Benito Mussolini Part 5: The Pact of Steel

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

It's Wednesday, September the 28th, 1938.

Morning.

We're in the Palazzo Venezia, in Benito Mussolini's cavernous marbled office, the Sala del Mapamondo.

Other than the huge oak desk and chair, it contains just a leather couch and an oversized ornamental globe.

Spartan, muscular, intimidating.

At just after 10 a.m., the phone rings.

The call, the house operator informs the Ilduce, is most urgent.

On the other end of the line is Count Galiazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and foreign minister.

Nothing new there.

Ciano is prone to bouts of excitability, though today of all days, he has good cause.

Standing before him in the foreign ministry, Ciano explains, is Lord Perth, the British ambassador to Italy.

And Perth has come brandishing an urgent communique.

It's been cabled directly from 10 Downing Street, at the behest of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

Mussolini takes his time, the theatrics of power, for he knows exactly what this is about.

For the past few days, Europe, the world, has been on tenterhooks, all attention focused on the international crisis brewing over Czechoslovakia.

Hitler is bent on annexing its border region, the Sudetenland, home to 3 million ethnic Germans.

As per the Nazi playbook, the Führer has manufactured a crisis there, a pretext for military action.

Unless the Sudetenland is handed over to Germany by 2 p.m.

today, just four hours from now, his stormtroopers will go in.

As upholders of what's left of the crumbling international order, the British and French are now mobilizing their own armed forces.

It's 1914 all over again.

Europe locked in a death spiral, seemingly destined for all-out war.

Having flown in to visit the Fuhrer twice in recent days, Chamberlain has exhausted all appeals to Nazi reason, hence his request here.

As a favor, not to him, but to the people of Europe, could the Duce please try and swing her Hitler round?

He is their only hope.

Mussolini is no lover of Chamberlain.

He is one of the grey old men to whom a virile fascist Italy should be vehemently opposed.

But Il Duce has never want to pass up an opportunity, especially a chance to showboat.

Mussolini tells Ciano he'll see what he can do.

Five minutes later, Mussolini is being put through to the operator at the Berkhof, the Führer's home in the Bavarian Alps.

With a few clicks and burrs, he's connected with the distant, disinterested tones of Adolf Hitler.

In German this time, he tells the Führer about the petition from the British and how it suddenly sparked an idea, a way both to end this Sudeten crisis and achieve Hitler's aims without a shot being fired.

He, Mussolini, will host a four-power peace conference.

Himself, the Führer, Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Deladier.

Hitler has little time for talking shops.

His troops are ready to roll, and he's relishing the prospect.

The sword is mightier than the pen.

But Mussolini ladles on the charm.

Eventually, the Fuhrer concedes.

Mussolini suggests a neutral venue.

Switzerland, perhaps.

No, says Hitler.

He's going nowhere.

If Filduce must insist on this ridiculous Siraud, then people must come to him.

In the meantime...

He will defer the invasion by 24 hours.

30 minutes later, Mussolini rings Ciano back.

He has a message for Ambassador Perth to relay to his boss in London.

Tomorrow, he instructs

Munich.

From the Noiser Network, this is part five of the Mussolini story,

and this is Real Dictators.

Scrolling back to the end of 1937, and Mussolini has been in power for 15 years.

In the aftermath of the Great War, the violence of his rule had been accepted with a reluctant shrug.

Fine, while it was a domestic affair.

But Mussolini's recent forays into the international arena are setting alarm bells ringing.

Corfu, Libya, Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War.

Professor John Foote.

Mussolini is very popular in the West for a very long time.

If Italy had gone Bolshevik, that was very problematic for Western democracies, and they're delighted that it doesn't.

And I think at least until Ethiopia, he's a popular figure, or at least no one's really bothered about him apart from certain groups.

He's also seen as someone you can talk to, you can discuss things with.

His mass murders and violence is kind of placed aside.

Mussolini has become particularly emboldened since he began his love-in with fellow dictator Adolf Hitler.

In Rome in 1936, an agreement was signed initiating the Axis alliance.

In November 1937, the arrangement is tweaked again when an anti-Comintern pact brings fascist Italy and the Third Reich into strategic alignment, ostensibly as an anti-Bolshevik bloc.

