official complaint, Hitler turned a deaf ear. He preferred to shine the spotlight on Skorzeny and the fanatically loyal SS, the one organization in which Hitler still believed he could trust.¹⁹ However, this did not stop Student and his paratroopers from returning to the Gran Sasso with a camera crew to restage the rescue on film from their point of view.²⁰

In a slightly comical footnote to history, the American novelist John Steinbeck also made a brief appearance in the Mussolini rescue saga. As the Allies were struggling to establish a foothold at Salerno in the wake of the Italian surrender, Steinbeck was snooping around on the island of Ventotene, where he believed he had come close to bagging Il Duce. “Accompanying a British American tank force that recently took Ventotene island off Naples (on Sept. 9),” reported the New York Times on September 13, “Mr. Steinbeck said he missed Mussolini there by less than twelve hours.”²¹

As was seen earlier, the Duce was never imprisoned on Ventotene, though the island had captivated Hitler during the first half of August. (Steinbeck’s investigations also determined, correctly this time, that Mussolini had been imprisoned on Ponza as well.)

Two days after his liberation, Mussolini was reunited with Hitler— who, during their ten-year relationship, had played the roles of protégé, mentor, and savior in turn—at the Wolf ’s Lair in East Prussia.* The triumphant reunion of the two dictators was captured by German newsreel footage, which was broadcast throughout the Third Reich and beyond. In jerky black-and-white images, Hitler could be seen greeting the Duce enthusiastically as the latter stepped off a Junkers 52 at an airport near Rastenburg. Mussolini, who was wearing a darkcolored suit and a fedora, resembled a tired businessman after a lengthy flight. The two men shook hands for a long time and exchanged what appeared to be warm words. Hitler reportedly had tears in his eyes.²²

The mood behind the scenes was less convivial. Hitler had expected the Duce to be brimming with diabolical energy, but instead he seemed depressed and unresponsive. To begin with, the German dictator exhorted his friend to exact swift revenge on Galeazzo Ciano and the other traitors of July 25 who had voted against Mussolini in the Grand Council of Fascism. A handful of these men had fallen into German hands, and Hitler was determined to make an example out of them.

Ciano, who was still married to the Duce’s daughter Edda, had fled to Germany in late August in the naïve hope that the Nazis would facilitate the next leg of his journey to Spain. But Hitler despised Mussolini’s son-in-law, as did most of the Nazi hierarchy, and Ciano’s ill-advised plans to publish a tell-all book helped to seal his fate. “Ciano intends to write his memoirs,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “The Fuehrer rightly suspects that such memoirs can only be written in a manner derogatory to us, for otherwise he could not dispose of them in the international market. There is therefore no thought of authorizing Ciano to leave the Reich; he will remain in our custody.”²³

But when Hitler demanded that Ciano and the others pay with their heads, the Duce hesitated.²⁴ Weary and physically unwell, he was no longer the blustering dictator of former days, and he had no enthusiasm for enacting an Italian version of Hitler’s infamous Night of the Long Knives. The notion of signing Ciano’s death warrant was particularly troubling to Mussolini, but Hitler remained unmoved by arguments concerning family ties.

In the outlaw world of the Nazis, Mussolini’s lack of bloodlust was interpreted as a sign of weakness. “The Duce has not drawn the moral conclusions from Italy’s catastrophe that the Fuehrer had expected of him,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “He was naturally overjoyed to see the Fuehrer and to be fully at liberty again. But the Fuehrer expected that the first thing the Duce would do would be to wreak full vengeance on his betrayers. But he gave no such indication, and thereby showed his real limitations. He is not a revolutionary like the Fuehrer or Stalin. He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks the broad qualities of a worldwide revolutionary and insurrectionist.”25 As for Goebbels, he believed that Ciano should be executed and Edda “whipped.”²⁶

Hitler got another knock on the head when the Duce expressed a desire to retire from public life and return to Rocca delle Caminate, his country estate in the Romagna, to avoid an outbreak of civil war in Italy.²⁷ But Hitler quickly vetoed this option, telling his friend that such a development would reflect badly on Germany and undermine the legitimacy of the new Fascist state that Hitler was planning to establish in German-occupied Italy.²⁸ Mussolini eventually acquiesced to Hitler’s wishes, perhaps in the hope that he could protect his countrymen from Nazi brutality.

