CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“A GROTESQUE COMEDY”

At 9:30 a.m. on the day that Himmler bit into his suicide pill at Lüneberg, Wednesday 23 May, three gray limousines carrying Wehrmacht license plates left Admiral Doenitz’s headquarters at Flensburg and drove to the quayside.¹ Moored alongside was the Patria, a luxury German passenger ship of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. On board were the members of a special mission sent by Eisenhower from his headquarters ten days before. With them was a group of Soviet officers. The crew was German.

In the first car rode Doenitz, in the full dress uniform of a grand admiral. Behind followed Admiral von Friedeberg, commander-in-chief of the German Navy, and the third car contained General Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the German High Command. When the convoy reached the quayside, Doenitz’s aide-de-camp stepped out smartly and held open the door. Carrying his gold-tipped baton, Doenitz made his way up the gangplank, followed smartly by the others. They were shown into a spacious lounge with a log table covered by a white tablecloth and invited to sit down. Several minutes passed in silence. Then the members of the allied mission entered the room, headed by US Major-General Lowell W. Rooks, followed by his deputy, a British brigadier. The Germans rose to their feet. “Gentlemen,” said Rooks, reading from a prepared text, “I am under instructions . . . to tell you that the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, has decided, in concert with the Soviet High Command, that today the acting German Government and the German High Command shall be taken into custody with the several members as prisoners of war. Thereby the acting German Government is dissolved.”

Doenitz listened impassively, noted one witness, “turkey-necked and tight-lipped as ever.” Jodl’s face turned red and he let some papers slip from his hand to the floor. Von Friedeberg looked as though he was on the verge of tears. Rooks asked Doenitz if he had anything to say. “Any word from me,” replied the grand admiral curtly, “would be superfluous.”

The three Germans, now prisoners, were driven back to their quarters to collect their bags and then taken to the Murwick police building, which was surrounded by a detachment of British troops. Here they were joined by Albert Speer. Hitler’s former minister of war production had been arrested at Glucksburg Castle in a simultaneous and carefully planned operation by British forces reinforced by a Belgian field security company who all spoke German. Their swoop was such a surprise to the castle’s five dozen inmates that Speer was caught sitting in his bath. “So now the end has come,” he remarked. “That’s good. It was all only a kind of opera anyway.”²

Now, seated on a bench with the others, he waited patiently as they were summoned one by one into an adjoining room for a full body search for vials of concealed poison. Afterwards, they were driven in an armed convoy to the nearby airfield for a flight that took them to an allied prison and interrogation center at Bad Mondorf in Luxembourg. The bizarre final chapter of Hitler’s Third Reich had at last come to a close.

It was also the end of an awkward interlude for the Western allies. The continued existence of a Nazi enclave within conquered Germany had begun as a curiosity but ended as an embarrassment, reflecting fumbling and uncertainty at the very top of the allied High Command. According to official surrender documents, there was not even supposed to be a German government. Yet, for almost two weeks, allied officers in the area left alone Doenitz and his cabinet. Partly this was to avoid a confrontation with the armed soldiers guarding the Flensburg enclave and any unnecessary deaths. It was also tolerated because Doenitz enjoyed little obvious power or influence outside his tiny domain. This was especially true after British forces seized the radio station from which he was continuing to send broadcasts to the German people.

However, allied leaders were hesitant about dissolving it for other reasons, too. Churchill, at least, thought that Doenitz and his group might prove useful. Millions of German troops were now gathered inside the British zone in and around Schleswig-Holstein, and hundreds of thousands of fully armed German soldiers were still stationed in Denmark and Norway. How were they to be disarmed and managed? More important, how were the German people as a whole to be controlled and directed in the chaos now engulfing Europe? The British Prime Minister talked of “letting things slide” for a while, and of using the Doenitz government, including captured German generals, to help keep order in Germany. “I neither know nor care about Doenitz,” he wrote a week after VE Day. “He may be a war criminal . . . the question for me is has he any power to get the Germans to lay down and hand over quickly without any more loss of life? We cannot go running round into every German slum and argue with every German that it is his duty to surrender or we will shoot him. Do you want,” he asked the Foreign Office, “to have a handle with which to manipulate the conquered people, or just have to thrust your hands into an agitated ant-heap?”³

