Italy’s withdrawal from the war had embittered him. It was, he told Goebbels, who had again been summoned to Rastenburg, “a gigantic example of swinishness.” Moreover, the overthrow of Mussolini made him apprehensive of his own position. “The Fuehrer,” Goebbels noted in his diary on September 11, “invoked final measures to preclude similar developments with us once and for all.”