Ultimately, both men were disappointed by their reunion at the Wolf ’s Lair in September, and by their newest incarnation of the Axis. Mussolini’s attitude gave Hitler little hope that he could expect much from the resurrection of the Italian dictator. “We may consider him absolutely disillusioned concerning the Duce’s personality,” wrote Goebbels about his boss, though he added that there was “no actual quarrel.”²⁹ Goebbels, it should be said, was jealous of Mussolini’s bond with Hitler and took a certain degree of pleasure in watching the Duce’s stock fall in Hitler’s eyes.³⁰ In the final analysis, Mussolini was “nothing but an Italian,” Goebbels huffed, “and can’t get away from that heritage.”³¹

Hitler’s disappointment ran deep. “Belief in Fascist Italy as a pillar of the Nietzschean paradise had been part of his psychological structure,” according to the Axis expert Elizabeth Wiskemann. “He was now forced to admit that a major pretence of his life had been nonsense, that Italy had been no better in this war than in the last, and that Mussolini was excessively Italian. His Mentor, his twin- Superman for twenty-one years, was a perfectly ordinary man.”32

There was something ironic about this revelation. Though the rescue of the Duce had given the German public something to feel good about, that same event seems to have disillusioned Hitler in private.

As for Mussolini, his regrets were already etched on his face. “The resurrected dictator looked old, tired and wan,” recalled the SS man Eugen Dollmann, who saw the Duce on September 27, “and only his eyes retained their old Palazzo Venezia fire. . . . I congratulated him on his release from the Gran Sasso and reassumption [sic] of power, but he dismissed my remarks with a gesture of resignation and the light in his eyes grew dim.”³³ Rachele Mussolini later wrote that “after July, 1943, Benito Mussolini, my husband, thought that his star had completely faded; from that time he spoke of himself solely as ‘Mussolini defunto,’ or the late Mussolini. He greatly feared German intentions for the future of Italy and was conscious that as head of the Italian Social Republic he was merely protecting the Italians from German revenge.”³⁴

The Italian Social Republic was the name of the Duce’s new neo-Fascist regime, which came into being that September. Because nobody knew exactly when Rome might fall to the Allies, Mussolini’s government was established on the western shore of Lake Garda near Salò in northern Italy—Lake Garda being almost equidistant between Milan and Venice.³⁵ It was also believed that the Duce’s presence in Rome might prove to be too politically explosive in light of the anti-Fascist feeling in the city. Historians later dubbed the new regime the Salò Republic, but by any name it was a puppet kingdom created under the aegis of the Nazis. Though Mussolini was its nominal leader, Hitler and the Germans pulled most of the strings. During the remainder of his life, the Duce never again saw the Eternal City.36

Under pressure from Hitler, Mussolini convened a kangaroo court in January 1944 at Verona to dispense summary justice to Ciano and five other Fascists who had cast their votes against the Italian dictator during the Grand Council meeting several months earlier.³⁷ (Altogether, nineteen men had voted against Mussolini on the evening of July 24–25, but most of them, including Dino Grandi, had escaped the grasp of the Nazis. At Verona, thirteen of them were sentenced to death in absentia.)

Ciano’s wanderings came to an end at Fort Procolo, a few miles outside Verona in northern Italy, where he and four other defendants were shot by a firing squad (the sixth was given a long prison sentence). As a sign of contempt, the men were shot in the back, but Ciano managed to turn around at the last moment to face his executioners.³⁸ Edda, who had begged her father to spare her husband’s life, was crushed by Galeazzo’s death and nearly had a nervous breakdown.*

During his second incarnation as dictator, Mussolini found a home at the Villa Feltrinelli in the small town of Gargnano on Lake Garda.³⁹ He was “virtually a prisoner” of the Germans, according to the Italian historian Paolo Monelli.⁴⁰ Hitler’s SS troops guarded the villa day and night and followed the Duce almost everywhere he went. They were ostensibly there to protect his person, but they also spied on him and even monitored his telephone calls. (Mussolini liked to refer to General Karl Wolff, commander of the SS in Italy, as his jailer.)⁴¹ Further complicating matters, the Villa Feltrinelli was noisy and crowded. The house was practically overflowing with the Duce’s sizable family, which included his wife, children, daughters-in-law (who fought with each other), and several grandchildren.

