added belief that any impartial plebiscite held in Austria
 
would prove that an overwhelming majority of the Austrian
 
people desired to remain within the Reich. I said that the
 
impression I had formed was that the solution of these
 
problems was not an insoluble question, but that it was
 
in every sense secondary and subordinate to the real and
 
practical security of which I had spoken.
 
     Mussolini told me that approximately twelve hours
 
before my return to Rome he had received direct word from Berlin
 
that Hitler wished to confer with him. He told me that the
 
meeting had been arranged for ten A.M. on Monday, March 18th,
 
at the Brenner Pass. He said that throughout the course of
 
Ribbentrop's recent visit to Rome Ribbentrop had insisted that
 
Germany would consider no solution other than a military  victory
 
and that any peace negotiations were impossible. He said that
 
Ribbentrop had stated that Germany would undertake an immediate
 
offensive, that she would conquer France with three or four
 
months and that thereafter Great Britain would rapidly crumble.
 
         Mussolini said that he believed that the German military offen-
 
sire was in fact very close, and that it would be undertaken within a number of hours rather than 
 
within a number of days. As he phrased it, "The minute hand is pointing to one minute
 
before midnight".
 
     He said that if he was to have any success at all in
 
persuading Hitler to postpone the milltary offensive, he must have some hope to offer him that the 
 
Allied Governments would not prove completely intransigent if negotiations were
 
undertaken with regard to German insistence upon "lebensraum".
 
He wished to know whether I would authorize him to communicate Hitler the impressions I had 
 
formed with regard to the possibility of a negotiated solution of territorial and
 
                                   political