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In September 1937, Adolf Hitler welcomed Benito Mussolini to Germany. Both the German Führer and the Italian Duce had designed this encounter to project a powerful image of the world's first two fascist dictators as friends. Italy and Germany, two regimes supposedly ideologically united and entangled with one another within the Spanish Civil War, were challenging the status quo in Europe. The German and Italian authorities intended that the pomp and circumstance surrounding the meeting would assuage antagonisms that lingered in the public of both countries in consequence of fighting on opposite sides during the Great War.
Some eyewitnesses, including Ernst von Weizsäcker, director of the German foreign ministry's political department, characterized the visit as a feast of flags and medals that failed to produce tangible political outcomes.1In the 1970s, the historian Renzo De Felice, author of the most detailed Mussolini biography, made a similar observation and insisted that the 1937 dictators' encounter was relatively unimportant. Following his tendentious interpretation of Italian foreign policy under Fascism, he claimed that Mussolini left all diplomatic options open for Italy, an alliance with either Britain or Germany. In contrast, in their general works on Fascist Italy, historians such as Robert Mallett and Richard Bosworth have sharply criticized De Felice's interpretation. For them, the 1937 visit was a demonstration of the nascent Axis alliance which marked a clear pro-German shift in Italian foreign policy. As I argue in this article, the Duce's visit to Germany demonstrates that he preferred an alliance with the ideologically sympathetic Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, no Italo-German treaty was signed because the Duce was keen to maintain the illusion that Italy was pursuing a policy of equidistance to both Germany and Britain in order to give Italy, a country lacking natural resources and, because of its long coastline, vulnerable to foreign invasion, a stronger sense of power. For the same reason, Mussolini had signalled in the summer of 1937 that he wanted to revive the traditional Anglo-Italian friendship which had been damaged during the Italian conquest of Abyssinia.2
It would be a mistake, though, to interpret Mussolini's 1937 visit merely in terms of high politics. Shifting attention from high politics to propaganda, the German historian Wolfgang Benz has briefly explored the orchestration...