Word: cianos
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When terse, provocative Benito Mussolini feels that someone in authority should ramble on to the Italian people in soothing, fireside-chat fashion, Il Duce is apt to set his Foreign Minister and son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, a-chatting. In Rome last week the Chamber of Fasci & Corporations convened, Mussolini sitting quietly amid his newly revamped Cabinet (TIME, Nov. 13), and the Count talked for an hour and 53 minutes, mainly about how World War II began and why Italy is jolly well staying...
...Count Ciano was in frequent, close and friendly personal contact last spring and summer with Adolf Hitler and his diplomatic generalissimo, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. His speech last week explained why Italy, after signing a "pact of steel" with Nazi Germany in the spring, chose a state of "nonbelligerency" in the autumn...
Game Spoiled. According to the Ciano version, what really spoiled this Axis game was the overture of Neville Chamberlain to Joseph Stalin and the consequent alarm of Adolf Hitler lest he have to face an Anglo-Franco-Russian lineup. The action of the democracies, said Count Ciano, so bolstered the prestige of the Soviet Government that the Nazis had to do something about it. "If the great democracies had ignored Russia," feelingly continued Ciano, "Germany would have had well-founded motives for doing the same." Thus Britain and France were officially blamed for starting...
...treaty only two days before it was signed. "At 10 o'clock in the evening of Aug. 21, Ribbentrop telephoned me that he was going to Moscow on the 23rd to sign the pact of non-aggression between the Reich and the U. S. S. R.," recounted Count Ciano...
...Majesty and His Royal Highness, foreseeing this possibility, had "asked the privilege and honor of serving the country in arms." He warned Britain and France that "real peace" will be impossible to get if they insist on Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and Poland regaining their independence. Nor will Italy, declared Ciano, attempt to create a Balkan Bloc. In a slap at the Allied blockade control he concluded: "Italy continues to follow the conflict, ready to contribute to world peace, but also to defend her shipping and her air lines...