It was plain to the German leadership, however, that it would be even more difficult, in the new situation, for the armed forces to cope with the mounting pressures on both the eastern and the southern fronts.219 Goebbels saw the need looming to seek peace with either the Soviet Union or the western Allies. He suggested the time had come to sound out Stalin. Ribbentrop took the same line. He had tentative feelers put out to see whether the Soviet dictator would bite.220 But Hitler dismissed the idea. If anything, he said, he preferred to look for an arrangement with Britain — conceivably open to one. But, as always, he would not consider negotiating from a position of weakness. In the absence of the decisive military success he needed, which was receding ever more into the far distance, any hope of persuading him to consider an approach other than the remorseless continuation of the struggle was bound to be illusory.221
At least Goebbels, backed by Göring, successfully this time pleaded with Hitler to speak to the German people. To the last minute before recording the broadcast, on 10 September, Hitler showed his reluctance. He wanted to delay, to see how things turned out. Goebbels went through the text with him line by line. Eventually, he got the Führer to the microphone. The speech itself — largely confined to unstinting praise for Mussolini, condemnation of Badoglio and his supporters, the claim that the ‘treachery’ had been foreseen and every necessary step taken, and a call to maintain confidence and sustain the fight — had nothing of substance to offer, other than a hint at coming retaliation for the bombing of German cities.222 But Goebbels was satisfied. Reports suggested the speech had gone down well, and helped revive morale.223 He had, he said, achieved the main purpose of his visit to FHQ. He thought Hitler was relieved to get the speech off his chest after such a long time. And he wrung out of him a promise to speak soon in the Sportpalast to open the Winter Aid campaign. He thought he could give him back the taste for coming ‘directly in contact with the people’.224 Once more, he would be disappointed.
As far as the situation in Italy itself was concerned, Hitler was at this time resigned to losing any hold over the south of the country. His intention was to withdraw to the Apennines, long foreseen by the OKH Operations Staff as the favoured line of defence. However, he worried about the Allies advancing from Italy through the Balkans. By autumn, this concern was to persuade him to change his mind and defend Italy much further to the south. A consequence was to tie down forces desperately needed elsewhere.225
The Wehrmacht’s rapid successes in taking hold of Italy so speedily provided some relief. Hitler’s spirits then soared temporarily when the stunning news came through on the evening of 12 September that Mussolini, whose whereabouts had been recently discovered, had been freed from his captors in a ski hotel on the highest mountain in the Abruzzi through an extraordinarily daring raid by parachutists and SS-men carried in by glider and led by the Austrian SS-Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny.226 The euphoria did not last long. Hitler greeted the ex-Duce warmly when Mussolini, no longer the preening dictator but looking haggard and dressed soberly in a dark suit and black overcoat, was brought to Rastenburg on 14 September. But Mussolini, bereft of the trappings of power, was a broken man. The series of private talks they had left Hitler ‘extraordinarily disappointed’.227 Three days later, Mussolini was dispatched to Munich to begin forming his new regime.228 By the end of September he had set up his reconstituted Fascist ‘Repubblica di Salo’ in northern Italy, a repressive, brutish police state run by a combination of cruelty, corruption, and thuggery — but operating unmistakably under the auspices of German masters.229 The one-time bombastic dictator of Italy was now plainly no more than Hitler’s tame puppet, and living on borrowed time.
As autumn progressed, the situation on the eastern front predictably worsened. Even in private in late September, speaking only to Goebbels (allowed to join the Führer’s morning walk with his Alsatian, Blondi), Hitler had been remarkably optimistic. He was confident that the rapid withdrawal to the Dnieper would be successful and leave defences that would be impenetrable over the winter. The shortening of the front by some 350 kilometres would at the same time release troops for a floating reserve of thirty-four divisions, capable of being rushed at short notice to whichever front most needed them.230