When fascism has a friend, Mussolini declares, it will march with that friend to the last.

But it's just a smokescreen.

As both Hitler and Mussolini recognize, the immediate obstacle to their territorial ambitions is not the Soviet Union at all.

Rather, it's those old capitalist powers, Britain and France.

For the Axis, it's France with its huge army that's seen as the greater threat.

Maritime Britain, Hitler hopes, can still be sidelined.

Thomas Weber is professor of history at the University of Aberdeen.

Ultimately, his idea is if the British and the Germans can divide the world amongst them, then Germany will be safe for all time.

He thinks that Germany should be the hegemon of Eurasia, while Britain will rule the seas.

But even though Hitler is trying to tilt the balance within Britain to make this happen,

he obviously also knows that he's not anywhere close to that.

So he really has to look for other allies.

And that also, of course, really explains why he puts so much emphasis on trying to court Mussolini.

Having been paraded before the German people, Ilducci is keen to return the favor, to reintroduce Hitler to the Italian public.

Their first date in Venice back in 1934 was rather awkward, and so on May the 3rd, 1938, Hitler arrives in Rome.

Hundreds of thousands turn out to greet the Fuhrer, whipped up into a swastika waving flower-strewn frenzy.

But as the Reich Chancellor steps off the train, it's the king, Victor Emmanuel III, who leads the reception party.

He is, after all, the head of state.

A humiliated Mussolini playing second fiddle is forced to shuffle a few paces behind.

As the parade proceeds, the Fuhrer must then ride in a ceremonial carriage with the diminutive monarch, a man he openly loathes.

The feeling is mutual.

The king has already described Hitler as drug-addled, soulless, sexless, certainly compared with his own libidinous Duce.

That night, at his hotel, Hitler requests the services of a woman for the evening.

Both the king and Mussolini breathe a sigh of relief.

The Führer has his needs, after all.

But it's simply to turn down his bed.

Professor Helen Roche.

Yes, I mean, certainly you can't compete if you put Mussolini with his mountains of lovers and fitting his sex life into his everyday business with Hitler, who was sort of legendary for being very ascetic in all kinds of ways, you know, sexual vegetarianism, not smoking, not drinking, etc.

One thing that is interesting is that Hitler felt he had to keep his marriage with Eva Braun secret, or pretty much out of the public eye, because he wanted, I guess, female followers to see him as available and maybe cultivate that connection, which would be more difficult if he were married.

Maybe not that difficult, as Mussolini's example shows.

Hitler's ardour is reserved for his passion project, undoing the settlement of Versailles, stitching a dismembered Germany back together again,

a program on which he hopes he can count on Mussolini's support.

The pair, if you remember, had nearly fallen out over Hitler's meddling in Austria.

With Il Duce's reluctant blessing, that country, as of March 1938, has been annexed by the Reich.

an absorption known as the Anschluss.

Turning to his next target, the aforementioned Sudetenland, Hitler knows he must sweeten the deal.

On the border between Italy and the new expanded Reich lies the Alpine region of South Tyrol, ethnically German, but snatched by Italy during the Great War.

It's yours, Hitler tells him.

You can keep it.

How could Ild Duce refuse?

As if to sanctify their union, Mussolini does a few other things to bring the dictatorships more in line, to have them singing from the same hymn sheet.

Dr.

Lisa Pine

Emulating Nazi Germany, Italians could no longer shake hands in greeting, but they had to use the Roman salute.

Civil servants had to wear military uniforms.

And these policies were all very demonstrative of Mussolini's increasing closeness to Hitler and indeed of the affinity of these two regimes.

He He will also have his troops adopt the Wehrmacht stiff-legged marching stride, more commonly known as the goose-step.

Ilduce passes it off as a coincidence.

It is, he says, merely a version of the Paso Romano, a tribute to the yumping style of the Roman legions.

Most significantly, Mussolini will mimic some of the most disturbing Nazi legislation.

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Despite the virulent anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, Mussolini has never bought into Hitler's rampant Jew-bashing.