Mussolini found domestic life suffocating and began to spend more and more of his time at his nearby office, the Villa delle Orsoline. He also devoted an increasing amount of time to his philosophical ruminations and left the business of state largely to his various Fascist ministers. To some of those around him, the Duce seemed to be out of touch with the real world. “He lives by dreams, in dreams, and through dreams,” observed Fernando Mezzasoma, a young Fascist who grew close to Mussolini during the Salò Republic years. “He has not the least contact with reality, he lives and functions in a world which he constructs for himself, a completely fantastic world; he lives outside time.”⁴²

The Duce’s mistress, Claretta Petacci, and her family were installed on a nearby estate. However, under pressure from his wife, Mussolini did not visit Claretta as often as he might have wished. He found other ways to occupy his time, such as badmouthing the Nazis behind their backs, playing Beethoven or Verdi on his violin (in his less-than-graceful, machismo style), reading Plato and Goethe, and complaining about his insomnia and other health problems.

“He was an old man,” wrote the historian Martin Clark, “defeated in life, wasted by sickness, abandoned by his daughter, surrounded by a squabbling family, bullied by the Germans, without friends and without hope. Still, he deserved his fate. He was an arrogant bully, and he had miscalculated.”⁴³

His gloom could only have deepened as he watched a bitter civil war flare up behind the German lines. “Mussolini’s bid for a Fascist revival plunged Italy into the horrors of civil war,” Churchill later wrote. “In the weeks following the September Armistice, officers and men of the Italian Army stationed in German-occupied Northern Italy and patriots from the towns and countryside began to form partisan units and to operate against the Germans and against their compatriots who still adhered to the Duce.”⁴⁴

The 80,000 or so Partisans (more than half of whom had joined the Communist-controlled Garibaldi brigades) did everything they could to make life harder for Mussolini and the Nazis.45 They employed the standard tricks of the trade: assassinations, sabotage, and surprise attacks.⁴⁶ The Germans responded by launching vicious attacks of their own against Partisans and civilians alike, sometimes setting entire villages aflame.*

The last Axis summit took place at the Wolf ’s Lair on July 20, 1944, just hours after an assassin’s bomb had nearly killed Hitler.** The two dictators spent part of the time rehashing the usual issues, according to Eugen Dollmann, who was present for the bizarre tea party. “The only new feature,” he observed, “was that there had at last been a putsch against Hitler in his own Reich, and that the Italians need no longer suffer taunts about 25 July and 8 September in silence.”⁴⁷

The scene became more interesting when an argument erupted among some of Hitler’s top lieutenants—Goering, Doenitz, and Ribbentrop—who began to squabble over the Third Reich’s military failures and point fingers at one another.⁴⁸ Mussolini listened silently as all this was going on, crumbling a piece of cake with his fingers and creating tiny sculptures with the remains.⁴⁹

Hitler also remained mum, apparently pondering his close call with death. Then he proclaimed: “Never have I felt more strongly that providence is at my side—indeed, the miracle of a few hours ago has convinced me more than ever that I am destined for even greater things and shall lead the German people to the greatest victory in its history.”⁵⁰

Though a ghost of his former self by that time, the Duce mustered a nostalgic response. “I must say you are right, Führer,” he said. “Our position is bad, one might almost say desperate, but what has happened here today gives me new courage. After the miracle that has occurred here in this room today it is inconceivable that our cause should meet with misfortune.”⁵¹

When the meeting had ended and the two men said their goodbyes at the train station, Hitler looked Mussolini in the eye for what seemed like an eternity and reaffirmed his friendship.⁵² “I know that I can count on you,” Hitler told him, “and I beg you to believe me when I say that I look on you as my best and possibly only friend I have in the world.”⁵³ When the Duce’s back was turned, Hitler reportedly drew aside Rudolf Rahn, the German ambassador to Fascist Italy, and told him to keep an eye on Mussolini—but it is not clear whether this cryptic aside was made in a spirit of distrust or affection.⁵⁴

“One pale and ageing man [Hitler] . . . extended his left hand to another pale and ageing man,” remembered Dollmann. “The two incongruous friends gazed deep into each other’s eyes once more, as in the days of their glory, but the light in those eyes was extinguished, almost as though they guessed that this was their last meeting.”⁵⁵