But any idea of dealing with Hitler’s successor was anathema to Eisenhower and was sabotaged by Rooks and the allied mission on board the Patria when they decided that the last Nazi Government should be immediately disbanded. It was not just that it was proving useless in carrying out the tasks that Churchill had suggested. It was also that its continued existence was highlighting rifts between Washington and Moscow on how to deal with the Germans. The Americans were still committed to nonfraternization. By contrast, the Soviets were embracing the Germans with comradely abandon, sometimes literally so, and on board the Patria, reported Rooks with alarm, a Soviet officer had been drinking and laughing with three German officers in his cabin. Moreover, the press, especially in the United States, was becoming increasingly hostile to the whole Doenitz venture. Even on the news of his succession to Hitler two weeks before the New York Times had denounced the grand admiral as “no more trustworthy than Himmler” and the New York Herald Tribune was deriding the whole affair as “a grotesque comedy.” Even the more staid Times in London was by now criticizing any continued dealings with Doenitz.⁴

Worse, the wily Doenitz astutely exploited this. On Sunday 20 May, he had requested a meeting with Rooks and let loose with a diatribe in which he complained bitterly that in the West it was assumed that all Germans were criminals, and that the newspapers were full of reports about concentration camps–stories which, he protested, were “highly exaggerated.” By contrast, in their zone, the Russians were being friendly and even offering people cigarettes and sweets. “If you continue to treat the German people as you have done so far,” he warned, “they will turn to Russia, and Stalin will undoubtedly seize his chance.” Indeed, some pro-Soviet and anti-Western sentiment was already becoming apparent, especially in the German Navy, which had fought mainly against the British and whose officers and men felt that they–unlike the Wehrmacht–had not been defeated in battle. But Doenitz was exaggerating the fact, and using the argument merely as a cynical ploy to gain advantage.

Talk such as this was dangerous. But playing down Nazi atrocities in May 1945 was also foolish, and Doenitz badly overplayed his hand. Remarkably, even unconditional surrender did little to puncture illusions that continued to flourish at Flensburg. Only four days after VE Day, Jodl himself had declared–with no apparent irony–that “the moment will come when we shall play off the Russians against the Anglo-Americans,” and a German intelligence briefing that same day announced that “Germany was already again a factor in Europe.”⁵

By the time of Doenitz’s diatribe towards Rooks, though, an exasperated Eisenhower had already decided to have him and his ministers arrested, and the Soviet High Command agreed. Radio Moscow was also getting restless and broadcasting increasingly fiery denunciations of the Doenitz government. Two days later, Rooks gave the order for Hitler’s successor to attend the fateful meeting the next morning on the Patria.

One of those who did not make it to the Flensburg airfield was Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeberg, the man who had put his signature to the surrender at Montgomery’s headquarters just over two weeks before. While he was collecting his baggage he excused himself to go to the toilet, slammed the door shut, and managed to swallow the cyanide pill he had successfully concealed. His body was laid out on his bunk under a portrait of Doenitz.

But that same day, by way of compensation, allied troops found Alfred Rosenberg. The Nazi racial ideologist, former Minister for the Eastern Territories, and director of the special task force for the methodical plunder of Jewish art, had been hiding in the Flensburg Hospital nursing a sprained ankle suffered during a bout of heavy drinking.

One of the few on the allied side who had reservations about the arrest of Doenitz was Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Britain’s First Sea Lord, who was concerned about its possible effect on the thousands of German U-boat crews and naval personnel still at large in Bergen, Norway.

