Last week a diplomatic drama as strange as a Wagnerian opera unrolled in the Bavarian Alps. The setting was Wagnerian—Führer Adolf Hitler's Berghof at Berchtesgaden, a mountain hideaway 15 miles from music-haunted Salzburg, 600 miles from Danzig, 1,300 miles from Moscow, and 3,000 feet above sea level. Facing the cloud-capped mountains the brown and white Berghof itself—huge echoing rooms, wide halls, bedrooms for 40 guests, guards' turrets, flower gardens, machine-gun nests—seemed as unreal as the home of the Troll kings.
At this ethereal haunt there arrived one day last week Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italy's Foreign Minister, son-in-law of Il Duce. Already there were German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador to Rome, the Italian Ambassador to Berlin, sundry legal experts, advisers, retainers. They were to have lunch with the Führer.
Count Ciano, dressed in a white suit, was half an hour late. The Führer, who has recently been in a beaming, expansive mood, and who at Berchtesgaden likes to sleep late in the morning and talk late at night with his old cronies, was cordial. Lunch was long. Long was the talk after it. At tea time Count Ciano was still there. Then, literally as well as figuratively, the Führer took his guest, emissary of his Axis partner, up in the mountains to look at the view.
Panorama. Not far from his Berghof the Führer has built an even stranger retreat—a steel-and-glass "eagle's nest" atop Mt. Kehlstein. Few Nazis have seen it. Magnificent as is the view from the Berghof, it is surpassed by the panorama that opens below the eagle's nest—mountains stretching on over South Germany, into Ostmark, disappearing into the blue haze of distance in the south. Southeast lies Yugoslavia with its rich land of Croatia and the seacoast of Dalmatia stretching down the Adriatic. Eastward lies fertile Hungary, and Rumania with its oil wells, its grain, its ports on the Danube and Black Sea. Northeast, across what had been Czecho-Slovakia, lies Poland and the minute spot on the map known as Danzig, the present battlefield in Europe's war of nerves.