Under the pressure of the events in Italy, Hitler had finally made one overdue move at home. For months, egged on by Goebbels, he had expressed his dissatisfaction with the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, whom he contemptuously regarded as ‘old and worn-out’.208 But he could think of no alternative. He continued to defer any decision until the toppling of Mussolini concentrated his mind, persuading him that the time had come to stiffen the grip on the home front and eliminate any prospect of poor morale turning into subversive action. The man he could depend upon to do this was close at hand.
On 20 August he appointed Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as the new Reich Minister of the Interior. The appointment amounted to Hitler’s tacit recognition that his authority at home now rested on police repression, not the adulation of the masses he had once enjoyed.209 To save face, as usual, Frick was allowed to remain a Reich Minister and ‘kicked upstairs’ — seemingly given an important new post, replacing Neurath (who had not functioned in the post since September 1941) as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Even here, to ensure that Frick’s powers remained nominal, State Secretary Karl Hermann Frank was given a new title of State Minister for Bohemia and Moravia and enhanced authority.210
On 3 September the first British troops crossed the Straits of Messina to Italy, landing at Reggio di Calabria. That same day, the Italians secretly signed their armistice with the Allies which became public knowledge five days later.211
On 8 September Hitler had flown for the second time within a fortnight to Army Group South’s headquarters at Zaporozhye, on the lower Dnieper north of the Sea of Azov, to confer with Manstein about the increasingly critical situation on the southern flank of the eastern front. It was to be the last time he set foot on territory captured from the Soviet Union. A few days earlier, following Soviet breakthroughs, he had been forced to authorize withdrawal from the Donets Basin — so important for its rich coal deposits — and from the Kuban bridgehead over the Straits of Kerch, the gateway to the Crimea. Now the Red Army had breached the thin seam which had knitted together Kluge’s and Manstein’s Army Groups and was pouring through the gap. Retreat was the only possible course of action.212
Hitler found a tense atmosphere at the Wolf’s Lair on his return. What he had long anticipated — despite reassuring noises to the contrary from Kesselring, and from the German Embassy in Rome — was reality. British and American newspapers had that morning, 8 September, carried reports that the capitulation of the Italian army was imminent. By the afternoon, the news was hardening. At 6p.m. that evening the stories were confirmed by the BBC in London.213 Once again, Nazi leaders were summoned to Führer Headquarters for a crisis-meeting next day.214 The unseasonably cold, wet weather provided a fitting backdrop.215 Partly from spite, partly because he might know too much and prove dangerous, Hitler had Prince Philip of Hesse, the King of Italy’s son-in-law, who had been at FHQ for some weeks, promptly arrested and deposited in Gestapo Headquarters in Königsberg.216 The order had meanwhile been given to set ‘Operation Axis’ in motion. ‘The Führer,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘is determined to make a
The BBC’s premature announcement gave the OKW’s Operations Staff a head start. Sixteen German divisions had been moved to the Italian mainland by this time. The battle-hardened SS units withdrawn from the eastern front in late July and early August and troops withdrawn from Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia were in position to take control in central Italy. By 10 September, Rome was in German hands. Italian troops were disarmed. Small pockets of resistance were ruthlessly put down; one division that held out until 22 September ended with 6,000 dead. Over 650,000 soldiers entered German captivity. Only the bulk of the small navy and ineffective air-force escaped and were given over to the Allies. Within a few days Italy was occupied by its former Axis partner.218
Hours after the Italian capitulation, the Allies had landed in the Gulf of Salerno, thirty miles or so south-east of Naples. The dogged German resistance they encountered for a week before reinforcements enabled them to break out of their threatened beachhead — linking forces with troops from Montgomery’s 8th Army advancing northwards from Reggio di Calabria, and entering Naples on 1 October — was an indicator of what was in store for the Allies during the coming months as the Wehrmacht made them fight for every mile of their northward progression.
