Von Senger, one of the more senior officers present in Berchtesgaden, wondered what the more junior officers and NCOs must have thought of their leader, especially when Hitler began to list a string of defeats, and to describe the critical situation they now found themselves in. No mention was made of the few recent successes they had achieved in Italy. ‘The impression gained by General Baade, who had been summoned to the reception to receive an even higher decoration,’ noted von Senger, ‘was the same as mine, namely that this political and military regime was coming to an end … and Hitler knew it.’22
Hitler was certainly not the man he had once been. There had been too many defeats, too many setbacks, and by the spring of 1944 he had realised he had lost the unshakeable belief of his people. He had consequently become more and more withdrawn and was hardly seen at all in public or in newsreels or heard on the radio. He was also, as von Senger had seen with his own eyes, a sick man. Ageing fast, he had a heart condition, stomach and intestinal problems, and, it seems, was suffering from Parkinson’s, which caused uncontrollable trembling in his left arm and leg.
His all-consuming prosecution of the war was undoubtedly impairing his health. By nature, he was an idle man, and throughout the 1930s and the early years of the war he had been content to spout forth his ideas and let others put them into action. Now, though, trusting fewer and fewer people, he took increasingly direct control of every matter of state, be it military or domestic. His authority and power were absolute, and every decision required his authority and his alone. Because of this obsessive need to control, he subjected himself to a punishing work schedule, which allowed little or no time for relaxation and nowhere near enough sleep. Even then, he was unable to cope with such a vast workload, and the stress and strain accordingly took their toll. Although he was prone to violent mood swings and outbursts of anger at the best of times, these had recently become more frequent and severe.
And yet, although the war was spiralling out of his control, Hitler remained in deep denial about the catastrophic changes in German fortunes, and continued to preach the same unvarying message to his generals: that there should be no retreat and no surrender; that if they just held firm, the tide would be turned once more. The fragile alliance between Eastern and Western Allies would collapse; new German wonder weapons would come to their rescue. Massive self-deception and delusion were part and parcel of the Führer’s world. Occasionally, as von Senger had witnessed, doubts would creep in, striking him with a crippling depression; but there was never any question of surrender. If Hitler was going to fall, then all of Germany would fall with him.
Nor did he ever accept responsibility for any mistake or misjudgement. Failings and disasters were always because of other people’s treachery, disobedience or weakness. To his mind, the Italians were shining examples of this. They had waited too long to join the war and had bungled everything since then, starting with the failed invasion of Greece in October 1940. Since then, despite the large numbers of Italian troops fighting in Russia, they had been little more than a millstone around Germany’s neck. German troops had come to their rescue in the Balkans, elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and in North Africa. By the autumn of 1942, with Rommel’s men routed at Alamein, and with the Allies advancing towards Tunisia, Hitler began to realise that the great victory in North Africa that had seemed so tantalisingly possible in the summer of 1942 was rapidly turning into a catastrophe. He had considered the Mediterranean theatre peripheral so long as it had been restricted to North Africa; but like the British, he had begun to see all too clearly what would follow should they be defeated there. With this in mind, he had resolved to pour troops and equipment into Tunisia in an effort to forestall Italy’s collapse and any subsequent – and suddenly far more serious – threat to his southern flanks.
Hitler’s aim had been to keep the campaign in North Africa alive until the autumn of 1943 at the very least, by which time the conditions would be unfavourable for an Allied invasion of Sicily. The plan, however, had backfired spectacularly: the subsequent Axis defeat in May 1943 had been even bigger than that suffered at Stalingrad three months earlier, and only served to weaken Italy further.
With the collapse in North Africa, Hitler and the German High Command had very clearly read the writing on the wall, and so had hastily begun working on contingency plans for when Italy pulled out of the war. For some, there had been relief that they would soon be rid of the Italians, as many Germans felt little more than contempt for their less well-trained, poorly equipped, and mostly reluctant ally. No doubt Hitler could have defended the Alpine passes with only a handful of divisions, but an Allied-occupied Italy would have left Germany horribly exposed elsewhere. The Führer’s overriding fear, for example, had been the loss of the Balkans, a rich source of oil, bauxite, and other key minerals essential to his war effort – and it was this that the German High Command had believed was the most likely target for the Allies’ Mediterranean strategy. As a result Hitler had demanded that Italy should be hastily occupied and then defended.
Despite the warnings, however, Hitler had still flown into a severe rage when he heard, on 25 July 1943, the news that Mussolini had been dismissed as head of the Italian government and replaced with Marshal Pietro Badoglio, formerly Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, who had always been against Italy’s alliance with Germany and who had resigned following the disastrous campaign in Greece in 1940. Hitler now declared the Italians the ‘bitterest enemy. They say they’ll fight but that’s treachery… this bastard Badoglio has been working against us all the time.’23 He had demanded that German troops occupy Rome immediately, and that Badoglio and the King, Vittorio Emanuele III, be taken captive. In this kind of paranoid and irrational mood, the Führer was hard to placate, and both Generalobersts Keitel and Jodl, the German Chief of Staff and Chief of Operations, had only been able to listen with mounting concern as Hitler appeared ready to elevate the urgent needs of the Mediterranean above all others – even Russia, where the situation was worsening.
Hitler had eventually conceded that the storming of Rome might be impracticable, but he had refused to waver over the need to act in Italy; he had screamed for revenge for Italy’s ‘betrayal’ and he was going to get it. By committing his forces to the Italian peninsula, he had condemned his old ally to a terrible fate.
Feldmarschall Rommel had been hastily called in and given command of the newly formed Army Group B, and on 28 July had been ordered to begin seeping troops into northern Italy and securing the Alpine passes that fed into Austria. Then, when Italy surrendered – as Hitler had been convinced it would – his troops would disarm all members of the Italian armed forces and take over all areas of southern France, northern Italy, the Balkans, and the Aegean, which up to that point had been held by the Italians, in a carefully planned operation that was given the codename AXIS. Meanwhile, from 12 August, Kesselring, in agreement with Jodl, had begun evacuating all German troops from Sicily back to the mainland. With typical efficiency, he had managed to get more than 60,000 troops across the Straits of Messina, the last safely making their way across just a few hours after the Allies took Messina town and with it all of Sicily.
The problem was that despite the lightning efficiency with which these plans had been put into effect, Germany simply did not have the capacity either to mount a major front in Italy or to occupy the Balkans and the Aegean. When Feldmarschall von Kluge, commander of Army Group Centre in Russia, complained forcibly that the removal of key troops from the Eastern Front to Italy would be disastrous, Hitler had replied, ‘Even so, Herr Feldmarschall: we are not master here of our own decisions.’24 By September, the German southern flank in Russia had begun to collapse. With it came the loss of key strategic areas, including the Donets Basin with its vast reserves of coal. Every setback had knock-on effects