ON THIS DAY ·
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.
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The moment in context
The occupation of Prague in March 1939 changed the argument over Hitler’s intentions. Germany had previously presented its demands as a way to unite Germans; it now took control of a predominantly Czech population. Britain answered on 31 March with a guarantee to Poland. The promise was intended to warn Hitler that an attack would bring a wider war, though Britain could not put an army in Poland in time to stop him.
From Outbreak of WW2 in Europe, chapter 8 of The Road to War, 1931–1941 (1939).
The place: Pact of Steel — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Prague changes the British calculation. Britain’s earlier willingness to negotiate had rested partly on the idea that German demands concerned minorities, plebiscites and treaty…
- The turn — The Kremlin, 23 August 1939. The pact brought together two regimes whose ideologies proclaimed hostility. Their immediate interests made the bargain possible. Hitler reduced the…
- What it changed — The spheres become annexations. The secret protocol allocated spheres on paper; annexations soon gave them a place on the map. Eastern Poland was absorbed after a staged…
Then ask the room: Should Britain and France have guaranteed Poland — a promise they could not keep — or was the guarantee the necessary end of appeasement? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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