Not once has he ever made a pronouncement with regard to Italy's small Jewish population, around 50,000 or so, some of whom have origins going back to classical antiquity.

Mussolini has had Jewish cabinet members.

There have been Jewish generals.

Jews were patriotic players in the struggle for Italian unification.

Mussolini's long-term lover and biographer, Margherita Safati, self-styled godmother of fascism, is herself Jewish.

Blaming the Jews for the world's ills thus far has been viewed as a vulgar Nazi affectation.

Hitler, however, has been working his skills as a conversion therapist.

In Trieste, on September the 18th 1938, Mussolini makes yet another of his balcony addresses, presenting the latest threat to fascist Italy.

Not an enemy without this time,

but an enemy within.

The biggest current problem, he declares, is race.

Global Judaism, over the past 16 years and in spite of our policies, has been an irreconcilable enemy of fascism.

Regarding Jews, we will henceforth follow a policy of separation and we will put in place the necessary measures.

Similarly to the Nuremberg laws, the Italian racial laws called for foreign Jews to be deported.

It prohibited marriages between Italian Jews and non-Jews.

And it prohibited Italian Jews from holding public offices, including teaching and civil service jobs.

It banned them from joining the fascist party, nor did it allow them to run businesses with more than 100 employees, nor to have servants who were not Jewish.

And it wasn't particularly popular because it kind of, in some ways, seemed to go against the grain.

According to Mussolini's new manifesto on race, ethnic Italians are now declared to be part of the Aryan tribe.

Even amongst the hardcore, the pronouncement is unsettling.

The king, Victor Emmanuel III, appeals to Mussolini to rescind the proposed legislation.

But it's no use.

In November, it becomes official state policy.

Those alarmed at Mussolini's approach here had not been paying close enough attention.

In the northeastern Istrian Peninsula, a de facto apartheid has long existed between Italians and Slavs.

Mussolini, after all, was the man who invented the term ethnic cleansing.

Professor Giulia Albanese.

So it starts with keeping out at the margin the Slavs and Germans at the boundaries of the country, and then it strengthens through the years with the empire and with the idea that it should separate Italian from colonial people.

And then comes anti-Semitism, which is at the same time a propaganda drive to force this idea of the nation as a homogeneous aspect.

In fact, these laws laws are with regards more rigid than the Nuremberg laws.

So it's not a copycat situation.

It's a situation in which there is an idea of nation which is more and more exclusive and more and more rigid.

It has long been attributed to this turn towards Germany.

But I think if you look a bit more closely, you can see the seeds of it in the atrocities that are going on in Africa.

There were stringent racial and racist guidelines, and concerns, and fears going on, and there were also mass slaughters.

I think there definitely were people in Mussolini's regime who had anti-Semitic views, but there were also a lot of Jews who were high up in the fascist party until then.

At a stroke, 10,000 Jews are struck from the party lists, many of whom had participated in the March on Rome, the very act that brought Mussolini to power.

And although it isn't an exterminatory policy at first, it paves the way for the deaths of 9,000 Italian Jews in the Second World War by excluding them, eliminating them, discriminating against them, waging a campaign against them within Italian society.

Professor Nicholas O'Shaughnessy.

Even though their racism was not the biological racism of the Germans, it amounted to the same thing.

It was a cultural racism, but it was racism.

It was a loathing of so-called inferior races.

Professor Joshua Arthur

I would actually argue that while there is not the same kind of racial, biological anti-Semitism that we see in Nazi Germany, that there is an anti-Semitic current within Italian society, one initially that is more tied to traditional Catholic anti-Judaism.

I think part of the adoption of anti-Semitism was not necessarily under Hitler's influence, so much as an attempt to keep up with the latest mode of fascism.

that anti-Semitism was coming to the fore and that Mussolini, in order to maintain his position at the forefront of European fascism, had to get with the times.

It was also, fundamentally, a part of the project of constant revolution.

The regime was always hunting for a new internal enemy.

If there's one thing Mussolini admires about Hitler above all else, it's that Nazi can do spirit.

When Adolf wants something, he takes it.

Perhaps Mussolini himself thus far has been too restrained.

Mussolini came to power in order to make Italy greater, to create an empire, and this wasn't possible until 1933 when Hitler came to power.

