The Pact of Steel

On 22 May 1939, in the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin and in the presence of Adolf Hitler, the Foreign Ministers of Italy and Germany, Galeazzo Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed the “Pact of Friendship and Alliance between Germany and Italy”. It went down in history under a name devised by Benito Mussolini: the Pact of Steel (Italian: Patto d’Acciaio; German: Stahlpakt). The Rome–Berlin Axis, a political understanding since 1936, became a military alliance – and an alliance without precedent: the two states undertook to support each other with all their armed forces in any war in which either of them found itself, regardless of who had started it.

Many accounts state that the public pact merely announced further cooperation between the two powers and that only the secret annex gave it the character of a military alliance. In fact the reverse was true. The text published in the press, in Articles III–V, was already military in character. The secret additional protocol dealt with matters of implementation: military and economic commissions, and cooperation in the press and propaganda.

From axis to alliance

The road to the pact was opened by the war in Ethiopia. League of Nations sanctions set Mussolini at odds with London and Paris, and joint intervention in Spain brought him closer to Hitler. On 23 October 1936 Ciano signed a secret protocol on cooperation in Berlin, and on 1 November in Milan Mussolini proclaimed the existence of a Rome–Berlin “axis”. In November 1937 Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, in December it left the League of Nations, and in March 1938 the Duce accepted the Anschluss of Austria without objection. When Hitler visited Rome in May 1938 and hinted at an alliance, Mussolini was still evasive.

At the end of October 1938, a few weeks after the Munich conference, Ribbentrop came to Rome with a concrete proposal: the Anti-Comintern Pact of Germany, Italy and Japan should be turned into a tripartite military alliance. He argued that within a few years a clash with France and Britain would be inevitable, and that the Mediterranean was to be Italy’s domain. On 1 January 1939 Mussolini told Ciano that he accepted the proposal, since he increasingly regarded war with the Western democracies as inevitable and wanted to position himself for it in advance. The next day Ciano informed Ribbentrop by telephone and by letter.

Japan proved the obstacle. The ambassadors in Berlin and Rome, General Hiroshi Ōshima and Toshio Shiratori, were ardent supporters of the alliance, but the government of Kiichirō Hiranuma was divided. The army wanted an alliance directed against the USSR, with which Japan was fighting border skirmishes, while the navy and the Foreign Ministry did not want to be tied to a commitment to go to war with Britain and the United States. The Germans and Italians needed an alliance precisely against the Western powers. The negotiations dragged on through the winter and spring without result.

March and April 1939

Meanwhile Hitler demolished the settlement Mussolini had helped to create at Munich. On 15 March 1939 the Wehrmacht occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and Rome learned of it only at the last moment. According to Ciano’s diary, the Duce was depressed and did not even want to give Hitler’s message to the press, because “the Italians would laugh at me: every time Hitler occupies a country he sends me a message”. Nevertheless, as early as 16 March he came out firmly in favour of the alliance, regarding German hegemony in Central Europe as an accomplished fact. Ciano had his doubts: the alliance would not be popular in Italy, and Germany might use it for further expansion.

Mussolini’s answer to Prague was Albania. After the ultimatum to King Zog, Italian troops landed in the Albanian ports on 7 April and within a few days overran the country. Britain and France, which on 31 March had given a guarantee to Poland, extended guarantees to Greece and Romania on 13 April. Both dictators answered President Roosevelt’s appeal for an assurance of the inviolability of several dozen states with mockery. On 28 April Hitler renounced the non-aggression declaration with Poland and the naval agreement with Britain, and since 3 April the Wehrmacht had been under orders to prepare the plan for an attack on Poland. In Moscow, on 3 May, Maxim Litvinov was replaced as Commissar for Foreign Affairs by Vyacheslav Molotov.

Milan

Talks on a bilateral alliance, without Japan, which was still hesitating, took place in Milan on 6 and 7 May 1939. Mussolini moved them there from Como to give the lie to French rumours of anti-German demonstrations in the Lombard capital. Ciano noted that Ribbentrop was unusually calm and moderate. He gave assurances that Germany needed peace for at least four to five years, and that it wished to settle the dispute with Poland over Danzig and the “Corridor” by agreement. These assurances were of fundamental importance to the Italians. As recently as February 1939 Mussolini had judged that Italy would be ready for a major war only in 1943.

