In September 1937, Adolf Hitler welcomed Benito Mussolini to Germany. Both the German Führer and the Italian Duce had designed this encounter to project a powerful image of the world's first two fascist dictators as friends. Italy and Germany, two regimes supposedly ideologically united and entangled with one another within the Spanish Civil War, were challenging the status quo in Europe. The German and Italian authorities intended that the pomp and circumstance surrounding the meeting would assuage antagonisms that lingered in the public of both countries in consequence of fighting on opposite sides during the Great War.
Some eyewitnesses, including Ernst von Weizsäcker, director of the German foreign ministry's political department, characterized the visit as a feast of flags and medals that failed to produce tangible political outcomes.Footnote 1 In the 1970s, the historian Renzo De Felice, author of the most detailed Mussolini biography, made a similar observation and insisted that the 1937 dictators' encounter was relatively unimportant. Following his tendentious interpretation of Italian foreign policy under Fascism, he claimed that Mussolini left all diplomatic options open for Italy, an alliance with either Britain or Germany. In contrast, in their general works on Fascist Italy, historians such as Robert Mallett and Richard Bosworth have sharply criticized De Felice's interpretation. For them, the 1937 visit was a demonstration of the nascent Axis alliance which marked a clear pro-German shift in Italian foreign policy. As I argue in this article, the Duce's visit to Germany demonstrates that he preferred an alliance with the ideologically sympathetic Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, no Italo-German treaty was signed because the Duce was keen to maintain the illusion that Italy was pursuing a policy of equidistance to both Germany and Britain in order to give Italy, a country lacking natural resources and, because of its long coastline, vulnerable to foreign invasion, a stronger sense of power. For the same reason, Mussolini had signalled in the summer of 1937 that he wanted to revive the traditional Anglo-Italian friendship which had been damaged during the Italian conquest of Abyssinia.Footnote 2
It would be a mistake, though, to interpret Mussolini's 1937 visit merely in terms of high politics. Shifting attention from high politics to propaganda, the German historian Wolfgang Benz has briefly explored the orchestration of the visit as propagandistic acclamation for the Nazis by Goebbels's propaganda ministry, without considering Italian sources. Both regimes, not just Nazi Germany, were keen on maintaining unanimous popular support; propagandistic rituals were an essential instrument of exercising political power.Footnote 3
In this article, I go beyond existing interpretations of the 1937 encounter and explore the choreography of the visit as well as popular and international reactions to it, drawing upon published and unpublished German, Italian, American, and British sources. In contrast to Wolfgang Schieder and others who see the Axis between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as more or less ideologically inevitable, arguing against older literature dismissing the Axis as a myth, I take the 1937 encounter as a case-study to explore lurking tensions beneath a glitzy façade. The relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany was conflict-ridden and did not simply reflect Fascism's and Nazism's ‘common ideology’.Footnote 4
Thus, I interpret the visit as a moment in which the Italian and German governments overshadowed the lingering animosities between their countries and the cracks in the façade of alleged fascist unity. Furthermore, I explore the encounter's rituals and ceremonies which represented a combined Fascist–Nazi attempt to challenge the purportedly liberal dominance of international diplomacy and to create a new style of fascist diplomacy, centred on the two dictators' mingling with the crowds. The 1937 encounter was thus a sign of a new assertive style of fascist diplomacy. The organization of Mussolini's visit reflected a departure from international protocols and the culture of liberal internationalism, which has attracted considerable recent historiographical attention. Established by the Paris Peace Treaties, despised by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, liberal internationalism emphasized formal treaties, collective resolution of disputes through the international community, and the recognition of the rights of small countries and minority populations.Footnote 5
I divide the article in three parts. First, I introduce my methodology, critically invoking recent approaches towards the cultural history of diplomacy and the history of emotions. Second, I offer a thick description of the rituals and ceremonies of the visit. Third, I assess both the legacies of the visit for Italo-German relations and its impact upon the wider realm of diplomatic culture and international politics.
I
Writing the history of the 1937 encounter, and of the cultural history of diplomacy more generally, poses a number of methodological challenges, especially in terms of striking the balance between analysis and narrative, indispensable for a thick description of the event.Footnote 6 David Cannadine and, more recently, Johannes Paulmann have explored the genre of royal spectacle and state visits in the long nineteenth century. As political power shifted from monarchs to parliaments and bureaucracies, state visits of monarchs sharply increased in the age of mass politics and the mass media. These monarchs' encounters created an important background for subsequent state visits and summits and for the Mussolini–Hitler encounter – both for the bureaucracies who organized the visit as well as its audiences who remembered the pre-1914 state visits.Footnote 7 The organization of the visit as a face-to-face meeting reinforced the leadership cults of Mussolini and Hitler, as it suggested, contrary to the more complex reality of Fascist and Nazi rule, that the dictators were in total control of their countries' destinies and embodying their people's will.Footnote 8
But I go beyond Cannadine's and Paulmann's work and invoke two approaches to explore the rituals, ceremonies, and organization of the Mussolini–Hitler encounter. First, given that the Fascists and the Nazis saw themselves as anti-rational, the emphasis on emotions of friendship, recently subject of a historiographical debate, featured prominently in the choreography. Thus, the Nazis and Fascists organized the visit as a personal encounter between Mussolini and Hitler, whose relationship was stylized as a friendship, emblematic of amicable relations between the German and Italian peoples.Footnote 9 As Lucien Febvre, the Annales historian, wrote two years after the Mussolini–Hitler encounter, fascists prioritized emotions of love, hatred, and friendship over the purportedly rational orders of liberalism and Bolshevism.Footnote 10 The emphasis on friendship was not a coincidence and aimed to attract the masses, setting the Italo-German alliance apart from the purportedly secretive diplomacy of France and Britain. The staging of the Mussolini–Hitler friendship as an ‘emotive regime’, to borrow William Reddy's concept, was not entirely new. Hitler, Mussolini, and their propaganda officials misappropriated traditional rituals of bonds between statesmen and nations. In the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the founding fathers of modern nationalism, had pioneered the idea of the friendship amongst nations.Footnote 11 Above all, the Mussolini and Hitler friendship built on the idea of friendship of European monarchs with one another. But unlike kings and emperors, Mussolini and Hitler did not have dynastic links. Thus, the ‘emotive regime’ of fascist friendship compensated for this lack of dynastic mechanisms and symbolized strong ties between Mussolini and Hitler and their nations.