Hitler has long had the plan laid out.

It's all there in Mein Kampf.

The Anschluss with Austria had been preceded in 1936 by German troops marching into the demilitarized Rhineland.

The latest venture, reclaiming the Sudetenland, Hitler promises, would simply be the final act of restoration.

Unfortunately, the international community is less easily hoodwinked.

With the League of Nations powerless, it is, as anticipated, Britain and France who take the lead.

Thus far, their objections to German expansionism have amounted to mutterings of disapproval and threats to write stern letters.

But each know they must put on a united show of force if Nazi Germany is to be contained.

Across the summer of 1938, both sides seemed set on a collision path.

Hitler toying with his opponents in a classic case of brinkmanship.

So this was now really seen as a moment of crisis because now it was becoming clear this was no longer about undoing Basai.

Something else was going on here.

This was really aggression against foreign countries and against non-German populations.

People like Chamberlain still think this is maybe just a slightly more extreme version of creating the national security for Germany.

Because, of course, what Hitler would tell someone like Chamberlein is not my ultimate goal is to dominate the entire Eurasian landmass.

At 8 p.m.

on September the 27th, the eve of Hitler's threatened threatened invasion of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain makes his forlorn radio broadcast to the British people.

How horrible, how fantastic, how incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.

In Berlin, the French ambassador warns Hitler that he will be lighting the blue touchpaper to Armageddon.

But, thanks to that emergency phone call by Chamberlain, where we opened this episode, and thanks to Mussolini's intervention, a war could still be averted.

I think part of his drive for so long had been to get Italy that recognition to be seen as a world statesman rather than, quote, the least of the great powers, which is how Italy had always been viewed, you know, since unification.

It's a very heady thing to be able to play broker with the nations of Europe, as essentially he was doing in Munich.

And also, maybe the idea that Hitler would have to be a little bit beholden to him, you know, he was gonna be Daddy Mussolini and sort this out.

Maybe a little bit of a resumption of that earlier, more paternalistic relationship.

September the 29th, noon, Munich.

We're outside the Führerbau, Hitler's neoclassical Bavarian headquarters.

Crowds line the streets as the international delegations arrive.

When the limousines pull up, the teams of Britain and France are greeted warmly.

Unused to such clamor, Chamberlain and Deladier even give tentative waves.

Inside, however, the mood is tense, awkward.

Mussolini plays the genial host, though he has had a spat with Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe.

During a pre-meeting meeting, Goering's pet lion cupboard scratched Ilduce.

In Goering's office is the corpulent Reich Minister who had continued to play with his toy train set throughout.

But the show will not be derailed.

Munich is a strange affair.

In the conference antechamber, a buffet has been laid out.

Black bread, pickles and cold meats.

Both entourages stand apart, eyeing each other.

They're beings from different worlds.

Specimens of the old and new.

Chamberlain and Dalady,

grey and hunched in winged collars and morning suits.

The younger Axis contingent bedecked in their finest military attire.

Mussolini stands, chest puffed out, his tunic awash with medals.

Awarded for what, God only knows.

Beside him, costumed as a brown shirt, with his vivid swastika armband, is Adolf Hitler.

Ilduce nods at Chamberlain.

Britain is a country of four million sexually unsatisfied women equips to an aid.

What do you expect of men who have to change into dinner jackets to have their five o'clock tea?

A photographer comes over.

He suggests that the four leaders go and stand by the fireplace.

He will take a commemorative snap.

Then at 12.45, they're ushered into the conference room.

It's Mussolini in his self-appointed role as master of ceremonies who takes control.

Hitler throughout just grimaces.

At Munich, he has the most paradisal role, benign role, best role ever offered to a world statesman, if you can call him that, of being international peacemaker, because because Mussolini's unique advantage in a monolingual monocultural world is that he speaks English and French very well, German not so well, and so he can act as interpreter.

This is the whole point about Mussolini at Munich, that he can actually be the peacemaker because he's the interpreter.

You don't need a sort of geeky guy there with headphones.

And they're all looking to Mussolini his leadership, his guidance, his wisdom.

But of course, it's all wolf in sheep's clothing.