They met their ends the following year. By the spring of 1945, Mussolini’s kingdom in northern Italy was beginning to shrink rapidly under the pressure of the Allied advance and the increasing activity of Italian irregulars. Hitler sent his last message to the Duce on April 24, informing him that “the struggle for existence or non-existence has reached its climax.”⁵⁶ Shortly afterward, Mussolini and Claretta Petacci were captured by Partisans at a roadblock outside the village of Dongo (in the region of Lake Como).57 He was disguised as a German soldier at the time, wearing an army overcoat, helmet, and dark sunglasses.⁵⁸ On April 28, the Duce of Fascism and his lover were shot dead by the side of a road near the hamlet of Mezzegra on the western shores of Como.⁵⁹

The executions were conducted without fanfare or the semblance of a trial. The corpses were transported to Milan, where they were abused by the crowd and hung by their heels from a rafter in the Piazzale Loreto along with the dead bodies of several other captured Fascists.⁶⁰ The setting for this spectacle was strangely fitting: Milan was the city in which Mussolini had proclaimed the Axis almost ten years earlier.*

As the Duce dangled from a rope in Milan, Hitler was living in an underground bunker in Berlin. He had left the Wolf ’s Lair for good in November 1944;⁶¹ in January 1945, he ordered that it be destroyed, but German engineers did not have enough explosives to finish the job.**⁶² Half mad, his body nearly paralyzed from nervous tension and crazy drug cocktails, Hitler was still clinging to his center of power when he was informed of Mussolini’s demise.

“Hitler had heard of Mussolini’s shameful death,” remembered Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s secretaries. “I think someone had even shown him the photos of the naked bodies hanging head downwards in the main square of Milan. ‘I will not fall into the enemy’s hands either dead or alive. When I’m dead, my body is to be burned so that no one can ever find it,’ Hitler decreed.”***⁶³

On April 30, Hitler and Eva Braun, who had taken marriage vows the previous day, took their own lives. Goebbels, who had stayed by Hitler’s side until the bitter end, also chose death rather than face the tender mercies of the Russians, who were already fighting in the streets of Berlin. (Admiral Doenitz inherited the leadership of the Third Reich, albeit briefly.)

During the Saló years, Mussolini expressed the gratitude he felt at being rescued from the Gran Sasso. “The Greek philosopher, Thales,” wrote the Duce, making one of his beloved scholarly references, “thanked the gods for creating him a man and not a beast, a male and not a female, a Greek and not a barbarian. I thank the gods for having spared me the farce of a vociferous trial in Madison Square, New York—to which I should infinitely prefer a regular hanging in the Tower of London.”64

In what may have been a moment of greater honesty, Mussolini also admitted privately in the months before his death that he and Hitler had succumbed to their own illusions like a pair of madmen.⁶⁵

After the Gran Sasso raid, Skorzeny enjoyed a special status in the eyes of Hitler and was often entrusted with special missions that the German dictator considered especially important. “Throughout his military career,” wrote William H. McRaven, a U.S. Navy Seal, “Skorzeny used tactical deception and acts of extreme bravado to throw the enemy off guard and gain an advantage.”⁶⁶ Though not all his efforts were successful, he managed to score several more coups before war’s end that increased his notoriety.

One of Skorzeny’s most well-known exploits during World War II took place during the Battle of the Bulge, which was sparked by a surprise German offensive that Hitler launched in the West in December 1944. The primary attack force consisted of conventional army units. But, in one of his final brainstorms, Hitler instructed Skorzeny to send a group of commandos behind enemy lines dressed as American soldiers (Operation Greif). After receiving months of training, dozens of these bogus GIs were set loose in Allied territory, where they proceeded to commit acts of sabotage by misdirecting road traffic, snipping telephone lines, and generally creating havoc. Although Skorzeny’s commandos did little actual damage, their presence caused a mass panic that was out of all proportion to their numbers.

During this period, Allied soldiers had difficulty distinguishing friend from foe and had to subject one another to endless crossexaminations. In the furor, authentic GIs were swept up and arrested on the suspicion of being Nazi spies. The privileges of rank offered little protection. An American general by the name of Bruce Clark was arrested by overzealous MPs and detained for five hours.

