The Italo-German Split from A Concise History of Modern Europe, 3rd Edition (Columbia University Press, 1998)
The ascension of Count Galeazzo Ciano to the post of Prime Minister after the death of Mussolini in 1959 and his subsequent implementation of new policies of liberalization, quasi-democratization and colonial reform, and most especially his reversal of the Nazi-inspired Italian Race Laws of 1938 and the regime's general relaxation of anti-miscegenation laws caused a massive rift in the previously thriving Italo-German Alliance. The GGR’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribberntrop responded to the new, subversive Italian leadership by sending a series of ultimatums to Rome, threatening economic sanctions and even a possible suspension from the European Alliance if Italy did not abandon its liberal policies. Ciano however remained steadfast with his new line of policy and persistently ignored German threats. He and his ministers speculated that vital German stakes in Libyan oil would counter the ideological outrage in Berlin and for the time being prevent the Germans from doing anything more than sending out aggressive threats. However the German Fuhrer himself, Herman Goering made it clear to the world that the Ciano regime could not be tolerated for long with an inflammatory speech he gave to the Reichstag on 22 November, 1959;
“We gave Italy everything it has, its wealth, its power, its so-called Empire! Its alliance with the Reich was the sole reason it stands today as among the respectable powers of the world. And now Italy has turned on her one true ally and friend to pursue a path of reckless liberalization and senseless self-destruction. If this is allowed to continue then Italy will become the poison that will corrupt our European brotherhood from the very heart! It will be the destruction of the strong, free, united Europe that we had so valiantly fought for twenty years ago!
By the sacred and holy memory of the First Fuhrer, I shall not let this happen! Heil Hitler!”
The crisis reached a turning point on the 26th of November when military tensions flared up along the alpine border between Italy and the Reich as border guards aided by paramilitary forces on both sides prepared for a confrontation. The recent Italian acquisition of atomic technology made this affair far more dangerous and complicated than any crisis that Europe had ever had to face since the war. Hysteria engulfed the continent and America watched with glee at the possibility that Fascist Europe might destroy itself with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles commenting “Here we are worrying and commiserating about how to destroy Fascism and well, now it just looks like as if the Fascists themselves might make the job a lot easier by destroying each other.” The German High Command began reviewing War Plan Olive, its secret plans for a hitherto unthinkable invasion of the Italian peninsula and the dismantling of its North African dominions while the Italian Army was just a few orders away from mobilization. However cooler heads and pragmatism eventually prevailed and a secret meeting conducted between Ribberntrop and the influential Italian Deputy Prime Minister, Dino Grandi on the 7th of December in Geneva, was able defuse the crisis successfully and any possibility of war was conclusively prevented. However the underlying political tensions between the two powers remained.
Agents of the Gestapo, shortly after the end of the Alpine Crisis in mid-December, discovered clandestine communications between the Italians and the Auphan regime in Paris. The German press immediately seized on the new intelligence and revealed to the European public, Italian attempts to persuade France to join her in a joint withdrawal from the EA and in the creation of a new entity that would permanently oppose German hegemony on the continent, a so-called “Latin Union”. France, even after unification in 1950 was famously oppressed and disgruntled by German economic domination and was seen by Ciano as the best possible ally in standing up to Germany. This new crisis polarized Europe and led to demonstrations in the streets of Paris, Madrid and Lisbon, the Latin capitals of Europe and for a moment, it seemed Italy with the support of these popular demonstrations, would gain the upper hand and the “Latin Union” approached reality. But the decisive actions of the Euromacht immediately, brutally crushed these spontaneous attempts at resistance and by late-December, the situation had returned to the status-quo.
