The Germans move into Italy

In the first days of August 1943 the roads leading from Bavaria, the Tyrol and southern France into northern Italy filled with German columns. Division after division came through the Brenner Pass and the crossings of the Western Alps, officially to help an ally defend the peninsula against the expected Allied invasion. In reality Adolf Hitler was preparing to take control of a country whose new government, as he rightly suspected, was looking for a way out of the war. On 6 August 1943, in the Alpine town of Tarvisio, close to the border with the Reich, the foreign ministers and chiefs of staff of the two states met to assure each other of their loyalty. By then both sides knew they were talking to a future enemy.

The alliance after the fall of the Duce

On 25 July King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini, had him arrested and appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio prime minister. The new government’s first statement declared that “the war goes on” and that Italy remained faithful to its obligations towards its ally. Nobody in Berlin believed it. Mussolini’s fall came when the Allies had been fighting in Sicily for two weeks; they had taken Palermo on 22 July, and on 19 July American bombers had struck Rome for the first time. The Italian army was exhausted, the country bombed and hungry, and the monarchy and the generals had for months been weighing how to lead the state out of the war before it dragged Italy down with it.

Hitler had foreseen such a turn of events since the spring. As early as May 1943, after the Axis surrender in Tunisia, the staff of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) had drawn up plans for the event of an Italian “betrayal”. On 21 May Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel approved guidelines for several linked operations: “Alarich” was to be the occupation of mainland Italy, “Konstantin” the takeover of the Italian occupation zones in the Balkans, “Siegfried” the seizure of the Italian zone in southern France and “Kopenhagen” the capture of the Alpine passes on the Franco-Italian border. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, whose staff was being formed in Munich, was chosen to carry out Alarich.

On the evening of 25 July Hitler’s first impulse was to seize Rome at once and arrest the King, Badoglio and the Crown Prince. The German forces in Italy, however, were too weak, and an open break might drive the Italians straight into the arms of the Allies. It was decided to wait and build up strength. On 26 July Rommel, who had left for Salonika the day before to take command in the Balkans, was summoned back to Hitler’s headquarters. The May plans were revised and supplemented with new ones: the occupation of Rome, the liberation of Mussolini and the seizure of the Italian fleet. In the end the whole undertaking went down in history under the code name Operation Achse (“Axis”).

Divisions across the Alps

The movement began before the Italians had grasped its scale. During the night of 25–26 July the 215th Infantry Division crossed the border from France, heading for Liguria. Others followed: the 305th Infantry Division, which marched to Genoa and La Spezia, base of the main Italian fleet; the 76th Infantry Division, sent to the Savona area on 2 August; and the 94th Infantry Division, which set off towards the Susa valley in Piedmont on 4 August. The Feldherrnhalle Panzergrenadier Division and the 715th Infantry Division occupied the crossings on the Franco-Italian border. In mid-August the three divisions in Piedmont and Liguria came under the headquarters of LXXXVII Corps under General Gustav-Adolf von Zangen.

A second wave came from the north, over the Brenner. Rommel, alarmed by reports that the Italians were reinforcing the garrisons on the passes and preparing them for demolition, sent ahead a battle group made up of elements of the 26th Panzer Division and the 44th Infantry Division, with orders that its officers should tell the Italian posts they were arriving to help in the common struggle. The commander of the Italian corps in Bolzano threatened to use force, and the Italian Supreme Command (Comando Supremo) in Rome protested sharply. The crisis was defused only on 1 August by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German Commander-in-Chief South, who made the Italians let the columns through. The 44th Infantry Division occupied the area around Bolzano and took control of the Brenner railway, the only reliable link with the Reich.

On 3 August the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler crossed the pass, brought from the Eastern Front without its tanks, which it had left there for other SS divisions. It was deployed between Parma and Reggio nell’Emilia, where SS General Paul Hausser arrived the same day with the headquarters of II SS Panzer Corps. Hitler had initially wanted to move the Das Reich SS division to Italy as well, but the situation on the Eastern Front, where the Red Army had gone over to the counter-offensive after the Battle of Kursk, did not allow it. Over the following weeks the 65th Infantry Division arrived and was sent to the Adriatic near Ravenna and Rimini, as did the 24th Panzer Division, which by the end of August had reached the Modena area from the Tyrol. The last, the 71st Infantry Division, transferred from Denmark, began entering Friuli from Carinthia on 25 August and by early September stood near Gorizia and Trieste.

Thus in less than six weeks some eight German divisions took up position in northern Italy. In the south of the peninsula, under Kesselring’s command, there were already the divisions still fighting in Sicily and units deployed in Calabria, Campania and Apulia, while from 27 July General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke’s 2nd Parachute Division was being flown in from southern France to Pratica di Mare airfield near Rome. Its arrival surprised not only the Italians but also Kesselring himself, whom nobody had warned. The division took up position a dozen or so kilometres from the capital, ready if necessary to strike at it within a few hours.