Even as Doenitz was being unceremoniously arrested, a team of allied officers were uncovering the secrets of a practically invulnerable concrete pen that had sheltered his U-boats in the Norwegian port. Some four hundred thousand German troops were still on Norwegian soil, where order depended on continued discipline within the Wehrmacht. At the guardhouse, a young German officer at first refused to open the gate and stared sullenly at the British staff car and its passengers, but eventually he yielded, and they drove down a long drive lined by concrete walls between six and ten feet thick as a protection against shrapnel. In front of them, they saw a vast bunker with an eighteen-foot-thick roof on which workmen had been working just three weeks before. Inside, they discovered seven pens. Some were single, others large enough to take two U-boats moored side by side, and one also served as a dry dock; mobile power lines could carry electric current to the U-boats for welding repairs. The previous October, the Royal Air Force had carried out a devastating attack on Bergen Harbor, but although U-boat operations had been suspended for a while and buildings all around the pens were smashed, the British team could see only a single direct penetration of the bunker itself.

They were impressed. This, they felt, was something for British naval experts to examine. They were also intrigued to learn of the comforts that Doenitz had arranged for his U-boat crews. They had at least fourteen days’ leave after each patrol and were taken to hotels in the mountains above Bergen used in peacetime for winter sports. Now, as the British team examined the pens, German Navy personnel watched them, expressionless, as they went about their tasks.⁶

By the end of May, nearly all the top Nazis who had not committed suicide or been killed were behind bars. On allied instructions, Doenitz had been forced to hand over Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s High Command chief, just a few days before he and his government were arrested. And Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy, had been in British hands since flying to Scotland in a Messerschmitt on a bizarre and deluded one-man peace mission in May 1941.⁷ The rest were hunted down, mostly through good intelligence and sharp-eyed allied troops, although it proved a daunting operation given the chaos that was gripping Germany and the dozens of other urgent tasks that faced the occupiers. The Nazis had scattered widely during Hitler’s final days in the bunker, mostly to get away from the Russians but also in the hope that they might escape retribution and justice altogether. Extraordinarily, it would be August before the allies could agree on what to do about war crimes and war criminals. But the British and Americans did at least prepare detailed instructions for their troops on how to identify and apprehend those suspected of criminal activities, even though providing last-known addresses proved fairly futile in the circumstances. Those detained were to be sent to internment camps for preliminary interrogation and, if necessary, then for more intensive questioning.⁸

Some were captured almost by chance. Such was the case with Julius Streicher, caught in Bavaria by the Americans on 23 May. After fleeing Nuremberg ahead of Patton’s forces, the notorious editor of Der Stürmer joined dozens of other Nazis heading in the direction of Berchtesgaden. Then he disappeared. Four weeks later, an officer from the US 101st Airborne Division stopped at a farmhouse hoping to get a drink of fresh milk. A man with a shaggy white beard dressed in a collarless blue striped shirt was sitting by the door next to an easel. “Are you the farmer?” asked the American, speaking his native New Yorker’s Yiddish. “No,” said the man, “I only live here. I’m an artist.” The US officer asked what he thought of the Nazis. The man claimed not to understand such things–he never bothered about politics. “But you look like Julius Streicher!” joked the American, who suddenly saw a resemblance to the Nazi from a photograph on a warrant he had seen. The old man stared at him. “How did you recognize me?” he blurted out, before immediately trying to correct himself. But it was too late. By sheer chance, the infamous Nazi Jew-baiter had been captured by a Jew.

Other Nazis were betrayed by fellow Germans, some of whom were only too keen to ingratiate themselves with their occupiers, others who were fearful of the retribution that would follow if it became clear they had known but not told of their whereabouts, and some because they had at last found the courage to express their true anti-Nazi feelings. Robert Ley, Hitler’s minister of labor infamous for his luxurious lifestyle and gold-tapped bathroom, also fled south to Berchtesgaden, where he hid in a mountain hut south of the town. But after a tip-off by local residents, armed American soldiers broke into it with their automatics at the ready. Inside, they found a man wearing blue pajamas, climbing boots and a Tirolean hat, cowering at the edge of a bed. He adamantly denied he was Ley but was still taken to US Army headquarters in Berchtesgaden for further interrogation. Here, the intelligence officer brought another captured Nazi into the room, an elderly former treasurer of the party. He immediately blurted out, “Well, Dr. Ley, what are you doing here?” and the game was up. It was Ley who had created the “Strength through Joy” movement to organize workers’ leisure activities.

