The rescue of Mussolini

Shortly after 2 p.m. on 12 September 1943 German assault gliders landed on a meadow beside the Campo Imperatore hotel, which stands more than 2,100 metres above sea level in the Gran Sasso massif. Out climbed Luftwaffe paratroopers and a dozen or so SS men. The Italian Carabinieri and policemen who had been guarding the deposed dictator in the hotel for a week did not fire a single shot. Within a quarter of an hour Benito Mussolini was standing outside the hotel among German soldiers, and an hour later he was flying off towards Rome in a small liaison aircraft. The operation was codenamed Eiche (“Oak”).

Most popular accounts, and many war chronologies, state that Mussolini was freed by SS troops under the command of Otto Skorzeny. That is how German propaganda presented it, and how Skorzeny himself later described it. According to the documents and the accounts of participants, the operation was planned by the staff of General Kurt Student and commanded by Major Harald Mors of the parachute training battalion, while the gliders landing by the hotel were led by Lieutenant Georg von Berlepsch. Skorzeny and his small SS group were attached to them.

A prisoner of the Badoglio government

After his fall on 25 July 1943, Mussolini was a prisoner of the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The new authorities feared that the Germans would try to free him and restore him to power, so they moved him from place to place. From Rome he was taken via Gaeta to the island of Ponza, where he spent almost two weeks and turned 60 on 29 July. In the first days of August he was moved to the naval base on the island of La Maddalena off the north coast of Sardinia. The dictator read, wrote notes on his fall and was ill. Officials who visited him described a man who had lost his spark and was resigned to the end of his career.

When it emerged that the Germans had got wind of the island, he was flown to the mainland on 28 August and lodged in a guest house at the foot of the Gran Sasso, by the lower station of the cable car. At the beginning of September – on 6 September, according to Italian accounts – he was moved up the mountain to the Campo Imperatore hotel. This ski hotel from the 1930s, built on a plateau in the Abruzzo, could be reached only by cable car. The authorities considered it a place that could not be taken by surprise from the ground. The prisoner was guarded by several dozen Carabinieri and policemen under the police inspector Giuseppe Gueli. On 8 September Mussolini himself heard the announcement of Italy’s surrender on the radio. The fuller terms of surrender, which the Italian negotiator had already received when signing the Armistice of Cassibile, provided for him to be handed over to the Allies. According to his later account, he declared that he would not fall alive into the hands of the English.

The search

Adolf Hitler learned of his ally’s arrest on the evening of 25 July and announced at once that he would free him. General Student, commander of XI Air Corps, which grouped together the German airborne troops, was ordered to transfer the 2nd Parachute Division to Italy and prepare an operation in Rome – and first of all to find the prisoner. Assigned to his staff was SS Captain (SS-Hauptsturmführer) Otto Skorzeny, an Austrian who since April 1943 had commanded a small special-operations unit under the SS intelligence service. According to Skorzeny’s memoirs, Hitler chose him personally from among several officers presented to him.

Throughout August the Germans searched for Mussolini, following false leads planted by Italian counter-intelligence. The most was established by the Rome office of the German Security Police and SD, headed by SS Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler: wiretaps, bribed informers and the Mussolini family’s correspondence showed that the dictator was on La Maddalena. Skorzeny flew over the island in a reconnaissance aircraft; according to some accounts the machine had to ditch because of a fault and the crew were fished out of the sea. The landing being prepared on the island became pointless when the Italians moved the prisoner to the mainland. The Germans picked up the Gran Sasso trail at the beginning of September, after intercepting a message from Gueli to the chief of police, Carmine Senise, reporting that preparations for guarding the prisoner on the mountain were complete. An officer on Student’s staff took aerial photographs of the plateau, and the corps doctor, pretending to be looking for a site for a convalescent home, checked whether the cable car was guarded.

The announcement of Italy’s surrender on 8 September changed the situation. The Wehrmacht launched Operation Achse and disarmed the Italian forces, and after two days of fighting the Germans occupied Rome. King Victor Emmanuel III and Badoglio fled south, leaving Mussolini’s guards no clear orders. The Abruzzo now lay in the zone controlled by the Germans, and there could be no question of outside help for the Italian guard at the hotel.

Student’s plan

On the afternoon of 11 September, at Student’s headquarters at Frascati, the general instructed Major Harald Mors, commander of the parachute training battalion (Fallschirmjäger-Lehrbataillon), to prepare an operation for the following day. The plan had two strands. A motorised column with two companies of the battalion was to take the village of Assergi and the lower station of the cable car, cutting the hotel off from the valley. At the same time ten DFS 230 gliders, towed from Pratica di Mare airfield near Rome, were to land on the plateau with some 90 men under Lieutenant von Berlepsch. A parachute drop at that altitude and in the thin air was judged too risky.

