ABSTRACT
On 28 September 1937, the Italian Duce Benito Mussolini addressed an 800,000 strong crowd assembled on the Berlin Maifeld at the climax of his state visit to Germany. Amidst a tumultuous thunderstorm that created a truly Wagnerian atmosphere, but unfortunately also slowly dissolved his sheaf of notes, Mussolini extolled the close ties between the two countries that had in the previous year proclaimed themselves the Axis around which European diplomacy would henceforth revolve. National Socialism and Fascism, he declared, ‘have in common many elements of our Weltanschauung’ and ‘conceptions of life and history’, similar goals in economic, foreign and cultural policy, even the ‘same enemies’ in the shape of Bolshevism and capitalist plutocracy. The ‘German rebirth’ was inspired by the same ‘spiritual force’ that underpinned the ‘resurrected Roman Empire’ and bound the two nations ‘in a single unshatterable determination’, prepared to march together ‘to the end’.2 Similarly fulsome evocations of mutual solidarity accompanied Italian adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1937 and acquiescence in the Anschluss in March 1938, the signature of a military alliance in May 1939, and finally Mussolini’s declaration of intervention at the side of his ‘great ally’ in June 1940.3 Moreover, Mussolini and – in the shape of the puppet Salò republic – Fascism (if not the better part of the Italian nation that repudiated them in and after July 1943) did indeed remain true to Hitler until the last when both met bloody common ruin. These same years, however, also provided ample evidence of friction and
suspicion that unsettled the public representation of intensifying cooperation grounded in intimate affinity of ideology and interest. Mussolini bridled that
he was given only scant warning of Hitler’s intention to seize Austria in March 1938, and was more generally irritated by Nazi German economic and political penetration of the Danubian and Balkan regions, supposedly earmarked as Fascist Italy’s spheres of hegemonic influence. His invasion of Albania in April 1939 was partly motivated by pique at the Nazi occupation of Bohemia-Moravia in March. Hitler had neglected to inform Rome until the last minute of this annexation, even though it entailed the destruction of the Munich settlement that Mussolini proudly regarded as a product of his own mediation, and publicly relegated him to humiliating subordination within the Axis.4 The binding military commitment signified by the ‘Pact of Steel’ in May 1939 was for the Italians hedged by the caveat that they could not contemplate fighting for at least three years; hence their utter dismay when Hitler precipitated war in September, compelling the adoption of a ‘non-belligerence’ ill-fitting with Fascist boasts that warfare alone placed ‘the seal of nobility on those people who have the courage to face it’.5 Once Italy finally joined the conflict Axis military operations were uncoordinated and, on the part of the Italians in Greece and North Africa, disastrously executed. Consequently Germany assumed almost complete control over the relevant theatres, dashing Mussolini’s ‘fantasy’ of conducting a glorious ‘parallel war’.6
