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Aggression Pact. The Oslo Powers' replies made Herr Hitler's score of pact-seeking: four acceptances (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Denmark) and four rejections (The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland). None of these acceptances or rejections, however, held anything like the importance of a pact-signing that took place in Berlin early this week. There Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano and Herr von Ribbentrop put their names to a ten-year treaty which seemed to outsiders not so much a pact of non-aggression as one of aggression.
Made out in the name of the "German Reich's Chancellor and His Majesty the King of Italy and Albania and the Emperor of Ethiopia," this new military treaty affirmed the Italian-German determination to "stand side by side with their united strength for the preservation of peace and the securing of their living space." "On these lines forecast by history," the treaty's preamble reads, "Germany and Italy, in the midst of a world of unrest and dissolution, will serve to secure the bases for European culture."
The treaty, one of the most binding ever signed between two supposedly equal powers in Europe, provides that Germany and Italy will: 1) consult each other on all questions of "common interest or touching the general European situation"; 2) lend each other full "political and diplomatic support" to eliminate threats to either nation; 3) give each other military aid on "land, sea and air," in case either becomes involved in armed conflict; 4) set up permanent Axis commissions to deal with problems jointly.
Foreign correspondents predicted the formation of three Italo-German commissions, military, political and economic, and foresaw that they would be dominated by Germans. Moreover, the two nations promised each other aid in case one was endangered by "national events." That provision could be taken as insurance against civil revolt in either country, but since little Italy could obviously not intervene to "Keep order" in the big German Reich, this provision will, if ever implemented, give the Reich the right under some circumstances to intervene in Italy. To those who have seen German troops, generals, diplomats and agents pouring into Italy during the last six months the treaty seemed final confirmation of what has long been suspected: That long-independent Dictator Benito Mussolini had finally become the political, economic and military prisoner of the more powerful German Führer.
Tours. Although there was hope that the "war of nerves" waged by Italy and Germany might drag on through the summer without a major crisis, Germans and Italians were busy power-politicking on a half-dozen other fronts. Starting at Aachen on the Belgian frontier, Führer Hitler demonstratively inspected the reputedly impregnable 400-mile steel and concrete Limes Line (also called West Wall) on the French border, pronounced it good. II Duce wound up a tour of the Italian-French border with a more threatening speech against France than he had previously made on his tour.