Talk:Pact of Steel

Major changes
I made an attempt to expand this article, so please notify me if you make any major edits: I'd really love to see how this article expands further! EvocativeIntrigue TALK 22:28, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Language
I couldn't find a reference to the original language of the Pact: this would be a great addition, so if you find it, please do add it (preferably with a source!). EvocativeIntrigue TALK 22:28, 24 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Wikisource Italia for the Italian side. Tridentinus 02:34, 18 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I believe this may be a copy in English minus the secret verbal protocols of course.

http://users.dickinson.edu/~rhyne/232/PactOfSteel.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by AthabascaCree (talk • contribs) 05:53, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

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Motives?
Does anybody have any idea of what the motives behind this pact were? I ran across it in Shirer's RISE & FALL OF THE THIRD REICH and had problems figuring out what the point of it was. Everybody knew Italy was militarily weak at the time and, other than the Fuehrer's adoration of Mussolini, it was hard to see what the Germans got out of it. It appears that Wehrmacht brass had no idea of the point of it either.

According to Shirer, Mussolini drove the pact but after he signed it, he started getting a bad case of nerves and looked for ways to get out of it. Some discussion of the background by someone familiar with the topic might be interesting to add to this article. MrG 4.225.214.98 22:45, 12 July 2007 (UTC)


 * The 'motive' behind the 'Pact of Steel', imho, was to prepare for a joint German-Italian led active military alliance to carve up Europe and the Mediteranean, ideally not before 1942 even 43.


 * Unlike the 'Anti-Comintern Pact', it was not based on common political ideology, as in the containment of communism.


 * Unlike the later 'Tripartite Pact', it was not a defensive pact.

Although Western Historians gloss this over, as is typical of our own propaganda, Japan was invited to join and this is why Japan refused to join. It wanted nothing to do with another European conflict, and that's how they saw the motive or goal of the Pact of Steel, as an 'offensive' rather than 'defensive' alliance.


 * In fact, according to English historian/intelligence officer Elizabeth Wiskermann's 1949 book "The Rome-Berlin Axis", Japan's refusal was why Mussolini coined the term 'Axis Pact' to refer to the coincidence that both Rome and Berlin sat on the same Longitudinal Axis on your Globe.


 * Reality is that both Mussolini and his Foreign Minister nephew Cianno had grave reservations about the Pact of Steel and even as Mussolini was insisting on a verbal promise from Hitler not to provoke hostilities for at least 3 years when the Italian military said it would finally be ready, but planning on making her own moves into the Balkans.


 * It seemed insincere from the start. Hitler violated the 3 year term by provoking war with Poland immediately and invaded despite Mussolini's sincere efforts to arbitrate a peace even calling in the Papacy for help. Mussolini continued to try to arbitrate an end to the war until he knew France was about to ask for an armistice and felt he had no choice but to finally declare war on Germany's side else lose out on spoils of war again.


 * In return, Mussolini did not tell Hitler about his plans to invade Greece, so when the Greeks routed the Italians and the pro-Axis Yugoslav gov't was over-thrown in a pro-British coup, Hitler's armies took 6 vital weeks to invade Yugoslavia and Greece and Crete to save Mussolini. I say crucial because Hitler had lied to Mussolini during the Tripartite Pact negotiations as well so Mussolini did not know that Hitler was planning on invading the Soviet Union. Had the German armies been able to invade the USSR 6 weeks earlier, they very well might have taken Moscow maybe even Leningrad before being frozen to a halt by the severest winter in years.


