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Dipartimento di Studi Umani, Filosofici e della Formazione, Università di Salerno, via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084 Fisciano (Sa), Italy [email protected]
In the late evening of 25 July 1943, alarming news from Rome suddenly broke into Hitler's headquarters: apparently, the duce of fascism, Benito Mussolini, had resigned as prime minister and had been replaced by Pietro Badoglio, marshal of Italy and former head of general staff. In the following hours, despite the worrying situation on the Russian front, the ‘Italian crisis’ swiftly became the main topic of conversation at the Wolfsschanze as Mussolini's fate remained unknown and confusing reports began to circulate about the latest meeting of the Fascist Grand Council where the duce himself had reportedly received a vote of no confidence. As Goebbels recorded in his diary, the meeting had been requested by Farinacci and other fascist hardliners to force Mussolini into initiating ‘more energetic policies’ to step up Italian resistance against the Allied onslaught,1 but the debate had ended up in a violent opposition, led by Ciano and Grandi, against ‘Mussolini, his policies, and his conduct of the war’.2 Farinacci himself, Goebbels continued, ‘was involved, but from quite another viewpoint. He had been prevailed upon to criticize Mussolini, but wanted to give the whole attack a Fascist trend. He failed to prevail and thereby did great harm to the Fascist cause.’ The following day, during a meeting on the situation with Ribbentrop, Goering, and Goebbels, Hitler doubted that the duce had resigned voluntarily, conjecturing that the crisis had been provoked by the outcome of the Grand Council ‘where Farinacci had behaved there like a clumsy bear and…had played a role that proved fatal’.3 Thus, Hitler continued, after the supreme chamber of the fascist regime ‘had hurled its criticism at the duce, the Crown had entered the picture’ by giving the green light to Badoglio and his anti-German camarilla backed by the Italian Freemasonry and the church.4 Despite additional news, however, the whole crisis was still hard to understand from Berlin as Farinacci – now a refugee in Germany – reported that ‘the king acted loyally toward Mussolini and that the duce resigned voluntarily’.5 As the German foreign undersecretary, Steengracht von Moyland, summarized to the Japanese ambassador...