He is rapidly going over to the German side.

There must have been at least a residual of disdain at the sheer coarseness of the Nazis.

But in the end, it's who's the biggest thug who's in prison with you?

It's the most brutal kid in the playground on the block.

That's Germany.

And in the end, they are successful.

Mussolini loves success.

He identifies with them, but none of this is clear at Munich, where he can play the wise elder statesman.

It's Mussolini's show.

Munich is Mussolini's show.

The conventional narrative is that the leaders of Britain and France will appease, give in to Hitler.

But the policy pursued is pretty much a continuation of the League of Nations' ethos since 1919.

Peace at any price.

For Britain and France, Chamberlain and Deladier, the prospect of a repeat of World War I is simply unconscionable.

That conflict, barely 20 years old, killed over 20 million people in Europe, they repeat, the majority of them civilians.

With developments in military technology, particularly bomber aircraft, it is now possible for whole cities to be obliterated in a single night.

Members of all four delegations either fought in the war themselves or suffered family losses as a direct consequence of it.

Chamberlain appeals to the fact that both Hitler and Mussolini are veterans of the trenches, wounded in action.

The talks are long, they're pained, but just as predicted by Mussolini, the West caves in to Hitler's demands.

At 1.30 a.m., An agreement is reached.

The Sudeten territories will be transferred to Germany after after the formality of local plebiscites, overseen by an international commission.

The four men put their signatures to the necessary documents.

The Czechs are not involved in the discussion, but merely invited into the room afterwards to have the decision explained to them.

It was of course really Mussolini who had brought about Munich.

which we now today see as a triumph of Hitler, but at the time Hitler was furious.

This was absolutely not what he wanted to have.

He really had wanted to march into Czechoslovakia, and now Mussolini had forced his hand and had brought about this international agreement, which Hitler absolutely objected to.

And yet, he also knew that he was dependent on Italian support.

Back home, Chamberlain and Daladier are greeted as heroes, having pulled back civilization from the precipice.

But this is not how their adversaries see it.

Afterwards, Hitler tells Mussolini, if ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella, I'll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers.

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On a conference high, Mussolini gets carried away.

Days later, he makes a provocative statement to France, in which he insists on the return of Corsica and Savoy to Italian rule, as well as Tunisia, once part of the Roman Empire, you know.

He also has designs on French Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.

On November the 30th, 30th, the French ambassador André-François Penseet is invited to the opening of the Chamber of Deputies.

He is roundly heckled by fascist members chanting, Tunis, Nice, Corsica, Savoy.

Protesters outside shout and wave placards.

Having narrowly seen off one war, Mussolini still seems bent on starting another.

Chamberlain, meanwhile, doesn't give up.

In January 1939, he visits Mussolini in Rome.

He wants better relations with Italy, he assures.

A British friendship would be much more achievable, hints Chamberlain, if Mussolini could extract himself from the still ongoing Spanish Civil War.

Confirming his own nightmares about the nature of modern warfare, Italian planes have bombed Republican Barcelona, just as the Germans have leveled Guernica.

As the war builds to its climax there, it's becoming increasingly horrific.

The British, it's really rather sad to see how hard they try.

They want to get Mussolini away from the Spanish Civil War because they think only by doing that can they price him away from Hitler's clanic grasp.

But in the end, it doesn't work out for one simple reason.

that the British won't betray the French.

The French are an allied democracy.

They are their allies from World War I.

They are the neighbors right next door.

The French, the British are whistling in the wind.

On March the 15th, 1939, after a classic false flag operation, Hitler launches a full invasion of the Rump Czech state and occupies Prague.

Munich was always a charade.

In time-honored fashion, and despite all they've promised, Hitler had again failed to inform Mussolini of his plans.

Even amongst Il Ducci's own committed comrades, there is mounting concern that Italy is going to be dragged into something cataclysmic, without consultation, and against the Italian people's wishes.

Hitching its star to the Nazi wagon will come with dire consequences.

On March 21st, 1939, there's a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council.

Italo Balbo, a key Mussolini ally, the fascists' fascist, warns against, as he puts it, this constant licking of the German boots.