Second, the performative aspects of the fascist friendship ritual were instrumental in establishing a new fascist diplomacy, although a good deal of the organization followed the tradition of diplomatic protocol that had emerged over many centuries and been adopted to the tastes and expectations of mass audiences at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries.Footnote 12 Recent studies, such as Naoko Shimazu's adoption of social anthropological interpretations of gesture and performativity in her exploration of the 1955 Bandung Conference, have broadened our perspective and integrated the study of diplomacy with that of diplomatic culture, building upon pioneering work from the 1950s on diplomatic culture. A firm link between the culture of diplomacy, its rituals, symbols, and ceremonies on the one hand and the political context on the other hand, is thus crucial to capture the significance of the Mussolini–Hitler meeting.Footnote 13 Through a close analysis of the rituals and ceremonies of the visit, I thus locate the 1937 meeting at the confluence of culture and politics. Methodologically inspired by recent work on ‘social performance’ by Jeffrey C. Alexander, I thus connect the rituals and ceremonies of the visit. Seen through this lens, the 1937 encounter was a social and political drama, carefully scripted by the Nazi and Fascist regimes.Footnote 14
II
Before the visit began, Italo-Germans had been characterized by a mix of hostility and gradual rapprochement. Four years earlier, in June 1934, the first encounter between the Duce, a more experienced statesman than Hitler, and the recently appointed Reich chancellor, had been held in a tense atmosphere in Venice. After Mussolini's proclamation of the Rome–Berlin Axis in November 1936, all friction between the two revisionist countries, supporting Franco's nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, had ostensibly disappeared.Footnote 15
For Germany, Mussolini's visit was an exceptional event, as there had hardly been any significant state visits to Germany since the end of the World War, reflecting Germany's international isolation.Footnote 16 Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich, in charge of directing the content of German newspapers, told Italian journalists of Hitler's genuine joy to meet the Duce. This reinforced the message that the two leaders and, by extension, their nations were friends. While both Mussolini and Hitler preferred an alliance based on ideology, neither wanted to rebuff Britain entirely, which is why propaganda still avoided overt warmongering in favour of the message that the two leaders could bring peace to Europe.Footnote 17
Media coverage in Germany was tightly controlled by Goebbels and other officials. Reflecting a more general Nazi practice, propaganda officials issued daily guidelines to the press and instructed editors to highlight specific points of Mussolini's visit.Footnote 18 The Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter, a paper with wide circulation that went beyond Nazi party members, declared that Mussolini's visit was not a traditional state visit. This was partly a diplomatic gesture to Mussolini who was not head of state, and thus not entitled to a state visit. The Nazi paper claimed that the visit was a meeting between the leaders of two peoples, who also led and provided the ideological inspiration for movements that were based around shared ideas and which had a parallel historical trajectory. The paper conveniently ignored tensions, prejudices, and negative national stereotypes, which underpinned Italian and German views of each other. Significantly, no mention was made of the awkward fact that Italians and Germans had fought against each other in the Great War.Footnote 19
The journalists of the Völkischer Beobachter found it rather more difficult to explain the different positions of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany on the subject of race. While historians have recently begun to highlight the increasing importance of racial exclusion in Fascist Italy from the late 1930s onwards, racism was never as central to the policy or ideology of Fascist Italy as it was to the Third Reich.Footnote 20 Thus, the Nazi paper insisted that Fascism had not yet had a chance to clarify its position on the racial question (Volkstumsfrage). Fascism and Nazism, despite their similarities, such as their anti-Bolshevism and their common goal to overcome the principles of the French Revolution were not the same, the paper declared. This admission of difference was significant. Indeed, neither Mussolini nor Hitler articulated fundamental ideological parallels between their regimes. As leaders of ultra-nationalist regimes, they could not articulate explicitly their indebtedness to foreign influences. It is essential to recognize this problem if we are to understand the complex relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, rather than return to the debate on generic fascism and the question whether Nazism constituted a form of fascism.Footnote 21 Thus, the organization of the visit hid the political tensions between Italy and Germany and highlighted instead an ideological proximity between Fascism and Nazism notwithstanding the fact that it was only vague.Footnote 22
The visit was packed with parades, banquets, and tours and left little time for serious political discussions between the two dictators who were, in theory at least, in sole charge of their nations' respective foreign policies.Footnote 23 Nazi propaganda presented Mussolini's visit as the encounter of ‘115 million’ Italians and Germans.Footnote 24 Photographs by Hitler's photographer Heinrich Hoffmann who had the exclusive right to publish photographs of the Nazi leader in Germany highlighted the unprecedented nature of the Mussolini–Hitler encounter, building upon the genre of rulers' portraits which had become a central part of diplomatic culture in the early modern period, representing aspirations for alliances among rulers.Footnote 25 The Reich Ministry of Propaganda published a commemorative book with Hoffmann's pictures. Hoffmann's visual strategy to show both leaders in uniform together stressed the alliance between the two leaders, the two regimes, and the two peoples. This was not an unusual way of presenting photographs of state visits, as evidence of the visit of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to Rome in January 1939 reveals.Footnote 26
In the preface to Hoffmann's book, Fred Willis, a Rome-based German newspaper correspondent, depicted the friendship between the two dictators and between the peoples of Italy and Germany as historically inevitable. He stated – rather implausibly and in contradiction of much earlier nationalist rhetoric – that Italians and Germans had been friendly since at least the middle ages. They had a parallel history, as they had experienced national unification in the late nineteenth century. For Willis, the alleged friendship between Mussolini and Hitler had been predated by that of Francesco Crispi, Italian prime minister, and the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had presided over the consolidation of the Italian and German nation-states and the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary. While Crispi's 1887 meeting with Bismarck in Berlin had allegedly followed stiff and secretive diplomatic protocol, the Mussolini–Hitler encounter was held amongst jubilant crowds.Footnote 27 Willis omitted inconvenient details of the troublesome history of Italo-German relations, such as the Lega Lombarda against the Holy Roman Empire in the middle ages as an iconic moment in Italian patriotic history or Italy's exit from the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany during the World War because it was a bad omen for an Italo-German alliance.Footnote 28
Italian officials struck a similar chord and insisted that the second Mussolini–Hitler meeting would be a ‘decisive event for Europe's history’ and an ‘encounter of the two nations'. The Fascist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia prepared its readers for Mussolini's journey and described the meticulous German preparations, hoping to create a sense of great expectations and excitement amongst Italians.Footnote 29 In reality, as we will see, the organization of Mussolini's visit did not mark a radical departure from existing protocols of state visits. The staging of the visit was a blend between the old and the new, like Fascism and Nazism more generally, and a strategy to gain and maintain popular legitimacy.
