Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism

by Frederick William Dampier Deakin

Using source materials from summit conference records on the Axis side to private correspondence, police files and spy reports, Deakin writes a narrative history that reads like a psychological thriller, vividly detailing the intense relationship between the two notorious despots and its fatal consequences. Using source materials from summit conference records on the Axis side to private correspondence, police files and spy reports, Deakin writes a narrative history that reads like a psychological thriller, vividly detailing the intense relationship between the two notorious despots and its fatal consequences.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Italy

912 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Sir Frederick William Dampier Deakin DSO also known as F. W. Deakin, was a British historian, World War II veteran, literary assistant to Winston Churchill and the first warden of St Antony's College, Oxford.

Reviews

[Katherine Addison]

[This book has three entries on Goodreads. This is the one that gets the title complete and correct.]

Short version: No matter what he says, Hitler is not your friend.

Slightly longer version: This is a very top-down history of the Italian involvement in World War II. It deals only with Mussolini (and Hitler) and the ministers and generals and Party bigshots. One of the blurbs describes it as "impersonal," and I would agree. Deakin's interested in untangling the incredibly snarled political knot of the end of Italian fascism. He's not interested in any of the players as people, and he's certainly not interested in the Italian workers or soldiers (or, god forbid, women) whose lives were being destroyed by the machinations of these petty tin gods.

At the same time, as long as you're willing to go on the ride he wants to take you on, this is an excellent book. Deakin is painstaking and exhaustive; he makes no excuses for anyone; and although he does not discuss ideology or the reprehensible things that the Nazis were doing in other parts of Europe, he's not trying to make them look like anything but the toxic assholes that they were. And he does an excellent job of showing how Italy was doomed by the irrational, self-deluding decisions made by Mussolini, and by the really terrifying inability of anyone to say no to Hitler. (It's pathetic watching the German generals make puppy dog eyes at Mussolini in the hopes he can talk sense to Hitler about Russia.) It's frightening and appalling how much of World War II can be reduced to these two men, and the fact that they were both destroyed by it is very cold comfort.

[Julio The Fox]

Il ultimo word on the downfall of the Fascist regime in Italy. F.W. Deakin, a one-time British intelligence officer, uses everything from the Hitler-Mussolini correspondence to taped (and tapped) conversations to scraps of secretary notes to reconstruct the Dantesque last days of Il Duce. After his downfall in 1943 Mussolini found himself in the same conundrum as when he allied himself with Hitler in 1938. There was no way to satisfy both his German host and the Italian people. A dramatic case in point was the return of Italian POWs held in German hands after the Nazis occupied the north of Italy. Il Duce wanted them returned to regain popularity with their families while Hitler insisted they were too dangerous to free and would better serve the Axis as laborers in Germany. Guess who won this dispute? Mussolin's twenty-one years in power, plus the horrors of the Salo republic look to Deakin, and the reader, as equal parts tragedy and farce.

[Brian]

This book covers the downfall of Italy from the time of the German partnership until the capture of the Duce at the end of the war. It spends quite a bit of time on the last 600 days of Il Duce when he is holding conventions that are supposed to reform the nation and bring about a constitution. It really works well to show how Hitler and Mussolini reacted to one another. It does go into great detail about the fascist regime and the only flaw that you could assign to it is that it is a little dated. The book was published in 1962 but little of the new analysis has disproved it. This book still remains a gold standard within the field and is highly recommend for those who want to understand the last days of Italy or the relationship between Hitler and Mussolini.

[Gary Reger]

The title, The Brutal Friendship, comes from a comment Hitler made shortly before his suicide. He blamed the loss of the war on the Italians, whom he indulged because of his relationship with Mussolini. Mussolini, for his part, regarded Hitler's obsession with the USSR as blinding him to the centrality of the Mediterranean theater; the Allied invasion of Italy was, he believed, a result of Hitler's dismissal of Mussolini's fervent and repeated pleas for help.

The blame game was naturally an effort to direct accusations onto the other party. Hitler resented the Italian attack on Greece which was thoroughly defeated and required Nazi intervention. He saw Italian troops as unreliable and cowardly, and again felt he had to intervene in North Africa after the British beat the Italians there. Mussolini believed Hitler's failure to plan properly in North Africa by taking Malta, from which the British attacked Axis shipping to Rommel's forces. And after his dismissal by the king and installation in northern Italy he bridled at German interference in his government and railed at their failure to supply weapons.

Both Fascist leaders come across as deeply self-delusional, especially from 1943 on. Hitler saw the USSR as the great enemy and devoted massive resources in a fight that ended in disaster, but to the very end he convinced himself that a turn was about to come. Mussolini believed the Allies planned to invade either Greece or, after taking Sardinia, Italy via bases on the island or through the Adriatic. Of course in fact the Allies took Sicily and then moved into the Italian peninsula's toe.

The Brutal Friendship focuses exclusively on Mussolini and his immediate advisors; Hitler plays a lesser, but omnipresent, role. As a political history based on documentary sources The Brutal Friendship offers a detailed, sometimes day-by-day, picture of the machinations of the Fascist government and the internal fights in Mussolini's circle. But the larger picture which could have provided better context is missing. Two examples: there is not a word about the massacre of Italian troops by the Germans on the Greek island of Kephallania, which certainly must have resonated in Italy. Nor does Deakin examine the Allied advances up the peninsula, which formed the background to Mussolini's government in northern Italy; the siege of Rimini, which was a turning point described by British generals as the fiercest battle of the war, and which threatened the collapse of the "Gothic Line" that the Germans had determined to be the stopper for Allied advances, gets no treatment.

Since Deakin wrote there have no doubt been considerable advances in our understanding of the swirl of politics in 1943-1945 Italy. Still, for readers looking for a deep dive into a narrow pool, The Brutal Friendship remains a classic.

[Russ Spence]

not the easiest of reads as it appears to be the last book in a series covering the life, career & death of Mussolini, so you're pretty much launched into history from the beginning of 1943 with little indication of what happened prior to this, & expected to sink or swim. It is a dry read, mainly concentrating on meetings & letters rather than the actual events they report. There is a lot of detail concerning the ousting of Mussolini in 1943, but the details of his rescue by German forces are pretty much skated over, as is his death in 1945. What it does do is paint a picture of a man trapped in his own history with less & less power & control over even his own life, until it ends. In addition to that, it portrays the Italian Fascists as more than slightly pathetic & bombastic, with almost every proclamation & report, no matter how mundane, dressed up in ridiculously overblown "heroic" language. And to think some people miss the likes of these...

[John Vandike]

Initially I was under the impression this book was a mixture of the history of Mussolini's Italy with an emphasis on Hitler and Mussolini's interactions as the leaders of the European Axis. Though there is some of that, this book more strongly leans to the political side of the house and the decline of the Fascist government.

This can be a challenging read if you don't have much familiarity with Italy's Fascist government (I did not), which can lead to some Wikipedia searches to keep all of the -ini's straight. As something of a WWII reading enthusiast, the bits covering meetings between Hitler and Mussolini were something of a gem given the general dearth of information in both biographies of Hitler and even fairly complete histories of the war from the German perspective.

Overall, fairly enjoyable, even if it did take me 5 months to plow through the whole thing.