Skorzeny obtained Student’s consent for his group to take part: a dozen or so SS men took the places in the gliders of paratroopers who were left behind at the airfield. On his own initiative he brought into the operation an Italian general of the colonial police, Fernando Soleti, who had been brought from Rome that morning. His presence and his orders were meant to stop the guards from shooting. Skorzeny also took along a photographer and a war correspondent. Take-off was delayed because the gliders arrived late from France, and the operation began in the afternoon instead of the morning.

Gran Sasso, 12 September

Mors’s column reached Assergi in the early afternoon. The paratroopers cut the telephone lines and seized the lower cable-car station. There was a brief exchange of fire in which two Italians were killed – the Carabiniere Giovanni Natale and the forest warden Pasqualino Vitocco, who was trying to warn the hotel guard – and two Carabinieri were wounded. These were the only fatalities of the entire operation.

At about 1 p.m. the aircraft towing the gliders took off from Pratica di Mare. The leading group flew an extra loop over the Alban Hills to gain height, while the second, with Skorzeny aboard, flew straight on. According to German accounts this was the pilots’ decision; according to other accounts it was Skorzeny’s own, as he wanted to be first on the scene. As a result his gliders landed by the hotel before the group of the assault commander. One glider crashed on landing on the stony slope and its passengers were injured. The others touched down within a few minutes.

Skorzeny ran into the hotel with a few men and General Soleti. Soleti shouted to the guards not to shoot, and Mussolini, who had seen the Germans from a window, according to witnesses called out the same. Gueli and the Carabinieri commander, Lieutenant Alberto Faiola, made no attempt at defence. It is still disputed whether they had orders to kill the prisoner in the event of a rescue attempt. Faiola always denied it, and the instructions from Rome, which spoke of “the utmost caution”, could be read in different ways. What is certain is that the machine guns were kept in the cellar, and that Gueli had earlier declined additional men and light guns to defend the cable car. The paratroopers surrounded the hotel and disarmed the guards. At about 2.45 p.m. Major Mors came up by cable car and introduced himself to Mussolini as the commander of the operation.

From the outset the operation was also prepared with propaganda in mind. The paratroopers’ photographer Toni Schneiders and newsreel cameramen photographed and filmed Mussolini in a black coat and hat, surrounded by soldiers, with Skorzeny always in the foreground. These pictures went round the world.

The Storch’s flight

The plan was for Mussolini to go down to the valley by cable car and fly out from the airfield near L’Aquila, which was secured by paratroopers dropped there. In case the cable car was damaged, Student sent light aircraft to the plateau. In the end the shortest route was chosen. A Fieseler Fi 156 Storch light liaison aircraft landed on the plateau, flown by Student’s personal pilot, Captain Heinrich Gerlach. The machine was meant to take only one passenger, but Skorzeny insisted on flying with Mussolini. The overloaded aircraft set off on a short, stony take-off run, went over the edge of the plateau and gathered speed only above the slope. Gerlach managed to pull it up and landed at Pratica di Mare airfield. There Mussolini transferred to a Heinkel He 111 bomber, which took him to Vienna. He spent the night at the Hotel Imperial.

From Vienna Skorzeny telephoned the head of the Reich Main Security Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and gave his own account of events. That same evening he was congratulated by Heinrich Himmler and by Hitler, who awarded him the Knight’s Cross and promoted him to SS-Sturmbannführer (major). On 13 September Mussolini flew to Munich, where his wife Rachele and his younger children were waiting for him, and on 14 September he met Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters near Rastenburg (Kętrzyn).

The Skorzeny legend

For the Reich, which in the summer of 1943 had lost the Battle of Kursk, lost Sicily and was just losing its ally, the rescue of Mussolini was a rare piece of good news. The Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels exploited it to the full, and Himmler made sure the credit went to the SS. As early as 14 September German radio presented Skorzeny as the organiser and hero of the operation. Newsreels and the illustrated magazine Signal showed him at the Duce’s side, and Skorzeny was fêted in Berlin. The paratroopers were decorated a few days later on a meadow in the Alban Hills, with no cameras present: Gerlach and the pilot of the first glider received the Knight’s Cross, and Mors, von Berlepsch and several other officers the German Cross in Gold.