Mussolini was not keen on travelling abroad and strictly limited his foreign visits, as he felt that he could not control matters when he stepped beyond Italy's frontiers and that this risked the creation of situations in which he might look ridiculous. Not least, he was scared of organized anti-Fascist protests abroad. At the Locarno Conference in 1925, Mussolini had appeared silly to many and refused to travel to London to ratify the Locarno agreement, as he feared verbal attacks from Liberal and Labour politicians and trade unionists.Footnote 30 His reluctance to leave Italy was therefore a symbolical assertion of Italy's and, by extension, his own power. Mussolini's journey to Germany in September 1937 was thus a significant diplomatic gesture: his relationship with Hitler and Germany was so special that he would make an exception to this rule. His meeting with Hitler in Nazi Germany was appealing for Mussolini, for whom showmanship was a crucial aspect of his leadership style, as he expected a perfectly organized show of acclaim, which would boost his myth and self-confidence. Underlining the special character of the visit, Mussolini thus insisted that his visit must be different from other state visits. Mussolini paid close attention to detailed arrangements. For example, Massimo Magistrati, first councillor at the Italian embassy in Berlin, later remembered that Mussolini refused to wear tails and demanded that he be allowed to mingle with the crowds.Footnote 31
To see off Mussolini, the Italian government organized a ‘fascist spectacle’, invoking the well-tested choreography of Fascist mass rallies as powerful occasions. Furthermore, in line with other ‘fascist spectacles’, the highlights of Mussolini's visit were broadcast on the piazze of Italy.Footnote 32 A huge rally was held at Rome's Termini station on 24 September to see off Mussolini and his retinue, including Ciano, Fascist party secretary Achille Starace, minister of popular culture Dino Alfieri and Osvaldo Sebastiani, head of Mussolini's secretariat (segreteria particolare del Duce). Fascist party members had to wear their blackshirts. This projected an image of Fascist aggression, masculinity, and belligerence, and above all of the Mussolini myth. Greeted by predictably excited crowds, orchestrated by the regime, Mussolini was driven to the train station and boarded his special train. The train travelled via Florence towards the Austrian border. According to Il Popolo d'Italia, masses were cheering Mussolini on his train throughout Italy. In reality, like at other Fascist mass rallies, the regime, keen to convey to a domestic and international audience a sense of unanimous popular support for Fascism and the Axis with Germany, had used pressure and outright coercion to create the image of excited masses.Footnote 33
Print and radio journalists, hand-picked by the Ministry of Popular Culture, gave Mussolini's train journey a sense of political symbolism. The ministry, keen on a perfect choreography of the visit, instructed them on which events to highlight and prescribed their dress code, including uniforms and formal evening wear.Footnote 34 The German foreign ministry too issued specific dress codes for different groups participating in the events. For instance, for Mussolini's arrival at the German border, soldiers from the German armed services were instructed to wear their dress uniforms, while members of the various Nazi party organizations had to don their breeches and riding boots. Civilians, in contrast, got away with cutaways and top hats, a concession to the conventions of diplomacy.Footnote 35
A special correspondent of the Il Popolo d'Italia gave readers an account of Mussolini's journey from Rome to Munich. He implied that the movement of Mussolini's train was a metaphor for the advance of Fascism in Europe. On the long journey towards Germany, the train regularly slowed down at stations to allow people to cheer the Duce who, like other rulers before him, visited Italy's regions to assert his power.Footnote 36 The train travelled through the South Tyrol, which despite Fascist Italianization policies retained a German-speaking majority, in the early morning while it was still dark outside and few people were on the streets. This clever calculation prevented Mussolini from having to witness an embarrassing silence of the South Tyrolese who craved for a unification with Germany, even though Hitler had publicly renounced German claims over the region in the 1920s.Footnote 37
The train stopped at the Italo-Austrian border, the most tangible symbol of tense Italo-German relations. Although, during the Abyssinian war and faced with League of Nations' sanctions, Mussolini had signalled that he was prepared eventually to accept the German annexation of Austria, Italy officially still guaranteed Austrian independence. Mussolini emphasized this fact by stopping in Innsbruck where he appeared in Fascist uniform and shook hands with the Austrian foreign minister, whose government was increasingly steering the country towards a fascist-style regime. The New York Times reported that a letter by the widow of Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor murdered by the Nazis in July 1934, was handed over to the Duce, a reminder that Mussolini was about to meet the man ultimately responsible for her husband's assassination.Footnote 38
Nazi propaganda did not dwell upon Mussolini's brief halt in Austria. The editor of a Berlin paper who mentioned Mussolini's stay in Innsbruck was promptly reproached by a Nazi propaganda official for this unwelcome reminder of Italo-German tensions.Footnote 39 Il Popolo d'Italia only carried a short report of Mussolini's stop at Innsbruck to avoid offending the Germans. From Innsbruck, Mussolini's train continued to the Austro-German border, and Mussolini briefly got off the train to be welcomed by Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, alongside members of the Italian embassy in Berlin. The welcoming ceremony at the border was a usual aspect of diplomatic protocol. The train then sped to Munich. All stations on the way were crowded with jubilant people, waving swastikas and Italian flags. Clearly, many people, most of them members of one Nazi party organization or another, had been drafted in to cheer the Italian leader.Footnote 40