The king, too, remains unwavering in his disapproval.

Mussolini dismisses his sovereign in typical fashion, pointing out his inability to master the goose step, the Paso Romano.

What do you expect of someone who needs a ladder to mount a horse?

And besides, he is his own man.

What's more, he's going to prove it.

He's going to invade Albania.

Until recently, Albania was governed by Italy as a quasi-protectorate.

But Mussolini now makes noises about restoring it to its former position in the Roman Empire.

He gives some flannel about the ethnic kinship between Italians and Albanians, whom he regards as a race apart from the ghastly Slavs.

Taking Albania will not only restore Greater Italy, he boasts, it will also create a launch pad for further incursions into the Balkans.

There is further objection, this time from military and economic advisors.

The Ethiopian campaign, he is reminded, despite the glorious spin, has come at the cost of 12,000 Italian dead and another 5,000 or so Africans in the Italian colonial service.

It has also cost 33 billion lira,

a figure so staggering that Mussolini himself has had to devalue the currency.

The Spanish adventure has added another 14 billion to the debit.

His Under Secretary for War production, Carlo Favagrosa, lays it out.

The country's planes and tanks are obsolete.

Italy won't be on a full war footing till at least the summer of 1942.

Mussolini slaps him down.

To build a great people, he says, you must force them into battle with a kick up the backside.

Albania's King Zog is issued an ultimatum to allow an occupation.

When he refuses, the Italians move in.

It's April the 7th, 1939, Good Friday.

In the skies over Tirana rumble Italian bombers, though this time, they're dropping not mustard gas but leaflets.

Resistance, as they implore, is futile.

Despite Italy's perceived military shortcomings and against a spirited defense, it's still a one-sided affair.

The whole thing is over in just five days.

King Zog is deposed.

The disgruntled Victor Emmanuel, who also opposed the invasion, is proclaimed not just Emperor of Ethiopia, but of Albania too.

Mussolini now has a new cheerleader.

Her name is Clara Patacci.

If you remember, he'd met her at the roadside back in 1932 while hairing around in his Alfa Romeo convertible.

screeching to a halt in a cloud of dust.

Patacci was not only an attractive young woman, albeit nearly 30 years his junior, but turned out to be his biggest fan.

He had filed her away for later usage, and now here she is.

In 1936, age 24, Patachi is moved into the upstairs bachelor pad at the Palazzo Venezia.

Ilduce has had her husband, an Air Force officer, conveniently transferred as an attaché to Japan.

Patachi will displace the previous incumbent of the Lovenest,

a French actress named Magde Fontange,

a woman who wrote enthusiastically of how, over their first intense 48-hour encounter, Ilduce ravaged her 20 times.

Soon bored with Fontange, Mussolini had told the French embassy to see her removal from the country.

Not least because Ovra agents discovered amongst her possessions more than 300 compromising photographs of the pair of them together.

The breakup does not go well.

First, Fontange tries to poison herself.

Later, on March the 17th, 1937, having been deported, she will lie in wait for the French ambassador at Paris's Gardino station, shooting him as he alights from his train, assailing him.

for having destroyed the world's greatest love affair.

Mercifully, the wound is non-fatal, and Fontange is given a suspended sentence, only to be re-arrested when trying to escape to Spain.

During the war, she will go on to become a key German agent, betraying French underground networks to the Nazis.

Patachi, Mussolini hopes, will be less complicated.

There for handy access via a private staircase, available for swift fornications between official engagements.

He dubs her Little Sevilla after the mistress of Julius Caesar.

I love you madly, he tells her.

I want to harm you, be brutal with you.

Sevilia replies that her duce is the epitome of beauty and power.

Well, this aspect of Mussolini, I don't think, is just a quirk of his personality.

I think it's also central to his role as the embodiment of fascism.

Fascism is a masculinist ideology.

It's about aggression and force and potency.

And so he did very little to discourage rumors of his sexual exploits.

He also made sure that he was photographed with his peasant wife Rakele and their children so that he could be the respectable family man.

But he also had these very high-profile affairs over the years.

This was a demonstration of his virility.

and Pitachi was the kind of ultimate embodiment of that.