Hitler’s first foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, was captured before VE Day by the French, and on the same day–6 May–Hans Frank, a middle-class Catholic lawyer from Karlsruhe and one-time governor of occupied Poland known as the “Jew Butcher of Cracow” for presiding over the mass murders there, was identified among a group of two thousand German POWs at Berchtesgaden after he tried to slash his wrists. He then told the Americans that he was “a man of culture” and showed them where he had stashed millions of dollars’ worth of stolen art, as well as his thirty-eight-volume diary that detailed the atrocities in Poland. But Auschwitz and Maidanek, he insisted, had been Himmler’s work, not his. He had still recorded in his diary, however, that if the Nazis won the war, “as far as I am concerned the Poles and the rest can be turned into mincemeat.”⁹

Meanwhile, the Reichskommissar in the Netherlands, Artur Seyss-Inquart, was in British hands. After concluding his negotiations with allied and Dutch officers at the schoolhouse at Achterveld, he was escorted back through German lines and made his way to Schleswig-Holstein to see Doenitz, where, he fondly imagined, he could act as a mediator with the allies. After seeing the grand admiral, he tried to return to Holland by car but got caught up in a huge allied military vehicle traffic jam in Hamburg. When he was stopped by a military policeman and showed his papers, he announced he was on his way to see Montgomery. “You bloody well are,” replied the MP. That evening, he found himself under detention in one of Hamburg’s hotels.¹⁰

Late in May, another sensational capture hit the headlines–that of William Joyce, otherwise known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” who had spent most of the war broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Berlin. He was a former pro-British Irishman who worked as an informer against Sinn Fein for the notorious “Black and Tans” during the Irish Civil War. But he was also a rabid anti-Semite and avid supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Fascists before departing for Germany in 1939. After a slow start, he emerged as one of the stars of Nazi English-language propaganda broadcasting under his trademark introduction, “Germany Calling! Germany Calling!” It was his high-pitched, nasal drawl that earned him his mocking nickname. He sounded, wrote the American CBS radio correspondent William Shirer, “like a decadent old English blue-blooded aristocrat.”

Early in April 1945, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry ordered that Joyce, along with his wife, Margaret, must at all costs be kept out of allied hands and devised a plan to get them to Sweden. Joyce was given false identity papers naming him as Wilhelm Hansen, a schoolteacher born in Galway, Ireland. On the last day of the month, just hours before Hitler killed himself, a car drove the Joyces from their studio in Hamburg to Flensburg on the first stage of their flight to Stockholm. But in the general chaos the plan broke down and after a few days inside Denmark the couple returned to Flensburg. Then, unable to find a place to live in the crowded city, they moved to a small village nearby and found lodgings with an elderly English widow. There they lived quietly for the next two weeks, undetected.

On Monday 28 May, the couple walked into a neighboring village to buy food. By now, they had fallen to bickering about their predicament and had a quarrel, so Joyce walked home alone through the woods. It was evening, but still light. Suddenly, a couple of British soldiers appeared, driving a truck and looking for firewood for their cooking stove. “There’s more wood over there,” said Joyce, speaking in French. Then he repeated himself in English. Both soldiers instantly recognized his voice–his broadcasts had never been censored by the British, and had a wide audience. “You wouldn’t be William Joyce by any chance, would you?” asked one of them.

At this, Joyce quickly put his left hand in his pocket, reaching for his false identity papers. But the soldiers thought he was reaching for a gun and one of them shot him with his pistol, a German Walther he had confiscated in Hamburg. The bullet went straight through Joyce’s buttocks, and he fell to the ground. Asked again who he was, Joyce replied, “Fritz Hansen.” Of course, this did not even match the name on his papers, and certainly did not tally with the Wehrmacht pass he was also carrying, in the name of William Joyce. The soldiers dressed his wound as best they could and drove him to the nearest British command post. From there he was driven to Lüneberg Hospital. News had already spread of his capture. As he was taken in on his stretcher, British soldiers shouted out, in cruel mockery of his broadcasts and his accent, “Jairmany Calling! Jairmany Calling!”