 * That is my impression of the founding principles and motives behind the 'Pact of Steel' and the actual failings if you will.AthabascaCree (talk) 07:08, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The origins of the Pact of Steel went back to the autumn of 1938, when Adolf Hitler ordered Joachim von Ribbentrop to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-British military alliance. Contrary to popular opinion, Hitler regarded the Munich Agreement as a diplomatic defeat as it “cheated” out of the war he was so desperate to have against Czechoslovakia in 1938. Basically, the conclusion Hitler drew from Munich was that the Britain would neither ally herself nor stand aside from Germany’s continental ambitions, and so had to be eliminated as a power. As part of the preparation for a war to destroy the British Empire, Hitler ordered Plan Z for building the Kriegsmarine up so that the German Navy could destroy the Royal Navy, and ordered the Luftwaffe to start building strategic bombers so the Germans could bomb Britain. As already mentioned, the diplomatic counterpart to the naval and air comportments of the anti-British strategy was converting the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-British alliance. Unfortunately for the Germans, the Japanese had their hands full with the war with China plus a border war with the Soviet Union, and had no interest in taking on the British in 1938-39. The only country the Japanese wanted an alliance against was the Soviet Union, and the Germans were only interested in an alliance against Britain, so Ribbentrop's efforts to enlist the Japanese in his anti-British alliance was a total failure. The Pact of Steel was all that Ribbentrop could salvage from his anti-British alliance-making efforts, and even that was accomplished by falsely telling the Italians that there would be no war for the next three years. From the German viewpoint, having Italy as an ally would tie British resources in the Mediterranean Sea, and from the Italian viewpoint, a German alliance would allow the Italians to acquire what Benito Mussolini liked to call his spazio vitale (vital space), namely converting the entire Mediterranean into the Italian sphere of influence. Since the two dominant Mediterranean powers were Britain and France that meant conflict with those two powers, hence Italian alignment with Germany. I would have to disagree with the above statement that Mussolini was interested in saving the peace in 1939 for moral reasons. Mussolini peace-making efforts only started in August 1939 when he discovered much to his horror that Ribbentrop had lied to him about no war for the next three years, thereby leaving Mussolini with the choice of either going to a war that he knew he was not prepared for, or declaring neutrality, which Mussolini considered humiliating. As it was, when Italy did declare neutrality in September 1939, Mussolini forbade the use of that word, and instead used the phrase non-belligerence, which Mussolini found less peaceful sounding. Mussolini’s peace efforts were only due to his effort to avoid being put on the spot by the Pact of Steel, which he so foolishly signed in May 1939, despite all of the signs already evident in the spring of 1939 that the Germans were going to attack Poland that year. --A.S. Brown (talk) 19:35, 13 June 2008 (UTC)


 * The German intervention in Greece did not delay the invasion of the Soviet Union. That urban myth has been debunked. (AntePavolic (talk) 17:25, 23 October 2016 (UTC))
 * The disturbingly named Ante Pavolic is correct. The invasion of Greece did not delay Operation Barbarossa. Barbarossa was pushed back to June 1941 because of heavy rains in May 1941 in Eastern Europe. Moving on, this article misses the anti-British turn in German foreign policy in late 1938. The Japanese were prepared to sign a military alliance with Germany in 1938-1939, but only if it were directed against the Soviet Union. The article seems to make out that Hitler's plan was to turn west before going east, when it was actually the other way around. In the Hossbach conference in November 1937, Hitler talked much about the need to seize Eastern Europe before taking on Britain and France. I don't mean to sound like A.J.P. Taylor who infamously claimed that Hitler attacked Poland as a result of diplomatic miscalculation, but Taylor at least had a point that Hitler was making up his plans as he went along and did not have a master plan of the sort some had credited him with. Yes, Taylor went too far with that as Taylor presented a Hitler with no plans at all. Hitler did have plans, but he had to constantly adjust to what others were doing. The whole Great Man theory where Hitler is a "world historical" leader, a larger than life figure who causes everything to happen through the force of his demonic will is nonsense, and even worse it is apologetic nonsense. The Great Man view of Hitler lets off the hook all the functionaries of the German state from any responsibility for their actions, as they all become mere robots just obeying the will of the Fuhrer, instead of human beings making choices. Getting back to Hitler's plans, in 1922, Hitler stated his foreign policy when he came to power would be "the destruction of Russia with the help of England". The Anglo-German anti-Soviet alliance that Hitler wanted when he came to power in 1933 did not happen, mostly because the British were not interested. So Hitler had to adjust his plans, and it has been remarked that Hitler went to war in 1939 against Britain-the country he wanted as an ally-while being allied to the Soviet Union-the country he wanted as an enemy-which is a remarkable volte-face from what he was talking about in the 1920s. Anyhow, the article does not tie things together. In January 1939, Hitler approved the Z plan to build a gigantic navy to fight the Royal Navy by 1944. In 1939, Hitler's ultimate target was Britain, not the Soviet Union. And it this regard that one can best understand the Pact of Steel. Finally, this article is weak on the Italian side of things. At the risk of sounding egoistical, I did a lot of work on the Mussolini article back in April 2012 and October 2014, and most of the parts of the Mussolini article relating to his foreign policy were written by me, which would be a good start to explaining why Mussolini chose to sign the Pact of Steel. There is a certain revisionist school, most notably Renzo De Felice and Peter Neville, who argued that Mussolini has an unfair bad reputation, and he was really a great statesman, but at the risk of sounding like promoting my viewpoint, this is all nonsense. The Pact of Steel was both an offensive and defensive alliance, and Mussolini knew his country was not ready for war in 1939. Joachim von Ribbentrop promised Mussolini that there would be no war for the next three years, and unbelievable as it is, Mussolini fell for that lie. In August 1939, Ribbentrop was quite candid in admitting to Count Ciano that he lied about no war for the next three years, saying to the effect that if I told you that we going to attack Poland later this year, I knew you would not had signed the Pact of Steel, and so I had to lie to you about that. To be fair to Ribbentrop, he believed for reasons that remain understandable only to himself that Britain and France would not declare war if Germany invaded Poland, and incredibly he managed to persuade Hitler that there would be no general war if Germany attacked Poland. By all accounts, Hitler was very unpleasantly surprised when Sir Neville Henderson handed him the British declaration of war on September 3rd, 1939. But getting back to the spring of 1939, there was plenty of evidence in May 1939 that Germany was planning on attacking Poland later that year, not the least of which was that the German media was bashing Poland at every chance and Hitler was demanding that the Free City of Danzig return to the Reich, a demand the Poles were rejecting. Just how Mussolini missed all that is an interesting question. What sort of statesman signs an offensive alliance (giving up control of questions of war and peace to Hitler), knowing full well that Italy was not ready for war, and takes Ribbentrop's word at face value? Mussolini was a bully, a coward and an idiot who led country into a disaster that ulimatly caused the deaths of thousands of Italians and saw the length and breath of Italy destroyed by war, all for nothing--A.S. Brown (talk) 00:53, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