As a result of Operation Greif, “a half-million GI’s played cat and mouse with each other each time they met on the road,” recalled General Omar Bradley, a three-star general who was repeatedly stopped at Allied roadblocks and given the third-degree. “Three times I was ordered to prove my identity by cautious GI’s. The first time by identifying Springfield as the capital of Illinois (my questioner held out for Chicago); the second time by locating the guard between the center and tackle on a line of scrimmage; the third time by naming the then current spouse of a blonde named Betty Grable.”67

If that were not enough, the idea soon took hold in the Allied psyche that Skorzeny was planning to seize Eisenhower himself. As a result of these concerns, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces was practically put under house arrest by his own security men.

“Security officers,” recalled Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s secretary, “immediately turned headquarters compound [at Versailles] into a virtual fortress. Barbed wire appeared. Several tanks moved in. The normal guard was doubled, trebled, quadrupled. The pass system became a strict matter of life and death, instead of the old formality. The sound of a car exhaust was enough to halt work in every office, to start a flurry of telephone calls to our office, to inquire if the Boss were alright.”⁶⁸

Hitler’s offensive ultimately failed. But by the end of the war, Skorzeny had become something of a legend. When he finally surrendered in May 1945, the Allied press reports betrayed a grudging fascination with the boastful Austrian. “A rather handsome man,” wrote a New York Times reporter, “despite a scar stretching from his left ear to his chin, he smilingly disclaimed credit for heading a mission to murder members of the Allied High Command last winter . . . and declared that if any German soldiers operated behind the American lines in American uniform it was something that somebody else, not he, had cooked up.”69

But there was one subject about which Skorzeny could not keep silent. “After he had tried impatiently to convince his questioners that he was just an ordinary soldier whom gossip had maligned, Skorzeny settled down to telling a story he was obviously proud and eager to relate. It was the narrative of how he and a handful of picked men had snatched Mussolini from the fate that finally overtook him in northern Italy.”⁷⁰

Although Skorzeny’s roguish charm has captivated certain writers and historians in the succeeding years, it has disgusted others, who consider him little more than a resourceful terrorist.

In 1947, it was the opinion of an American military tribunal that mattered most. Skorzeny was charged with various offenses related to Operation Greif, including the murder of captured American soldiers. During his trial, the judges heard dramatic testimony from Wing Commander Forrest Yeo-Thomas, a legendary British agent who had worked closely with the French Resistance. Yeo-Thomas, known during the war as the White Rabbit, explained to the court that he had ordered his own operatives to carry out special missions disguised in German uniform. As a result of this and other testimony, Skorzeny was eventually acquitted of all charges, but was not immediately released.

He subsequently spent months languishing in a detention camp at Darmstadt in Germany awaiting the de-nazification process. Several Allied countries, such as Czechoslovakia and Belgium, expressed an interest in having Skorzeny extradited to face additional charges. When he appealed for help to Yeo-Thomas, the British hero gave a concise reply: “Escape.”71 Shortly afterwards, Skorzeny did just that. In July 1948, three former SS officers dressed as American military police drove to Skorzeny’s internment camp at Darmstadt, presented some official-looking papers, and whisked their celebrity prisoner to freedom (or so the story goes).*

The remainder of Skorzeny’s life, much of which was spent in South America and Spain, was shrouded in mystery. It was also the subject of fantastic rumors and wild speculation, some of which may well be true. During his postwar years, some writers claim, Skorzeny lent his sinister services to the CIA, went to work for Juan and Evita Peron in Argentina (it is even said that Skorzeny and Evita had a romantic affair), and played a key role in founding the so-called Odessa network, a covert organization that aimed to smuggle former SS men and other Nazis out of Germany and help them evade justice.

Truth often being stranger than fiction, it was revealed in 1989 that Skorzeny had also worked as a temporary agent of the Mossad, Israel’s version of the CIA, during the early 1960s.⁷² According to press reports, Skorzeny helped the Mossad to foil an Egyptian plan to use former Nazi scientists to develop a missile program.⁷³

He died of cancer in 1975 in Madrid.

In the decades after World War II, the name of Otto Skorzeny became synonymous with the rescue of Mussolini, and that was the way he liked it. His fame was apparently an endless source of irritation to Student and the German paratroopers, whose grievances with Skorzeny outlasted the cold war. According to author Charles Whiting, who interviewed General Student in the 1970s, the former paratrooper chief was still griping about Skorzeny thirty years after the Duce was snatched from the Gran Sasso. Student died in 1978.