There was a double irony in the capture of Joyce, who within months went on trial in London for treason and was hanged. Only by a dubious technicality was he actually British, for he had been born in New York of Irish parents who renounced their British nationality to become Americans. As for the British soldier who shot him, his ID papers revealed him as Lieutenant Geoffrey Perry of the Intelligence Corps. But his birth name was Horst Pinschewer, a German Jew forced to flee Hitler’s Reich in 1936. Along with hundreds of other refugee Germans, he joined the Pioneer Corps and changed his name. He was sent to Germany in the war’s closing weeks to help with the interrogation of German prisoners, and then hand-picked to start a free German press the minute the war was over. The first edition of the Hamburger Nachrichtsdienst, edited by Perry, had appeared the day after VE Day.¹¹

So, with Joyce’s arrest, one outsider had caught another. And because it was still too sensitive to admit that German nationals had fought in British uniform, Perry’s role in the affair was long concealed.

Joyce was only one of many renegade allied nationals who had backed Hitler or Mussolini, a reminder that the appeal of Nazism and Fascism reached far beyond the borders of Germany, Italy and even Europe. Another whose capture that month made headlines was Englishman John Amery. In many ways, his case was even more shocking than that of Joyce, for he was the son of one of Winston Churchill’s cabinet ministers.

He was born in 1912, the first son of Leo Amery, a Conservative Member of Parliament who was Secretary of State for the Dominions in the 1920s and as a Churchill loyalist was wartime Secretary of State for India. But the young Amery was trouble from the start. He possessed, as the distinguished writer and journalist Rebecca West once put it, “a character like an automobile that will not hold the road.” Twice withdrawn from Harrow School, he lived a life of petty crime, sexual promiscuity and drunkenness in Britain before leaving for France in the late 1930s. From here, after getting mixed up in far-right anti-Semitic and anti-communist politics in Vichy France, he headed for Berlin.

The arrival in Hitler’s capital of the son of a British cabinet minister caused a minor sensation. With the eager support of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Amery began broadcasting to Britain. The broadcasts, notes Adrian Weale, amounted to little more than “a farrago of ugly, incoherent, anti-semitic drivel.” Or, as Rebecca West put it more colorfully, “words flowed from Amery’s mouth in the conventional groupings of English culture, but he had no intelligence, only a vacancy round which there rolled a snowball of Fascist chatter.”¹² He also helped raise a volunteer force named the “British Legion of St. George” to fight alongside the Wehrmacht against the Red Army and traveled throughout occupied Europe exhorting local collaborators to ever more heroic efforts against the Bolshevik enemy.

He spent the last six months of the war in Italy at Mussolini’s invitation, broadcasting on Italian radio, and even met with the dictator just hours before he fled to Lake Como. Mussolini offered to make him a member of the Black Brigades, but Amery declined on the grounds that he did not want to fight against his fellow countrymen. Instead, he said, he would wear a simple Fascist uniform.

Thus clothed, he too left for Como, only to be picked up on the autostrada by partisans and returned to Milan. After they broadcast news of his capture, a British officer named Captain Alan Whicker–later to become a distinguished TV journalist–rushed to the city to rescue him from the jail where he was being held. “Thank God you’re here,” said a relieved and frightened Amery, “I thought they were going to shoot me.” A few hours later, though, he effectively put the noose around his own neck when he asked for a typewriter and produced a statement several thousand words long in which he described in detail his wartime activities. He, like Joyce, was put on trial when he got back to Britain, and was hanged. His younger brother, Julian, had served loyally throughout the war as an officer in the Special Operations Executive.¹³

Amery’s capture was not the only one in Italy to make headlines. Just a few days later, the American poet Ezra Pound, the most notorious allied pro-Fascist propagandist of all, fell into the hands of US forces in Rapallo.

