Book Five: Beginning of the End
- By the summer of 1943, the Anglo-American armies were on Italy's doorstep.
- Even though he wasn't even sixty years old, Mussolini was exhausted, and maybe demented, by this time.
- After meeting with Hitler in July, Mussolini returned to a minor coup in Rome. Along with other members of the Fascist Party, Count Galeazzo Ciano forced Mussolini to convene the Fascist Grand Council.
- When he did, the council voted and carried a resolution demanding the restoration of a constitutional monarchy and Parliament and also calling for Mussolini to be stripped of the command of the armed forces.
- Mussolini's troubles weren't over yet: on July 25, the day after the Grand Council had met, he was arrested on the order of some generals and the King.
- "So fell," says Shirer, "ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-sounding man of the twentieth century who had known how to profit from its confusions and despair, but who underneath the gaudy façade was made largely of sawdust." (5.28.13)
- The Italian people were overjoyed at his fall, and that was the end of Fascism in Italy.
- After hearing the news about Mussolini, Hitler quickly began making plans for the worst-case scenario: that is, the strong possibility that Italy's new government would try to withdraw from the war
- In fact, in the second week of September 1943, Italy signed an armistice with the Western powers.
- True to form, Hitler invaded. In short order, he managed to occupy roughly two-thirds of Italy Next, he hatched a plan to spring Mussolini from prison before he could be turned over to the Allies.
- After the plan had been successfully carried out, Hitler convinced Mussolini to take revenge on the conspirators. Most of them—including Mussolini's son-in-law Ciano—were soon sentenced to death and executed.
- As he draws this chapter to a close, Shirer examines the political and military advantages that Hitler gained by occupying Italy and toppling the government that had ousted his Axis ally.
- There were other less victorious events that Germany experienced throughout the summer and autumn of 1943.
- The German Army suffered continuing losses in Russia; the German Navy likewise had continuing losses in the Atlantic; the German public lived through ongoing daily and nightly bombings by the British and American air forces.
- The morale of the German people was disintegrating steadily, and even Goebbels had begun to consider the possibility of finding some kind of political solution that would bring an end to the war.
- As 1943 drew to a close, everyone's favorite group of ineffectual conspirators had finally hatched a plan that would—they hoped—put an end to Hitler's regime once and for all.