Stresa front
The Stresa Front was an interwar agreement confirming the Locarno Treaties . It was the United Kingdom , France and Italy participated. It was agreed between April 11 and 14, 1935 in Stresa , near Lake Maggiore .
The reason for the agreement was Germany's declaration , one month old at the time , that any arms restrictions of the Versailles Treaty would be considered null and void. Hitler justified this by extending the service in the French army as well as renewing the Franco-Belgian military agreement (which in turn was a reaction to Hitler's refusal to extend the Locarno treaties).
Mussolini feared a German alliance with Austria and hoped that the rapprochement with France and Great Britain would make concessions in his expansion plans against Ethiopia . The French Prime Minister Pierre Laval signaled French concessions, while Great Britain referred to domestic public opinion in the upcoming elections. At the instigation of France and Italy, only peace in Europe was mentioned in the final communique . Mussolini saw this as a diplomatic success for his military expansion plans in East Africa and trusted that Britain would not endanger the alliance against Hitler because of Ethiopia in the event of war.
The Stresa front only lasted about two months. Great Britain, which as one of the victorious powers of the First World War concluded the naval agreement with Germany, had thereby undermined the requirements of the Versailles Treaty on the size of Germany's army and fleet . Adolf Hitler thus achieved a foreign policy success that seemed to legitimize the armament of the Wehrmacht .
Individual evidence
- ^ John Ashley Soames Grenville: A History of the World from the 20th to the 21st Century . Routledge 2005, ISBN 0-415-28954-8 , p. 211.
- ^ Robert Mallett: The Italian Navy and Fascist Expansionism, 1935-1940 . Frank Cass 1998, ISBN 0-7146-4878-7 , p. 21 f.