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 avanguardistas, made similar trips. At last, in September, 1937, Mussolini went himself.
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, Führer!” 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 pettiness, calculation, or envy. A contributing factor was that both had come from simple circumstances. With Mussolini he did not have that sense of constraint he felt almost everywhere else in Europe with representatives of the old bourgeois class. Their mutual understanding was spontaneous, at any rate after the unfortunate first meeting at Venice had been put behind. Trusting in this, Hitler had, in the agenda, reserved only a single hour for political discussion.
Mussolini was unquestionably a man of judgment and political acumen; but the style of personal foreign policy practiced by Hitler, the method of direct dialogue, handshakes, man-to-man talk, appealed to the stronger side of his nature. Under the influence of Hitler he yielded to it more and more, and the result was that ultimately he became curiously vulnerable, diminished, and finally drained, like so many of Hitler’s other victims. Even then, when he allowed political rationale to be corrupted by flatteries and grandiose theatrical effects, he was basically lost; the inglorious end at the gasoline station on the Piazzale Loreto, not quite eight years later, could already have been foreseen. For, in spite of all his ideological community with Hitler, his own future depended on his not losing sight of their fundamental difference of interests: the difference between a weak, saturated power and a strong, expansionist power. Under the spell of the visit he had already veered far too widely from the categories of politics to the unpolitical category of blind shared destiny. That became clear in the course of his Berlin speech, when he referred to a precept of Fascist and personal morality; that precept held, he said, that when one has found a friend, one must “march together with him to the end.”
Thus Hitler had succeeded with surprising rapidity in achieving one side of his design for alliances. For the first time in modern history two governments joined under ideological auspices to form a “community of action… and contrary to all the predictions of Lenin these were not two socialist but two Fascist governments.” The question was whether Hitler, after entering upon an alliance that flaunted its ideological nature, could win over his other dreamed-of partner, England. Or had he not, in terms of his own premises and aims, already taken the first step which was to prove fatal for him?