Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini

by Greg Annussek

  “I was afraid I’d have difficulties with the German language,” admitted the Duce, who spoke several languages, including German. “But I had none whatever. He gave me no chance to speak.”15 Mussolini was not much impressed by the effusive Nazi, whom he compared to a broken record that repeated itself endlessly.16 “He [Hitler] is a violent man with no self-control,” he concluded, “and nothing positive came out of our talks.”17

  It was a prophetic comment. Though no stranger to violence, the Duce was shocked when, just a few days after the conference, Hitler murdered several hundred Nazi comrades and political enemies during a bloody purge later dubbed the Night of the Long Knives. “Look at his,” Mussolini said in disgust to his wife, Rachele, pointing to newspaper accounts of Hitler’s brutal handiwork. “That person makes me think of Attila the Hun. Those men he killed were his closest supporters, who raised him to power.”18

  He was even more flabbergasted in July by a Nazi attempt to seize power in Vienna (Hitler did not like to waste time). Hitler quickly backed down when the Duce made threatening gestures by placing four Italian divisions on the Brenner Pass (on the frontier between Italy and Austria). But relations between the two men had hit an all-time low. Shortly after the Austrian fiasco, Mussolini referred to Hitler as a “horrible sexual degenerate” and a “dangerous fool.”19 Nazism was nothing less than “savage barbarism” in his eyes.20 “Murder and killing, loot and pillage and blackmail are all it can produce.”21

  Over the next several years, England and France encouraged the Duce’s hostility toward Germany and sought to cultivate an alliance with Italy to counter the potential threat posed by the Nazis. But Hitler also began an elaborate courtship of Mussolini, who dreamed of reviving the power and glory of the ancient Roman Empire, by slowly drawing him into Germany’s orbit and playing on the dictator’s vanity and greed. Being an opportunist by nature, the Duce was content to play both sides against each other and so obtain the maximum advantage for himself and his nation.

  Hitler’s aggressive swagger continued to give Mussolini cause for concern.22 In March 1935, Hitler mocked the Treaty of Versailles by announcing his intention to create an army of half a million men. One month later, Italy joined England and France in condemning Hitler’s actions and voicing its support for Austrian independence. This momentary alliance was referred to as the Stresa front, and it was aimed squarely at Germany. By joining ranks with the democratic states, the Duce had provided himself with a measure of security on Italy’s northern border. And keeping Hitler in check was particularly important for Mussolini because the Italian dictator was contemplating a land grab of his own—in Africa.23

  In October 1935, the Duce launched his brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia). “I had to wage the Abyssinian campaign,” Mussolini remarked privately (and grandiosely) during the war. “Italy needs new colonies, the Italian people require more land, Italy has become too small for us.”24 England and France had already gobbled up large parts of the world, he was wont to argue, so why should Italy not do the same? With the Duce’s approval, General Pietro Badoglio, who was running the military operation, used poison gas against the Ethiopians to speed the progress of the invasion.

  Europe was divided over Mussolini’s blatant act of aggression. Hitler was delighted, but the Western Powers found themselves in a more awkward position. Although they were loath to allow Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia to go unpunished, they were also hesitant to alienate the Italian dictator, whom they viewed as a possible counterweight to Hitler. England and France therefore decided to issue sanctions against Italy (through the League of Nations), but made certain that they had no teeth. Though this compromise solution failed to prevent the rape of Ethiopia, it did succeed in antagonizing the Duce and driving him closer to Hitler.

  Their partnership began to coalesce in 1936. Early in the year, Hitler snubbed his nose at the West by sending German troops into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized. Though England and France could have easily stopped Hitler in his tracks (and Hitler was aware of this), they declined to force the issue.

  In May, the Italians took the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa and effectively completed their conquest of that country, after which the League of Nations admitted defeat and cancelled its sanctions. The war against the Ethiopians made Mussolini more popular than ever among the Italians, who were now informed that they were the proud owners of a new Italian Empire.25 On the heels of this victory came another, more private (and longer-lasting) conquest: Claretta Petacci.

