Benito Mussolini Part 5: The Pact of Steel

Real Dictators

NOISER

History, Fiction, Drama

4.8 • 8.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

At the Munich Conference, Mussolini postures as a peacemaker. With Hitler in the ascendancy, the Rome-Berlin Axis is upgraded to a military alliance. High on fascist adrenaline, Il Duce invades Albania. Soon, in the backdraft of the German Blitzkrieg, he will declare war on Britain and France… A Noiser production, written by Jeff Dawson. Many thanks to Giulia Albanese, Joshua Arthurs, John Foot, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, Lisa Pine, Helen Roche, Thomas Weber. This is Part 5 of 7. Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Wednesday, September 28th, 1938.
0:05.3	Morning.
0:07.1	We're in the Palazzo, Venetia, in Benito Mussolini's cavernous marbled office,
0:13.1	the Sala del Mapamondo.
0:15.9	Other than the huge oak desk and chair,
0:18.2	it contains just a leather couch and an oversized ornamental globe.
0:23.6	Spartan, muscular, intimidating.
0:27.6	At just after 10 a.m., the phone rings.
0:31.6	The call, the house operator informs Yilducci, is most urgent. On the other end of the line is Count
0:39.5	Galliatsu Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and foreign minister. Nothing new there. Chano is
0:47.4	prone to bouts of excitability, though today of all days he has good cause.
0:58.0	Standing before him in the foreign ministry, Chano explains is Lord Perth, the British ambassador to Italy,
1:01.0	and Perth has come brandishing an urgent communique.
1:05.0	It's been cabled directly from Ten Downing Street
1:09.0	at the behest of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
1:13.5	Mussolini takes his time, the theatrics of power, for he knows exactly what this is about.
1:21.2	For the past few days, Europe, the world has been on tenterhooks, all attention focused on
1:27.2	the international crisis brewing over
1:29.2	Czechoslovakia. Hitler is bent on annexing its border region, the Sudatenland, home to 3 million
1:37.0	ethnic Germans. As per the Nazi playbook, the Fuhrer has manufactured a crisis there, a pretext for military action.
1:47.0	Unless the Sudatenland is handed over to Germany by 2pm today, just four hours from now, his stormtroopers will go in.
1:57.0	As upholders of what's left of the crumbling international order, the British and French are now mobilising their own armed forces.
	...

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