Hitler and Mussolini meet at the Brenner Pass

On the morning of 18 March 1940, at the railway station on the Brenner Pass, on the border between the Reich and Italy, Adolf Hitler met Benito Mussolini. Snow was falling. The talks took place in Hitler’s saloon carriage in the presence of the two foreign ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano, and were, as Ciano noted, “more of a monologue than anything else”. Hitler talked almost the whole time; Mussolini listened. At the end, however, he confirmed what he had told Ribbentrop in Rome a week earlier: Italy would not stay out of the war until its end and would stand at Germany’s side, but the Duce reserved to himself the choice of the moment to enter the fighting. It was the first meeting between the two dictators since the Munich conference of September 1938, and it closed a month in which the Germans, the British and the Americans had all been courting Italy at once.

Non-belligerence and coal

Since 1 September 1939 Italy had been “non-belligerent”, which was meant to signify that it was not fighting but was not neutral either and had not renounced the Pact of Steel. With every month Mussolini found this role harder to bear. He did not want to be thought a coward or, as in 1914, an ally who deserts his partner. At the same time he knew from his own staffs that the army would not be ready for a major war for several years. On 3 January 1940 he wrote Hitler a long letter in which he assured him of his loyalty but advised him not to sacrifice the struggle against Bolshevism for an arrangement with Moscow, suggested that the restoration of a reduced, purely Polish state would make it easier to end the war, and warned that it was not certain that France and Britain could be brought to their knees without sacrifices out of all proportion to the aims. For two months Hitler did not reply.

Meanwhile a dispute with London over coal was growing. Italy mined only a small part of the coal it needed and imported some 10–12 million tons a year from Germany. Most of this coal went down the Rhine to Rotterdam and from there in Italian ships round Europe to Italian ports. At the end of November 1939 the British government, in retaliation for the German mine warfare, announced that it would stop German exports even in neutral ships. For several months it turned a blind eye where Italy was concerned, hoping for an agreement: the British offered to supply Italy with coal themselves and in return to buy Italian armaments, including several hundred Caproni aircraft. At the beginning of February, however, Mussolini broke off these talks, and on 20 February the British Minister of Economic Warfare announced in the House of Commons that the transitional period was coming to an end.

On 1 March the British press announced that from that day German coal carried by sea to Italy would be treated as contraband. On 2 March Mussolini himself dictated the closing sentences of a sharp note of protest, which Ciano toned down a little and handed to the British the following day. The German ambassador, Hans Georg von Mackensen, at once offered to have the entire German press join in the attack on Britain, but Ciano declined. He understood that Berlin’s aim was to set Rome against London. On 5 March the Royal Navy stopped the first Italian colliers sailing from Rotterdam in the English Channel, and within a few days, according to the press of the time, a dozen or so of them were lying in the Downs with more than 100,000 tons of coal. Mussolini flew into a rage. “It cannot be that I, of all people, should become the laughing stock of Europe,” he said, according to Ciano’s diary. “As soon as I am ready, I shall make the English regret it.” On 9 March a compromise was reached: the British released the ships with their cargoes, and the Italians undertook not to send any more ships to fetch German coal from North Sea ports. From then on coal from the Reich could reach Italy only by rail across the Alps, above all over the Brenner.

The Sumner Welles mission

At the same time an envoy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, was travelling around Europe. On 9 February 1940 the President announced that Welles would visit Italy, France, Germany and Britain solely in order to report to him on the situation in Europe, and that he was not authorised to make any proposals or commitments. In Europe, however, it was widely assumed that Washington was sounding out the chances of peace. Welles arrived in Italy aboard the liner Rex and on 26 February talked in Rome with Ciano and, in the afternoon, with Mussolini at the Palazzo Venezia. The Duce struck him as aged and tired. He said that the Poles had a right to independence, but that Poland could not again be a mosaic of nationalities, and he did not rule out a reasonable peace. Ciano noted that the conversation with Mussolini had taken place in a “rather icy atmosphere”, and the Duce himself commented on it mockingly: agreement with the Americans was impossible because they judged problems superficially. He afterwards had the record of the conversation passed to the German ambassador.

