Hitler

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 farther to the south. A consequence was to tie down forces desperately needed elsewhere.
    The Wehrmacht’s rapid successes in taking hold of Italy so speedilyprovided 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. 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’. Three days later, Mussolini was dispatched to Munich to begin forming his new regime. By the end of September he had set up his reconstituted Fascist ‘Repubblica di Salò’ 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. 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. The redeployment of troops to Italy weakened the chances of staving off the Soviet offensive. And the failure to erect the ‘eastern wall’ of fortifications along the Dnieper during the two years that it had been in German hands now proved costly. The speed of the Soviet advance gave no opportunity to construct any solid defence line. By the end of September the Red Army had been able to cross the Dnieper and establish important bridgeheads on the west banks of the great river. The German bridgehead at Zaporozhye was lost in early October. By then, the Wehrmacht had been pushed back about 150 miles along the southern front. German and Romanian troops were also cut off on the Crimea, which Hitler refused to evacuate, fearing, as of old, the opportunities it would give for air-attacks on Romanian oil-fields, and concerned about the message it would send to Turkey and Bulgaria. By the end of the month, the Red Army had pushed so far over the big bend of the Dnieper in the south that any notion of the Germans holding their intended defensive line was purely fanciful. To the north, the largest Soviet city in German hands, Kiev, was recaptured on 5–6 November. Manstein wanted to make the attempt to retake it. For Hitler, the lowerDnieper and the Crimea were more important. Control of the lower Dnieper held the key to the protection of the manganese ores of Nikopol, vital for the German steel industry. And should the Red Army again control the Crimea, the Romanian oil-fields would once more be threatened from the air. But, whatever Hitler’s thirst for new military successes, the reality was that by the end of 1943, the limitless granaries of the Ukraine and the industrial heartlands of the northern Caucasus, seen by Hitler on so many occasions as vital to the war effort (as well as the source of future German prosperity in the ‘New Order’), were irredeemably lost.
    V
    Not lost, however, was the war against the Jews. By autumn 1943, ‘Aktion Reinhard’ was terminated: in the region of 1½ million Jews had been killed in the gas-chambers of extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka in eastern Poland. The SS leadership were now pressing hard for the extension of the ‘Final Solution’ to all remaining corners of the Nazi
imperium
– even those where the deportations were likely to have diplomatic repercussions. Among these were Denmark and Italy.
    In September, Hitler complied with the request of Werner Best, the Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark, to have the Danish Jews deported, dismissing Ribbentrop’s anxieties about a possible general strike and other civil disobedience. Though these did not materialize, the round-up of Danish Jews was a resounding failure. Several hundred