Axis Peace

Teutons naturally dislike Latins, more specifically Italians dislike Germans, and last week Der Fuehrer and II Duce worked like stevedores to keep their peoples sold on the Rome-Berlin Axis. The press of the world had done everything possible to suggest that Italy and Germany can no longer be friends, now that Germany has engulfed Austria and thus brought German soldiers down to the Brenner Pass frontier of Italy, immediately below which live 613,000 Italian subjects, many of whom were Austrian Tyroleans before the War and are as fiercely German as A. Hitler himself.

In Rome, therefore, Orator Mussolini last week appeared before the Italian Chamber, and two days later in Berlin Orator Hitler appeared before the Reichstag. Mussolini declared that at 12 o'clock on March 7 he categorically warned a person in Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg's confidence against attempting to hold the Austrian plebiscite which Dr. Schuschnigg announced to take place March 13, canceled on March 11. "This contraption will explode in your hands,'' II Duce claimed last week he told Chancellor Schuschnigg. The Italian Dictator went on to tell the Italian people that Austrians had not thanked him for preserving their independence from Germany by his 1934 mobilization which bluffed down the Nazis, and he asserted his belief that the Austrian people would have resisted Italian intervention last fortnight had it been ordered by Rome.

"We admit with perfect equanimity that within a few years we will be only 50,000,000 whereas the Germans will be 80,000,000!" summed up Orator Mussolini, with a certain ambiguity for a peace speech. "But the Germans will not be on one but on ten frontiers, among which the Italian is the frontier between two friendly peoples--an intangible frontier."

Orator Hitler, always somewhat feminine in contrast to the Italian Dictator's pronounced masculinity, gushed to the German Reichstag about "the leader of that great Fascist country, who is such a great friend of mine!" Der Fuehrer continued, "I should like to express to the great Italian statesman in the name of the German people, and my own name, our warmest thanks. We know what Mussolini's attitude has meant to Germany in these days. . . . Indissoluble friendship! The land and frontiers of this friend are to us inviolable. The Italian people know that the German nation supports my word!"

Thus, in their own queerly truculent ways, Dictators Mussolini & Hitler last week formally sealed the Rome-Berlin Axis as an axis of mutual Italian-German peace.

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