Before his death in 2001, Major Mors also continued to champion the Luftwaffe cause. “Yes, it was the paratroops who planned and carried out the operation,” Mors explained in an interview published in the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “But for more than 40 years, Skorzeny has gotten all the credit. His version is something of a fairy tale. . . . The point is, Skorzeny and his SS commandos went along as passengers; Von Berlepsch commanded the assault team.”74

Mors said that his own critical role in the mission had been obscured because he remained in the valley. “I chose to stay with the two companies in the valley, because if anything went wrong with the glider force, I would still be in position to supervise the operation and decide what to do. Later, some people didn’t understand this, but my job was to command the whole operation, not just one aspect.”⁷⁵

Another paratrooper officer, Arnold von Roon, who had been a major on General Student’s staff during the war, later contended that politics had clouded the issue. “Once Hitler decided that it was Skorzeny and the SS commandos who led the operation,” Roon said, “it was difficult to do anything about it. Gen. Student didn’t want to get into a row with Goering over who got the credit. So he never protested. He thought history would provide the truth.”⁷⁶

Both Mors and Roon concede that Skorzeny was an imposing figure and quite a character. “He was huge, robust, intelligent, but not intellectual,” Roon recalled. “He was quite a charmer, too, and could be very persuasive. It is simply that he did not plan or lead the Mussolini operation.”⁷⁷

While not denying the role played by German airborne troops, some military historians continue to emphasize the Skorzeny factor. “Clearly Mors played a significant role in both the planning and execution of the mission,” McRaven argued in a 1995 book devoted to the subject of special operations. “But it was Skorzeny who conducted the aerial reconnaissance, it was Skorzeny who was the first to land at Gran Sasso, it was Skorzeny who controlled General Soleti, and it was Skorzeny who first reached Mussolini. Whether Skorzeny was a straphanger or the mastermind of the operation is inconsequential. Ultimately, success resulted from Skorzeny’s actions at Gran Sasso and not from Mors’s.”78

It is fair to say that the competing claims of Skorzeny and the German paratroopers have added yet another chapter to the complicated story of Operation Oak.

Once the summer of 1943 had faded into history, the curtain opened on a much larger drama: the battle for Italy. “From September 1943 until the end of April 1945,” wrote the historian Richard Lamb, “Italy suffered the disaster of being occupied by two conquering armies at war with each other, and the peninsula became a battleground.” ⁷⁹ In some ways, the six short weeks following the Italian coup of July 25 had determined the course of this long and brutal struggle. By failing to obstruct the German infiltration of Italy and declining to lend support to the Allied invasion (in the Rome area or elsewhere), the king and Badoglio had helped set the stage for the grim consequences that followed.

However, these consequences were not readily apparent in the wake of September 8. After their victory at Salerno, the Allies began to cast a covetous eye at the rest of the peninsula. Much like Hitler and Rommel, they believed that the Nazis would be forced to turn tail in the face of the Allied invasion, evacuate the region south of Rome, and make a stand in the north somewhere near Florence, more than one hundred miles from the Eternal City. Most of the country would therefore fall into Allied hands with little, if any, fighting. The capture of Rome would be the icing on the cake; but then again, considering its psychological value as a former Axis capital, perhaps Rome was the whole cake. Needless to say, most Italians preferred this upbeat scenario as well because it would spare much of the nation from the horrors of war.

“At first Hitler had intended to keep hold only of North Italy after Italy’s retirement from the war,” remembered General Westphal, Kesselring’s chief of staff. “Rommel was to absorb Kesselring’s forces into his army group in the [northern] Apennines and to make his stand in these mountains. Kesselring, who according to rumour was too soft with the Italians, was then to be transferred with his staff to some other war theatre—possibly Norway.”80

But Kesselring, who viewed the Allies as cautious and predictable from a military standpoint, managed to turn this situation on its head. He was so successful in foiling the enemy’s advance in the weeks after September 8 that Hitler gave Rommel his walking papers in November and named Kesselring the commander of all German forces in Italy. Kesselring, whose gullibility had so often made Hitler wince during the months of crisis, had finally beaten out his rival once and for all.*

Kesselring’s efforts at redemption created endless difficulties for the Allies. One glance at their timetable told the story. The Anglo- Americans had planned to liberate the nearby port of Naples by Day Three.⁸¹ It ultimately took them three weeks to get there (Naples fell on October 1), General Clark’s Fifth Army suffering 12,000 casualties (killed, wounded, or missing) in the process.⁸² Many in the Allied camp clung to the hope that Rome could be captured later that fall, perhaps by the end of October 1943.⁸³ Tragically, for the Allies and Italians alike, this prediction was about eight months off target.

