Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (25 page)

Wenner and von Schweinitz were thunderstruck. The prospect of another long drive along dreadful roads was bad enough. Far worse was the knowledge that the Gestapo were after them for signing the surrender agreement. It was the last thing they wanted to hear as they climbed wearily into the car, more dead than alive with fatigue, and settled down for the final leg of their tortuous journey to Bolzano.

*   *   *

THE WEHRMACHT HEADQUARTERS
at Bolzano had been tunneled into a mountain to protect it from the daily air raids by the U.S. Air Force. The SS headquarters nearby had almost been destroyed by a near miss the previous night. Both headquarters were in turmoil as the German commanders waited uneasily to hear the surrender terms from the Allies. They were in several different minds about what to do if the terms were not to their liking, as they almost certainly wouldn’t be.

Some were talking of an Alpine redoubt, a last-ditch stand in the mountains around the Führer’s Berchtesgaden retreat. Others were adamant that there could be no surrender if the troops were not allowed to march home afterward, preferably carrying their weapons. A few, rather more realistic, recognized that the war was lost and they would have to accept whatever terms they could get. All were troubled by their oath to Hitler, divided as to whether they could legitimately repudiate it, or whether it should continue to bind them until the Führer’s death.

The situation was complicated by the interference of the politicians. Franz Hofer, Gauleiter of the Tyrol, had initially supported the approach to the Allies, but had now changed his mind, favoring a separate deal instead that would leave him in charge of the Tyrol. Ernst Kaltenbrunner wanted to negotiate a separate peace for Austria, one for which he himself could take the credit. Alarmed at the talk of hanging Nazi leaders after the war, Kaltenbrunner had decided that his best chance of survival was to negotiate a comprehensive surrender package that included his own exoneration among its provisions. That was why the Gestapo in Innsbruck had been ordered to arrest Wenner and von Schweinitz before they got to Bolzano.

To add to the confusion, General von Vietinghoff, commanding the German army in Italy, had just been relieved of his duties. It was Vietinghoff who had reluctantly sent Wenner and von Schweinitz to Caserta to negotiate the surrender. But Vietinghoff had been sacked that morning by Field Marshal Kesselring, a Hitler diehard determined to keep the war going until all the German soldiers on the Russian front had successfully escaped to the west. While Wenner and von Schweinitz were driving to Bolzano with the surrender terms, Vietinghoff was on his way to Lake Carezza in the Dolomites to face a court-martial for dereliction of duty. Thus were the deck chairs being rearranged on the
Titanic
.

*   *   *

IN THE MOUNTAINS
above Villabassa, the
Prominente
from Dachau were enjoying their first taste of freedom after their release from the SS. Now under the protection of the Wehrmacht, they were being ferried in relays to the Hotel Pragser-Wildsee, a lakeside watering hole in the snow, five thousand feet above sea level. Known also as the Lago di Braies, the hotel had been closed since the beginning of the war, but had been reopened by the partisans as a place for the
Prominente
to remain in safety and a modicum of comfort until the Americans arrived or the war ended, whichever happened first.

The
Prominente
could hardly believe their change of fortune. After years in Dachau and other prisons, knowing that they could be taken out and shot at any moment, it seemed unreal to be walking the grounds of a tourist hotel, with a beautiful lake in front of them and a wonderful view of the mountains behind. Snow lay thick on the ground, and the hotel was freezing cold after being shut up for so long, but the
Prominente
hardly noticed. It was enough just to be free again, able to come and go as they pleased. They were still under guard, but the guards were for their own protection, sentries discreetly patrolling the forest to shield them from marauding deserters or a counterattack by the SS.

It was still possible that the SS might try to kill the
Prominente
before they fell into Allied hands. Some Gestapo who had accompanied the
Prominente
to the hotel had a list of people to be executed on Himmler’s orders. They had shown it to Kurt von Schuschnigg, the former chancellor of Austria. He had not been surprised to see his name on it, and his wife’s too. He presumed the Gestapo had shown him the list to frighten him, but they may have been trying to curry favor, letting him see their orders and then conspicuously failing to carry them out in the hope of getting a good report from him when the Americans appeared and took them prisoner.