The New Year and the opening of a new decade was greeted by Europe with a sense of fear and uncertainty as this great crisis lingered on and remained unresolved. The Ciano regime had uncovered the inevitable link between the Nazis in Berlin and the Fascist hardliners at home, who gathered around the person of Cesare Maria de Vecchi, a Fascist old guard and March on Rome veteran. The new Duce immediately ordered these hardliners be put under house arrest. Goering and the rest of the German leadership, frustrated and beyond humiliated by perhaps the greatest affront to German hegemony, now turned to Reinhard Heydrich of the SS who since the beginning of the crisis, had been drawing up plans for a viable way to end the Ciano regime without the risk of atomic war. Heydrich’s Operation Geist gave detailed plans for the assassination of the entire Ciano cabinet. On January 10, 1960 German agent Franz Dietrichs and a team of eight Albanian resistance members, working from the rooftop of a twenty storey building fired rockets into a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council at the Hotel Roma. Hiding under the table as the rockets shattered the rooftop of their meeting place, the Fascist Grand Council had miraculously survived this violent onslaught. An abortive German-supported putsch from the Fascist hardliners which aimed to install de Vecchi as Duce,was crushed by the Army and the Blackshirts as the embattled Ciano regime struggled to hold on to power.
This deadliest, most intolerable and most unforgivable offense finally pushed Italy to initiate the most decisive and effective course of action it would take in this crisis. On the 13th of January, 1960, the Duce, Gazeallo Ciano announced to his people;
“Centuries ago, the Germanic hordes, with all their barbarism and their backwardness and their tyranny, descended upon Italy and destroyed civilization, plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Today, we see that history is repeating itself except that in this instance, the forces of civilization shall strike back! In this instance, the forces of civilization shall triumph!”
This bold speech was not followed by a declaration of war as most in the world had predicted and feared (or in some cases hoped) but rather it was followed by a single, stern order from the Duce. All exports of Libyan oil to Germany and Europe was halted and the Suez Canal, which Hitler had given full control of to Mussolini as a gift on the latter’s birthday in 1949 was closed to all German and European vessels. To enforce this new order, the Italian Navy was called to action, blockading all strategic ports in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the most regretful and cruel of ironies, this force which had been nearly a joke at the beginning of the Second World War was so generously furnished by German funds and technology throughout the late forties and fifties, and so greatly enhanced by the tearing apart of the late Royal Navy, that it was powerful enough to carry out the Duce’s orders, and to top it all off Italian agents had managed to lend enough support to the notorious Caucasian resistance group, the Kobashvili, so that they could perform their greatest stunt, the “Burning of Baku”, a series of strategic terrorist bombings that decimated the German petroleum and synthetic petroleum industries as the city possesed the Reich's highest concentration of oil refineries and synthetic plants.
At first, the mighty colossus that was the Greater German Reich, which extended from the British Isles to the Ural Mountains, carried on and continued thriving unhindered by “Italy’s silly, little embargo” which seemed to the Reich “like nothing but the annoyances of a pesky mosquito”. It slowly rebuilt over the burning ruins of Baku and increased the production of synthetic oils. Heydrich swore revenge for the bombings and provided support for the bombing of Italy’s own oil fields at the hands of Berber nationalist insurgents. Goering installed a new and more loyal, more reliable and more radical regime in France that of Jacques Doriot’s Parti Social Francais’ and it seemed that everything would return to order and normalcy.
But by late 1960 and into the first few months of 1961, the Reich began to feel the sharp stings of pesky Italy’s little embargo. The rebuilding of a decade’s worth of petroleum infrastructure proved to be a difficult and costly task, while the attempted development of the Reich’s native petroleum industries in the Volga and German Ural regions was much hindered by the chaos of the ongoing guerrilla war, and the Reich’s precious internal oil reserves were diminished greatly in the years of 1960-1961. So Germany was forced to look in desperation to those left who were willing to sell petroleum, none other than its own enemies; the Americans who owned every oilfield from Kurdistan to Khuzestan and Lavrenty Beria’s GAZPROM. Only at unbearable prices, which included portions of its national dignity, could the Reich replenish its petroleum reserves. The Fuhrer even considered plans to launch an invasion of the Yamal Oblast, the oil-rich region of the USSR which was just a hair’s breadth away from the Reich’s easternmost borders but the American troops stationed there made any such invasion, nothing less than a trigger for atomic war. As the Reich’s coffers were being bled dry, German propaganda did however do an excellent job of downplaying and covering up the growing oil crisis, both to the world and to its own people, but the citizens of the GGR could not help but wonder why their previously bountiful and near-paradisaical lives as members of the supreme Herrenvolk, kept getting harder and harder.
