The Hitler–Mussolini meeting at Klessheim

On 7 April 1943 a special train from Rome pulled into a station near Salzburg. On board was Benito Mussolini, accompanied by the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Ministry, Giuseppe Bastianini, the Chief of the Supreme Command, General Vittorio Ambrosio, and the ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri. The guests were received by Adolf Hitler, who had been staying at the Berghof since the end of March. The talks went on until 10 April at the baroque Klessheim Palace, which had been fitted out as a residence for the Führer’s guests. The two dictators had held talks in the same place less than a year earlier, at the end of April 1942. Then the Axis had been preparing its summer offensive towards the Caucasus and thinking of capturing Malta. Now the talk was of how not to lose.

It is usually said that the meeting served mainly to shore up Mussolini’s flagging spirits. That is an apt summary, though an incomplete one. The Duce also travelled to Austria with a political plan of his own: he wanted to persuade Hitler to end the war with the Soviet Union. He did not press the plan with full force and returned to Rome empty-handed – though, so the Germans claimed, in better spirits.

Italy in the spring of 1943

The winter of 1942–1943 had destroyed everything on which Italy’s standing in the alliance rested. At El Alamein and in the retreat across Libya most of the army in North Africa had been lost, and on 23 January the British entered Tripoli. On the Don the Eighth Army, or ARMIR, successor to the corps sent to Russia in 1941, had been shattered: of some 230,000 soldiers, tens of thousands had been killed or captured. After the American and British landings in Morocco and Algeria, Tunisia was the Axis’s last foothold in Africa. In March the British Eighth Army broke the Mareth Line, while the Americans and the British First Army were attacking from the direction of Algeria. Allied bombers were destroying the ports and cities of southern Italy, and supply ships bound for Tunis were going to the bottom one after another.

At home war-weariness was growing. Food was short, prices were rising and rations were not enough to live on. On 5 March 1943 workers at the FIAT Mirafiori plant in Turin went on strike. The strike spread to other factories in Piedmont and, at the end of the month, to Milan. According to the usual estimates some 100,000 people took part. These were the first mass strikes in Italy since the Fascists had seized power. The workers demanded above all money and bread, but underground communists were already active in many plants. The regime did not dare resort to mass repression. It gave way on wages and allowances while arresting some of the organisers. For Mussolini it was a shock: the factories of the north, which he had boasted of for twenty years, had turned against him.

The Duce tried to save the situation with a reshuffle. On 5 February 1943 he dismissed almost the entire government. He moved his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, from the Foreign Ministry to the post of ambassador to the Holy See and took over the ministry himself. In practice it was run by Bastianini, a diplomat convinced that Italy had to break free of German domination. Shortly before, Marshal Ugo Cavallero, regarded as the Germans’ man, had been replaced at the head of the Supreme Command by General Ambrosio. The new chief believed that the war had to be ended while Italy still had an army.

Mussolini himself was ill. Since the autumn of 1942 he had suffered severe stomach pains. His doctors diagnosed inflammation of the lining of the stomach and duodenum, and some accounts speak of an ulcer. He had lost weight, spent weeks in bed, and those around him described him as apathetic and indecisive. He travelled to Salzburg with his diet and his medicines.

Peace with Stalin?

The idea of an agreement with Moscow was not new for Mussolini. As early as the autumn of 1942 he had urged Hitler to seek peace in the east, even at the cost of giving up some of his conquests. In December 1942 Ciano had taken this proposal to the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia and had been rebuffed. The Duce’s reasoning was simple. A war on two fronts had ruined Germany in 1918 and would ruin it again. If the eastern front could be closed, the full strength of the Axis could be turned against the British and Americans in the Mediterranean and in western Europe. Bastianini added an idea of his own. Germany’s smaller allies, Hungary and Romania, and perhaps Bulgaria too, were to gather around Rome and together demand from Berlin a say in matters of war and peace. Behind this scheme lay a more cautious hope as well: if the Germans refused to listen, such a bloc might one day look for a way out of the war on its own.

At Klessheim nothing came of it. According to Italian and German accounts, Hitler did most of the talking. He spoke of the invincible strength of the Reich, of new tanks and submarines, of the exhaustion of the Red Army, and of how Stalin would not be satisfied with any compromise. He declared peace with the Soviet Union impossible, arguing that the Russians would use a pause to rebuild their strength and that Germany would lose the raw materials and food of the east. Mussolini, most accounts suggest, did not put the matter as firmly as he had intended. Bastianini for his part tried to persuade Joachim von Ribbentrop to issue a joint declaration on the future organisation of Europe that would promise the conquered nations sovereignty. Ribbentrop refused. Historians note that Hitler understood perfectly well what the Italians wanted. Any concession to Rome would become a precedent for the Hungarians, Romanians and Finns, and the first step towards peace in the east would mark the beginning of the alliance’s break-up.

Tunisia, the Balkans and tanks for the Blackshirts

The most urgent matter was Tunisia. The two dictators agreed that the bridgehead must be held as long as possible, so that the Allies could not immediately carry the war to Sicily, Sardinia or southern Italy. Mussolini and Ambrosio asked for more aircraft and fuel and for help in protecting convoys. The Germans made promises, but in the military talks they reproached the Italians that their fleet did not leave port and their ships were being sunk in the Strait of Sicily. At the same time, in Tunisia, the battle on the Wadi Akarit was being fought, after which the Axis forces had to fall back north towards Enfidaville. No decisions taken at Klessheim could now change the fate of the army in Africa.