The 140-mile distance from Salerno to Rome may have looked somewhat modest on a map, but the view from the ground was depressingly different.⁸⁴ The American and British soldiers whose job it was to slug their way up the boot of Italy were faced with mountains, rivers, and accurate German artillery. Kesselring forced them to fight for every inch of territory. Exploiting the lay of the land, he established a series of natural defensive lines on the rivers that run from the Apennines into the sea. The Germans held on to each line for as long as possible before falling back to yet another position— which they had thoroughly prepared beforehand—scorching the earth as they went. Kesselring’s tactics took on a monotonous regularity, but they were enormously effective.*

“The mountainous terrain of central Italy was Kesselring’s greatest ally,” according to the military historian Carlo D’Este. “Not only were the mountains themselves formidable obstacles, but the many rivers, the freezing winter weather, the wind, mud, and rain, and the limited road net made any advance against a well-prepared defender a potential nightmare.”⁸⁵

The Gustav Line, which brushed by the town of Cassino, about eighty miles south of Rome, was one of Kesselring’s toughest barriers. ⁸⁶ By January 1944, the Allies had ground to a halt before it. When brute force failed to shatter the stalemate, the Allies attempted to outmaneuver the Nazis in late January by landing additional troops at Anzio, which was situated north of the dreaded Gustav Line. If everything went according to plan, the Germans would be trapped between two Allied armies—one in front of them at Cassino and another in their rear at Anzio.

But things did not go as planned. Having taken the Germans by surprise, the Allied soldiers who landed at Anzio were easily able to establish a bridgehead. However, by the time they were ready to break out into other parts of the country, Kesselring had effectively bottled them up on the beaches. (Otto von Berlepsch, the ostensible commander of the glider assault force at Gran Sasso, took part in the fighting at Anzio and was killed in action there.)⁸⁷

The Allies—who were now stalled on two fronts—remained stuck at Cassino and Anzio for several months, unable to penetrate the suffocating German defense. The static nature of the fighting, and the heavy casualties that resulted, conjured up memories of brutal World War I trench warfare.

This deadlock was finally broken in the spring after a mighty effort on the part of the Allies. American soldiers from Clark’s Fifth Army entered Rome on June 4, 1944—nine months after the Salerno landings.

The city had not fared well under the German occupation. “Rome was an ‘open city’ whose walls shook under the waves of German military movements and the thunder of Allied bombs,” wrote the historian Robert Katz, referring to the occupation. “Swollen to nearly twice its usual size by refugees from the countryside, Rome was a city of spies, double agents, informers, torturers, escaped war prisoners, hunted Jews, and hungry people.”88

During this period, approximately 2,000 Jews from the city were shipped to concentration camps in the Third Reich (though most Roman Jews managed to avoid capture).* Understandably perhaps, many other Romans felt let down by their own leaders as well as by the Allies, whose promises of speedy liberation had never materialized. While the Allies were bogged down at Anzio, one bitter Roman scribbled an ironic piece of graffiti on a city wall: “Americans, hold on!” it read, mocking the promises of Allied propaganda. “We’ll be there soon to liberate you!”⁸⁹

But the Romans reserved their true anger for the Nazis. Throughout the occupation, the Germans were harried by the activity of various groups belonging to the Roman resistance. After one violent attack in March 1944, in which thirty-three German SS men were killed while marching along the Via Rasella, Hitler reacted with fury and ordered the immediate execution of hundreds of Romans. Herbert Kappler, who had been transformed from a mere attaché into the much-feared head of the Gestapo in Rome, carried out Hitler’s command (aided by his subordinate, Erich Priebke). Ultimately, 335 men were rounded up and shot dead in the Ardeatine Caves just outside Rome.*⁹⁰

Though this massacre remained the most infamous example of German brutality in the Italian mind, the Nazis carried out other atrocities in other cities and villages throughout occupied Italy. Kesselring, who had so often been criticized for being too “soft” when it came to the Italians, swung to the opposite pole in the years following the Italian surrender and advised his commanders to apply draconian measures in the fight against the Partisans.