The fifty-nine-year-old Idaho-born Pound had already made his name as a poet when he settled in Italy in the 1920s. After meeting with Mussolini, however, his political obsessions steadily took over, and in 1941 he began broadcasting against the allies on Radio Rome. Two years later, he was indicted for treason by the US Attorney-General, and American military intelligence in Italy was issued with his FBI photograph and full descriptive details.

Pound’s broadcasts were rambling, anti-Semitic tirades denouncing America for waging an “illegal” war, condemning Roosevelt for violating his oath of office, pronouncing that the war was essentially about “gold, usury, and monopoly,” and praising both Mussolini and Hitler. After the Italian dictator’s overthrow, Pound moved to Rapallo on the Italian Riviera and threw his support behind the Fascist Republic of Salò. Over the next eighteen months, he worked assiduously for Radio Milan as a speech and slogan writer, making occasional fiery broadcasts of his own.

Typical was the one he made in a series aimed at US troops in North Africa and Europe in December 1943. After denouncing the Italians who had turned against Mussolini and urging the execution of Count Ciano, he concluded by stating that “every human being who is not a hopeless idiotic worm should realize that fascism is superior in every way to Russian Jewocracy and that capitalism stinks.”¹⁴

American forces entered Rapallo two days after Mussolini and Clara Petacci were shot. Soon afterwards, communist partisans armed with Tommy guns arrived at Pound’s home, handcuffed him and drove him away. After questioning him about bigger Fascist fry they were chasing, they let him go, but then delivered him, at his own request, to the local US military police post. From there, he was driven to the Counter-Intelligence Corps headquarters in nearby Genoa, where he arrived just twenty hours before the German surrender in Italy. Here, he signed several statements about his wartime activities before being transferred to the US Army’s detention training center (DTC) close to Pisa on Thursday 24 May. “Hitler was a martyr,” he told a reporter who briefly managed to interview him before he was taken away.

The DTC was a dusty, half-mile-square compound surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Here were kept the “killers, brawlers, rapists and deserters from line and service outfits, 3,600 of the most hard-headed, recalcitrant soldiery the Army had to offer.” Inside its perimeter, detainees not bound for execution or prison were given a last chance to redeem themselves with a year-long program of fourteen-hour-a-day, heavily regimented training. It was, as one biographer of Pound has put it, “truly the First Circle [of Dante’s Hell].” Anyone who tried to escape was shot on sight.

The camp also contained a row of ten wire cages, each measuring six by six and a half feet. These were for the men condemned to death, and stood out in the open with just a tar-paper roof to protect them from the sun and rain. One of them was made ready for Pound. The night before he arrived, it was specially reinforced with galvanized mesh and heavy airstrip steel. This was not so much to prevent Pound from escaping as to thwart any Fascist sympathizers from trying to rescue him. The end of May found Pound sleeping on the cement floor, being fed meager rations once a day, and using a tin can as a toilet. At night, a light was kept shining onto the cage. He was the only civilian in the camp. The Yank, the US Army weekly, declared that the DTC was “the toughest training detail in the Army . . . tougher even than frontline combat.”¹⁵

It seems unlikely that Robert Ellis or any other soldier of the US Tenth Mountain Division would have agreed with this assessment given what they had suffered and survived on front-line service in the Apennines. But it was certainly a lot tougher than what they faced now.

At the end of May, allied forces in Italy were still on the alert for a possible new conflict with Tito’s Yugoslav Army. On the day that Pound was imprisoned in his wire cage, Ellis and his regiment were moved from their wet and muddy bivouac area on the banks of the Torre River near Udine, close to the disputed Italo-Yugoslav border, to drier land close by, at Tricesimo. The situation was a stand-off, with most of the action taking place behind the scenes in the diplomatic corridors of Washington, London, Belgrade and Moscow. But the American forces still had plenty to do. The mountain troops located all the Osoppo, Garibaldi and Yugoslav troops in their area and mobilized partisans to neutralize a renegade Fascist band still at large which had attacked them. There were minor firefights between the Osoppo (the “green,” anti-communist) partisans and Yugoslav forces, and the Yugoslavs and their Garibaldi partisan allies tried hard to draft civilians into their units.