  Claretta was then twenty-four years old (half the Duce’s age).26 Their affair began shortly after the Ethiopian war, although they had known each other for several years.27 Her fascination with Mussolini had started much earlier: As a young girl, she had slept with his photograph under her pillow.28 Though the Duce kept many mistresses during the Fascist era, it was his steady relationship with this attractive, husky-voiced, green-eyed brunette that captured the imagination of the Romans and caused tongues to wag.

  Another notable event that took place in 1936 (in June) was the elevation of Count Galeazzo Ciano to the position of Italian foreign minister. The thirty-three-year-old Ciano, who had spent the previous few years working in the Press Office, was married to Mussolini’s favorite daughter, Edda.29 Though Ciano was not without intelligence—or cunning, for that matter—he was also young and frivolous, a handsome playboy who worshipped the Duce and shared his father-in-law’s ambitious aspirations for Italy.30

  “He was by nature extremely vivacious, whimsical, imaginative, ironical and sentimental,” wrote Dino Alfieri, a Fascist diplomat. “He always had a ready retort and his wit was facile and spontaneous. In Ciano contrasting qualities blended and often clashed.”31 Like Mussolini, Ciano believed that the Western powers were weak and on the decline.32 Though he favored an alliance with the Nazis on practical grounds, he was never hypnotized by them in the way the Duce was.33

  In October 1936, Ciano and Hitler met for talks. Hitler was lavish in his praise for Mussolini, calling him “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.”34 Hitler also bragged about the great things that could be accomplished if the Germans and Italians joined forces. Carving up the world in his mind, Hitler explained that the Nazis could dominate Eastern Europe and the Duce could expand his empire in the Mediterranean and North Africa.35 Ciano did not need much convincing. He returned to Italy naïvely thinking that he and Mussolini could easily manipulate the Fuehrer to their own advantage.36

  A few days later, on November 1, speaking in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo, the Duce referred to the growing relationship between Italy and Germany and employed the metaphor of an axis: “This vertical line between Rome and Berlin is not a partition, but rather an axis around which all the European States animated by the will to collaboration and peace can also collaborate.”*37

  In 1936, Mussolini also began to boast irresponsibly of Italy’s “eight million bayonets” (a phrase he often repeated thereafter), a wildly misleading reference to the number of Italian troops that could be mustered in the event of war.38 In reality, the Duce could raise only about 1.5 million soldiers, and the country was generally unprepared for a major European conflict.39 Italy’s tanks were too light by the standards of the day, its warplanes and artillery were woefully out of date, and many of its soldiers were armed with antiquated, 1890s-style rifles more suitable for the American Wild West than for a modern-day battlefield.40

  In September 1937, wearing a brand new blue-gray uniform that he had ordered for the occasion, Mussolini visited Germany at Hitler’s invitation.41 The Nazis spared no expense in attempting to woo the Duce with shows of pomp and pageantry and demonstrations of Germany’s increasing military might.

  On the Maifeld in Berlin, near the Olympic stadium, the two dictators made speeches to a cheering audience of nearly a million people (some of whom had been coached on the intricacies of proper cheering).42 Hitler praised Mussolini as
“one of the lonely men in history who are not put to trial by historic events but determine the history of their country themselves.”43 The Duce responded with a fateful promise: “When one finds a friend, march along with him to the end.”44

  Though Mussolini continued to flirt with England and France in the years to come, his visit to Germany had made a profound impression on him.45 Psychologically he had chosen sides. “From now onwards Mussolini clung to the myth of probable German invincibility,” observed the historian Denis Mack Smith, “and this reception in 1937 was a fateful and fatal event in his life.”46 Or as the SS man Eugen Dollmann put it: “Megalomania is infectious.”47

  In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria; but even though Mussolini had repeatedly sworn to protect Austria from Nazi intrusion, he looked the other way. Hitler could barely contain himself when he learned that the Duce had offered no objections.

