Italy joins the Anti-Comintern Pact

On 6 November 1937 in Rome the Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, Joachim von Ribbentrop on behalf of Germany and Japan’s ambassador to Italy, Masaaki Hotta, signed a protocol under which the Kingdom of Italy acceded to the Anti-Comintern Pact, concluded a year earlier by Germany and Japan. The bilateral agreement became the Berlin–Rome–Tokyo triangle. Formally it was still a matter of common defence against the Communist International. In reality three states which within a few years had broken the international order in Manchuria, Ethiopia and the Rhineland were showing the world that they stood together.

Mussolini’s road to Berlin

Only a few years earlier such a step had seemed unlikely. In September 1933 Benito Mussolini concluded a pact of friendship with the USSR, and in July 1934, after the Austrian Nazis’ coup attempt against Chancellor Dollfuss, he sent divisions to the Brenner Pass to warn Hitler off Austria. In the spring of 1935 at Stresa he joined Britain and France in condemning German rearmament. The war in Ethiopia changed everything. The League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy, and Germany not only did not support them but supplied Italy with coal and raw materials. By the time the Italians took Addis Ababa in May 1936, Mussolini had fallen out with London and Paris.

The rapprochement with Germany was sealed by the Spanish Civil War, in which both states backed General Franco. In October 1936 Ciano visited Germany and signed a secret protocol on cooperation, and on 1 November in Milan Mussolini announced that the Rome–Berlin line was an “axis” around which all states desiring peace could gather. Italy was not, however, keen to join the Anti-Comintern Pact straight away. It considered that its anti-communism was sufficiently attested by its soldiers fighting in Spain, and did not want to tie itself to Japan in a matter that concerned above all the Far East.

In 1937 the calculation changed. In March the Italian corps suffered a humiliating defeat at Guadalajara, and relations with Britain, despite the Mediterranean “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of January, were deteriorating rapidly. In the summer Italian submarines sank ships bound for Republican Spain, which in September led the powers to convene the Nyon Conference. From 25 to 29 September 1937 Mussolini was Germany’s guest. He watched Wehrmacht manoeuvres, toured the Krupp works in Essen and saw a great parade in Berlin, and on the Maifeld he addressed hundreds of thousands of people. He returned to Rome convinced of the Reich’s might.

The Far East, too, had ceased to be remote. Since July 1937 Japan had been waging open war in China, and at Shanghai one of the greatest battles of that conflict was under way. On 21 August China signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, which began supplying it with aircraft and weapons. For Tokyo, Italy became a valuable partner, while Mussolini saw Japan as an opponent of Britain in Asia. At the conference of the signatories of the Nine-Power Treaty, which opened in Brussels on 3 November 1937 to seek peace in China, the Italian delegate openly defended the position of Japan, which had not even sent representatives.

The protocol of 6 November

Ribbentrop arrived in Rome at the beginning of November. Ciano noted in his diary on 2 November that the pact was anti-communist in theory but in practice clearly aimed at Britain. The protocol was signed on Saturday 6 November. It consisted of a few short articles. Italy acceded to the agreement of 25 November 1936 and to the public supplementary protocol, whose texts were annexed. It was to be regarded as an original signatory, on an equal footing with Germany and Japan. The protocol came into force on the day of signature.

Italy did not, however, accede to the secret protocol in which Germany and Japan promised each other that, in the event of an unprovoked Soviet attack on one of them, the other would do nothing to ease the position of the Soviet Union. According to some scholars the Italians were not even told that it existed. Rome’s legal obligations thus amounted to the exchange of information and police cooperation against communists. The political significance of the act, however, was obvious to everyone. Ciano wrote that day that the three nations were setting out together on a road that might lead them to war – a war necessary to break the crust that was stifling the young nations.

After the signing Ribbentrop talked with Mussolini. According to Ciano’s note, the Duce declared that he was tired of mounting guard over the independence of Austria, which was a German country, and that events should be allowed to take their natural course. The day before, in Berlin, at a secret meeting at the Reich Chancellery, Hitler had laid before his generals and ministers his plans to take Austria and Czechoslovakia. Mussolini’s words meant that Italy would not stand in his way.

Reactions

The Italian, German and Japanese press presented Italy’s accession as a great front of civilisation against Bolshevism. Moscow saw it as further proof of encirclement, and Paris as a strengthening of Germany in Central Europe at the expense of France’s allies, Poland and Czechoslovakia. In London the main concern was the situation in the Mediterranean. The Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Robert Vansittart, warned that Italy, with its new possessions in East Africa, might threaten Egypt and the Sudan, and the British military began to reckon with the possibility of war against Germany, Italy and Japan at the same time. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain drew the opposite conclusion from his critics: all the more reason to seek an understanding with Mussolini and draw him away from Hitler.

Over the following weeks Italy gave further evidence of its change of course. On 29 November 1937 it recognised Manchukuo, and in December it left the League of Nations.

Significance

Italy’s accession turned the Anti-Comintern Pact from a bilateral agreement into the nucleus of a bloc. The press began to speak of a Berlin–Rome–Tokyo axis, although a genuine tripartite military alliance was not concluded until 1940. For Europe the immediate consequences mattered more. Mussolini, who had defended Austria in 1934, accepted the Anschluss without objection in March 1938, and Hitler gratefully assured him that he would never forget it. The Stresa Front was dead.

In the following years Ribbentrop tried to turn the triangle into a military alliance directed above all against Britain and France. Japan, which wanted an alliance against the USSR, hesitated, so on 22 May 1939 Germany and Italy concluded the bilateral Pact of Steel. Only on 27 September 1940 did Ciano, Ribbentrop and the Japanese ambassador in Berlin sign the Tripartite Pact. The way to it had been opened by that day in Rome when Mussolini joined Hitler and Japan under an anti-communist banner.