Road to WW2 · TURNING POINT · 1939

Pact of Steel (1939)

On the Road to WW2 map as “The Pact of Steel”

22 May 1939 — Germany and Italy sign a full military alliance in Rome. Their plans for war do not match: Mussolini privately warns that he cannot fight before 1943, while Hitler is planning for that September.

When: 22 May 1939
Type: Turning point
Chapter: Outbreak of WW2 in Europe (chapter 8 of Road to WW2)
Atlas: The Road to War, 1931–1941

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Map showing Pact of Steel (1939), turning point in The Road to War, 1931–1941 — TURNING POINT · THE ROAD TO WAR, 1931–1941

These maps are reconstructed from published sources · Cliopatria v0.2.1 — dated political boundaries · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — Danzig and German annexation in September 1939 · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — German territorial expansion · IGM Fiume, 1:25,000, sheet53B II SE — boundary established in1924 · Natural Earth — physical reference geography · Yugoslavia (1929–1939) location map — international frontier and Adriatic coast · Treaty of Rome (1924), division of Fiume and west-bank boundary · Murli / rowanwindwhistler — Slovakia border changes, 1938–1945 · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — The Holocaust in Slovakia · Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute — The First Vienna Award

Source details

Cliopatria contributors / Seshat Global History Databank. CC BY4.0 · Dated polity and constituent territory selections; campaign-dependent occupation overlays reconstructed separately.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — Danzig and German annexation in September 1939. Historical chronology consulted; no source prose or artwork republished
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Historical dates consulted; no prose or image copied
Istituto Geografico Militare, Fiume (printed1946; 1927 survey with1931–1940 updates), reproduced by Istituto regionale per la storia della Resistenza e dell’Età contemporanea nel Friuli Venezia Giulia. Independent reconstruction from graticule coordinates and boundary observations; archive page reserves artwork rights.. Geographical-fact reconstruction; original archive artwork not distributed
Natural Earth. Public domain
NordNordWest/Wikipedia. Converted from the published SVG to WGS84; eastern Italian regional territory extracted. Source cites Velhagen & Klasings Großer Volksatlas (1938).. CC BY-SA 3.0 Germany
1924 agreement interpreted alongside the regional history institute and City of Rijeka’s explanation of the Donja/Gornja Drenova division.. Historical geographic facts; citation only
Murli; SVG adaptation by rowanwindwhistler (2021). CC BY-SA 2.5; derived geographic paths under the same license · Georeferenced actual published vector regions using eight printed city positions; no map artwork or labels in the atlas.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — The Holocaust in Slovakia. Historical chronology consulted; no source prose or artwork republished
Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute — The First Vienna Award. Historical territorial chronology consulted; no source artwork or prose republished

Danzig is assigned to German control in September 1939. Its geometry comes from the annual source’s free-city outline.

Slovak territory is reconstructed from the published 1938–1945 border-change map, distinguishing the client state from Hungarian and German annexations. Small northern frontier changes and survey-level detail lie outside this regional source. After August 1944, German military occupation supersedes the client-state fill.

The eastern Italian frontier uses the published 1930s regional map and a 1924 Fiume boundary reconstruction. Source conquests after April 1941 remain separately dated.

reconstruction: 1922–1952 · reconstruction: 1936–1939 · reconstruction: 1936–1940 · reconstruction: 1936–1941 · reconstruction: 1936–1942 · reconstruction: 1936–1944 · reconstruction: 1938-10 · reconstruction: 1939 · reconstruction: 1939-03 · reconstruction: 1939-09-28 · reconstruction: 1939.7 · reconstruction: 1939–1939 · vector: 1895–1941 · vector: 1912–1955 · vector: 1918–1941 · vector: 1920–1939 · vector: 1924–1940 · vector: 1936–1939 · vector: 1936–1941 · vector: 1936–1945 · vector: 1936–1986 · vector: 1938–1939 · vector: 1938–1972 · vector: 1939–1939 · vector: 1939–1944 · vector: 1939–2023 · vector: September 1939

Layer records and reconstruction methods

In the same chapter

● Prague ● Albania ● The Pact ✕ Westerplatte ✕ Warsaw

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Pact of Steel (1939)

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