World War II Day by Day

Rome, Italy · May 3, 1938

On this date in 1938 Adolf Hitler began a six-day Ital­ian state visit to Rome, Naples, and Flo­rence in a dis­play of Axis sol­i­darity, which in­cluded a parade by the Ital­ian armed forces (demon­stra­ting to Ger­man reviewers a lack of mod­ern equip­ment) and a re­view of the Ital­ian navy (world’s fifth largest). To Hitler’s annoy­ance, his host was King Victor Em­man­uel III, not Prime Minister Benito Mus­so­lini. This was not the first meeting between the two states­men. Hitler and Mus­so­lini had first met in Venice on the Ital­ian Adri­atic Coast in June 1934 and three years later in Ger­many, in Munich and Ber­lin. During that latter visit in Novem­ber 1937, Italy was prompted to join the sym­bolic anti-Com­intern Pact (anti-Com­mu­nist pact) directed against the Soviet Union, which already linked Ger­many and Japan. But the Ger­man leader’s 1938 visit to Italy had several im­por­tant objec­tives, one being Hitler’s show of grati­tude to Mus­so­lini for allowing, in a pre­arranged script, neu­tral Austria to be annexed to the Reich. The March 13 An­schluss (union) eli­mi­nated the buf­fer state between the two mili­ta­rized dicta­tor­ships that the Duce had long pre­ferred, a buf­fer that the Aus­trians had recently made cum­ber­some in Mus­so­lini’s opin­ion by their poli­tical dis­array. A second objec­tive was to secure Ital­ian neu­tra­lity when Hitler moved to occupy Czecho­slo­va­kia with its Sudeten-German minor­i­ty. The third objec­tive was to cement a bond of “eter­nal friend­ship” between the two dicta­tor­ships. This friend­ship logically led to the “Pact of Steel” (Ital­ian, “Patto d’Acciaio”) in 1939, which com­mitted both coun­tries to mutual sup­port in the event of war, though Mus­so­lini let the Ger­mans know that Italy would not be ready to wage war for sev­eral more years. The Pact (orig­i­nally named “Pact of Blood” which it did, in fact, become in June 1940), marked the for­mal crea­tion of the Rome-Berlin Axis, giving Italy an ally sym­pa­thetic to its pre­da­tory poli­cies in the Bal­kans and East Africa and Ger­many the ability to respond to poli­cies of en­circle­ment directed against it by the West­ern demo­cra­cies—Great Britain, France, and Poland.

Mussolini and Hitler: On Route to the 1939 Blood Pact

Left: Signing the Pact of Steel in the Reich Chan­cel­lery, Berlin, May 22, 1939. From left, sitting, Italy’s Foreign Minis­ter Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mus­so­lini’s son-in-law; Adolf Hitler; and Ger­man For­eign Minis­ter Joachim von Rib­ben­trop. Behind Hitler, standing, is Luft­waffe chief Her­mann Goering.

Right: Adolf Hitler with his mis­tress Eva Braun at the Berg­hof, the Fuehrer’s lux­u­ri­ous Bava­rian re­treat on the Ober­salz­berg, June 14, 1942. In her 1938 travel papers to Italy, the then 26‑year‑old Braun was given the fictitious title of “secretary.”

Left: His face expressionless, Mus­so­lini rides in an open-air car with Hitler in Flo­rence, Italy, May 1938. Hitler beamed and strutted like a pea­cock across his host’s stage, having pulled off his coup in Aus­tria (An­schluss) earlier in March after Mus­so­lini had aban­doned his north­ern neigh­bor to the Nazi predator.

Right: 1941 German stamp of Hitler and Mus­so­lini. Trans­lation of text at the top: “Two Peoples and One Struggle.”

Hitler’s Visit to Rome, Naples, and Florence, Italy, May 1938. Foot­age from Ital­ian Newsreels (in Italian)