A much younger woman, he essentially becomes her patron and the patron of her family.

He sets her sister up with a film career.

He finds jobs and bribes for her brother and father.

And after Mussolini's fall, Pitachi becomes the symbol of fascist corruption and excess.

After their adventures in Czechoslovakia and Albania, both Mussolini and Hitler concede that going solo is not a prudent option, particularly now they have the upper hand.

On April the 1st, 1939, Spain falls to Franco's Falangists, fascists by any other name.

With fascistic movements springing up all over Europe, in Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, in Hungary, in Croatia, they need to act in concert.

On May the 22nd, 1939, at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, the two foreign ministers, Count Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop, sign a military alliance, the unsubtly titled Pact of Blood.

While the PR gurus scratch their heads as to how they're going to spin this as a peacekeeping venture, Mussolini suggests an alternative title, the Pact of Steel.

Macho but less morbid.

It's not just a mutual defensive pact.

Hitler and Mussolini promise to support each other for better or worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.

Once that Pact of Steel has been signed, he's really signed over Italy's fate to be that of Germany's.

There's kind of no two ways about it after that.

Italy's fate has been signed by Mussolini at that point, and then entry into the Second World War and all the consequences of that become inevitable.

Over the summer, Ciano and Ribbentrop continue a series of meetings.

Unfortunately, unlike their bosses, they detest each other.

On their travels, it transpires both have had affairs with the same woman, a certain Mrs.

Wallace Simpson.

the consort of the recently abdicated King Edward VIII of England.

And Ciano is insulted by the brazen way in which Ribbentrop treats Italy as a junior partner with near contempt.

In Berlin, a delegation of Italian officers is invited by Hitler to join a meeting of the German High Command.

Hitler now speaks openly of reclaiming the strip of territory known as the Polish Corridor and seizing back the old East Prussian port of Danzig.

And that's just for starters.

At a dinner in Salzburg, while the two foreign ministers are waiting to be seated, Czarno asks Ribbentrop bluntly, what is it you want?

Ribbentrop replies simply, we want war.

Hitler, without doubt, is bent on a full-on invasion of Poland.

But Polish sovereignty since the Munich Conference has been guaranteed by both Britain and France.

Desperate to relay this information back to Rome, Chano knows that he cannot do it by phone.

The line will surely be tapped.

In his hotel room he can only talk to confidants with the taps running, knowing that the room is bugged.

He even orders his plane to be put under guard lest anyone tamper with it.

Until his return, he's only able to record his concerns in his diary.

They have betrayed us and lied to us.

Now they're dragging us into an adventure which we do not want and which may compromise the regime and the country as a whole.

The Italian people will recoil in horror when they learn about the aggression against Poland and will most probably want to fight the Germans.

On August 23, 1939, Hitler drops a political hand grenade.

Ribbentrop has sneaked off to Moscow and signed a secret non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union.

Hitler and Stalin are a hot new item.

Like a spurned lover, Mussolini howls his outrage in private.

In public, he assures that he and Hitler are working through their difficulties.

The inevitable happens.

German panzers roll across the Polish border, and with it, the Anglo-French line drawn in the sand.

On September the 3rd, reluctantly, they declare war on Germany.

Under the terms of the Pact of Steel, Mussolini should now be rushing to join the party, coming to Hitler's aid.

But not so.

He cites a technicality.

That, due to the unsanctioned Nazi-Soviet Pact, germany has violated the letter of their agreement

while poland is being crushed italy remains for the moment if not neutral then a non-combatant

italy's not as prepared militarily mussolini's kind of dragging his feet he wants a little bit more time there's quite a lot of shitty shallying he's kind of not quite sure not quite prepared not ready for decisive action and yet he's already put himself up for it.

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Though Mussolini is soon blinded.

In the spring of 1940, the speed with which Hitler sweeps through Denmark and Norway is a wonder to behold.

The pace with which the Blitzkrieg scorches across the Low Countries, then mighty France, exceeds the wildest of expectations.

Hitler has achieved in four weeks what the generals of the First World War couldn't do in four years.

There is no doubt to Mussolini which is the winning side in this struggle for European civilization.

Plus, he's got a classic case of FOMO: fear of missing out.

