Though satisfied with the outcome of his talks with Antonescu, Hitler felt he had failed to make an impact on Horthy. Goebbels suspected that Hitler’s harsh tone had not been helpful. The Hungarians, he remarked, recognized Germany’s weak position and knew wars were not won simply with words.121 Hitler told the Gauleiter that he had not succeeded in persuading Horthy of the need for tougher measures against the Jews. Horthy had put forward what Hitler described — only from his perspective could they be seen as such — as ‘humanitarian counter-arguments’. Hitler naturally dismissed them. As Goebbels summarized it, Hitler said: ‘Towards Jewry there can be no talk of humanity. Jewry must be cast down to the ground.’122
Earlier in the spring, Ribbentrop, picking up on fears expressed by Axis partners about their future under German domination, had put to Hitler loose notions of a future European federation.123 How little ice this cut with the Dictator can be seen from his reactions to his April meetings with heads of state and government — particularly the unsatisfactory discussion with Horthy. He drew the consequence, he told the Gauleiter in early May, that the ‘small-state rubbish
Speaking to Goebbels on 6 May in Berlin, where he had come to attend the state funeral of SA-Chief Viktor Lutze (who had been killed in a car accident), Hitler accepted that the situation in Tunis was ‘fairly hopeless’. The inability to get supplies to the troops meant there was no way out. Goebbels summarized the way Hitler was thinking: ‘When you think that 150,000 of our best young people are still in Tunis, you rapidly get an idea of the catastrophe threatening us there. It’ll be on the scale of Stalingrad, and certainly also produce the harshest criticism among the German people.’125 But when he spoke the next day to the Reichs — and Gauleiter, Hitler never mentioned Tunis, making no reference at all to the latest news that Allied troops had penetrated as far as the outskirts of the city and that the harbour was already in British hands.126
Axis troops were, in fact, by then giving themselves up in droves. Within a week, on 13 May, almost a quarter of a million of them — the largest number taken so far by the Allies, around half of them German, the remainder Italian — surrendered. Only about 800 managed to escape.127 North Africa was lost. The catastrophe left the Italian Axis partner reeling. For Mussolini, the writing was on the wall. But for Hitler, too, the defeat was nothing short of calamitous. One short step across the Straits of Sicily by the Allies would mean that the fortress of Europe was breached through its southern underbelly.