Below the surface of enthusiasm, consensus, and the image of collective German support for a German alliance with Fascist Italy, the Nazi regime massively stepped up security at any place to be visited by Mussolini. British newspaper articles, later filed by German diplomats, concerned with the visit's international impact, predictably dwelt upon the tight security arrangements, suggesting that Mussolini was unpopular in Germany. According to the Daily Telegraph, Mussolini was travelling in a ‘bullet-proof train’, with thousands of SS guards lining the railway to Munich. Many Germans had low views of the Italians and Mussolini, which obliged the regime to crack down on potential articulation of anti-Italian sentiment.Footnote 41 Indeed, the Nazis mobilized their full repressive apparatus which included the SS and the police and compiled detailed plans for the deployment of SS guards during Mussolini's visit. Furthermore, the regime confined several men seen as politically unreliable or openly critical of an alliance with Italy in the Dachau concentration camp. Munich was full of plain-clothes policemen as the Nazis were extremely concerned about the safety of Mussolini and Hitler within Germany.Footnote 42
While it had been raining for the previous two days in Munich, German papers insisted that the sky cleared for Mussolini's morning arrival. By 9 am, outside Munich central station, soldiers, alongside SS, Reich Labour Service, and SA troops, were waiting. Significantly, they were surrounded by members of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi girls' league, reinforcing the sense that Nazism was a movement of the young shaping Europe's future. The Nazis were keen to outdo the Fascist parade during Hitler's 1934 visit to Venice in order to emphasize that Hitler was no longer Mussolini's disciple following the swift and ruthless consolidation of the Nazi regime. Hundreds of thousands of men and women, alongside local Italian Fascists in their blackshirts, came out onto the streets in eager anticipation of the Duce, waving Italian tricolours which the regime had distributed. Half an hour before Mussolini's scheduled arrival, Nazi party grandees, including Reich Leader SS Heinrich Himmler and Goebbels, appeared. Following the traditional pattern of Nazi party rallies, Hitler was the last one to appear, before Mussolini's arrival. This created suspense amongst the audience, which turned silent in anticipation of the Duce's arrival. At 10 am, as could be expected, given Fascist propaganda about making the trains run on time, Mussolini's train pulled into Munich's central station and came to a halt on a platform adorned with Roman laurel trees, Roman sculptures, German and Italian flags, and an enormously long red carpet, stretching from the point of the platform where Mussolini was supposed to alight to the station square. As Mussolini's train pulled in, a military band played Giacomo Puccini's ‘Hymn to Rome’ (Inno a Roma), composed in 1919 but adopted by the Fascists to emphasize their romanità.Footnote 43
Significantly, Mussolini's visit to Germany began in the capital of the Nazi movement, site of the failed November 1923 Beer Hall putsch, in part inspired by the Fascist March on Rome. Hitler immediately approached Mussolini. The two leaders stretched out their right arms and shook hands, before walking down the red carpet. After gun salutes in Mussolini's honour, an honour normally reserved for heads of state, the leaders inspected the troops while a band played Giovinezza, the Fascist anthem, and the German national anthem. Mussolini and Hitler then drove in a Mercedes through a triumphal arch, adorned with an ‘M’, specifically built for Mussolini's visit, followed by other cars, each shared by a Nazi and a Fascist dignitary, suggesting that the alliance was not just one between Mussolini and Hitler, but also among other high-ranking officials. The route was adorned with pylons, wooden lictor rods, and flags. At the Prinz Carl Palais, lavishly renovated for Mussolini's stay visit, the cars stopped.Footnote 44 Despite the lengthy preparations, the Munich welcoming ceremony failed to create the impression that the German people unanimously supported the Axis alliance. The SS had cordoned off the streets so tightly that the crowds could not get anywhere near the leaders' cars.Footnote 45
If Mussolini and Hitler were really as popular as Nazi propaganda suggested, then why was such tight and wide-ranging security necessary? For the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps, the answer was clear: many thousand SS men were necessary to protect the two dictators, not from potential assassins, but from the over-excited masses. The SS paper could not hold back from condescension towards Italy. According to the SS units who guarded the Duce in Germany, Italian officers in Mussolini's retinue admired the strict discipline of the SS and the German Army. Implicitly, the report reinforced the view, widespread in Germany since the war, that the Germans were far better soldiers than the Italians. This view of the decadent Italians as effeminate, cowardly, and opportunistic was widespread across Europe and a thorn in the side for Mussolini and the Fascists. Even after fifteen years of Fascist rule, Mussolini's aim to transform Italians through extended warfare into a great nation of fighters that would be taken seriously abroad as a great power had failed to change German views of the Italians which is one of the reasons why Mussolini pressed for an alliance with the Third Reich in order to toughen up the Italians.Footnote 46
Beyond the glitzy surface of Nazi propaganda, many Germans remained reserved towards Mussolini and Italians, building on a tradition of anti-Italian stereotypes. Nazi propaganda did not raise the reputation of the Italians, long seen as opportunistic, disloyal, and cowardly by many Germans. While it is hard to measure popular opinion in Nazi Germany, the few existing sources suggest widespread negative views on Mussolini and an alliance with Italy. Agents of the exiled Social Democratic party (Sopade), reporting to the party leadership on public opinion in the Third Reich, overheard conversations at Munich railway station a few days before Mussolini's arrival. The reports' authors echoed their usual stance to interpret any departure from official designs as a lack of enthusiasm. Many passengers could not find the ticket offices which had been moved in preparation of Mussolini's arrival. A Bavarian peasant who had missed his train as a result loudly complained that he could not care less about Mussolini's visit. He was immediately arrested, as the regime was keen to maintain the image of unanimous popular support for the alliance with Mussolini. Another passenger said of the Italians: ‘I think that they aren't different today; we'll see.’ Even the massive and concerted Nazi propaganda failed to transform this deep-seated resentment.Footnote 47
