The Brenner Pass meeting (October 1940)

On 4 October 1940, at the railway station on the Brenner Pass, on the border between the Reich and Italy, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met for the second time that year. They were accompanied by their foreign ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano, and the conversation was recorded by Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt. Six months earlier, in March 1940, Hitler had used the same place to urge a still non-belligerent Italy to enter the war. Now the talks were between allies, bound for a week by the Tripartite Pact, who had to come to terms with the fact that Britain would not collapse in 1940. The discussion turned above all on how to win the war without a landing in England: by drawing Spain and France into the Axis camp. That evening Ciano noted that he had rarely seen the Duce in such good humour and form, and that the talks had been “certainly the most interesting of all so far”. There was one matter, however, which a few days later would infuriate Mussolini, and which Hitler did not mention.

Why Hitler wanted to talk

The idea of the meeting was put forward in Berlin on 28 September, the day after the Tripartite Pact was signed. Hitler asked Ciano for a meeting with the Duce before “far-reaching decisions” were taken on Spain. In the second half of September Berlin had played host to the brother-in-law and closest adviser of General Francisco Franco, the Interior Minister Ramón Serrano Suñer. Spain, exhausted by the civil war, declared itself ready to enter the war, but at a high price: Germany was to supply between 400,000 and 700,000 tonnes of grain, fuel, equipment, artillery and special units for the capture of Gibraltar, and after the war to hand Spain French Morocco and Oran in Algeria. In return, as Hitler put it ironically, Spain offered its friendship. Ciano agreed: Italy remembered how, during the civil war, twelve aircraft promised to Franco had turned into more than a thousand machines, six thousand dead and 14 billion lire. The meeting was fixed for 4 October, when Serrano Suñer was due to be in Rome. He arrived there on 1 October, did not spare the Germans accusations of tactlessness in his talk with Mussolini, and put off his departure until the Italians returned from the Brenner, so as to learn the outcome of the talks.

Hitler on Britain, America and Russia

Mussolini began with what he considered good news from London: on 3 October the gravely ill Neville Chamberlain had left the government, which the Duce took as a sign of crisis. Hitler moved on to a long account of the preparations for a landing in England: rebuilt bridges and canals, cleared harbours, heavy batteries on the Channel coast, amphibious tanks. Five days of good weather would be enough to win command of the air, and another eight to ten for the crossing, but for four weeks the weather had let him down. He described the first great raid – the attack on London of 7 September – as a strike by some 1,500 aircraft, and put the losses at one to three in the Luftwaffe’s favour, which was far from the truth. He insisted that the night raids were breaking British nerves and that forty divisions stood ready. He did not say outright that on 17 September he had postponed Operation Sea Lion until further notice, but Ciano understood perfectly: “there is no more talk of a landing in the British Isles”, he wrote, and the resources assembled would stay where they were.

Britain, Hitler said, was holding on only in the hope of America and Russia. The United States, however, could supply only equipment, and the Tripartite Pact had warned it against a war on two oceans. Stalin had counted on a long, exhausting war in Europe and had miscalculated. Germany did not fear the USSR: after March it would have a hundred first-class divisions, 24 of them armoured. Hitler added that he favoured steering Soviet ambitions towards India and the Indian Ocean, although he doubted whether the Russians could be induced to move. Mussolini agreed. He did not know that the expansion of the army he was hearing about served not defence but preparations for aggression: as early as 31 July Hitler had told his generals that Russia would have to be crushed in the spring of 1941.

A continental bloc against Britain

Since Britain could not for the moment be defeated directly, the British Empire had to be struck wherever possible. Here Hitler came to the heart of the matter. Spain counted only because of Gibraltar, for its military help was, in his view, “absolutely nil”: according to reports from the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the country’s economy was in ruins and Franco’s position was insecure. On top of the demands for grain came 56,000 tonnes of petrol a month and unsettled civil-war debts of 400 million marks, and Franco had refused Germany even a base on one of the Canary Islands. But the worst lay elsewhere. If the French learned that Morocco and Oran had been promised to Spain, they might stop defending North Africa, and some energetic officer might detach it from Vichy and hand it to the British. The expedition against Dakar, just repulsed, had shown that the French colonies would defend themselves against de Gaulle – but only as long as they believed they were defending something of their own.

Hence what Hitler called the “ideal solution”: a European coalition against Britain that would include Spain and defeated France. France would cede part of Morocco to Spain and might receive British Nigeria in return; the Spaniards would have to give up Oran. Hitler assured the Duce that Germany would not make peace with France without satisfying Italy’s demands. Mussolini listed them once again: a frontier correction near Nice, Corsica, Tunisia and French Somaliland. Hitler named Germany’s: Alsace and Lorraine with a “strategically improved” frontier, the Longwy–Briey iron-ore basin, bases on Morocco’s Atlantic coast at Agadir or Casablanca, and the rounding-off of Germany’s former colonies in Central Africa. He told of Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch’s talks with General Charles Huntziger and considered a meeting with representatives of Vichy, while stressing that France must never again be allowed to become a strong power.