But the Gestapo were unlikely to get a good report from Schuschnigg. He knew the Gestapo from old. He had known them since the Anschluss of 1938, when the German army marched into Austria to overthrow the government and annex the country to Germany. Chancellor Schuschnigg had been arrested by the Gestapo and kept in solitary confinement at Gestapo headquarters in Vienna for seventeen months. A cultivated man, intellectual and upper class, he had been bullied by the SS guards, forced to empty their slop buckets and clean the latrine after they deliberately fouled it. The guards had read his letters, aimed their guns at him, threatened to shoot him if he went near a window, banged the table for an hour at a time to annoy him, and denied him permission to attend his father’s funeral. Schuschnigg’s only crime had been to stand in the way of Adolf Hitler, but he had paid a heavy price for it at the hands of the Gestapo and their goons.

Happily, those days were over forever. As soon as the
Prominente
had all arrived at the hotel, they were called to a meeting in the lobby. Captain von Alvensleben of the Wehrmacht stood up and told them that they were no longer prisoners, that he and his men were only there for their protection. Schuschnigg and the others listened incredulously as Alvensleben was followed by an Italian partisan who invited them all to consider themselves guests of the Tyrolean district government: “We are dumbfounded. We look at each other somewhat diffidently, somewhat afraid that this is merely a dream. Soon we shall wake again to reality. But the impossible has happened. The dream is a reality—we are almost free! And we are home! They have spoken to us like human beings! Oh, God, dear God, it is true.”
2

There was a little chapel in the forest close to the hotel. A devout man, Schuschnigg went there to give thanks after the meeting was over. So did quite a few of the other prisoners.

*   *   *

A HUNDRED MILES
to the south, the fighting was still continuing as the Allies raced eastward around the Gulf of Venice. They had just taken Venice itself and were on their way to Trieste, aiming to secure the port for the Allies before Josip Tito and his Yugoslav partisans could reach it from the other side.

Venice had fallen on April 29. It had fallen not to the Allies but to the Italian partisans in the city, who had risen against the Germans and liberated themselves. There had been pockets of resistance, as always, but these had been swiftly mopped up before the arrival of British and New Zealand troops from the Eighth Army. The Italians had rounded up almost three thousand German soldiers still in the city and imprisoned them in a large garage. Then they had come out on the streets to greet the first troops of the Queen’s Brigade driving in over the causeway from the mainland. The whole operation had gone so smoothly that Geoffrey Cox, a New Zealand intelligence officer who arrived early on April 30, found the city virtually untouched by the fighting:

In St Mark’s square the scene was almost fantastically normal. Women sold food for the pigeons to the few Allied troops who had got into the city. In the entrance to the Campanile they were taking down the German price lists for the lift and putting them up in English. All the shops were still shut, but the crowds walked to and fro quietly. Enormous flags—the winged lion of Venice and the Italian tricolour—hung from the standards in front of St Mark’s. There was a moment of excitement as a group of partisans came from a side street escorting a Fascist, surrounded by a curious, shouting crowd. The Fascist was a miserable specimen in all sooth, a meagre man in his late thirties with a blue cap on his head, looking like a railway porter. He carried a paper parcel under his arm and his face was white. He grimaced constantly, from either fear or indifference. They took him across the bridge which runs parallel to the Bridge of Sighs, and into the prison.
3

Cox went to the Hotel Danieli for lunch. He found the restaurant full of rich Italians, elegant men squiring women covered in jewels, who looked as if the war hadn’t touched them in the slightest. Venice was where the rich of Italy had come to escape the bombing. It was where the Fascist leaders had sent their wives and mistresses for safety. The only casualties Venice had sustained from the war had been from people falling into the canals during the blackout.