His new attitude was reflected in orders such as those issued in August 1944: “Every act of violence must be followed immediately by appropriate counter-measures,” part of the order read. “If there are a large number of [Partisan] bands in a district, then in every single case a certain percentage of the male population of the place must be arrested, and, in cases of violence, shot. If German soldiers are fired at in villages, the village must be burnt. The criminals or else the leaders must be publicly hanged.”⁹¹

Shortly after liberating Rome, the Allied drive began to lose momentum. The culprit was Allied grand strategy, which involved the Normandy invasion in June 1944 and an additional landing in southern France in August. To carry out the latter, dubbed Operation Dragoon, several divisions were removed from the Italian theater.

By August 1944, the Germans had established the Gothic Line (in the mountains north of Florence), which their adversaries found to be another formidable barrier.⁹² Incredibly, this was the defensive line to which the Nazis had planned to retreat during the summer of 1943, before Kesselring had convinced Hitler to fight tooth and nail for Italy. Come winter, the Allies had run out of steam a few miles short of the Po Valley, which remained in German hands for several more months. The Allies finally made a breakthrough in the spring of 1945, but some parts of northern Italy remained under German control almost until the end of the war.*

The German army in Italy laid down its arms on May 2, 1945— nearly two years after Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio had toppled Mussolini in the hopes of putting a speedy end to the war.** When all was said and done, according to Carlo D’Este, the war in Italy was “the longest and bloodiest campaign fought by the Anglo-American Alliance in all of World War II.”⁹³

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*Mors was awarded the German Cross in Gold. Gerlach and Meyer each received a Knight’s Cross. Kappler was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and given the Iron Cross. Priebke, Kappler’s deputy, was bumped up to captain and also received the Iron Cross.

*Mussolini flew to the Wolf ’s Lair from Munich, where he had been reunited with his wife and family after the rescue.

*Edda’s attempts to save her husband’s life and smuggle his diaries out of Italy read like fiction but are outside the scope of this book. At the heart of the story is a female Nazi spy who became a de facto double agent after falling for Ciano’s charms during his brief prison term.

*There were also thousands of former Allied POWs roaming around Germanoccupied Italy, many of whom were aided by ordinary Italians at great personal risk.

**Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was implicated in the plot to kill Hitler and was subsequently thrown into a concentration camp. He was executed on Hitler’s orders in 1945. After the fall of Canaris, the victorious Schellenberg absorbed German Military Intelligence into the SS, ending the Nazi intelligence wars once and for all.

*An autopsy conducted in 1945 failed to shed much light on Mussolini’s mysterious health problems; it did, however, reveal a small scar indicative of an ulcer.

**The remains of the Wolf ’s Lair are now a tourist attraction in Poland.

***In his Last Days of Hitler, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper maintains that Hitler could not have seen the photos of Mussolini’s corpse and may have been unaware of the gruesome details.

*Some writers have alleged that the CIA aided Skorzeny in his escape with the view that he might prove useful to them in the future.

*In the fall of 1943, Hitler instructed Rommel to apply his formidable talents to the task of defending the Western frontiers of the Reich. Rommel, who so often had expressed his admiration for Hitler during the Italian crisis, was later implicated in the attempted assassination of the German dictator in July 1944 and forced to commit suicide.

*Student’s paratroopers made up part of Kesselring’s forces. The rescue of Mussolini proved to be their last notable airborne success. For the remainder of the war, they were employed as high-quality ground troops.

*Thanks to the efforts of the Italian people, about 80 percent of the Jews living in Italy escaped the clutches of the Nazis during the German occupation, though 8,000 died at their hands. During the Salò years, Mussolini also managed to save a number of Jewish lives.

*After the war, Kappler was convicted of war crimes and spent several decades in Italian prisons. Priebke fled to South America, where he lived as a free man for fifty years. In the mid–1990s, he was unmasked and extradited to Italy, where the octogenarian was sentenced to fifteen years of house arrest.

*In March 1945, Hitler gave Kesselring command of the German armies in the Western theater. After the war, he was convicted of war crimes in connection with German anti-Partisan activities in Italy. He served a brief prison term and was released in 1952.

**In June 1944, the Badoglio regime was replaced with a broad-based coalition government. In 1946, the Italians voted to get rid of the monarchy altogether and establish a republic. In 1948, the Italians banned the king and all his male descendents from ever again setting foot in Italy. This ban was lifted in 2002.