Following his ‘rescue’ by German SS and Fallschirmjäger troops from Gran Sasso the previous September, his ambition had been at its lowest ebb and he had said as much to Hitler, telling him he did not believe in the possible resurrection of fascism and that he wanted merely to retire quietly. The Führer, however, had swept aside such concerns. ‘Northern Italy will be forced to envy the fate of Poland,’ Hitler had warned him, ‘if you do not accept to give renewed vigour to the alliance between Germany and Italy, by becoming head of the state and of the new government.’57 The following day, Mussolini had reluctantly agreed to do as Hitler asked, although he had been fully aware of what that meant. ‘The Germans will find a way to administer Italy according to their habits,’ he had said, ‘and the only outcome will be the loss of that little respect that Italy still has as a nation.’58 In this instance, he had hit the nail on the head.
There were those in Germany who had believed Hitler had made a mistake in giving the Italians any form of self-rule at all: Kesselring, for one, had felt it would be better for Italy to be treated as an occupied country, and that an Italian government, in whatever form, would be a hindrance to the freedom of action of his troops in the country. Dr Rudolf Rahn, the newly appointed German ambassador, had also agreed with Kesselring. He had recognised that there was little enthusiasm within Italy for a return to fascism, especially after it had dissolved so spectacularly as a political movement after 25 July. Hitler, however, had not wanted to waste valuable German resources carrying out civil administration when there were a number of Italian Fascists willing and ready to carry out his wishes for him. Yet he had been unimpressed with the Fascists who had fled to Germany the previous summer, and quite apart from his fondness for his old friend, had known that Mussolini was the only possible candidate to head up a Neo-Fascist government.
Most of those who now rallied round the Duce were either diehard fanatics or men for whom it had been too dangerous to remain in Italy following Mussolini’s overthrow. Alessandro Pavolini, a charismatic forty-year-old Florentine poet and former editor of the newspaper La Stampa, was something of an intellectual but also an increasingly fanatical Fascist. His drive and determination to see fascism back in Italy had made him the obvious candidate for secretary of the Neo-Fascist Party, the PRF, or Partito Repubblicano Fascista. There were a handful of others from the Fascist hierarchy of the pre-war heydays. Roberto Farinacci, for one: a former party secretary in the 1920s, and the most outspoken of those who had urged Italy to fight alongside Germany to the bitter end. Another was Renato Ricci, founder of the Fascist squadristi, or hit squads, and later head of the Fascist Youth Organisations and Minister of Corporations until fired in February 1943. And there was Guido Buffarini-Guidi, another Fascist of the old school, albeit one who had been previously discredited for a number of frauds.
From this core, a Neo-Fascist government had emerged. Such had been the shortage of able candidates, Pavolini had persuaded Ambassador Rahn to accompany him to Rome back in September to try and recruit others to rally to the cause. As Rahn had suspected, it had proved something of a fool’s errand: most former Fascists had wanted nothing to do with it. This had not overly worried the Germans, who had never had any intention of allowing the new government any real power. However, Rahn had felt there was a need for a competent Minister of War to rally support for the continuation of the war, and in desperation had turned to Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. This sixty-one-year-old marshal had been a successful commander in Ethiopia in the 1930s but after being defeated in North Africa at the hands of the British in 1941, he had resigned and returned to Italy. More soldier than politician, he nonetheless carried both the gravitas and the fame Rahn believed was needed.
Mussolini was back, but although physically his health had greatly improved within a few weeks of his return, he found it hard to rekindle the strutting arrogance of old when Germany was piling one humiliation upon him after another. There had, for example, been no return to Rome. Hitler had refused to allow the seat of government to be centred there; it was, as Kesselring had announced, now an ‘Open City’, and thus supposedly politically neutralised. A good excuse, but one that had scarcely hidden the real reason: that Hitler did not want the Neo-Fascist government getting above itself, which was far more likely had it been based in Italy’s largest and most historic city. Milan had also been rejected for the same reason.
Rather, the new seat of government was now based around the tiny town of Salò, on the western banks of Lake Garda in the foothills of the Alps. Government offices were to be established in towns all along the lake. With fuel scarce and only narrow roads connecting them, effective government had been deliberately made harder. Moreover, by setting up in Salò, a small and insignificant place of little note, the prestige of the new government was undermined from the outset.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, the new government’s sphere of control had also become increasingly depleted. Quite apart from land already lost to the Allies, the Brenner Pass and the Ljubljana Gap – the two main access routes from Greater Germany into Italy – had been annexed into the Reich, in what was yet another stinging blow to Mussolini’s power and prestige. The first now became an area known as the Alpine Approaches, incorporating the Tyrol – the Dolomites and towns of Bolzano, Belluno and Trento. The second was the Adriatic Coastland, which consisted of an area that spread through north-east Italy – including Trieste, Fiume, and Istria – and into Croatia. As in other areas of the Greater Reich, two Gauleiters – military governors – were appointed, Franz Hofer for the Alpine Approaches, and Dr Friedrich Rainer for the Adriatic Coastland. Both were confirmed Nazis, and ruled as such. The Italian legal system there was abolished and all Italians in those areas came directly under German military law. It was not lost on Mussolini that the annexed areas were more or less those that had been taken from Austria at the end of the First World War.
There were still further disappointments for the man Hitler had once looked up to as a role model. One of the Duce’s first jobs had been to order Renato Ricci to re-form the Fascist militia, which now became the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana, or GNR, and which would work alongside the Carabinieri, the military-based police force, as a means of enforcing fascism once more. Yet although political militias were a useful means of imposing a regime’s will, Mussolini knew that for him to regain any kind of reputation, he needed an army, a New Army, with which Italy could once more rise from the ashes.
It was, of course, never to be. The first blow came following Marshal Graziani’s visit to Germany in early October 1943, where it had quickly become clear that there was considerable distrust amongst many of the German High Command of Mussolini and Graziani’s plans. ‘The only Italian Army that will not be treacherous,’ Feldmarschall Keitel had noted, ‘is one that does not exist.’59 And anyway, they had already decided that able-bodied Italian men would be more useful as labourers, while those Italians who did want to fight willingly were encouraged to join the German armed forces instead – and did so: by May 1944, there were more than 200,000 Italian soldiers serving directly under the Germans. Even leading Fascists were against the New Army; both Pavolini and Ricci had been against it, as they distrusted Graziani and feared he might then use such a force against them.
Hitler, however, had agreed to the raising of a mere four Italian divisions, which he believed would be useful, not as front-line troops, but as guardians along the coast and behind the lines. He had also eventually agreed to release 12,000 former officers and NCOs from camps in Germany, but the rest of Mussolini’s New Army had to come from entirely new recruits and from those who had returned home but had not been interned by the Germans. Dampened but undeterred, he issued a conscription order for all those born in the years 1923, 1924 and 1925 and started a major propaganda effort to draw in volunteers. By the beginning of 1944, some 50,000 young men had responded to Mussolini’s call to arms – but a mere four divisions was small fry indeed compared to the fifty-six divisions eradicated by the Germans following the armistice.
The reality was that Mussolini had fallen a long, long way – from more than twenty years of absolute power to almost no power at all. Everything