Meanwhile Italy, capturing the hearts and minds of the non-Nazi world with its staunch, unflinching defiance of Berlin was congratulated by every world leader outside from outside of the German sphere, from the President in Washington to the Generalissimo in Nanking. The historic visit of Vice President Johnson to Rome in 1960 was seen by the Germans as an offense and the launch of Italian satellite Garibaldi the following year in 1961 insulted Germany once more, as all previous Italian attempts to reach the stars were subservient to Germany’s. However beneath a glorious facade of independence and self-determination, Italy too, just as Germany was, suffering a slow economic stagnation. With nobody to buy its oil, as the European Alliance was virtually its only market, and the lack of German and European expertise to manage its oil refineries, the Ciano regime realized the folly of its audacious embargo.
It is said that it was the stress of finding a solution to the oil crisis that killed the German Fuhrer in the beginning of 1962. But his successor Wilhelm Frick assumed the Fuhrership with an air of fresh pragmatism as he was immediately willing to reconcile with Italy, to bring an end the crippling oil crisis and restore order to Europe. Realizing that the state of relations between Germany and Italy could never return to the way it was in the days of the First Fuhrer and the first Duce, Frick sent out feelers to the Italians, hinting that the Reich was ready to negotiate with terms agreeable to Rome. German and Italian delegations met at Bern, Switzerland to work out the preliminary terms that would lead to a resumption of friendly or at least non-hostile relations between the two. The Italians found out that what had disturbed the Germans the most about Ciano’s liberal policies was the abolition of the Race Laws which Mussolini had introduced under pressure from Hitler. “Jews and Negroes would be allowed to reenter the shores of Europe through Italy and that would be the end of us all” Himmler once commented on Ciano’s decision to abandon the Race Laws. The Italians decided after much commiseration, that they were willing to introduce a toned down version of the Race Laws which would satisfy the German requirement for racial separation. Ciano did not give in to the German demands to reduce his nation’s naval might and give up control of the Suez, but he did agree to reduce his nation’s already meager atomic arsenal however, if the GGR was willing to listen to Italy’s demands.
Independence, from the whims of Berlin, was what Italy wanted most. Although already a fact as proven by Italy’s actions since 1959, that Italy possessed enough of this desired independence and self-sufficiency to do what it wished, Ciano wanted German assent. The chief German negotiator Count von Krosigk after contacting his superiors in Berlin told the Italians that the Germans would be willing to “respect the bounds of Italian power as long as it did not extend past the bounds of the Italian realm”. The Germans also wanted Italian assurance that it would abandon all future attempts to create a Latin Union. Italy meanwhile would not be expelled from the European Alliance but its power within the organization was severely reduced, demoting it from a status second only to Germany, where it could veto motions in the European Parliament, to a status shared by the likes of Spain and Greece, where it could do nothing but submit a second-class vote. But the Italians figured that since all power in that organization was ultimately in the hands of Germany anyway, their position in the EA meant nothing. Demands that the head of the SS write an apology addressed to the Duce for Operation Geist were turned down just as an Italian admission of guilt for the Burning of Baku was rejected.
Preliminary terms for reconciliation were agreed upon and a meeting between high-level leaders from both nations, was set for the 22nd of May, 1964, the 25th anniversary of the Pact of Steel which none other than then-Foreign Minister, Count Ciano had signed on behalf of his father-in-law. Meeting in the palatial Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan on the historic date, Deputy Prime Minister Dino Grandi shook hands with his German counterpart, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and proceeded to sign the Milan Agreement which restored some semblance of a friendly relationship between Berlin and Rome although just as Frick had believed, the fraternal alliance from the era of the Pact of Steel was irretrievably lost, though it was not much missed by anyone, other than the extreme right-wing of the Fascist Party. As soon as the Agreement was ratified, Italian exports of Libyan oil to Germany and Europe were resumed and the German, Italian and European economies regained the lost momentum of four years of stagnation. Italy was able to continue with its liberal policies without fear of German intervention, which paved the way for President Jackson's historic visit to Rome in 1976, Italy’s eventual withdrawal from the European Alliance in 1984, the Italian Democratic Revolution of 1989 and Italy’s role in the founding of the new European Commonwealth in 1994.
