Benito Mussolini travels by train to Wolfschanze, the so-called Wolf’s Lair, where he and Adolf Hitler continue by plane to Brest-Litovsk, the Soviet fortress city recently captured by the Nazis. Hitler wants to show his ally his recent successes in Russia. Mussolini is taciturn and uncharacteristic, perhaps due to the recent death of his son Bruno. He stops to read the burned letters found on the ground from a Russian soldier and comments: “…how touching. It’s a soldier writing to his sweetheart in Moscow… Like all soldiers in the world, he too has a girlfriend.” Meanwhile, Hitler conspires with his men, asking how his ally knows Russian. They reply that he learned it from Russian lovers he had in Switzerland, including one, a certain Balabanof, rumored to have been Lenin’s lover. On the return journey, the Duce also insists on flying the German plane, and they allow him to win, with the pilots at his side, for a full thirty minutes.