This problem became more serious at the end of May, and instructions were issued that any civilians requiring protection against such efforts were to be placed under armed protection and evacuated out of the region.¹⁶ That serious fighting could still break out was alarmingly brought home to Ellis when regular training was suddenly resumed, and battalions were instructed to find firing ranges and draw down on live ammunition for the carrying out of field exercises.

But in general the situation remained orderly and quiet. Ellis whiled away the time, as most of his companions did, playing softball, reading and enjoying good food. And it had finally stopped raining. So long as he was in Italy and not being shipped out to fight the Japanese, he was content.

In Trieste, Geoffrey Cox likewise remained on the alert. After the Russian-made T34 tanks put on their show of force on the waterfront, all social functions between the New Zealanders and the Yugoslavs were canceled, and allied forces remained on high alert. But both sides seemed keen to avoid any further deterioration in relations. Half the Soviet tanks disappeared almost immediately into the surrounding countryside, and the remainder were never brought into action. Two days later, they too were withdrawn.

In several places, recorded Cox, “harsh words” passed between the Yugoslavs and the New Zealanders, but there was no exchange of fire. The Yugoslavs put up some roadblocks around the city, but when a New Zealand Sherman tank pushed the most troublesome of them aside, nothing happened. Three days later, the Yugoslavs entertained allied officers in Trieste to a banquet in honor of Tito’s birthday and fireworks lit up the waterfront. Meanwhile, though, in the city, “political cleansing” remained in full swing.¹⁷

Across northern Italy, late spring brought peace but no end to the killing. The shooting of Mussolini and his top Fascist associates by partisans was only the most gruesomely visible and dramatic act of retribution and vengeance in what during the lifetime of the Salò Republic had become a virtual civil war. In the gap between the departure of the Germans and the imposition of effective military rule by the allies, a wave of violence and death swept across the region.

Geoffrey Cox and the New Zealanders had bypassed Bologna on their race north, leaving the city to be entered first by Polish troops. Two days later, the head of the Allied Commission for Italy, the future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, drove into the city in the back of a jeep wearing his trademark tweed hunting coat and in the company of the American regional commissioner. Climbing into a more appropriate staff car, they then headed for the miraculously undamaged City Hall, where military government officers had already established themselves. Just before fleeing the city, Fascist Black Brigades had shot two well-known political opponents, and the victims were now lying in state in the building, with a tearful crowd filing past the open coffins. “One of the murdered men,” scribbled Macmillan in his diary, “was old, white hair, fine well-cut face–obviously a man of character.” He could see the bloodstains on the wall where the two men had been shot. It was already covered with photographs of dozens of others, men and women of all ages, who had been slaughtered by the Black Brigades over the previous few months. The Fascist prefect of the city, however, had failed to make his escape in time, and was shot by the partisans next to his last victim. “You could see the brains spattered against the brick,” observed Macmillan.¹⁸

This was graphic evidence of the liquidation of Fascists taking place across northern Italy during the liberation. Bologna was at the center of a particularly murderous region known as the “Red Triangle,” a traditionally communist area covering the provinces of Reggio Emilio, Modena, Ferrara and Bologna itself. Throughout this part of the Po Valley there were hundreds of summary executions, as well as thousands of assaults, lynchings, abductions, robberies and beatings. This formidable crime wave was motivated in part by pure revenge, but also by a desire to clear the ground for a wider social and political revolution. Several large landowners were forced to pay large amounts of ransom. Many of the killings and beatings were the products of personal vendettas and the settling of private scores. Some of the violence was organized by local liberation committees, but some was the random and spontaneous “justice of the piazza.” In the Po Valley and throughout the region of Emilia-Romagna in particular–the so-called Triangle of Death–the killings went on for the next three years.¹⁹