Mors protested to Student, but Student did not want a conflict with Himmler, and Hitler had already accepted the SS version. According to the Italian historian of the operation Marco Patricelli, Mors, who kept on demanding a correction, was soon transferred to the Eastern Front. Mors and von Berlepsch were convinced that Skorzeny had deliberately overtaken the commander’s group so as to be the first to stand before Mussolini and the cameras. In 1959 Student wrote that Skorzeny “had nothing to do with the plan”. Skorzeny himself, in his memoirs published in 1950 and in later books, presented himself as the originator and commander of the operation, and the paratroopers as men who landed when it was all over. This version dominated popular literature and film for decades. Only the work of historians drawing on documents and participants’ accounts, among them Patricelli, restored a sense of proportion.

This does not alter the fact that Skorzeny did part of the intelligence work, flew to the Gran Sasso and was the first to enter the hotel, and that his presence on the aircraft with Mussolini was genuine. At the same time the enemy put up no resistance: the area around the mountain was already controlled by the Germans, and after the flight of the king and the government the Italian guards had neither the orders nor the will to fight.

In London, on 21 September, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that the Badoglio government had been bound to hand Mussolini over to the Allies, and that a daring German stroke had prevented it.

The meeting at the Wolf’s Lair

The man Hitler welcomed on 14 September bore little resemblance to the Duce of old. Mussolini was exhausted and ill and, as Goebbels noted in his diary after Mussolini’s talks with Hitler, showed no desire for revenge on those who had overthrown him. He reportedly wanted to withdraw into private life. Hitler had no intention of letting him do so. He needed an Italian government that would lend the German occupation of northern and central Italy a veneer of legality, make it easier to exploit the industry and manpower there, and keep some Italians on the side of the Axis. According to accounts from Mussolini’s circle, Hitler gave him to understand that if he refused, Italy would be treated as a conquered country. Mussolini agreed.

On 15 September the Duce’s first orders were announced from Munich: the re-establishment of the Fascist party, henceforth Republican, under the direction of Alessandro Pavolini. On 18 September Mussolini spoke on Munich radio, announcing a new Fascist state and a reckoning with the “traitors”. On 23 September the ministers of the new government met in his absence at the German embassy in Rome. The post of Minister of Defence went to Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, one of the few senior commanders who joined Mussolini. At the end of September the Duce returned to Italy and on 27 September convened a cabinet meeting at Rocca delle Caminate in Romagna. On 1 December 1943 the state took the name Italian Social Republic. Because some ministries, including propaganda, settled in Salò on Lake Garda, and Mussolini took up residence in nearby Gargnano, it was known as the Salò Republic.

Mussolini’s power was limited from the start. The country was occupied by the Wehrmacht of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and the army group of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; the Reich ambassador and the Higher SS and Police Leader kept watch over the government; and the Germans removed from its authority the provinces along the border with the Reich, creating the Operational Zones of the Alpine Foothills and the Adriatic Littoral, run by Gauleiters. More than 600,000 Italian soldiers disarmed in Operation Achse were held in German camps as military internees, and only some of them agreed to serve the republic.

Place in the war

The rescue of Mussolini did not change the military situation. In the days of the Gran Sasso operation the Allies were fighting for the Salerno beachhead, and the Germans were completing the disarming of the Italian army. It did, however, have serious political consequences. Without Mussolini the Germans would have ruled occupied Italy directly. With him they could present the occupation as an alliance, and the split in Italy turned into a civil war. On one side stood the Kingdom of Italy, which declared war on Germany on 13 October, and the Resistance; on the other the Salò Fascists, their militias and police, fighting alongside the Germans against the partisans. The republic helped in round-ups of Jews, in November 1943 declared them “aliens belonging to an enemy nationality”, and in January 1944 its court in Verona sentenced to death those members of the Grand Council who had voted against Mussolini. Five of them, those who had been caught, were shot, among them his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano.

For Mussolini himself the Gran Sasso meant a nineteen-month extension of his career, in a role that many contemporaries – and he himself in private conversations – regarded as humiliating. It ended on 28 April 1945, when partisans shot him by Lake Como.

The operation also marked the beginning of a legend. In propaganda Otto Skorzeny became “the most dangerous man in Europe” and was given one special assignment after another, from the kidnapping of the Hungarian regent’s son in Budapest in October 1944 to the operations of German commandos in Allied uniforms during the Ardennes offensive. The version of events he himself spread outlived by far the state that came into being thanks to the rescue. The freeing of Mussolini became a model for later tales of daring commando raids, although in reality it was above all an efficient airborne landing on ground that nobody was defending any longer.