After dinner at the Hotel Continental on 6 May, Ciano telephoned Mussolini, who demanded more: an immediate announcement of the alliance. Ribbentrop, who would have preferred a pact that included Japan, hesitated, but Hitler agreed at once by telephone. A communiqué announcing the intention to conclude an alliance was issued while the meeting was still under way. The two sides left Milan with different ideas: they had not agreed on the conditions for entering a war, the period of peace that was to precede a conflict, or the division of spheres of influence. Ciano had brought no Italian draft and agreed that the Germans should prepare the text. The German historian Ferdinand Siebert later wrote that seldom had an alliance been built on so many ambiguities, out of the recklessness of one partner and the cunning of the other.

Ciano received the German draft on 13 May on the train to Florence. He found it acceptable but noted: “I have never read such a pact; it contains real dynamite.” The Italians added to the preamble a recognition of the frontier at the Brenner Pass as inviolable for ever, which was meant to close the question of the German minority in South Tyrol (PL), a mention of Italian “living space”, and a ten-year term. On 15 May Ciano received the Polish ambassador in Rome, General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski. The Italian ambassador in Warsaw had already informed the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, of Italy’s “full solidarity” with Germany in the event of war. Wieniawa was pessimistic and asked to be recalled. Ciano advised him to show “great moderation” and argued that Poland would pay in any case: if the Axis won, Poland would be swallowed by Germany; if it lost, Poland would become a province of Bolshevik Russia. On 17 May Mussolini approved the final text.

The Germans proposed holding the ceremony between 21 and 24 May. Ciano made it clear that he would not sign so dangerous an alliance on 24 May, the anniversary of Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Entente in 1915.

The ceremony in Berlin

Ciano arrived in Berlin on 21 May and was received with great pomp. He held talks with Ribbentrop and with Hitler, who assured him that Italy would direct policy in the Mediterranean and spoke enthusiastically of turning Albania into a fortress dominating the Balkans. Ribbentrop repeated that Germany wanted a long period of peace, of at least three years.

The document was signed on Monday 22 May in the New Reich Chancellery. Hitler, Hermann Göring and numerous dignitaries of the Party and the Wehrmacht were present, and photographs of Hitler handing the document to Ciano went round the press. According to Ciano, the ceremony was very solemn and Hitler “deeply moved”. Ribbentrop received the highest Italian decoration from the King, the Collar of the Annunziata, which according to Ciano’s diary reduced Göring, who considered himself the true architect of the alliance, to tears and a scene. Mussolini had at first wanted to call it the “Pact of Blood”, but decided that the name would sound bad in Italy. King Victor Emmanuel III sent Hitler a telegram expressing the sentiments of “an ally and a friend”, although three days later he told Ciano that the Germans would be polite, even servile, as long as they needed Italy, and at the first opportunity would show themselves to be “scoundrels”.

What the pact contained

The preamble spoke of the “close affinity between their ideologies” and the “comprehensive solidarity of their interests” of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, which were resolved to act side by side to secure their living space and to maintain peace. The style and titles alone were a political statement: Victor Emmanuel III appeared as King of Italy and Albania and Emperor of Ethiopia, and by signing such a text Germany once again confirmed both conquests.

The treaty proper had seven articles:

• Article I bound the parties to remain in permanent contact on all matters of common interest and on the European situation as a whole.
• Article II provided for immediate consultation should their common interests be endangered, and for full political and diplomatic support for a party whose security or vital interests were threatened from outside.
• Article III was the heart of the alliance: if, contrary to the wishes and hopes of the parties, one of them became “involved in warlike complications” with another power or powers, the other would “immediately step to its side as an ally and support it with all its military forces on land, at sea and in the air”.
• Article IV announced closer cooperation in military matters and in the war economy, with standing commissions under the direction of the Foreign Ministers.
• Article V prohibited concluding a separate armistice or peace in the event of a war waged jointly.
• Article VI concerned relations with friendly powers – above all Japan.
• Article VII stated that the pact came into force on signature and was valid for ten years.

Article III was the novelty. Classic defensive alliances, such as the Polish–French one, were triggered by an “unprovoked” attack. The Pact of Steel contained no such reservation. The obligation applied even if the ally itself started the war, and the duty of consultation in Articles I and II was not a condition of it. German historians therefore describe it as an offensive alliance that operated almost automatically. It was an alliance in which the stronger partner could choose the moment of war for both.