He has a rethink.

To have his seat at the table, to share in the victory, he tells his deputies.

Italy must now join the war.

After the surrender of Belgium on May the 28th, 1940, Mussolini summons his chiefs of staff.

He informs them that he will declare war on June the 5th.

There is a numb resignation in the room.

The army head, General Pietro Badoglio, protests that such a move would be suicide.

This is no case of butchering their way through colonial outposts, slaughtering people armed with spears.

But in a system built around a cult of personality, with insufficient checks and balances, the whim of Ilduce overrides all.

Don't worry, he assures.

It will all be over by September.

Though accepting the military could be better prepared, he pushes his declaration back a few days.

On June the 10th, he strides onto the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia to address not just the hand-picked fascist crowd, but by radio, the entire nation.

Fighting men of the land, the sea, in the air, blackshirts of the revolution and and of the Legions.

Men and women of Italy, of the Empire and the Kingdom of Albania.

An hour marked by destiny is striking in the heavens of our fatherland.

We go to battle against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West.

Ambassadors of Britain and France are summoned.

Communiques are issued.

Diplomats and foreign correspondents are seen off with tears and handshakes.

People of Italy, rush to arms, bellows Mussolini, and show your tenacity, your courage, your valour.

But there are no cheering crowds beyond the choreographed fanatics of the Piazza.

So, Mussolini is caught by surprise when Hitler invades Poland, and Mussolini is outraged when he finds out that Hitler had not told him in advance.

And there is a bit of a wait-and-see strategy.

Will this pay off?

And it's not until it's clear that France is collapsing in May 1940 that Mussolini decides, okay, the coast is clear.

We need to get in on this.

We need to, if we want to be part of the new fascist Europe that is going to emerge out of the inevitable German victory, then we have to join in.

And so that's where the invasion of France and Italy's formal entry into the war starts.

It is hardly a triumphant entrance.

Within days, with France effectively beaten, Italian troops advance past the little Maginot line on the French-Italian border and occupy a thin strip of territory.

As Franklin D.

Roosevelt puts it, the hand that held the dagger has stuck it into the back of its neighbor.

Edging along the French Riviera, they still make heavy weather of it.

But it's of little consequence.

Eleven days after Mussolini's declaration, France signs the armistice.

Mussolini is hedging his bets.

But in the end, Mussolini sides with Hitler.

There are too many common interests.

And he covets the spoils of war.

Once France has fallen, it means that he can have French territory.

Hitler gives him parts of France to occupy, which have been, of course, for those French much more pleasant than German occupations.

But he takes Nice, he takes Savoy and a few of the southern French counties.

And his cut runneth over...

Mussolini can now turn his attention to the colonies.

In East Africa, Italian forces attack British Somaliland.

On September the 3rd, 1940, under General Rodolfo Graziani, The Italian 10th Army crosses the border into British-controlled Egypt from Libya.

This initiates what would become known as the Western Desert Campaign.

Draziani initially is successful.

He gets to the city Birani.

They attack the British in Kenya, in Sudan, in Somaliland, and they roll out Somaliland, British Somaliland, conquer that.

They're doing awfully well.

In the Middle East, Italians even bomb British positions in the Mandate of Palestine.

There is a new international order, and Mussolini's Italy, just like Hitler's Germany, seems unstoppable.

Whipped up by the propaganda, thrilled with this string of victories, even the most skeptical can concede that this is shaping up to become quite a ride.

Il Duce's new Rome, the glorious fascist empire, has its place in the sun.

1940, it looks like it's going really well, right?

The invasion of France.

I mean, it's incredibly opportunist, but it seems perfect, right?

We've gone on the coattails of this great victory.

You know, he's a great opportunist, but the opportunism in the end is his downfall.

Sure enough, it's all about to go horribly wrong.

In the next episode,

despite mounting military disasters, Mussolini invades Greece and sends troops to Russia.

In solidarity with Japan, he declares war on the United States.

Following an Axis collapse in North Africa, the Allies land in Sicily,

and amid widespread civil unrest, the fascist Grand Council calls an extraordinary meeting.

Ilduce's future is on the line.

That's next time.

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