swirled, largely retailed by elderly men and women who could have no idea. Mussolini was dead. My cousin told me for a fact, said Anna Maria. The Allies were set to invade Florence from the south and would be here next week. It’s a known fact, said the crippled man who came to sharpen their knives. They had been in Sicily now for two months and Enrico said they had landed at Salerno two nights ago, but that was not yet a ‘known fact’. Salerno was a long way from Florence. Truckloads of Italian soldiers raced through the city, going where? To fight the Germans? Many questions, no answers. Soon a stream of those same soldiers, ragged, stunned and aimless, began drifting back from the north. In the sultry heat, tempers spilled and the pus of reprisal poisoned the city. Fascists, and possible fascists and sympathisers with fascists or anyone resembling a fascist, were hunted out and beaten or humiliated or killed. Professor Ottone Rosai had been beaten nearly to death.
‘What will happen to Roberto?’ Annabelle wondered.
Their cousin, a captain in the army, had been wounded in Africa, evacuated back to Italy just ahead of the surrender, and placed in charge of another division.
‘Never mind about Roberto,’ said Enrico, ‘it’s what the Germans will do that we should be worried about.’
The answer came two days later. As the German forces under Himmler’s right-hand man, SS General Karl Wolff, rolled through the country, the Italian Army had no idea whatsoever what to do – no orders from their King or Badoglio, no directives from the command. Nothing. As the Germans advanced there was practically no army left, and those who remained did not feel enthusiastic about Badoglio’s parting exhortation to oppose the Nazis.
Civilians were terrified and exhausted and could oppose no-one. On 11 September the Germans invaded Florence, arrested all Italian soldiers, and set up their barracks and headquarters in Piazza San Marco. The Germans took prisoners by the thousands, then tens of thousands, then people stopped counting. Most of the prisoners were shipped to Germany to labour camps. The rattle of machine-gun fire was a signal that an escaping prisoner had not made it, and the body lay where it fell until nightfall, when parents or wives came to take it away. The only mitigation came the in the form of the long-time German Consul, Gerhard Wolf, who did his best to help the citizens, warn the Jews, and head off the wholesale pillage of the city’s art treasures by Goering. Otherwise, German contempt for the defeated Italians seared the population like battery acid.
Under German command, the fascists were given untrammelled power to conduct their own affairs and counter-reprisals began in earnest. Major Mario Carità was given headquarters in via Benedetto Varchi and put in charge of the Office of Political Investigation with enough men to conduct torture and murder on a scale sufficient to please both the fascists and the Germans.
‘We are caught between two wolves. Carità is an animal. We have more to fear from our own people than from the Germans,’ said Enrico.
As the Major’s activities escalated, he was given more villas for detention of his victims. They were scattered throughout the city, and he set up in via Bolognese in what quickly became known as the Villa Triste – villa of sadness. Enrico and his friends were driven underground again. The Tuscan Committee of National Liberation was formed, and a concerted effort to get Jews out of the city and to plan a resistance began.
Gran Sasso 1943
High up in the clear mountain air of Campo Imperatore atop the Gran Sasso, Mussolini was not enjoying himself. The modernist circular architecture of the luxury ski resort glowered like a gun-emplacement on the bare plain, which was normally covered in snow. Carabinieri patrolled on all sides – at least two hundred of them. What did they think he was going to do? Try to escape? He had been dragged about the country like unwanted baggage and he was tired of it. For his own good, they said. To keep him safe. One of the Carabinieri who played cards with him at night, told him the Germans had been flying reconnaissance missions over their positions, looking for him, which was why he had had to be shifted about. Well, they would not find him here. The only way up was by cable car from the valley floor below.
He did not care. Tired and dispirited, he was uninterested in the war or the outside world. Food did not interest him. Neither did the gramophone they had offered, and he had not touched the violin. He had his books. At least up here was the silence he craved. The exclusion zone around Palazzo Venezia where he had forbidden car horns and traffic noise was all that had made Rome bearable, until he banned private vehicles and got some peace. Sipping his camomile, he picked at a sliced apple on a plate. Dressed in his blue and white striped pyjama top over his trousers, he was expecting his barber. He had not shaved for three days and it was probably time he tidied up. It was a little brisk – some snow had already fallen. Perhaps he should have the heat turned on. Wandering to the window to check the sky, he stopped dead, mid-stride.
Out of the sky, a squadron of German gliders appeared soundlessly, settling like blue cranes on the grassy slopes. One of the gliders landed heavily, tipping sideways. Soldiers spilled from them all and suddenly German paratroopers were everywhere. An Italian officer accompanied them. The Carabinieri were overwhelmed within minutes, without a single shot. Told in Italian to stand down or be executed, they willingly took the former offer.
Mussolini stood too, transfixed, at the window, until an officer entered. He introduced himself as SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny, snapped to attention, gave the Nazi salute and said, ‘Duce, the Führer has sent me to rescue you.’
Mussolini nodded, replying flatly, ‘I knew my friend would not abandon me.’
Behind the gliders, a Storch aeroplane taxied to a halt on the tufty grass. Mussolini found himself dressed in his heavy dark coat and fedora and, and along with Skorzeny, crammed into the Storch, almost between the feet of the pilot. The overloaded little plane staggered beneath the weight of the three men but, assisted by the downhill slope and the skill of the pilot, Hauptmann Heinrich Gerlach, they reached into the air and stayed there. They had intended, said Gerlach, to rescue him with one of the Drache helicopters used for rescuing downed pilots, but the machine had broken down and the decision was made to use the Storch. A helicopter! Only Germany had helicopters.
Roused from his torpor, Mussolini was thrilled. He and Hitler were obsessed by flight. Mussolini and both his sons were pilots. Italo Balbo was his great friend and Marshal of the Italian Air Force which, in the 1920s, Balbo built from the ground up under Mussolini’s patronage. Through the twenties, Mussolini animatedly informed his rescuers, he financed aviators to fly all over the world, and Balbo flew two transatlantic flights. It was only ten years ago, he raved, that an Australian aviator crashed his plane and died on the slopes of a Casentino mountain. Il Duce had his body retrieved and gave him a State funeral in Florence. We are living in the age of flight, he enthused.
The enthusiasm was brief. He was unshaven, ill and spent. After the initial excitement he sank into silence, gloom and apathy, shrinking into the carapace of his dark hat and overcoat.
When asked where he would like to go, he replied, ‘Take me home to Caminate. Where else? I am already dead and buried.’
When he found he was on his way to Munich instead, he simply shrugged, hunched himself deeper into his coat and went to sleep.
On arrival in Munich, Mussolini found his family waiting, but still could not manage enthusiasm. He was crumpled, tired, sunken-eyed, wanting to sleep forever. He was glad they were safe but the sight of Rachele was certainly not enough to rouse him – being back under her thumb was not a prospect he relished. She would be sure to begin issuing orders and instructions and harangue him about what was to happen – and he did not care what was to happen. He was glad