The itinerary, prepared by Goebbels's propaganda ministry and the German foreign ministry in co-operation with the Italian foreign ministry and the Duce's secretariat, projected an image of Mussolini and Hitler as friends who met in public, surrounded by their peoples. Going beyond the preparations of the propaganda ministry and the foreign ministry, Hitler took an unusual personal interest in his guest's well-being and gave detailed instructions, for example, to put fresh flowers into Mussolini's suite at the Prinz Carl Palais.Footnote 48
However, despite the friendship propaganda, only one private conversation of the dictators was scheduled when Hitler received his Italian guest for tea at his Munich flat. This setup was in line with the protocol of state visits.Footnote 49 Nonetheless, this moment of intimacy was a rare honour and was supposed to reinforce the emotional bonds between the two leaders. No record has survived of their conversation. Paul Schmidt, the interpreter of the German foreign ministry, was present, although his services were not required because Mussolini insisted on showing off his German, a highly suggestive gesture creating a common bond with Hitler. Schmidt later recalled in his memoirs, produced after the war with a view to minimizing his role in Nazi diplomacy, that the leaders did not discuss specific ideological or strategic issues. Instead, they railed against France and stressed their support for Franco. The lack of a concrete political discussion between the leaders suggests that Mussolini's visit was above all a significant display of unity, which, like state visits more generally, glossed over ideological and strategic differences.Footnote 50
As a gesture of friendship and in line with the protocol of royal state visits, the Duce awarded Hitler an honorary military rank. But the award of the rank of the lowly rank of honorary corporal of the Fascist militia, meant to reflect Mussolini's and Hitler's humble origins in the trenches of the war, was perhaps not the most tactful gesture, as Hitler had been known in the Weimar Republic's conservative circles rather dismissively as the ‘Bohemian corporal’.Footnote 51 Later on the same day, Hitler, in line with the diplomatic tradition of reciprocity, paid his guest a brief return visit and awarded him the Great Cross of the German Eagle with diamonds, a new honour which was more prestigious than Hitler's honorary corporalship, as well as a golden Nazi party lapel pin. This was an even more special show of appreciation for Mussolini because only Hitler had previously worn one.Footnote 52 Hitler later told Goebbels that he had discussed all diplomatic issues with Mussolini, including Spain and East Asia, the latter presumably a reference to the 1936 German–Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact which was directed against the Soviet Union. Italy would join this pact in November 1937. Yet until the signing of the Pact of Steel in 1939, there was no military alliance between Germany and Italy.Footnote 53
Like at other diplomatic events, the itinerary symbolized a seal of friendship between Mussolini and Hitler and concealed the differences between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. For example, SS and party formations goose-stepped outside the Nazi party headquarters for an hour, showing off German military discipline and strength.Footnote 54 Mussolini was allegedly so impressed by the goose-step that he later introduced it to Italy as the passo romano. Here was an Italian appropriation of a German tradition, just as the Nazi use of the Heil Hitler greeting was in reality a copy of the fascist Roman greeting despite vehement Nazi denials. Nazi Germany was now clearly a model for Italy.Footnote 55
From Munich, both leaders then departed in separate trains to Mecklenburg to the Wehrmacht's autumn manoeuvres. Military manoeuvres were a usual point on the itinerary of state visits. Hitler, the caring host, took his guest in a motorcade to the station whence Mussolini's special train departed on time at 7:12 pm. Hitler's train left ten minutes later. High-ranking German officials, including the German ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, the German protocol chief, and Hans Frank, president of the Academy of German Law who had helped facilitate the Italo-German rapprochement in 1936, joined Mussolini and his delegation in their saloon carriage. Despite all the friendship propaganda, Mussolini and Hitler, accompanied by their retinues, travelled on different trains to have a break from each other and to discuss their strategies separately.Footnote 56
As the Völkischer Beobachter emphasized, Hitler and Mussolini, the two ex-corporals, represented the millions of Europeans who had fought in the trenches. Two former enemies were now united in friendship, allegedly striving for peace, but demanding parity from France and Britain. Hoffmann's pictures show Mussolini, fascinated by the German armed forces, in animated conversation with the heads of the German armed services, and the two dictators talking on the backseat of Hitler's open car. Throughout Mecklenburg, the leaders were greeted by crowds. To give weight to the military co-operation between both states, Hitler received high-ranking Italian officers on his train, while Mussolini received German officers in his carriage. Many of them had fought against Germany in the war, including the supreme chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, responsible for the crushing Italian defeat at Caporetto by Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1917. Neither the German nor the Italian press mentioned these tense memories of the war. Giorgio Pini, editor of the Popolo d'Italia, anticipated Italians' lukewarm, if not hostile, reaction to the Axis and reassured them that the Axis was fundamentally different and more profound than the Triple Alliance, culminating in the statement that Hitler's Germany ‘is no longer the German of William II [the Kaiser]’.Footnote 57