In Berlin Welles was received on 1 March by Ribbentrop, who lectured him on German policy for two hours almost without pause; on 2 March by Hitler in the New Reich Chancellery; and on 3 March by Hermann Göring at Carinhall. All three blamed Britain and France for the war and argued that Germany wanted peace – but only a peace that recognised its conquests. On 7–9 March in Paris Welles talked with President Albert Lebrun, Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and Finance Minister Paul Reynaud, as well as with the Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile, General Władysław Sikorski, and the Foreign Minister, August Zaleski. Daladier assured him that the restoration of independence to Poland and to the Czechs was a condition of any peace. On 11–13 March in London Welles was received by King George VI, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax and Winston Churchill, who spent almost two hours explaining to him that no lasting peace could be made with Hitler.

Ribbentrop in Rome

On 8 March Mackensen informed Ciano that on Sunday 10 March Ribbentrop would come to Rome with Hitler’s reply to the Duce’s January letter and would also call on the Pope. Ciano tried to dissuade Mussolini from receiving the visitor at a moment when the coal affair had so strained relations with London, but the Duce was pleased. Ribbentrop was received coolly at the station, and the crowd assembled by party officials remained reserved. While still in the car, the German minister declared that the fine weather was bringing the moment for action nearer, and added: “Within a few months the French army will be destroyed and the English on the Continent will be prisoners.” He repeated the same thing to Mussolini.

The letter from Hitler that he brought, dated 8 March, was long. In it Hitler explained his policy at length, including the agreement with Moscow, but two ideas mattered most: Germany would decide the war by force of arms, and Italy’s place was inevitably at Germany’s side. Ribbentrop also brought a promise meant to sweeten the coal affair: the Reich undertook to supply Italy with about a million tons of coal a month by rail. On the first day Mussolini mostly listened. When the guests had gone, he told Ciano that he believed neither in a German offensive nor in complete German success.

On 11 March Ribbentrop was received by Pius XII. The Pope asked him about the persecution of Catholics in the Reich and requested permission to send an apostolic delegate to occupied Poland to examine the situation of the Church there. Ribbentrop gave no assurances beyond saying that he would consider the matter. That same day Mussolini made the declaration the Germans had been waiting for. According to Ciano’s diary, he stated that, while reserving freedom to choose the date, he intended to enter the war and wage it in parallel with Germany, because Italy was “a prisoner of the Mediterranean”. Ribbentrop asked for the Italian forces on the French border to be strengthened in order to tie down French forces there, and proposed an early meeting between Hitler and Mussolini at the Brenner Pass. The Duce agreed at once.

By the very next day Mussolini regretted having committed himself so far. He hoped that at the Brenner he would be able to talk Hitler out of a land offensive in the west – which Ciano was sure would not succeed. On 13 March Ribbentrop telephoned to propose that the meeting take place on Monday 18 March. “These Germans are unbearable; they give one no time to breathe or to think things over,” Mussolini burst out, but he agreed. In the following days he pondered how to obtain from Hitler a joint communiqué that would leave Italy free to stay out of the war even after the offensive in the west had begun.

Welles in Rome again

On 16 March Welles returned to Rome. In the morning he was received by King Victor Emmanuel III, then talked with Ciano, and in the evening with Mussolini, who according to Welles looked much better than two weeks earlier. The Duce told him that Hitler wished to see him at the Brenner on Monday at ten in the morning, and that in his opinion the German offensive was imminent: “the minute hand stands at one minute to midnight”. He asked whether he might pass on to Hitler Welles’s impressions from Paris and London, so as to have an argument for postponing the offensive. After a telephone conversation with Roosevelt, Welles declined, because the President did not want it to appear that the United States was taking part in framing peace terms put forward by Hitler. As they parted, Mussolini remarked: “Remember that although the German–Italian pact exists, I retain complete freedom of action.”

That evening Ciano noted that Mussolini was calmer and intended to maintain solidarity with Germany but not, for the moment, to enter the war. The Duce compared himself to Bertoldo, the cunning peasant of Italian folk tale who, sentenced to be hanged, secured the right to choose the tree himself and never found one. “I shall agree to enter the war, but I shall reserve the choice of the moment. I want to decide that myself, and a great deal depends on how the war goes,” he said. Ciano added that it was easy to push Mussolini forward and hard to hold him back.

The meeting in the saloon carriage

At 1.30 p.m. on 17 March Mussolini and Ciano left Rome by train for the north. During the journey the Duce expounded his latest idea to his son-in-law: if the war in the west began, the Italian forces would be the “left wing”, which without fighting would tie down equally large enemy forces but would be ready to act at the right moment. Dispatches were already arriving from the European capitals linking the announcement of the meeting with Welles’s presence in Rome.