The ascension of Count Galeazzo Ciano to the post of Prime Minister after the death of Mussolini in 1959 and his subsequent implementation of new policies of liberalization, quasi-democratization and colonial reform, and most especially his reversal of the Nazi-inspired Italian Race Laws of 1938 and the regime's general relaxation of anti-miscegenation laws caused a massive rift in the previously thriving Italo-German Alliance. The GGR’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribberntrop responded to the new, subversive Italian leadership by sending a series of ultimatums to Rome, threatening economic sanctions and even a possible suspension from the European Alliance if Italy did not abandon its liberal policies. Ciano however remained steadfast with his new line of policy and persistently ignored German threats. He and his ministers speculated that vital German stakes in Libyan oil would counter the ideological outrage in Berlin and for the time being prevent the Germans from doing anything more than sending out aggressive threats. However the German Fuhrer himself, Herman Goering made it clear to the world that the Ciano regime could not be tolerated for long with an inflammatory speech he gave to the Reichstag on 22 November, 1959;
“We gave Italy everything it has, its wealth, its power, its so-called Empire! Its alliance with the Reich was the sole reason it stands today as among the respectable powers of the world. And now Italy has turned on her one true ally and friend to pursue a path of reckless liberalization and senseless self-destruction. If this is allowed to continue then Italy will become the poison that will corrupt our European brotherhood from the very heart! It will be the destruction of the strong, free, united Europe that we had so valiantly fought for twenty years ago!
By the sacred and holy memory of the First Fuhrer, I shall not let this happen! Heil Hitler!”
The crisis reached a turning point on the 26th of November when military tensions flared up along the alpine border between Italy and the Reich as border guards aided by paramilitary forces on both sides prepared for a confrontation. The recent Italian acquisition of atomic technology made this affair far more dangerous and complicated than any crisis that Europe had ever had to face since the war. Hysteria engulfed the continent and America watched with glee at the possibility that Fascist Europe might destroy itself with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles commenting “Here we are worrying and commiserating about how to destroy Fascism and well, now it just looks like as if the Fascists themselves might make the job a lot easier by destroying each other.” The German High Command began reviewing War Plan Olive, its secret plans for a hitherto unthinkable invasion of the Italian peninsula and the dismantling of its North African dominions while the Italian Army was just a few orders away from mobilization. However cooler heads and pragmatism eventually prevailed and a secret meeting conducted between Ribberntrop and the influential Italian Deputy Prime Minister, Dino Grandi on the 7th of December in Geneva, was able defuse the crisis successfully and any possibility of war was conclusively prevented. However the underlying political tensions between the two powers remained.
Agents of the Gestapo, shortly after the end of the Alpine Crisis in mid-December, discovered clandestine communications between the Italians and the Auphan regime in Paris. The German press immediately seized on the new intelligence and revealed to the European public, Italian attempts to persuade France to join her in a joint withdrawal from the EA and in the creation of a new entity that would permanently oppose German hegemony on the continent, a so-called “Latin Union”. France, even after unification in 1950 was famously oppressed and disgruntled by German economic domination and was seen by Ciano as the best possible ally in standing up to Germany. This new crisis polarized Europe and led to demonstrations in the streets of Paris, Madrid and Lisbon, the Latin capitals of Europe and for a moment, it seemed Italy with the support of these popular demonstrations, would gain the upper hand and the “Latin Union” approached reality. But the decisive actions of the Euromacht immediately, brutally crushed these spontaneous attempts at resistance and by late-December, the situation had returned to the status-quo.