The meeting at Tarvisio

The Badoglio government found itself in a trap it had partly set for itself. To gain time and lull the Germans, it professed loyalty and even asked for more divisions to defend the peninsula, while at the same time trying to prevent those divisions from occupying the key points of the country. As early as 31 July the chief of the Supreme Command, General Vittorio Ambrosio, argued with Kesselring over where the arriving units should be stationed. The Italians wanted them in the south, on the front line, where fighting the Allies would tie them down. The Germans were deploying them in the north, along the lines of communication with the Reich and around the ports and naval bases.

Badoglio proposed a meeting of heads of state and government. Hitler, who feared an assassination attempt and did not want to travel to Italy, refused and suggested talks between the foreign ministers and chiefs of staff instead. These took place at Tarvisio on 6 August: on the German side Joachim von Ribbentrop and Keitel, accompanied by General Walter Warlimont; on the Italian side the new foreign minister, Raffaele Guariglia, recalled from the embassy in Ankara, and Ambrosio. The Germans came with an armed SS escort, which the Italians took as an ostentatious display of mistrust.

Ribbentrop asked outright whether Guariglia had been talking to the British or the Americans. The minister denied it, admitting only that in Ankara he had spoken with the Turkish foreign minister. He gave assurances that Italy was staying in the war and asked merely for understanding of its difficult position. Ribbentrop for his part professed German friendship, although the plans for occupying Italy lay ready at OKW headquarters and Hitler himself, in private, called the new government traitors. Ambrosio demanded an explanation of the troop movements, of which the Italians had not been informed, and proposed that the number of German divisions in Italy be increased from nine to as many as sixteen – but on condition that they went south, against the Allies. Keitel and Warlimont replied that the new units would remain in central and northern Italy as a strategic reserve. The dispute over who was to command German troops on Italian soil was left unresolved.

Both sides were lying. Even as Guariglia was giving his assurances, Italian emissaries were already seeking contact with the Allies: on 4 August the embassy counsellor, the Marchese Blasco Lanza d’Ajeta, spoke with the British ambassador in Lisbon, and on 5 August a Foreign Ministry official, Alberto Berio, made contact with the British in Tangier. Their missions came to nothing, because the Allies, holding to the principle of unconditional surrender adopted at the Casablanca Conference, had no intention of negotiating terms. The Germans, meanwhile, while speaking of allied assistance, were in practice preparing an occupation. The meeting ended with an exchange of courtesies, but once the two delegations had returned home nobody was under any illusion. The German military concluded that the Italian “betrayal” was a matter of weeks and stepped up their preparations.

A race against time

After Tarvisio events moved quickly. On 12 August Brigadier General Giuseppe Castellano, a trusted aide of Ambrosio, left Rome disguised as a member of a delegation travelling to meet diplomats in Lisbon. In Madrid he met the British ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, and on 19 August in Lisbon he held talks with the envoys of General Dwight Eisenhower: his chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, and his head of intelligence, Brigadier Kenneth Strong. Castellano came with a proposal that Italy should change sides and fight alongside the Allies. He was told that it could only accept terms of surrender.

On 15 August the last conference between the military of the two countries took place in Bologna. Colonel General Alfred Jodl arrived accompanied by Rommel, who was just taking command of Army Group B in northern Italy, and under the protection of Leibstandarte troops. The Italian army chief of staff, General Mario Roatta, insisted that Italy would not change sides, while at the same time presenting a plan for the deployment of forces in which the Germans saw a trap for their divisions in the south. The atmosphere was so tense that the German delegation declined refreshments for fear of being poisoned. Soon afterwards Rommel’s headquarters moved to Lake Garda, while in the south Kesselring formed the new Tenth Army, which was to face the Allies.

Significance

On 3 September 1943 Castellano and Bedell Smith signed the armistice at Cassibile in Sicily; it was announced on the evening of 8 September, when the Allies had already landed in Calabria and were preparing the landing at Salerno. The Germans, ready since late July, immediately launched Operation Achse. Within a few days they disarmed most of the Italian army in Italy, southern France and the Balkans and occupied Rome, while the King and Badoglio fled to Brindisi. More than 600,000 Italian soldiers were deported to the Reich as military internees, and where the Italians resisted, as on the island of Kefalonia, the Germans shot their prisoners. The divisions that had crossed the Alps in August under the pretext of allied assistance became an occupation force.

The August movement ensured that Italy did not leave the war but became one of its battlefields. The Allies had counted on the surrender opening a quick road to the north of the peninsula. Instead, the presence of more than a dozen German divisions allowed Kesselring to halt them far south of Rome, and the fighting on the peninsula went on until early May 1945. For Hitler, though, it was a costly operation: the divisions sent to Italy and the Balkans to replace the Italians there were missing on the Eastern Front, where after the Battle of Kursk the Red Army had seized the initiative for good.