A British soldier from the Queen’s Brigade, arriving a few hours after Cox, shared his contempt for the Italians they saw sitting out the war:

So this was Venice. We all thought it a dump. The gondoliers put up their prices immediately. They must have thought we earned as much as the Yanks. I had heard a lot about this so-called beautiful city. To me it was a waterlogged dump smelling of damp and drains. Nor did the Eyeties there like us. The main square was filled with little tables and chairs and on every chair, all day long, there was either some old woman dripping with pearls or some well-dressed nancy boy in a silk shirt and ponced-up hair. We had been out since well before Alamein and on those bloody chairs in the main square of Venice were the people whom we had sweated to liberate. They didn’t want to be liberated. They told us so. And the waiters hated our guts too, because we weren’t like the pre-war British.
4

Cox thought the Italians should start in the restaurant at the Danieli, if they wanted to go looking for Fascists. He was glad to get away after lunch, driving back to the mainland and taking the road to Trieste. The port was still in German hands, but was threatened by the Yugoslavs from one direction and the Allies from the other. The question for the Allies, as Cox’s truck turned toward the front line, was whether they could get there first, or whether Tito’s Communist troops would beat them to it, seize the port facilities, and then claim Trieste for Yugoslavia.

*   *   *

IN MILAN,
General Willis Crittenberger of the U.S. Army’s IV Corps had arrived that afternoon to find the city still in chaos as the last of the Germans surrendered and the Italian Fascists continued to be hunted down. Partisans were roaming the streets, flourishing red scarves and waving their rifles about to impress the girls. Upward of five hundred people had been killed before the violence subsided. Their bodies were left in the gutter or else dumped at the city morgue or the cemetery, often without any identification marks of any kind. In the words of the British ambassador: “It is therefore difficult to say whether the victims are Fascists executed by partisans, or partisans executed by Fascists, or just victims of personal vendettas.”

But at least in the Piazzale Loreto, the bodies of Mussolini and his accomplices were no longer dangling from a girder. They had been taken down the previous night. The other bodies were being prepared for burial, but Mussolini’s had been removed to the Policlinico hospital for an autopsy. While rifle shots continued to reverberate around the city, Benito Mussolini was lying naked on a porcelain slab, surrounded by Italian doctors sharpening their scalpels and a group of American cameramen catching every stage of the procedure on film.

Mussolini’s head was still a mess because of the beating he had taken. His skull was misshapen because of the destruction of the cranium. Bone slivers were forced into the sinus cavities. His eyeball was crushed and lacerated, and contained escaping vitreous fluid. His upper jaw was fractured, with multiple lacerations of the palate. The cerebellum, pons, midbrain, and part of the occipital lobes were crushed. There was a massive fracture at the base of the cranium. The Italian dictator was not a pretty sight.

An assistant sponged away the haloes around the bullet holes in Mussolini’s chest. Then the doctors sawed off the top of his skull and slit him open from throat to abdomen. The procedure was routine, but it left the cameramen shaken. The doctors examined Mussolini’s stomach and found an ulcer. They searched his aorta for any sign of the stellar white maculas indicative of syphilis, but apparently found none, which suggested that his enemies had been wrong when they claimed that an advanced case of venereal insanity had contributed to some of Il Duce’s wilder political posturings.

The whole operation took four hours. The doctors stitched Mussolini up again when they had finished. His brain was in pieces, but the Americans took a portion of it away for further analysis in the United States. Bring me the head of my enemy. If there was anything to be learned about dictators from a study of Mussolini’s cerebrum, the scientists at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington had their microscopes poised to find it.

*   *   *

WHILE HER HUSBAND
was being sewn up, Rachele Mussolini was still in jail in Como, expecting to be shot at any moment. Her worst fears appeared to be confirmed that evening when a priest arrived, bringing her children Romano and Anna Maria with him. They hadn’t been reunited for long when a policeman arrived in turn, politely asking Rachele to come with him. The excitable Rachele assumed at once that she had been allowed to see her children one last time and was now being led away to her death.

Instead, she was put in a car and taken to American headquarters in Como. An Italian-speaking officer received her civily and took her to a room for a long talk. He confided that he was already finding the administration of Como a strain. “How on earth did Mussolini manage to govern these people for twenty years?” he wanted to know.