The New Year and the opening of a new decade was greeted by Europe with a sense of fear and uncertainty as this great crisis lingered on and remained unresolved. The Ciano regime had uncovered the inevitable link between the Nazis in Berlin and the Fascist hardliners at home, who gathered around the person of Cesare Maria de Vecchi, a Fascist old guard and March on Rome veteran. The new Duce immediately ordered these hardliners be put under house arrest. Goering and the rest of the German leadership, frustrated and beyond humiliated by perhaps the greatest affront to German hegemony, now turned to Reinhard Heydrich of the SS who since the beginning of the crisis, had been drawing up plans for a viable way to end the Ciano regime without the risk of atomic war. Heydrich’s Operation Geist gave detailed plans for the assassination of the entire Ciano cabinet. On January 10, 1960 German agent Franz Dietrichs and a team of eight Albanian resistance members, working from the rooftop of a twenty storey building fired rockets into a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council at the Hotel Roma. Hiding under the table as the rockets shattered the rooftop of their meeting place, the Fascist Grand Council had miraculously survived this violent onslaught. An abortive German-supported putsch from the Fascist hardliners which aimed to install de Vecchi as Duce,was crushed by the Army and the Blackshirts as the embattled Ciano regime struggled to hold on to power.
This deadliest, most intolerable and most unforgivable offense finally pushed Italy to initiate the most decisive and effective course of action it would take in this crisis. On the 13th of January, 1960, the Duce, Gazeallo Ciano announced to his people;
“Centuries ago, the Germanic hordes, with all their barbarism and their backwardness and their tyranny, descended upon Italy and destroyed civilization, plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Today, we see that history is repeating itself except that in this instance, the forces of civilization shall strike back! In this instance, the forces of civilization shall triumph!”
This bold speech was not followed by a declaration of war as most in the world had predicted and feared (or in some cases hoped) but rather it was followed by a single, stern order from the Duce. All exports of Libyan oil to Germany and Europe was halted and the Suez Canal, which Hitler had given full control of to Mussolini as a gift on the latter’s birthday in 1949 was closed to all German and European vessels. To enforce this new order, the Italian Navy was called to action, blockading all strategic ports in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the most regretful and cruel of ironies, this force which had been nearly a joke at the beginning of the Second World War was so generously furnished by German funds and technology throughout the late forties and fifties, and so greatly enhanced by the tearing apart of the late Royal Navy, that it was powerful enough to carry out the Duce’s orders, and to top it all off Italian agents had managed to lend enough support to the notorious Caucasian resistance group, the Kobashvili, so that they could perform their greatest stunt, the “Burning of Baku”, a series of strategic terrorist bombings that decimated the German petroleum and synthetic petroleum industries as the city possesed the Reich's highest concentration of oil refineries and synthetic plants.
At first, the mighty colossus that was the Greater German Reich, which extended from the British Isles to the Ural Mountains, carried on and continued thriving unhindered by “Italy’s silly, little embargo” which seemed to the Reich “like nothing but the annoyances of a pesky mosquito”. It slowly rebuilt over the burning ruins of Baku and increased the production of synthetic oils. Heydrich swore revenge for the bombings and provided support for the bombing of Italy’s own oil fields at the hands of Berber nationalist insurgents. Goering installed a new and more loyal, more reliable and more radical regime in France that of Jacques Doriot’s Parti Social Francais’ and it seemed that everything would return to order and normalcy.
But by late 1960 and into the first few months of 1961, the Reich began to feel the sharp stings of pesky Italy’s little embargo. The rebuilding of a decade’s worth of petroleum infrastructure proved to be a difficult and costly task, while the attempted development of the Reich’s native petroleum industries in the Volga and German Ural regions was much hindered by the chaos of the ongoing guerrilla war, and the Reich’s precious internal oil reserves were diminished greatly in the years of 1960-1961. So Germany was forced to look in desperation to those left who were willing to sell petroleum, none other than its own enemies; the Americans who owned every oilfield from Kurdistan to Khuzestan and Lavrenty Beria’s GAZPROM. Only at unbearable prices, which included portions of its national dignity, could the Reich replenish its petroleum reserves. The Fuhrer even considered plans to launch an invasion of the Yamal Oblast, the oil-rich region of the USSR which was just a hair’s breadth away from the Reich’s easternmost borders but the American troops stationed there made any such invasion, nothing less than a trigger for atomic war. As the Reich’s coffers were being bled dry, German propaganda did however do an excellent job of downplaying and covering up the growing oil crisis, both to the world and to its own people, but the citizens of the GGR could not help but wonder why their previously bountiful and near-paradisaical lives as members of the supreme Herrenvolk, kept getting harder and harder.
