When Fanatics Fall Out

THE BRUTAL FRIENDSHIP (896 pp.)--F. W. Deakin--Harper & Row ($10.95).

For all their pledges of undying loyalty, Hitler and Mussolini never had much to say to each other. In their dissimilar ways, each had a kind of affection for the other. But they rarely met, rarely agreed, and as the war drew to an end, they blamed each other for the defeat. In this scrupulously documented and vividly told history, Oxford Historian F. W. Deakin, who collaborated with Winston Churchill on his monumental war memoirs, shows how far-reaching the rift was, how it poisoned relations between the two countries from the top command to the soldiers in the field.

The Axis pact got off to a bad start because Hitler never let Mussolini know what he was up to. When he invaded Poland in 1939 without advance warning, the Duce was shaken. He was happy to have German support for his conquests in the Mediterranean, but he did not want to be dragged into a major European war. When Hitler invaded Russia, again without consulting Mussolini, many Fascists began to have second thoughts about the Axis pact. Among them was Mussolini's son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, who upbraided the German ambassador to Italy for hours on end. "The Germans seem to be [Ciano's] favorite target," an Italian official wrote. "He enjoys himself by talking of them in the worst possible way . . . Bum here, bum there; imbecile Germany here, cretinous Germans there; 'that delinquent Ribbentrop,' 'that criminal Hitler.' "

Cold Retreat. Military reverses in Russia strained relations even further. The Duce had sent some Italian troops along to Russia to be in on the victory. When victory turned into disaster at Stalingrad in early 1943, the Germans blamed the Italians for capitulating too quickly. They took revenge by grabbing the Italian transport for their own retreat, leaving many Italians to freeze to death in the Russian winter. They also gleefully filmed Italians fleeing from battle. Mussolini received a letter from a soldier at the front: "Among the officers of both higher and lower rank a general feeling of rancor and distrust against the Germans is generally predominant here." It was no coincidence, notes Deakin, that many Italians who had fought in Russia joined the partisans when they returned to Italy.

There was always a considerable difference between the two dictatorial regimes. At its worst, Italian Fascism was not so ruthless or fanatical as Nazism. The Italians largely ignored Nazi demands that they persecute the Jews. When a wave of strikes broke out in 1943, Mussolini hesitated, eventually arrested some of the strikers and drafted others into the army. Hitler exploded: "That it is possible for people to stop work firmly in eight factories is for me unthinkable. I am convinced that if one shows the slightest weakness in such a case, one is lost."

Nazis for Peace. By early 1943, most top-ranking Fascists were ready to desert Germany and make a separate peace. "The Germans suspect us. And they are right," wrote Giuseppe Bastianini, Italian Foreign Under Secretary. "The whole of Europe is in revolt against the German attempt at hegemony, conducted with such bestiality." Among the most fascinating of Deakin's disclosures is that many top Nazis were also eager for peace (at least with Russia) and were counting on Mussolini to bring Hitler to his senses. "It is impossible to think of continuing to govern with bayonets and violence," one of Ribbentrop's advisers, Megerle, admitted to Bastianini's chef de cabinet in February 1943. The German "vision" of Europe had to be profoundly altered, he went on. The hopes of the European peoples lay not with German arms, but with the "spiritual and political resources of the Italians."

But Mussolini was not the man to bring Hitler to heel. In addition, he was by this time sick and demoralized. When he and Hitler met, they avoided unpleasantries and simply pepped each other up.

When Mussolini was overthrown in July 1943 and imprisoned at a skiing resort in the Apennines, Hitler sent a Nazi rescue mission to spirit him away, and was personally on hand to greet him. Mussolini was once again installed as ruler of Italy, but for the remainder of the war he was little more than a ward of the Germans, trying in vain to govern what was left of Fascist Italy, writing to Hitler only to complain that Nazi soldiers were stealing bicycles. Even in his last flight, Mussolini had to depend on a German convoy. And when the partisans found him, he was huddled in the back of a German truck, wearing a German greatcoat and a German helmet.

A few days earlier, holed up in his Berlin bunker, Hitler had recorded his own last judgment: "The Italian alliance rendered more service to the enemy than to ourselves . . . My attachment to the person of the Duce has not changed . . . but I regret not having listened to reason, which imposed on me a brutal friendship in regard to Italy."

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