But campaigns of retribution and revenge swept through the other big industrial cities of the north as well. The main targets were invariably members of Mussolini’s Black Brigades. Here, the end of the war between Germany and the allies was close to irrelevant. Partisans and Black Brigades had been waging open war for months, and liberation merely changed the balance in favor of the former. In Turin, the Black Brigade was named the Ather Capelli. Of its 220 members, 93 were killed by partisans–55 of these died immediately before the liberation, and 28 in the month that followed. Of its officers, more were killed after the liberation than before. Overall in Piedmont, some two thousand people were estimated to have been killed during the liberation.²⁰

Similar killings took place in Milan and Genoa, but often in ways that made it impossible to tally the exact numbers. People just disappeared, and in the mornings their bodies were found heaped in the gutters or dumped at the gates of the local cemetery or in front of the city morgue. Two days after VE Day, the British Ambassador in Rome reported that “about 500” people had been executed in Milan, the majority of them Fascists. In Turin, he claimed, the numbers amounted to “about 1,000.” The local British liaison officer with the partisans swore that “no one had been shot who did not deserve it.”²¹

The more fortunate among the victims of this wave of retribution ended up in prison. By the middle of May, Milan’s San Vittore Prison was packed to overflowing with more than 3,500 political prisoners, many of whom were poking their heads out of the windows and shouting to their families and friends in the street below. The vast Coltano Prison outside Pisa housed over 32,000 men.

But even with so many incarcerated, the killings did not die down gradually. In Milan, after a brief lull, they rose sharply again in the middle of May, and the total of unidentified bodies in the city’s morgue since liberation rose to more than four hundred. A sinister feature was that all identification marks had been carefully removed before the victims were shot. “It is therefore difficult to say,” reported the British Ambassador, “whether the victims are Fascists executed by partisans, or partisans executed by Fascists, or just victims of personal vendettas.” The numbers rose even higher with forty-four killings on Thursday 17 May alone.

Ten days after that, the situation was still chaotic. In some places, special civil assize courts following regular legal procedures were hard at work. In others, semi-legal extraordinary military tribunals were handing out death sentences. Everywhere, partisan liberation committees were issuing orders cutting across those of the allied military government. Finally, on Monday 28 May, a senior US officer called on the chairman of the CLNAI. “This has got to stop,” he ordered. From now on, he told the chairman, no order, decree or appointment made by the Italians was to have any force unless it was confirmed by the allies.

But this did not put an end to the killings, and it remained an open question of when–or even whether–public order in Italy would finally be enforced.²²

Doenitz’s Flensburg government was not the only one to be dissolved on Wednesday 23 May. Britain’s wartime government had been a coalition of the three major parties–Conservative, Labour and Liberal–and Churchill hoped it would continue in office until after victory over Japan. But the Labour Party rejected the idea, and at noon that day Churchill drove to Buckingham Palace and tendered his resignation to King George VI. A few hours later, though, he returned to the palace and was asked to head a new, purely Conservative administration. Campaigning soon began for a general election.

The day before the Prime Minister’s two trips to the palace, the first of Doenitz’s surrendered U-boat fleet, U-776, had sailed up the Thames to be moored off Westminster Pier. She was a recently commissioned seven-hundred-tonner, fast and gray, and still carried three anti-aircraft guns abaft her conning tower. The powerful engines carried her swiftly up the river under escort while dense but silent crowds lined the banks and watched. In scenes such as these, observed one spectator, Hitler’s navy died.²³

But was the killing really over? On this same day, Churchill was handed a top-secret report by his personal chief of staff, Sir Hastings Ismay. The Prime Minister was becoming increasingly alarmed about Stalin’s plans and the fate of Central European countries now occupied by his troops. The report was an analysis of “Operation Unthinkable,” a hypothetical plan for a limited war against the Soviet Union to enforce a “square deal” for Poland. Its firm conclusion was that any such attack would precipitate a general war that was unwinnable, and hence also unthinkable. The only route forward with the Soviets, concluded Churchill, was tough negotiation.