  “Then, please tell Mussolini,” Hitler said over the telephone to his envoy in Rome, “I will never forget him for this! Never, never, never, no matter what happens! . . . As soon as the Austrian affair has been settled I shall be ready to go with him through thick and thin— through anything! . . . You may tell him that I do thank him from the bottom of my heart. Never, never shall I forget it. I shall never forget him for this, no matter what happens. If he should ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be convinced that I shall stick to him whatever may happen, even if the whole world gangs up on him.”48

  The Duce accepted Hitler’s fervent gratitude. The murmurs of the Italian people, on the other hand, were less accommodating. “For the first time since the murder of Matteotti,” wrote Mussolini biographer Christopher Hibbert, referring to a great scandal that had occurred early in the Duce’s reign, “a general and deep sense of disenchantment swept over them; and although the Axis survived the Anschluss, the Duce’s hitherto unquestionable popularity did not. Apart from the sudden and seemingly abject change of policy to please an unwanted ally, no intelligent observer could fail to realize the dangers for Italy in allowing a strong and militant Germany to extend its frontiers to the Alps.”49 (These dangers became clear during the summer of 1943 when Hitler began sending the German army into Italy via Austria and the Brenner Pass.)

  Hitler was keen on obtaining a formal military alliance with Italy before making his next brash (and illegal) move—an invasion of Czechoslovakia—but Mussolini was not yet ready to sign on the dotted line. He did, however, take other steps during 1938 to strengthen ties between the two countries. For one thing, he forced his fellow Italians to adopt the Nazi goose step, which the Duce renamed the passo Romano (Roman step) and demonstrated in public.* (The borrowing occasionally went both ways. The Nazi raisedarm salute, for example, was modeled on the Roman salute adopted by the Fascists.)50

  More important, during the summer and fall of 1938, Mussolini introduced a series of anti-Semitic racial laws that affected the 40,000 to 70,000 Jews living in Italy.51 He had already laid the groundwork for this legislation by instructing the Italian press to denigrate Jews in the media.52 According to the new restrictions, Jews were to be expelled from Italian schools (whether they be teachers or pupils), purged from the military, forbidden to marry gentiles, and excluded from owning land or certain types of businesses.53

  By all accounts, the Duce’s racial laws (though not energetically enforced) were not well received by the open-minded Italian people. 54 Mussolini’s own beliefs about race—to the extent that he had a well-defined point of view at all—are harder to decipher. Over the years, for instance, the dictator had worked with Italian Jews, many of whom were Fascists and looked fondly on the Duce, and had indulged in affairs with Jewish women.55

  During the early 1930s, in fact, he had shown contempt for Hitler’s racial theories, which he had dismissed as the ravings of a crank. “Here in Italy we have practically no Jewish question,” Mussolini remarked at the time. “We too have our Jews. There are many in the Fascist Party, and they are good Fascists and good Italians.”56 Hitler’s views on race were “nonsense.”57 The very notion of anti- Semitism was “stupid and barbarous.”58

  “Thirty centuries of history,” the Duce proclaimed during a public speech in September of 1934, “enable us to look with majestic pity at certain doctrines taught on the other side of the Alps by the descendants of people who were wholly illiterate in the days when Rome boasted a Caesar, a Virgil, and an Augustus.”59

  Regardless of Mussolini’s true feelings on the subject, in practice he approached the so-called Jewish question with the same sort of opportunistic spirit that he applied to other aspects of political life. That is to say, he was never inclined to make an issue of race except in circumstances where it was politically expedient to do so—for example, in trying to justify his conquest of African peoples (such as the Ethiopians) or in cementing the bond between Italy and her new would-be ally, Germany.

  By the late 1930s, when Hitler had become a dominant factor in world politics, he began to treat the Duce as his junior partner. Even at this early date, Mussolini was beginning to chafe at his subordinate role in the Axis; he complained bitterly that Hitler failed to ask his opinion and informed him of Germany’s plans only at the last moment.

  For one brief, shining moment in the Axis partnership, in September 1938, the Duce seemed to transcend his second-fiddle status. The occasion was the Munich peace conference, the notorious exercise in “appeasement” that sacrificed portions of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis in an effort by Mussolini and the West to avoid allout war. Though the multilingual Duce appeared to occupy center stage at the four-power summit, conversing with the participating statesmen in their native languages, it was Hitler who pulled the strings and reaped all the benefits from the final agreement.

