Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy (1869–1947)

Italian monarch during both world wars. Born in Naples on 11 November 1869, the only child of Umberto I and Margherita of Savoy, Victor Emmanuel, Prince of Naples, was tutored in a rigorous, Prussian-style military regimen despite his diminutive size. He inherited the Italian throne after his father’s assassination in 1900. Presiding over a Liberal constitutional monarchy and playing Italy’s Triple Alliance position against overtures to the Triple Entente, he procured Libya following the 1911–1912 Italo-Turkish War and entered World War I in 1915 on the side of the entente. Fascist Party leader Benito Mussolini made a bid for primacy in ruling Italy in 1922, and the king failed to remove him by invoking his cabinet’s martial law decree; in 1924, he sealed the Fascist triumph by allowing the embattled Duce to stay on despite widespread furor over the murder of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti by Fascist operatives.

The attentive yet reticent figurehead acquiesced in the 1935–1936 Italian war with Ethiopia, the intervention in Spain’s civil war, Mussolini’s inchoate anti-Semitic laws, the 1939 invasion of Albania, the Pact of Steel approved later that year, and Italy’s ill-advised declaration of war on the Allies on 10 June 1940. Witnessing his country’s abysmal military efforts, the king did not relish being swept away in the inevitable Fascist defeat. Retaining his authority over Italy’s armed forces, Victor Emmanuel arrested Mussolini after his ouster by the Fascist Grand Council on 25 July 1943, replacing him with the army’s Marshal Pietro Badoglio.

Following the 8 September 1943 armistice with the Western Allies, the king, with his family and aides, fled Rome for Brindisi as German troops surrounded the capital, provoking the ire of his subjects in liberated and occupied Italy alike. Urged by the Allies to abdicate, he nonetheless clung to his title but relinquished power as his son, Crown Prince Umberto, was installed as the ruling “lieutenant of the realm” following the 4 June 1944 liberation of Rome. On 9 May 1946, the stubborn Victor Emmanuel III formally passed the throne to Umberto II, but it was too late to save the monarchy. He then went into exile in Egypt and died in Alexandria on 28 December 1947.

References Ellwood, David. Italy, 1943–1945. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1985. Katz, Robert. The Fall of the House of Savoy. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Knox, MacGregor. Hitler’s Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940–43. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Mack Smith, Denis. Italy and Its Monarchy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.

Heinrich Gottfried von Vietinghoff genannt Scheel, (1887–1952)

German army general in command of Germany’s forces in Italy in 1945. Born on 6 December 1887 at Mainz, Germany, into an old noble family, Heinrich Vietinghoff genannt Scheel joined the Garde-Grenadier Kaiser Franz Regiment in 1906 and was commissioned a year later. In 1914, he was promoted to lieutenant and the next year to captain. During World War I, he served on both the Western and Eastern Fronts and was awarded the Iron Cross, both First and Second Class. In December 1916, he was assigned to the Army High Command; in April 1917, he was posted to the General Staff, where he remained until the end of the war.

Vietinghoff remained in the Reichswehr after the war and served on the staff of army commander General Hans Seekt and later at the War Ministry. He also held various troop assignments. In November 1938, as a Generalleutnant (U.S. equiv. major general), Vietinghoff assumed command of the 5th Panzer Division, and from October 1939, he commanded XIII Army Corps. He served ably in these positions, and in June 1940, he was promoted to General der Panzertruppen (U.S. equiv. lieutenant general) and given command of the XLVI Panzer Corps under General Heinz Guderian on the Russian Front until June 1942. After briefly leading Ninth Army in the Soviet Union on an interim basis, he took charge of the Fifteenth Army on the Channel coast.

 In August 1943, Vietinghoff assumed command of Tenth Army in Italy and the next month was promoted to Generaloberst (U.S. equiv. full general). He temporarily replaced the wounded Field Marshal Albert Kesselring as commander of Army Group C and the Southwest Front and, following a month in command of Army Group Kurland from the end of January to early March 1945, he returned to Italy to be named commander of German forces in that country, on 10 March. That same month, he and Schutzstaffel (SS) General Karl Wolff met in Switzerland in secret talks with the Allies regarding a separate surrender of German forces in Italy. Following discussions at his headquarters at Recoaro and pressed by his chief of staff, General Hans Röttiger, Vietinghoff dispatched the special envoys who signed the surrender on the Italian Front that went into effect on 2May 1945. Taken prisoner by the Allies, Vietinghoff was held until 1948. He died at Pronten on 25 February 1952.

References Graham, Dominick, and Shelford Bidwell. Tug of War: The Battle for Italy, 1943–45. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Morris, Eric. Circles of Hell: The War in Italy, 1943–1945. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993. Vietinghoff Sheel, Heinrich von. La fine della guerra in Italia: Appunti dell’ultimo comandante in capo tedesco in Italia. Ed. Peter Hattenkofer, Alessandro Massignani, and Maurizio Dal Lago. Valdagno, Italy: Lions’ Club, 1997.