in battle. One further gain that counted was the militant demonstration of superiority to all rival political systems. The cries of indignation arising from the entire civilized world at the bombardment of the port of Almeria, or the air raid upon Guernica, were complemented by perverse respect for the inhuman brutality with which the Communist threat was challenged and ultimately smashed. On a vastly larger plane this matched the discovery Hitler had made in the beer-hall brawls: terrorism exerts an attraction upon the masses.
Soon, too, it became possible to discern the polarization to which the war was pushing things—and once again familiar lines appeared. Anti-Fascism created its legend on the battlefields of Spain, when the Left, split into numerous cliques and factions, rent by internal feuds, nevertheless united in the International Brigades as if for “the final conflict” and once more demonstrated the continuing force of the old myths. But the concept of the power and danger of the Left had never been much more than a legend. It had exerted its most significant function as legend: to bring together and mobilize the opposition.
This was the effect of the Left’s commitment in Spain, despite all its defeats. It finally brought together the Fascist powers that had long been at odds and had only tentatively begun to approach one another. The result was the “Berlin-Rome Axis,” presumably a new and triumphant element of strength around which the decadent democracies and the antihuman, terroristic systems with a leftist tinge rotated in jittery orbits. From this point on, there existed a Fascist International of sorts, its power center in Germany. And simultaneously the line-up of the Second World War first appeared in outline.
For all the inadvertent prodding from outside, this alliance did not come into being with ease. Several hurdles had to be taken. The reservations on the Italian side were matched by considerable reservations in Germany. Bismarck had remarked that it was impossible to engage in any political relationships with Italy because as friend and as foe she was equally untrustworthy. During the First World War that comment had become an axiom, and it was as difficult to make an alliance with Italy acceptable to the public as, for example, the one with Poland. The bias did not go quite so far as Mussolini presumed when in December, 1934, he remarked to Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador in Rome: “I have the feeling that no war would be so popular in Germany as a war with Italy.” Still, the Germans were hardly convinced by Ciano’s assurance that Fascist Italy had abandoned all intrigue and attempts to seek its own advantage and was no longer “the whore of the democracies.”
What strengthened the tie in the end was the personal liking Hitler and Mussolini developed for one another, after their unpropitious first meeting in Venice. Despite obvious differences between them—Mussolini’s extrovert nature, his practicality, spontaneity, and ebullience contrasted markedly with Hitler’s solemn rigidity— both men had important traits in common. They shared a craving for power, a hunger for greatness, irritability, boastful cynicism and theatricality. Mussolini felt himself the elder and liked to take a patronizing tone, a kind of Fascist precedence, toward his German partner. At any rate, a number of leading Nazi functionaries began reading Machiavelli. A heavy bronze bust of the Italian dictator stood in Hitler’s study in the Brown House; and in a most unusual burst of veneration Hitler referred to Mussolini during a visit from the Italian Foreign Minister in Berchtesgaden in October, 1936, as “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may be remotely compared.”
Mussolini had been watching Hitler’s obvious wooing with a good measure of skeptical reserve. His inveterate fear of “Germanism” recommended restraint. So did the interests of his country, which, strictly speaking, pointed in the opposite direction. To be sure, he had won his East African colonial empire partly because National Socialist Germany had provided a distraction. But Germany could do nothing to secure this empire. Rather, everything now depended on Italy’s consolidating her new acquisitions by a policy of good behavior toward the West. That, however, was a political consideration, and, in the light of Hitler’s rapid ascent, Mussolini no longer wanted to engage in mere politics. He wanted to make history, to participate in the march to greatness, to display dynamism, to arouse faith, to satisfy the old “yearning for war,” and so on—there were many other phrases to express such fateful self-infatuation. Therefore, no matter what he might have felt originally about the German dictator, Mussolini was impressed by the boldness with which the strange fellow left the League of Nations, proclaimed universal military service, repeatedly defied the world, and broke up stultified European patterns. Mussolini was all the more provoked because it seemed as though Hitler, who had made such a poor showing at Venice, had taken over the original Fascist policy of eclat and was putting it across with remarkable energy. Concerned for his own standing, Mussolini began considering the rapprochement.