Mussolini judged the idea of a continental coalition “excellent”, but laid down a condition: first a peace treaty with France that would define its position, and a compromise between Vichy and Madrid, since recognising Spain’s claims to Morocco would rule out any agreement with the French. Towards Spain he recommended a wait-and-see attitude: Serrano Suñer should be told that the Axis supported Spain’s claims against Britain – that is, Gibraltar – while territorial questions at France’s expense would be settled by the peace treaty. Hitler agreed and said he would write to Franco frankly that his demands were too high, and that if the Caudillo still wished to talk, he would come to the Spanish–French border.

Egypt and the offer of German help

Hitler also offered the Italians concrete help: German armoured units, dive-bombers, long-range heavy fighters and new ground mines with which aircraft could close the Suez Canal and the port of Alexandria for months on end. Mussolini thanked him but declined. He announced that he had just ordered the second phase of the offensive in Egypt to begin: the troops of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, which in mid-September had halted at Sidi Barrani, were to advance on Mersa Matruh between 10 and 15 October and take it before the end of the month. He might need German tanks – 50 to 100 heavy machines – and dive-bombers only in the third phase, the battle for the Nile Delta in mid-November. His generals, he admitted, considered the operation “imprudent”, but he had given Graziani a strict order. In reality Graziani, as Ciano had been told two days earlier, wanted to wait at least until the end of November, until he had built up his supply base.

Finally Hitler called in Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who explained on maps the question of bases in West Africa and the range of aircraft, and the talks ended with lunch for the four of them. Ciano recorded three conclusions: there was no more talk of a landing in England; the Germans wanted to draw France into the coalition because they had realised that the Anglo-Saxon world was “a hard nut to crack”; and the Mediterranean theatre was growing in importance, “which is good for us”. Hitler was energetic and once again violently anti-Bolshevik; Ribbentrop was silent and visibly unwell. The chief of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl, told the German armistice commission on his return that on the question of reinforcing the French forces in Africa the military point of view had prevailed at the Brenner, “including with the Italians, who were initially more reserved”.

What was not discussed

The German record of the conversation contains not a word about Romania, although it was then the most pressing issue in the Balkans. After the Second Vienna Award and the abdication of Carol II, the new dictator, General Ion Antonescu, had asked the Reich for a military mission. On 20 September Hitler made his decision. A secret OKW order stated that officially the missions were to help train the Romanian army, while their real tasks – which were not to be revealed either to the Romanians or to the German troops themselves – were to protect the oilfields around Ploiești from a “third power” and to prepare, in the event of war with Russia, an attack from Romanian territory. To begin with, a motorised division reinforced with tanks was to go there. Ribbentrop had mentioned to Ciano in Rome on 19 September, at the close of their talks, that Romania had asked for a mission and that Germany would send one. At the Brenner, two weeks after Hitler’s decision, the subject did not come up. The German ambassador in Rome, Hans Georg von Mackensen, later admitted in a letter to Berlin that the Italians had learned of the dispatch of troops from the press, the radio and their own sources.

Mussolini, for his part, said nothing of his own intentions. On 19 September he had assured Ribbentrop that Italy would for the time being touch neither Yugoslavia nor Greece, although he compared Greece to Norway as a British instrument in the Mediterranean. Since August, when an Italian submarine sank the Greek cruiser Elli and Berlin demanded calm in the Balkans, the Greek question had been kept in a drawer, even though plans for an attack from Albania, occupied in 1939, were ready. At the Brenner nobody raised it.

A few days later everything changed. On 8 October Mussolini telephoned Ciano, angry that only German troops were in the Romanian oil basin, and told him to press Bucharest for an invitation to the Italians. Ribbentrop ordered formal notification to be given to Ciano only on 10 October; the embassy counsellor Otto von Bismarck reported that the minister had received it “without comment”. On 12 October the Duce exploded: “Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli. This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece.” On 19 October he wrote Hitler a long letter in which, referring to the Brenner talks, he stated only in general terms that as regards Greece he was determined “to put an end to the delay very quickly”. The letter reached Hitler as he was returning from his meetings with Franco and Pétain.

Place in the war

The Brenner meeting showed how the war had changed by the autumn of 1940. Hitler, who in the summer had been counting on Britain’s capitulation, was now looking for ways to hem it in through Gibraltar, North Africa and the Mediterranean, with the help of Spain and Vichy France. For Mussolini this meant that his “parallel war” was gaining in importance, but also that the Germans were intruding into matters he regarded as Italian. The continental bloc fell apart within a few weeks. On 23 October at Hendaye Franco refused to commit himself to any specific date for entering the war, and on 24 October at Montoire Marshal Philippe Pétain accepted the principle of “collaboration”, but not war with Britain. In November the talks in Berlin with Vyacheslav Molotov failed to draw the USSR into the coalition, and in December Hitler ordered preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

The consequences of what was left unsaid at the Brenner were felt most painfully by Italy itself. On 28 October Mussolini attacked Greece without having agreed it with Hitler, who learned of the attack on his way to meet the Duce in Florence. The offensive on Mersa Matruh, announced for mid-October, never began at all, and in December the British routed Graziani’s army. Before long Italy itself had to call on the German help that the Duce had proudly refused on 4 October: in 1941 the Afrika Korps arrived in Libya, and the Wehrmacht marched into Yugoslavia and Greece. The meeting at which Mussolini felt himself Hitler’s equal partner was one of the last at which he could see himself that way.