Weinrowski invited us to his place. He lived with his wife in a three-room apartment in Kreuzberg. He showed us two photos on the piano of young men, one framed in black with a ribbon: his eldest son, Egon, killed in Demiansk; the younger one was serving in France and had been quiet till then, but his division had just been rushed to Italy to reinforce the new front. While Frau Weinrowski served us tea and cakes, we talked about the Italian situation: as pretty much everyone expected, Badoglio was just waiting for the occasion to switch sides, and as soon as the Anglo-Americans had set foot on Italian soil, he had seized it. “Fortunately, fortunately, the Führer was cleverer than he!” Weinrowski exclaimed.—“You say that,” Frau Weinrowski murmured sadly as she offered us sugar, “but it’s your Karl who is there, not the Führer.” She was a rather heavy woman, with puffy, tired features; but the outline of her mouth and especially the light in her eyes hinted at past beauty. “Oh, be quiet,” Weinrowski grumbled, “the Führer knows what he’s doing. Look at that Skorzeny! Tell me that wasn’t a master stroke.” The raid on the Gran Sasso, to liberate Mussolini, had made headlines for days in Goebbels’s press. Since then, our forces had occupied northern Italy, interned six hundred and fifty thousand Italian soldiers, and set up a Fascist republic in Salò; and all that was presented as a significant victory, a brilliant maneuver of the Führer’s. But the resumption of raids on Berlin was also a direct consequence; the new front was draining our divisions, and in August the Americans had managed to bomb Ploesti, our last source of oil. Germany was truly caught in the crossfire.
