The Hitler–Mussolini meeting at Salzburg

On 29 April 1942 a special train from Rome brought Benito Mussolini, the Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano and the chief of the Italian Supreme Command, General Ugo Cavallero, to Salzburg. Waiting at the station were Adolf Hitler and the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The guests were lodged in the Baroque Klessheim Palace on the western outskirts of Salzburg, a former summer residence of the prince-archbishops that after the Anschluss had been converted into the Führer’s official guest house. For two days, 29 and 30 April, the Axis leaders discussed their plans for the summer of 1942: the offensive in southern Russia, Malta and North Africa, France, and Italy’s part in the war in the east. It was the dictators’ first meeting since the summer of 1941 and the first since the United States had entered the war.

The meeting is sometimes described as a thinly disguised attempt to persuade the Italians to send more troops to the east, ending in success for Hitler: Mussolini is said to have agreed to an additional seven divisions on top of the two already promised. This needs qualifying. The decision to send a whole army to Russia had been taken earlier and on the initiative of Mussolini himself, who had been pressing for it since the summer of 1941. Hitler accepted the Italian offer on 29 December 1941, and the headquarters of the new Eighth Army was re-formed in Italy as early as 1 April 1942. The figure of seven new divisions is correct, but they joined not two but three divisions which had been fighting since the summer of 1941 in the Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia. At Salzburg the matter was one topic among others rather than the subject of bargaining, and Ciano’s notes suggest that what worried the Italians more than the number of divisions was what they heard about the state of Germany.

A meeting without an agenda

Ciano noted in his diary that it was the Germans who had wanted the meeting and that, as usual, they had sent no agenda. On the train Cavallero talked to him about the planned landing on Malta. Preparations were going ahead with the greatest care, but, as Ciano observed, whether and when the operation would take place was “another matter”, and the marshal hid behind “a great many ifs and buts”. Cavallero also said that the war had to be won this year, or at least a position had to be reached that would bring victory, since otherwise the dangers would grow.

Besides Hitler and Ribbentrop, the Germans were represented by the chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and the chief of the operations staff, General Alfred Jodl; the Italians also by their ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri. Ciano at once noted the hosts’ exceptional cordiality, which put him on his guard: “the courtesy of the Germans is always in inverse proportion to their good fortune”. Hitler seemed tired to him. “The winter months in Russia have weighed heavily on him. For the first time I see that he has a lot of grey hair,” he wrote. Two days earlier a series of four night-time RAF raids on Rostock had ended, and on 26 April, in his speech to the Reichstag, Hitler had spoken mainly about the winter that had been survived and had demanded confirmation of his power, unconstrained by any law. Ciano believed the speech had made a depressing impression in Italy.

Russia and oil

Hitler talked with Mussolini, and Ciano with Ribbentrop, in separate rooms, but according to Ciano “the same record was playing in both”. Ribbentrop painted for him a picture of Napoleon, the Berezina and the disaster of 1812, which this time “Hitler’s genius” was to overcome. Asked about the future, he was less clear: there would be an offensive against the Russians in the south, whose political and military objective was the oilfields. Once Russia ran out of oil she would be brought to her knees, and then the British Conservatives, and even Winston Churchill, who “is after all a sensible man”, would give way in order to save what was left of the Empire. This corresponded to the assumptions of Directive No. 41, which Hitler had signed on 5 April, although the Germans did not pass its details on to their allies. If the British fought on nonetheless, they were to be broken by aircraft and U-boats. Ciano noted that this was “the formula of 1940”, which had failed at the time, and said so to Ribbentrop’s face, to Alfieri’s horror. Everyone, from ministers to the antechambers, repeated that America was “a great bluff”. Ciano thought that the idea of American strength worried the Germans more than they cared to admit.

The talks also touched on France. A few days earlier, on 18 April, Pierre Laval had once again become head of the government in Vichy under German pressure. Ciano recorded that the Germans regarded France with mistrust rather than friendship, and that Laval did not convince them either. Hitler and Mussolini also agreed that the time had not yet come for a joint declaration on the independence of India and the Arab countries, which Japan had proposed and which the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose had been seeking. A few days later Mussolini, won over by Bose, tried to revive the matter in spite of the “Salzburg decisions”, without success.

From conversations on the sidelines the Italians took away a picture of an exhausted Germany. Ribbentrop admitted that 270,000 German soldiers had been killed in the east. The Italian military attaché in Berlin, General Efisio Marras, estimated the number of dead at 700,000, and together with the maimed, the frostbitten and the seriously ill, losses in his view reached three million. These figures, recorded by Ciano, cannot be taken as accurate, but they show how the Italians assessed the consequences of the past winter. Ciano noted that no able-bodied men were to be seen in the streets of German towns, only women, children, old men and forced labourers from all over Europe. His wife Edda, Mussolini’s daughter, visited a camp of Italian workers and saw a man who had been wounded by a guard with a scythe. When she told Hitler about it, he flew into a rage and ordered an investigation.