Hitler himself removed the most serious obstacle. Convinced that everything could be arranged later on among friends, he pretended to give way on the question of Austria. In July, 1936, he concluded a pact with Vienna whose main point was his recognition of Austrian sovereignty. He promised nonintervention in Austrian affairs, and in exchange for this received the concession that “decent” Nazis would no longer be barred from assuming political responsibility. Naturally, Mussolini interpreted this treaty as largely his own personal triumph. Even so, he might still have been wary of moving closer to Germany had not some curious circumstances favored such a tie at this very moment. For likewise in July the League of Nations powers revoked their not very effective edict of sanctions against Italy. Thus, with a confession of failure, they left Ethiopia to its conqueror. At the same time, Mussolini was able to satisfy his pride in Spain, where his commitment far exceeded Hitler’s and where he appeared as the leading Fascist force.
In September Hans Frank called upon Mussolini to bring him a note from Hitler. It began by the most flattering tributes to Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean region before proposing close co-operation. Mussolini still hung back; but he was obviously only displaying a great man’s majestic indolence. A month later he sent his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, to Germany to reconnoiter. Shortly afterward the prominent Fascists Tullio Cianetti and Renato Ricci, Minister of Corporations, then a thousand Fascist
To honor his guest, Hitler put on a display of all the spectacle of which the regime was capable. The effects, as Munich Gauleiter Wagner attested, were of Hitler’s own devising. On arrival Mussolini found that he was to pass down a lane of busts of the Roman Emperors, flanked by laurel trees. Thus the Duce, restorer of the Roman imperium, was placed in the line of the noblest ancestry in European political history. During their first conversation Hitler conferred the highest German decoration on his guest as well as a golden party badge, which he alone had hitherto worn. Meanwhile, designer Benno von Arent had created a mile-long triumphal avenue in Berlin between the Brandenburg Gate and the West End, lined with white pylons from which were festooned garlands, banners, and streamers, reiterating the symbols of fasces and swastika. On Unter den Linden hundreds of columns were set up, crowned with gold imperial eagles. For the night show the stage managers had conceived a play of lights featuring the green-white-red of Italy and the black-white-red of Hitler Germany.
Hitler had taken leave of his guest in Munich, before Mussolini was to be conducted to Berlin. But as the Italian dictator’s special train reached the city limits of Berlin, Hitler’s train surprisingly appeared on the adjacent track and accompanied the Duce’s, their two cars side by side, for the last stretch of the way. At last it pulled a bit ahead, and when Mussolini arrived at the Heerstrasse station, his host was already waiting at the predetermined spot and holding out his hand in greeting. Standing beside Hitler in the open limousine, deeply impressed by the solemnity and the obvious sincerity of the tributes that were being paid him, Mussolini entered the capital of the Reich. Sightseeing, parades, banquets, and demonstrations followed one another in continual whirl. At a drill ground in Mecklenburg the Italian dictator was shown the newest weapons and the striking power of the new German army. At the Krupp plant in Essen he saw the capacity of German war industry. On the evening of September 28 at the Maifeld, close to the Olympic Stadium, Hitler held a “demonstration of the nations of the 115 millions,” at which he again cleverly ministered to the pride of his guest. He hailed Mussolini as “one of those lonely men of the ages on whom history is not tested, but who themselves are the makers of history.”
Obviously overwhelmed by the impressions of the past few days, the Duce delivered a speech in German in which he opposed to the “false and mendacious idols of Geneva and Moscow” the “radiant truth” that tomorrow all Europe would be Fascist. Before he had finished his speech a tremendous thunderstorm with torrents of rain scattered the audience in panic, and he found himself suddenly alone. At the Maifeld, Ciano noted ironically, there had been “beautiful choreography: lots of sentiment and lots of rain.” Drenched, Mussolini had to find his way back to Berlin. Nevertheless, the impression of that visit to Germany remained with him for the rest of his life.
“I admire you, Fuhrer!” he had exclaimed in Essen at the sight of a giant cannon until then kept a strict secret. But the feeling was mutual. Little as Hitler was capable of undivided feelings in other respects, he manifested toward the Italian dictator a rarely candid, seemingly almost naive liking, and preserved it through the many disappointments of later years. Mussolini was one of the few persons toward whom he did not show
