After landing at Treviso, Hitler and Mussolini travelled in the Duce’s train to a station near Feltre, and then still had an hour’s drive in open-top cars in the sweltering heat until they reached the villa chosen for the meeting, which began at noon. No sooner had Hitler begun to speak than news came in of a heavy air-raid on Rome, the first the city had suffered, causing panic among the population and encouraging the recognition that the Fascist regime was on the verge of collapse. Hitler spoke non-stop for two hours. Mussolini, tired and unwell, could not follow all that he was saying. The Duce’s entourage understood little or nothing. In any case, the speech was devoid of substantive proposals. It amounted to no more than a battery of propaganda, aimed at bolstering the Duce’s faltering morale and preventing Italy agreeing a separate peace. It was embarrassingly thin to some of those present. Hitler avoided putting the concrete proposals wanted by his military staff for a unified command structure of the Axis forces in Sicily. Mussolini disgusted his own military advisers by his feebleness. He commented subsequently that he had felt his own willpower ebbing away as Hitler spoke. After the speech Hitler spoke privately over lunch with Mussolini, telling him that Germany had improved U-boats in preparation along with secret weapons capable of razing London to the ground within a week. Then it was time for the tedious journey back to Treviso aerodrome. Hitler’s generals thought the visit had been a wasted effort. Hitler himself — convinced still of the power of his own rhetoric — probably thought he had once more succeeded in stirring Mussolini’s fighting spirits.172 He was soon disabused. On the very evening after the Feltre talks, he was shown an intelligence report sent on by Himmler that a
During the course of Saturday, 24 July, reports started to come in that the Fascist Grand Council had been summoned for the first time since early in the war. It looked as if the Fascist old guard were going to press Mussolini to lay down some of his accumulated offices of state in order to devote more energy to the war effort.174 Probably, this is what Mussolini himself thought. He may also have been looking for a pretext to break with Germany. Mussolini’s ill-health perhaps combined with an over-confidence that he would ultimately have little difficulty in manipulating the Grand Council. Whatever the reasons, the way he responded to his increasingly strident critics at the meeting was strangely apathetic, dulled, and supine. The Council began its deliberations at 5p.m. that evening. These lasted in all for ten hours, culminating in an astonishing vote of nineteen to seven to request the King to seek a policy more capable of saving Italy from destruction.175 Even then the Duce did not fully see the danger. He went to see the King — about whom he had far fewer doubts than did Hitler — later that morning, unaware of what was to befall him. During Mussolini’s audience, the King abruptly interrupted him, announcing that, since the war appeared lost and army morale was collapsing, Marshal Badoglio would take over his offices as prime minister. As a stunned Duce left the royal chambers the police, who for weeks had had plans for his arrest, put them into effect. Mussolini was bundled into a waiting ambulance and, accompanied by several members of the
While Hitler was holding his regular military briefing at midday on 25 July, what was filtering through from Rome still amounted to little more than rumours. Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison at FHQ, passed on the news that Roberto Farinacci, the radical Fascist boss of Cremona and former Party Secretary, had been behind the summoning of the Grand Council. Hitler remarked that Farinacci was lucky he had done it in Italy, not in Germany. He would have had him immediately picked up by Himmler. ‘What’ll come out of it, anyway?’ he asked. ‘Twaddle’ was his own answer.177 The meeting — and especially its outcome — can only have reinforced his satisfaction at never allowing a Nazi Party Senate to come into existence.