Germany's military strength was also emphasized during the dictators' visit to the Krupp armaments works in Essen.Footnote 58 From Essen, Mussolini and Hitler travelled on separate trains to Berlin. Predictably, the regime had ensured that the railways were lined by enthusiastic Germans. During the journey's last fifteen minutes, in a powerful display of German technical superiority, both trains ran at the same speed on parallel tracks, a metaphor for the compelling parallels between the leaders, their regimes, and the German and Italian peoples. As Willis declared in his book on Mussolini's visit, ‘115 million [people] have entered into a front of unity. 115 million [people] therefore carry this journey in their hearts because they can recognize in it the great directions of the two leaders in whom they believe in a world of hatred and unbelief.’Footnote 59 Just before the arrival at a small station close to the site of the 1936 Olympics, Hitler's train overtook Mussolini's. When the Italian delegation arrived, Hitler was already standing on the platform to welcome his guest. Was Hitler's overtaking simply a gesture of politeness so that he could greet the Duce at the station, or was there a hidden agenda that Nazi Germany had surpassed Fascist Italy, overtaking it as the leading state of the European far right? From the station, the two leaders went in an open car down the East–West Axis, a pompous street recently designed by Albert Speer, adorned with thousands of Italian and German flags, towards Unter den Linden and the Wilhelmstrasse, site of the German government. Reich stage designer Benno von Arent had designed the decorations for Mussolini's visit on Hitler's orders at a cost of more than a million Reichsmark.Footnote 60
As in Munich and Essen, enthusiastic crowds lined the streets of Berlin. The regime had ferried in almost a million spectators from Germany's provinces to cheer Mussolini at this social and political drama, many more than the Fascist regime had mobilized in Venice in 1934.Footnote 61 According to the limited evidence gathered by Sopade agents, the Nazis had manufactured popular enthusiasm. For example, Berlin employees and school children were given 28 September off and coerced into attending the parades and lining the streets. Moreover, the German Labour Front forced its members, most German workers, to attend the ceremonies at a time when the Third Reich was gearing for war, and signs of workers' discontent became visible. For instance, the employees of a large Berlin bank received a letter a few days before Mussolini's arrival, ordering them to participate in the celebrations with ‘absolute discipline’. Those who refused to attend had their pay docked for the day. Sopade reports highlighted the emblematic experience of a worker who refused to attend the rally. He believed, like many others, that Italy had betrayed Germany in the last war. The worker grumbled that Italy was blocking the annexation of Austria and suppressing Germans in South Tyrol, a typical view shared by many Germans. A German Labour Front official agreed with the worker's anti-Italian views, but insisted that everyone had to attend the rally because the regime had ordered it. Each group of workers received precise instructions where to assemble and applaud Mussolini. Many complained that they could not get a glimpse of Mussolini because up to 60,000 SS soldiers cordoned off the crowds from the dictators. This enhanced security stood in marked contrast to the alleged popularity of Hitler and Mussolini.Footnote 62
For foreign diplomats, ambiguity, rather than enthusiasm, characterized the views of ordinary people towards Mussolini and Italy. The British diplomat George Ogilvie-Forbes reported directly to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, reflecting British concerns over an Italo-German alliance and, at the same time, hopes for an Anglo-Italian rapprochement with Italy.Footnote 63 Ogilvie-Forbes noticed that the crowds were not over-enthusiastic for Mussolini, but rather ‘in a happy holiday mood, anxious to see the show’. He added that ‘the man in the street viewed the Italian entente with no enthusiasm and with some misgiving’. Nevertheless, the massive propaganda and the Italian and German support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War left some positive impression on Germans and made them more receptive of an alliance with Italy as ‘the fear of Mediterranean entanglements largely gave way to a feeling of self-esteem at the spectacle of the union of two powerful States extending from the Baltic to the Eastern Mediterranean’.Footnote 64
In line with the protocol of royal state visits, an official dinner, attended by German and Italian political officials and guests from high society, was held on the night of 27 September in the Reich Chancellery where both leaders gave toasts. Hitler called Mussolini a genius and emphasized the ‘sincere friendship’ between the Italian and German peoples, before raising his glass to Mussolini's health. In a gesture of reciprocity Mussolini flattered Hitler and stressed how touched he was by the great reception in Germany, a friendly nation led by the great Hitler. Fascism and Nazism were movements with a strong future, so Italo-German solidarity was inevitable. Significantly, both Mussolini and Hitler failed to specify the contours of their common ideology. This was not a coincidence and once again highlights that, rather than return to the debate on generic fascism and the question whether Nazism was a form of fascism, it is more fruitful in terms of our understanding the relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to consider the paradox of fascism, an ultra-nationalist movement whose leaders could not acknowledge foreign influences, as they recognized how different their ideologies were over key issues.Footnote 65
A huge rally on 28 September marked the apotheosis of Mussolini's visit. In contrast to royal state visits, both leaders spoke to the masses. At least one million people assembled on the Maifeld, site of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Mussolini and Hitler arrived together in an open car. In his speech, Hitler highlighted the uniqueness of Mussolini's visit as a ‘demonstration joined by 115 million members of two peoples in greatest sentiment’.Footnote 66 Mussolini then spoke for about fifteen minutes. He addressed the audience in German, reflecting his linguistic abilities, but also the close bonds he believed he shared with the German people. Like Hitler, he remained vague about the specific common ideology. Mussolini insisted that ‘no government, in any part of the world, has the acclaim of the people to such an extent as the governments of Germany and Italy’. Spectators on the Maifeld included foreign correspondents such as the New York Times's Frederick T. Birchall, who was impressed by the spectacle. Others admired Mussolini's good German pronunciation. Yet Mussolini's speech was hardly intelligible to radio listeners as he bellowed into the microphone.Footnote 67 Moreover, he spoke amidst a downpour of rain, so the audience worried about the weather instead of listening to the Duce's elaborations on the Axis. Never short of good jokes, ordinary Berliners began to parody the popular exclamation ‘Duce! Duce!’ into ‘Dusche, Dusche’, the German word for shower. The ceremony ended with a military tattoo, illuminated by a ‘dome of light’, part of typical Nazi rituals at the Nuremberg party rallies, and the playing of the Italian and German state and party anthems. The crowds dispersed in a huge stampede to escape the rain as soon as the parade ended. So many people flocked to the underground station at the Olympic stadium that some were pushed to death, an inconvenient fact not mentioned in the press. The ceremony outside the Olympic stadium gave the encounter a special character as a political and social drama, uniting the two leaders with the audience and the German and Italian peoples who were following the speeches on the radio.Footnote 68
