Hitler

Any idea of using him as the figurehead of a German-controlled regime was discarded. Hitler spoke individually to his leading henchmen before, in need of a rest after a hectic twenty-four hours, retiring to his rooms to eat alone. He returned for a lengthy conference that evening, attended by thirty-five persons. But the matter was taken no further. Within a few days, he was forced to concede that any notion of occupying Rome and sending in a raiding party to take the members of the Badoglio government and the Italian royal family captive was both precipitate and wholly impracticable. The plans were called off. Hitler’s attention focused now on discovering the whereabouts of the Duce and bringing him into German hands as soon as possible.
    With the Italian crisis still at its height, the disastrous month of July drew to a close amid the heaviest air-raids to date. Between 24 and 30 July, the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, using the release of aluminium strips to blind German radar, unleashed ‘Operation Gomorrha’ – a series of devastating raids on Hamburg, outdoing in death and destruction anything previously experienced in the air-war. Waves of incendiaries whipped up horrific fire-storms, turning the city into a raging inferno, consuming everything and everybody in their path. People suffocated in their thousands in cellars or were burnt to cinders on the streets. An estimated 30,000 people lost their lives; over half a million were left homeless; twenty-four hospitals, fifty-eight churches, and 277 schools lay in ruins; over 50 per cent of the city was completely gutted. As usual, Hitler revealed no sense of remorse at any human losses. He was chiefly concerned about the psychological impact. When he was given news that fifty German planes had mined the Humberestuary, he exploded: ‘You can’t tell the German people in this situation: that’s mined; 50 planes have laid mines! That has no effect at all … You only break terror through terror! We have to have counter-attacks. Everything else is rubbish.’
    Hitler mistook the mood of a people with whom he had lost touch. What they wanted, in their vast majority, was less the retaliation that was Hitler’s only thought than proper defence against the terror from the skies and – above all else – an end to the war that was costing them their homes and their lives. But Hitler remained, as he had been throughout the agony of Hamburg, more taken up with events in Italy.
    Though he had still rejected any evacuation of Sicily, insistent that the enemy should not set foot on the Italian mainland, Kesselring had taken steps to prepare the ground for what proved a brilliantly planned evacuation on the night of 11 – 12 August, catching the Allies by surprise and allowing 40,000 German and 62,000 Italian troops, with their equipment, to escape to safety. But as August drew on, suspicions mounted that it would not be long before the Italians defected. And at the end of the month, directives for action in the event of an Italian defection, in the drawer for months and now refashioned under the code-name ‘Axis’, were issued.
    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’. 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.
    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.
    On 8 September Hitler had flown for the second time within a fortnightto 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