The secret additional protocol, which was not published, had two points. In the first, the ministers undertook to agree swiftly on the organisation, seats and working methods of the commissions on military matters and the war economy. General Ugo Cavallero became the Italian vice-chairman of the commission. In the second, both sides promised cooperation in matters of “the press, the news service and propaganda” in order to strengthen the power and image of the Axis; each ministry was to attach one or more specialists to its embassy in the other capital. The secret annex therefore did not turn the pact into a military alliance, since the public part already made it one. It merely elaborated how it was to be carried out.

The next day

The pact was signed in the Italian belief that war would not break out for several years. Yet on 23 May 1939 Hitler gathered the Wehrmacht commanders in the Reich Chancellery. According to the notes of his adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, he declared that Danzig was not the subject of the dispute, that the issue was the expansion of living space in the east, and that Poland must be “attacked at the first suitable opportunity”. The Italians were not informed of this decision.

Mussolini, meanwhile, set down his own understanding of the alliance. In a memorandum of 30 May, which General Cavallero took to Berlin at the beginning of June, he wrote that war between the “plutocratic” nations and the “poor and populous” ones was inevitable, but that Italy and Germany needed at least three years of peace. Italy had to complete its battleships, replace its artillery, move part of its armaments industry to the south, fortify Libya and Albania and, in 1942, host a world exhibition in Rome. A war before 1943 would have no chance of success. Hitler replied orally and evasively, suggesting that the two dictators would discuss these matters at their next meeting. It did not take place before the war.

Reactions

In Germany the pact was greeted with enthusiasm. Ciano, who returned to Rome on 24 May, observed that it was less popular in Italy: “hatred of France has not yet turned into love for Germany”. In London and Paris it was seen as confirmation that the Axis was preparing further conquests and that the policy of guarantees had been necessary. On 24 May the government of Neville Chamberlain, hitherto deeply distrustful of Moscow, agreed in principle to negotiations on a tripartite alliance with the USSR, which the Kremlin had sought since the Soviet proposal of an alliance in April. For Poland the pact meant that in a war with Germany it would also have to reckon with a hostile Italy, and hopes that Mussolini would restrain Hitler, as at Munich, faded sharply. In Tokyo the Hiranuma government went on debating, ever more divided, whether to join the alliance, while on the Khalkhin Gol river fighting with Soviet and Mongolian forces had been under way since 11 May, which sharpened still further the dispute over whom the alliance should be aimed against.

Significance

The Pact of Steel was, alongside the agreement with the USSR concluded three months later, Hitler’s most important diplomatic preparation for the war with Poland. For Hitler it was an instrument for a quick war, since it tied down French and British forces in the Mediterranean and the Alps. For Mussolini it was meant to guarantee several years of peace and an assurance that Germany would not start a war without him. These two conceptions could not be reconciled.

The rift soon came into the open. On 11–13 August 1939, at Salzburg and on the Obersalzberg, Ribbentrop and Hitler told Ciano that they intended to attack Poland and that the conflict would remain local. Ciano returned to Rome convinced that the Germans had lied to their ally, and urged his father-in-law to break with them. On 25 August Mussolini informed Hitler that Italy was not ready for war, and the next day sent so enormous a list of the supplies it needed that Germany could not meet it. When Germany attacked Poland, the Council of Ministers in Rome announced on 1 September that Italy would not undertake military operations. What was proclaimed was “non-belligerence” (non belligeranza) rather than neutrality, to signal that the alliance remained in force. Contrary to Article III, Italy entered the war only on 10 June 1940, when France was already beaten.

On 27 September 1940 in Berlin, Ciano and Ribbentrop signed with the Japanese ambassador the Tripartite Pact, which brought Japan into the alliance. The Pact of Steel, concluded for ten years, lasted four. When in September 1943 Marshal Badoglio’s government signed an armistice with the Allies, the Germans regarded it as treachery, invoking precisely the ban on a separate peace in Article V. Ciano, a signatory of the pact, was shot by the Fascists of Salò in January 1944, and Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg, where Ciano’s diary was among the evidence for the prosecution.