Pictured: Fascist politicians (notably Galeazzo Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop) signing the Pact of Steel in Berlin.

Quoting Christian Goeschel’s Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance, pages 157–158:

After a fortnight, Ciano and Ribbentrop signed the treaty in Hitler’s presence on 22 May 1939 in the Reich Chancellery. Mussolini was absent, as another trip to [the Third Reich] within a short time would have further undermined his domestic reputation. In fact, the location of the signing ceremony reinforced the view that [the Third Reich], not [Fascist] Italy, was the senior power.

The name of the alliance, Pact of Steel, displayed the aggressive and supposedly robust foundations of the alliance, which was implicitly unlike the pre‐1914 secretive alliances. (Mussolini had initially preferred the term ‘Pact of Blood’, reflecting his belief in the transformative quality of war.) A propaganda pamphlet issued by the Ministry of Popular Culture insisted that this was an alliance that departed from earlier pacts.

The pamphlet located the history of the pact in 1935–6, when [Berlin] had supported [Rome] in the Ethiopian campaign, and presented it as historically inevitable. Documents, including Hitler’s and Mussolini’s various pro‐Axis declarations, alongside bulletins from the Stefani news agency, were used to illustrate this point. Crucially, the pamphlet reprinted the king’s endorsement of the pact and included his telegrams to Hitler and Ciano in which he had congratulated them on the occasion of the signing of the pact.

This was a strategy to represent the pact as the fulfilment of the desires of the Italian nation as a whole and not just of the Fascists. Hitler and Mussolini were given ample space in the pamphlet. Hitler had emphasised the ‘unbreakable commonality of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany consecrated in a solemn treaty’, while Mussolini, echoing a similar sentiment, had insisted that there was ‘the unbreakable union of our will’. As usual, these declarations remained vague and lofty.¹²³

Other propaganda messages went even further. For example, the Italien‐Beobachter titled a cover story ‘Linked for Life and Death!’, giving the pact an existential meaning. The cover story of Il Popolo d’Italia emphasised the military strength of the Italian Empire and menacingly insisted that ‘against the power of the Axis, there is nothing to do’. Goebbels, still doubtful whether the Italians would honour the treaty, observed Hitler’s joy at having sealed the alliance with [Rome].¹²⁴

If the style of the propaganda on the pact had emphasised unity, so did the substance of the treaty. The pact prescribed mutual consultation of foreign and military policies. This [might have been] wishful thinking, given the [sometime] mistrust that characterised the relationship between both countries and their leaders, who had failed to consult each other on several previous occasions such as the Anschluss and the invasion of Albania.

At Mussolini’s behest, this clause was superseded by a paragraph which committed both allies go to war if either of the signatories found itself involved in war‐like conditions. This clause went way beyond other defensive military treaties and reflected the aggressive nature of the Axis.¹²⁵

Through a combination of Mussolini’s boasting and Ciano’s incompetence at the negotiations, [Fascist] Italy had effectively given carte blanche to the Third Reich.¹²⁶ For Hitler, the pact gave him backing for the planned invasion of Poland. Although Mussolini and Ciano later claimed that they had not known about [Berlin’s] plans for an attack on Poland, Ribbentrop’s briefing notes for his conversation clearly discuss a possibility of war with that country.¹²⁷ Yet, days after the signing of the pact, Mussolini panicked.

After seventeen years of Fascist rule, Italy was not ready for a modern war, not least because of its lack of equipment and insufficiently trained troops and officers. The Duce thus sent General Ugo Cavallero to [the Third Reich], with a memorandum stipulating that [Fascist] Italy needed peace for at least three years.

The myths of a peace‐minded Duce and a secret clause to the Pact of Steel committing [Fascist] Italy and [the Third Reich] to a period of three or four years of peace became part of the Italian political and diplomatic élites’ wider strategy after 1945 to dissociate Italy from responsibility for the Axis alliance and the Second World War [in Europe].¹²⁸

(Emphasis added.)