  But Mussolini enjoyed his moment in the sun. When he returned to Italy in triumph, he announced that he had saved Europe from the maelstrom—and much of Europe seemed to agree.

  Having lulled the world into thinking that peace was at hand, Hitler returned to his plans for future war. Shortly after the peace conference, Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, descended on Rome and informed the Duce and his son-in-law, Ciano, that, regardless of what had transpired at Munich, a world war was inevitable within three or four years.60 Ribbentrop wanted to put Mussolini’s signature on a military alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan. But the Duce stalled for time. Having taken a measure of the Great Powers at Munich, Mussolini thought that he might be able to wring a few more concessions out of the West by playing the peace card.61

  A few days before Ribbentrop arrived in Rome, the Duce and Ciano mocked him behind his back. “He is vain, fickle, and talkative,” Ciano noted in his diary. “The Duce says that all you have to do is look at his head to see that he has a small brain.”62

  By 1939, the storm clouds were gathering ominously over Europe. In March of that year Hitler surprised Mussolini (and much of the world) when he occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia, thus tearing to shreds the very Munich agreement that had reflected so well on the Duce. Shocked and insulted, Mussolini referred to Hitler as untrustworthy and considered aligning himself with the Western powers against Germany.63

  Jealous over Hitler’s mounting successes, the Duce manufactured a victory of his own by pouncing on the small state of Albania in April 1939.64 Albania was more or less under Italy’s thumb before the attack, and the so-called invasion was actually a bumbling and meaningless adventure designed, at least in part, to soothe Mussolini’s bruised ego.65

  The Duce was well aware in the spring of 1939 that Hitler was planning to make Poland his next target and that such a move could easily ignite a world war for which Italy was unprepared.66 He had repeatedly told the Nazis that Italy would not be strong enough militarily to wage war against England and France for several more years. But Hitler’s hold on Mussolini was strong—stronger even than he was ready to admit. Instead of distancing himself from Hitler, the Duce simply put his faith in the empty promises of Ribbentrop, who a
ssured the Italians in May that the climactic battle between the Axis and the West would not take place for another four years or so.67

  Thus soothed, Mussolini agreed to sign a formal military alliance with Germany. (The king of Italy disapproved, but the Duce brushed off his reservations.)68 He dubbed it the Pact of Steel, and Ciano signed it on May 22 in Berlin.69 (Mussolini had considered calling it the Patto di Sangue, or Pact of Blood, but then thought better of it.)70 The preamble of the treaty included this statement: “[T]he German and Italian nations are resolved in future also to act side by side and with united forces to secure their living-space and to maintain peace.”71 The “living space” phrase was a thinly veiled euphemism for territorial expansion.

  But most important, the agreement required Italy to come to Germany’s aid in the event of war.* To avoid misunderstandings on this last point, the Duce sent a secret memo to Hitler on May 30 reiterating his position that Italy could not be ready for war until 1943. “Italy requires a period of preparation,” wrote Mussolini, who added that his country “does not wish to hasten a European war, although she is convinced of the inevitability of such a war.”72

  But Hitler was in a hurry. Three months later, he would plunge Europe into World War II.

  The Pact of Steel put the official stamp on the Rome-Berlin Axis. But although it involved the fates of millions of Italians and Germans, the alliance was based almost exclusively on the personal relationship between the two dictators, many of whose own advisors expressed indifference or outright hostility over the new partnership.

  Hitler and Mussolini paid them no mind. Indeed, the two leaders found plenty of common ground. For one thing, they were both essentially self-educated men who had risen from humble beginnings (Hitler’s father was a civil servant, Mussolini’s a blacksmith).73 Having been underestimated by the opposition, they had skillfully exploited the explosive political atmosphere following World War I (in which both men had served as corporals) by playing on fears of communism, making deals with big business, and preaching a sermon of nationalism in which both men genuinely believed.74 Despite some public comments to the contrary, both reveled in the idea of aggressive war and sought to expand their power and prestige at the expense of other nations. Neither knew much about such practical affairs of state as economics.75