Tropes of political harmony, friendship, and ideological unity continued to dominate the visit through its final day. On his final day in Germany, Mussolini, in the presence of German veterans, put down a wreath at the Neue Wache, the German memorial for the fallen of the Great War. This significant gesture revealed that former enemies were now allied. After the ceremony at the war memorial, units of the Wehrmacht paraded down the East–West Axis, another illustration of German military power, outdoing Italian military capability and effectively demoting Mussolini's status.Footnote 69 At Mussolini's departure, Hoffmann took a photograph showing a happy Duce talking through an open train window to a pensive Hitler. Probably unconsciously, this photograph paid tribute to Mussolini's vanity, for Hitler, standing on the platform, had to look up to the Italian dictator. Yet Hitler had the last shot. In the final picture of Hoffmann's book, Hitler waves farewell to Mussolini.Footnote 70 Hitler was sentimental when his Italian guests departed, according to Goebbels's diaries. No formal alliance had been concluded, but the social and political drama of the encounter gave the Italo-German relationship a new, emotional image: the friendship between the two dictators and their peoples. Until late at night, Germans cheered the Duce as his train sped through the Reich towards the Austrian border.Footnote 71
Upon crossing the Austro-German border, Mussolini sent Hitler a telegram, which was promptly published in the German and Italian press. Although both regimes claimed that the encounter had gone beyond traditional diplomatic rules, Mussolini followed diplomatic protocol when he sent the thank-you telegram. He assured Hitler of the ‘indissolubility of their friendship’. Mussolini invited Hitler to Italy to reciprocate the hospitality and to underline Italo-German solidarity.Footnote 72
Mussolini knew that his pro-German attitude was not without its critics, even from within the ranks of Fascist supporters. Mussolini thus interrupted his journey at Verona to meet Gabriele D'Annunzio, the hero of Fiume who had, in some ways, paved the way for the Fascist seizure of power. The meeting of Mussolini and D'Annunzio, a known opponent of an Italian alliance with Germany, was covered in Il Popolo d'Italia and international papers, such as the New York Times, and suggested that the future of Italian foreign policy was still open. In reality, Mussolini's push for an alliance with Hitler, symbolized by the invitation of Hitler to come to Italy, was clear, and the idea that Italy would be the determining weight (peso determinante) between the Western democracies and Germany was entirely unrealistic and obsolete. While Mussolini's public gestures and his invitation of Chamberlain to visit Italy in early 1939 thus symbolized the continuation of the peso determinante rhetoric, in reality, he had decided to side with Nazi Germany.Footnote 73
As for Mussolini's departure, the Italian government staged a fascist spectacle to welcome back the Duce. State and party workers were given the day off so that they could welcome the Duce. Public buildings were illuminated and adorned with flags. The welcoming ceremony reinforced the sense of Mussolini's triumph in Germany. A moved Mussolini addressed the crowd, boasting that the Italo-German friendship was now at the heart of the two nations. He remained vague about plans for a formal Italo-German collaboration, as no pact had been signed in Germany. On 4 October 1937, Mussolini reported his triumphant reception in Germany to the king, who had led Italy in the war against Germany in the World War. The Duce tried to persuade the king that an alliance with Germany was in Italy's interest.Footnote 74 The Axis became a self-fulfilling prophecy for Mussolini who was so deeply impressed by Hitler and Nazi Germany that he told Italians that the deep friendship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had developed in the hearts of their peoples and would remain strong, setting Italo-German relations apart from traditional bilateral relations with other countries.Footnote 75 Ciano, deeply opportunistic and at this time a staunch advocate of an alliance with Germany, was uncertain whether Italo-German ‘solidarity’ would really ‘unite two peoples drawn into opposite directions by race, civilization, and tastes?’ Nevertheless, for Ciano, the Axis was not just a political manoeuvre, but a pursuit of a common ideology, reinforced by Mussolini's political views. Like Mussolini and Hitler, Ciano failed to specify the contours of this common ideology, once again pointing to the paradox of fascism, highlighted above.Footnote 76
Still, the Fascist press gave the illusion that both countries, indeed both leaders, were on an equal footing. On 1 October 1937, Mussolini's Popolo d'Italia announced that Hitler would come to Italy soon, following the invitation Mussolini had extended during his visit. Yet German officials in charge of directing newspapers' content discouraged editors from discussing Hitler's visit to Italy, following Mussolini's invitation, as tensions beyond the glittering surface of Nazi propaganda remained. Anticipating questions from German and international newspaper editors why no formal treaty had been signed and why there was no official communiqué, a propaganda official reminded editors that Mussolini's and Hitler's speeches on the Maifeld contained all important points. Moreover, the strong feeling of unity between Germany and Italy rendered a formal treaty unnecessary, so ritual supplanted formal treaties, reinforcing the special and innovative nature of the Mussolini–Hitler rapport. The diplomatic performance thus seemed to acquire the role of a political treaty.Footnote 77