ciano citation
Someone please correct me if I am doing this wrong, or explain how I should be doing this. But I have book proof of this author's statement.

However, members of the Italian government, including the signatory Ciano, were opposed to the Pact [citation needed].

"The Oxford Companion to World War II" Oxford Companion Press, New York, 1995 Page 242 Ciano di Cortellazzo, Count Galeazzo (1903-44) "Initially he(Cianno) supported the Rome-Berlin axis but later changed his mind, for he feared German expansionism and was opposed to Italy's throwing in its lot with Hitler. He became conviced that Germany would eventually lose any war it started, that Italy was in no position militarily to support it, and that he must form a Balkan bloc to thwart any German move into the Mediterranean. He therefore opposed the Pact of Steel, signed in May 1939, and, after the Nazis had occupied the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 he exerted his influence to keep his country neutral, but he had no power base of his own, nor a feasible alternative policy to war." AthabascaCree (talk) 04:09, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

I hope that helps.

Can someone help teach me how to demand a "citation required" for others here who have made comments we know they cannot prove?

12 March 2015
I spend my night improving and expanding this article with the purpose of getting it to GA-status. I have just nominated the article and hope the articles editors will assist me, if there will be the need for it, in the review when it begins. Cheers, Jonas Vinther • (speak to me!) 02:26, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I think that the article as it is now is little more than a stub. Alex2006 (talk) 06:10, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I've added three additional sections to expanded the article. It's also worth noticing that there is no length requirements in the GA-criteria, only comprehensiveness requirements. Jonas Vinther • (speak to me!) 10:52, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
 * This is the real problem, comprehensiveness. The genesis of the pact, the reasons behind them, cannot be dismissed with a couple of sentences. I know two books which deal with the pact. In De Felice's "Mussolini" there are more than sixty pages devoted to the birth of the Pact. Moreover, Mario Toscano, a key figure in the genesis of the Pact, wrote a whole book ("Le origini diplomatiche del Patto d'acciaio") about it. As it is now, I think that the article clearly misses point 3 of good article's criteria. Alex2006 (talk) 13:06, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, I disagree, but that's just my opinion. Unless the GA-reviewer asks for an expansion of a certain section, I won't be doing it. If you, however, have those two books in question at your disposal and feel like implementing information from them, be my guest. Jonas Vinther • (speak to me!) 14:59, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Actually expanding this article would be nice (I like this subject, and already wrote a couple of articles about the history of the fascist period), but right now I am moving, my books are lost somewhere in a box...I hope to find them again! :-) Keep the good work, Alex2006 (talk) 05:44, 13 March 2015 (UTC)