The second subject was the Balkans. In occupied Yugoslavia the Germans and Italians had just completed a major operation against Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans, known as the Battle of the Neretva. The Partisans had broken out of the encirclement, and the Germans were already preparing the next blow. The Germans were irritated that the Italians were arming Draža Mihailović’s Chetnik detachments and using them against the Partisans. Berlin regarded the Chetniks as enemies who would turn against the Axis in the event of an Allied landing. According to German literature, Mussolini, influenced by Bastianini, at the same time demanded predominance for Italy in Croatia. Hitler replied in generalities and avoided details. The question of disarming the Chetniks remained unresolved and came up again over the following weeks in talks between the commanders of the two armies.

Hitler also made a gesture intended to raise the Duce’s spirits. He offered to equip with German tanks and assault guns an armoured division formed from the Fascist militia, the Blackshirts. The unit, called the “M” Division after the first letter of Mussolini’s name, was to be the regime’s guard. The equipment reached Italy in the spring. After the Duce’s fall in July the division was taken over by the Royal Army and renamed.

“A new man”

The talks ended on 10 April. A joint communiqué asserted that the two sides were in agreement on all matters and determined to fight on to victory, defending Europe against Bolshevism and Anglo-Saxon plutocracy. It said not a word about peace in the east. The German participants – and, following them, the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who knew the course of the meeting from Hitler’s account and described it in his diary – claimed that Hitler had managed to put the Duce back on his feet. Mussolini, who had arrived subdued and ill, was said to have left revived and full of enthusiasm. Members of the Italian delegation saw it differently. In their view the Duce had lost the meeting, because he had not dared to tell Hitler that Italy could no longer go on fighting this war. Ambrosio and Bastianini returned to Rome convinced that Mussolini would not lead the country out of its alliance with Germany. They began to look for other ways.

In Rome the Duce set about further house-cleaning. On 14 April he dismissed the chief of police, Carmine Senise, who had links with the royal court. Five days later he removed the young and ineffectual party secretary Aldo Vidussoni and replaced him with Carlo Scorza, who was to revive the ossified Fascist Party. But changes of personnel could not alter either the military situation or the mood in the country.

A procession of allies

Mussolini was not the only guest at Klessheim that spring. For Hitler it was a time to review his allies. After the defeat at Stalingrad each of them was wondering how much longer to go along with Germany. After the Duce, other visitors came one after another to the palace near Salzburg.

On 12 and 13 April Marshal Ion Antonescu was there. Hitler and Ribbentrop reproached him that his deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Mihai Antonescu, was sounding out the possibility of an agreement with the Allies and conferring with the Italians about a joint exit from the war. The Marshal defended his colleague and gave assurances of Romania’s loyalty. Mihai Antonescu kept his post.

On 16 and 17 April the Regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy, arrived. The Germans knew that Prime Minister Miklós Kállay was seeking contacts with the British and Americans, and that at the beginning of April he had visited Mussolini and proposed an understanding between Italy, Hungary and Finland. Hitler demanded Kállay’s dismissal. Horthy refused. Hitler also demanded that the Hungarian Jews be handed over. According to the German record of the conversation of 17 April, Ribbentrop declared that the Jews must either be murdered or put into concentration camps. Hitler compared them to tuberculosis bacilli. Horthy did not give way on this either. The conversation at Klessheim foreshadowed what happened a year later, when Germany occupied Hungary.

On 22 April came the President of Slovakia, Father Jozef Tiso, and on 27 April the Poglavnik of the Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelić. At the end of the month Hitler also received the head of the Vichy government, Pierre Laval, at Klessheim. He assured them all of the Reich’s certain victory and called on them all to make a greater effort.

The Duce’s last months

The meeting at Klessheim showed that the Axis had no common strategy, only common troubles. Hitler had no intention of ending the war in the east. From April he was preparing the summer offensive against the Kursk salient, and it was there that the tanks and aircraft went which the Italians needed to defend their coasts. Mussolini could neither convince his ally nor break away from him.

On 13 May 1943 the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. Some 250,000 German and Italian soldiers went into captivity. On 10 July the Allies landed in Sicily. Nine days later Hitler and Mussolini met at Feltre in northern Italy. Once again the Führer did almost all the talking, and once again the Duce could not bring himself to demand consent for Italy to leave the war. The generals, the court and some of the Fascist leaders then concluded that Mussolini had to be removed. During the night of 24–25 July the Fascist Grand Council backed a motion against him, and on the afternoon of 25 July King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed him and had him arrested. In September the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio concluded an armistice with the Allies. The Germans then occupied most of Italy, and Hitler had Mussolini freed from captivity and set him at the head of a puppet republic in northern Italy. In April 1944 the two dictators met again at Klessheim, but by then the Duce was merely the Germans’ guest in his own country.

The troubles of Hitler’s other guests did not go away either. Kállay went on seeking a way to the Allies. In March 1944 Hitler again summoned Horthy to Klessheim, and during his absence the Wehrmacht marched into Hungary. Romania changed sides in August 1944, and both Antonescus were executed after the war. The April talks at Klessheim were the last moment at which Mussolini could still have tried to persuade Hitler to change course. He failed – and in truth he did not even try.