Leading Nazis remained sceptical about an alliance with Italy. When, after his return to Rome, Mussolini sent Hitler his signed portrait, with a dedication ‘in sincere friendship’, Goebbels doubted whether Mussolini would be a loyal ally.Footnote 78 Here was an articulation of the extremely complex nature of Nazi views on Italy. Leading Nazis admired Mussolini, crediting him with returning Italy to its ancient glory, but without fully understanding the complexities and inner contradictions of the Fascist regime. At the same time, Nazi leaders were extremely reserved towards the Italians, a people seen as lazy, cowardly, and sometimes even as racially inferior.Footnote 79
Concerted Nazi efforts to propagate an Italo-German alliance were not entirely without an impact on Germans. Hundreds of thousands of Germans had participated in the celebrations during Mussolini's visit out of curiosity or because of Nazi pressure. Their complaints about the massive costs of the visit were accompanied by respect for the Nazis' perfect organizational skills. Paradoxically, while many Germans rejected the Nazis' courting of the Italians, for some, at least, Mussolini's visit helped consolidate the Nazi regime's popularity. Sopade agents quoted a Munich home owner, not a fan, of the Nazis, who found Mussolini unsympathetic and untrustworthy. This Bavarian grumbled about the Nazis' lavish spending on Mussolini's visit, but at the same time greatly admired the Nazis' military and ceremonial pomp, not to mention German superiority over the Italians. The limited evidence on public opinion thus suggests that the diplomatic pageant was popular, while the diplomatic relationship with a country seen as an inferior military ally, was not.Footnote 80
In Italy, the regime was also propagating a closer co-operation with Nazi Germany and issued a commemorative book Il Duce in Germania, which reprinted some of the pictures Hoffmann had taken of the two leaders. Gherardo Casini, head of the Directorate General for the Italian Press in the Ministry of Popular Culture, provided a preface in which he insisted that Italians were following their Duce's enthusiasm for the Italo-German friendship ‘at the heart of both peoples’. In reality, despite increasing Italian pro-German propaganda, most Italians remained reserved towards such an alliance, seen as a flagship project of a regime facing increasing domestic discontent over the Spanish Civil War. Similar to their German counterparts' views on Italy, many Italians viewed Germany, the recent enemy, with suspicion and even fear, especially after the rapid consolidation of the Third Reich. A common view of ordinary Italians was that a stronger association between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany would almost inevitably lead to war.Footnote 81
III
The principal objective of the social and political drama which was the Mussolini–Hitler encounter was to make the friendship between Hitler and Mussolini a metaphor of Italo-German relations. The powerful performance resonated with foreign observers, such as the New York Times's Italian correspondent Arnaldo Cortesi, a man with some Fascist sympathies. He declared that the ‘dictators combat London–Paris rule’.Footnote 82
While the lack of popular support amongst Germans for an alliance with Italy did not escape the attention of British diplomats such as Ogilvie-Forbes, they understood the innovative nature of the social and political drama.Footnote 83 This emotive regime of fascist friendship, projected during Mussolini's visit, posed a strong challenge to the purported hegemony of Britain and France, states representing a purportedly bygone age of liberal internationalism, with its alleged emphasis on bureaucracy and endless debates. Here were two leaders, purported friends, directing the peoples of two countries, despite significant underlying tensions over geographical interest and long-lasting stereotypical views of each other, geared towards creating a New Order in Europe, redrawing the map of Europe through war and conquest in the Mediterranean in Italy's case and Eastern Europe in Germany's.Footnote 84 The representation of this friendship created political meaning and resonated with foreign observers, concerned with the powerful fascist challenge projected during Mussolini's visit to Germany, as I have argued, using the framework of social and political performance.Footnote 85 Given the recent work on liberal internationalism, the Mussolini–Hitler meeting is a reminder that the interwar culture of internationalism was challenged by the Right and eventually destroyed by it. Paradoxically this was a radical Right, keen on creating a New Order of conquest, war, and destruction that was tied together transnationally, although these ties were overshadowed by powerful tensions.Footnote 86
In the age of mass politics, there was a gradual shift, too, amongst democratic leaders to meet personally at summits.Footnote 87 But no other significant political leaders during the 1930s and 1940s, except for Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War, met as often as Mussolini and Hitler did. Fifteen face-to-face meetings of the dictatorial friends followed their 1937 meeting.Footnote 88 The face-to-face meetings reflected the alleged omnipotence of Mussolini and Hitler and their claim that they could, therefore, dispense with traditional, secretive, and bureaucratic diplomacy, a style later taken up by democratic leaders as well in the age of live television. Ultimately, the increasing Fascist–Nazi entanglement and the attempt to reshape the culture of international relations made the Mussolini–Hitler meeting politically significant and threatening to the Western democracies.Footnote 89
The performative approach used in this article brings together cultural history with political history and has enabled a more complex interpretation of Italo-German relations than traditional diplomatic histories and recent German studies of Fascist–Nazi relations, which rely almost exclusively on Italian and German sources and prioritize the ‘common ideology’, propagated by the regimes, over strategy, have painted.Footnote 90 More attention needs to be devoted to the fact that Fascist and Nazi officials, including Mussolini and Hitler, took great pains before, during, and after the meeting to insist that Fascism and Nazism, ultra-nationalist regimes, were not the same. In order to capture the complex and contingent nature of the relationship of both regimes, and indeed the international collaboration of other fascist movements with each other, we need to pay more attention to the strange balance of national tensions and purported or real ideological affinities that characterized their rapport.Footnote 91