Meanwhile Italy, capturing the hearts and minds of the non-Nazi world with its staunch, unflinching defiance of Berlin was congratulated by every world leader outside from outside of the German sphere, from the President in Washington to the Generalissimo in Nanking. The historic visit of Vice President Johnson to Rome in 1960 was seen by the Germans as an offense and the launch of Italian satellite Garibaldi the following year in 1961 insulted Germany once more, as all previous Italian attempts to reach the stars were subservient to Germany’s. However beneath a glorious facade of independence and self-determination, Italy too, just as Germany was, suffering a slow economic stagnation. With nobody to buy its oil, as the European Alliance was virtually its only market, and the lack of German and European expertise to manage its oil refineries, the Ciano regime realized the folly of its audacious embargo.
It is said that it was the stress of finding a solution to the oil crisis that killed the German Fuhrer in the beginning of 1962. But his successor Wilhelm Frick assumed the Fuhrership with an air of fresh pragmatism as he was immediately willing to reconcile with Italy, to bring an end the crippling oil crisis and restore order to Europe. Realizing that the state of relations between Germany and Italy could never return to the way it was in the days of the First Fuhrer and the first Duce, Frick sent out feelers to the Italians, hinting that the Reich was ready to negotiate with terms agreeable to Rome. German and Italian delegations met at Bern, Switzerland to work out the preliminary terms that would lead to a resumption of friendly or at least non-hostile relations between the two. The Italians found out that what had disturbed the Germans the most about Ciano’s liberal policies was the abolition of the Race Laws which Mussolini had introduced under pressure from Hitler. “Jews and Negroes would be allowed to reenter the shores of Europe through Italy and that would be the end of us all” Himmler once commented on Ciano’s decision to abandon the Race Laws. The Italians decided after much commiseration, that they were willing to introduce a toned down version of the Race Laws which would satisfy the German requirement for racial separation. Ciano did not give in to the German demands to reduce his nation’s naval might and give up control of the Suez, but he did agree to reduce his nation’s already meager atomic arsenal however, if the GGR was willing to listen to Italy’s demands.
Independence, from the whims of Berlin, was what Italy wanted most. Although already a fact as proven by Italy’s actions since 1959, that Italy possessed enough of this desired independence and self-sufficiency to do what it wished, Ciano wanted German assent. The chief German negotiator Count von Krosigk after contacting his superiors in Berlin told the Italians that the Germans would be willing to “respect the bounds of Italian power as long as it did not extend past the bounds of the Italian realm”. The Germans also wanted Italian assurance that it would abandon all future attempts to create a Latin Union. Italy meanwhile would not be expelled from the European Alliance but its power within the organization was severely reduced, demoting it from a status second only to Germany, where it could veto motions in the European Parliament, to a status shared by the likes of Spain and Greece, where it could do nothing but submit a second-class vote. But the Italians figured that since all power in that organization was ultimately in the hands of Germany anyway, their position in the EA meant nothing. Demands that the head of the SS write an apology addressed to the Duce for Operation Geist were turned down just as an Italian admission of guilt for the Burning of Baku was rejected.
Preliminary terms for reconciliation were agreed upon and a meeting between high-level leaders from both nations, was set for the 22nd of May, 1964, the 25th anniversary of the Pact of Steel which none other than then-Foreign Minister, Count Ciano had signed on behalf of his father-in-law. Meeting in the palatial Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan on the historic date, Deputy Prime Minister Dino Grandi shook hands with his German counterpart, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and proceeded to sign the Milan Agreement which restored some semblance of a friendly relationship between Berlin and Rome although just as Frick had believed, the fraternal alliance from the era of the Pact of Steel was irretrievably lost, though it was not much missed by anyone, other than the extreme right-wing of the Fascist Party. As soon as the Agreement was ratified, Italian exports of Libyan oil to Germany and Europe were resumed and the German, Italian and European economies regained the lost momentum of four years of stagnation. Italy was able to continue with its liberal policies without fear of German intervention, which paved the way for President Jackson's historic visit to Rome in 1976, Italy’s eventual withdrawal from the European Alliance in 1984, the Italian Democratic Revolution of 1989 and Italy’s role in the founding of the new European Commonwealth in 1994.
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