On the morning of 18 March, while in Rome Welles was talking with Pius XII and the Cardinal Secretary of State, Luigi Maglione, Mussolini waited at the Brenner for Hitler’s train, as Ciano noted, “in a state of restless excitement”. The greeting was cordial. According to press reports, the talks in the saloon carriage lasted about two and a half hours and ended with a short meal. Hitler, calmer than usual, talked almost without a break: about the victory in Poland, about the strength of the Wehrmacht, about the need to decide the war by force of arms. He gave no date for the offensive in the west and said not a word about the operation against Norway and Denmark that had been in preparation for several weeks. Mussolini said little. According to Ciano’s notes, he confirmed his intention of marching with Germany and reserved to himself only the choice of the right moment. The German record, drawn up by Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt, gives a similar picture: the Duce regarded Italy’s entry into the war as inevitable, but reminded Hitler that the state of Italy’s finances did not allow it to wage a long war, and gave him to understand that he would join the fighting once the German blow had created a favourable situation. Coal and supplies for Italy were also discussed.

After the meeting Mussolini told Ciano that he had not found in Hitler the uncompromising attitude Ribbentrop had spoken of, and that Hitler would think twice before launching the offensive. “The meeting has not substantially changed our position,” Ciano concluded. The next day, however, the Duce admitted resentfully that Hitler had talked the whole time, while he, who had had so much to say to him, had mostly had to keep quiet.

Echoes of the meeting

In Rome the news of the meeting was taken as a step towards peace and, as Ciano observed, the city celebrated, which made him reflect on how hard it would be to arouse similar joy by announcing war. On 19 March Ciano had a discreet lunch with Welles at the golf club. He assured him that Italy’s attitude as a non-belligerent would not change, that Hitler had put forward no peace proposals and had barely mentioned Russia. He claimed, moreover, that the meeting had been arranged by telephone at Hitler’s initiative only two days before Welles’s arrival, and not during Ribbentrop’s visit as the German communiqué stated – although his own diary shows that the idea was raised in Rome on 11 March. Ciano reassured the British ambassador, Sir Percy Loraine, that the Brenner was not a prelude to any surprises. The French ambassador, André François-Poncet, was not convinced. “You have backed the wrong horse and now you are doubling your stake,” he told Ciano.

Welles, besieged by rumours of an alleged peace plan, announced on 19 March that he had neither received nor transmitted any peace proposals, and the following day sailed from Genoa for the United States. On 29 March Roosevelt stated that the mission was over and that the “prospects for the establishment of a just, stable and lasting peace in Europe” were at present slight. Welles’s talks had made it plain that Hitler intended to decide the war with a blow in the west and that the Allies would not agree to a peace that left Germany its conquests.

Place in the war

The Brenner meeting did not change Italy’s formal status, but it settled its direction. Mussolini, who as recently as January had advised Hitler to seek an understanding with the Western powers, in March pledged to Ribbentrop and to Hitler himself that he would enter the war on Germany’s side. The coal dispute only confirmed him in this: from the spring of 1940 Italy received about a million tons of coal a month from the Reich by rail across the Alps and depended more and more on German supplies. On 31 March 1940 Mussolini sent the King and the highest commanders a secret memorandum in which he wrote that Italy could not remain neutral for the whole war without abdicating its role and becoming “a Switzerland multiplied by ten”. The question was not whether to enter the war but when and how, and entry was to come as late as possible, within the bounds of honour.

Mussolini learned of the invasion of Denmark and Norway on 9 April 1940 only on the day it began. When on 10 May Germany attacked France, Belgium and the Netherlands and within a few weeks routed the Allied armies, the Duce decided that the moment of his choosing had come. On 10 June 1940 Italy declared war on France and Britain, and its offensive in the Alps ended after a few days with meagre gains. The two dictators met at the Brenner Pass once more, on 4 October 1940, when Italy was already waging its own “parallel” war, which soon, in Greece and North Africa, made it still more dependent on Germany. The Welles mission, the last serious attempt to sound out the chances of peace before the German offensive in the west, came to nothing. A few weeks later the United States began to support Britain ever more openly, and Welles himself remained one of Roosevelt’s closest advisers on the post-war order.