Malta and Africa

The most concrete arrangements concerned the Mediterranean. Since December 1941 the German Luftflotte 2 under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had been bombing Malta, and in April the raids reached their peak. The British withdrew the remnants of Force K from the island, and most of the Spitfires delivered by the carrier Wasp were destroyed on the ground and in the air within a few days. The Italians had long regarded the capture of Malta as a precondition for safely supplying their forces in Libya, and in the spring Kesselring argued that the island had already been neutralised and was ripe for a landing.

At Salzburg the two high commands agreed on the sequence of operations. At the end of May Erwin Rommel was to attack the British Eighth Army on the Gazala Line and take Tobruk, and then halt at the Egyptian frontier. After that, around the middle of July, an Italo-German seaborne and airborne landing, called Operation Herkules by the Germans and C3 by the Italians, was to capture Malta. Historians link the approval of this plan precisely to the talks of 29 and 30 April. Hitler agreed to it without enthusiasm. He did not trust the Italian navy and remembered the losses of the paratroopers on Crete, and he made everything else depend on the capture of Tobruk.

The monologue

Ciano remembered the second day as a Hitler performance. “Hitler talks, talks, talks, talks. Mussolini suffers – he who is used to doing the talking himself and now has to keep practically silent.” After lunch, when everything had already been said, Hitler talked without a break for an hour and forty minutes, about war and peace, religion and philosophy, art and history. Mussolini glanced mechanically at his watch, Ciano thought about his own affairs, and Cavallero, “a phenomenon of servility”, feigned rapture and nodded continually. The Germans, who knew these disquisitions by heart, suffered most. General Jodl, “after an epic struggle”, fell asleep on a sofa, while Keitel swayed but managed to keep his head up.

Mussolini returned satisfied, as he always did after talks with Hitler. He summed up the situation to Ciano in these words: “The German machine is still powerful, but it has worn out a great deal. Now it will make a new and impressive effort. It must reach its goal.” On 2 May he reported on the results of the journey at a meeting of the government, and Ciano presented King Victor Emmanuel III with a memorandum on his talks with Ribbentrop. The King, as Ciano recorded, made remarks against the Germans: if they did not need the Italians, they would throw them away “like old rags”.

The Eighth Army

Although the number of divisions was not bargained over at Salzburg, the question of Italian troops for Russia was bound up with the arrangements of those days. On 1 May General Italo Gariboldi formally took command of the new army, having been chosen instead of the commander of the expeditionary corps, General Giovanni Messe, who was junior to him in rank. The corps’ three divisions – the Pasubio, the Torino and the 3rd Cavalry (Celere) Division – were to be joined by II Army Corps with the Cosseria, Ravenna and Sforzesca infantry divisions, the Alpine Corps with the Tridentina, Julia and Cuneense divisions, and the Vicenza division, intended for rear-area security. In June the troop trains set off. Thus was formed the Eighth Army, known as the Italian Army in Russia (ARMIR), some 230,000 men in ten Italian divisions. In the summer it took up positions on the Don as part of Army Group B under General Maximilian von Weichs, which was split off in July from Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group South.

Place in the war

The meeting at Klessheim was the last at which the Axis leaders could still believe that 1942 would bring them victory. The plan approved there fell apart within a few months. Rommel moved against Gazala on 26 May and took Tobruk on 21 June. Instead of halting at the frontier, he persuaded Hitler that he could reach the Suez Canal. Hitler, who did not believe in the Malta landing anyway, readily agreed, and Mussolini gave way. Operation Herkules was postponed and in the autumn abandoned. Malta held out, and Rommel’s pursuit came to a halt in July at El Alamein, where in November 1942 the Axis forces suffered a decisive defeat. The offensive towards the Caucasus and Stalingrad, presented to the Italians as the road to the end of the war, ended with the encirclement of the Sixth Army. In mid-December 1942 the Red Army, in Operation Little Saturn, smashed the Italian corps on the Don, and in January 1943 the Alpine Corps. By February 1943, according to Italian figures, the Eighth Army had lost nearly 88,000 killed and missing and more than 34,000 wounded and frostbitten.

Ciano’s notes from Salzburg show that some of the Italian elite could already see in the spring of 1942 how badly the war had exhausted Germany and how little Italy counted for in the alliance. The defeats on the Don and in Africa sealed the fate of the regime. In July 1943 the Fascist Grand Council, with Ciano’s vote, removed Mussolini from power, and in January 1944 Ciano, sentenced by a special court of the Italian Social Republic, was shot in Verona. That republic had been set up by the Germans for Mussolini after they had freed him.