Spring in the Axis

The private affairs of rulers become matters of history. Informed quarters in Europe thought last week they had data for a future footnote to the story of the world in 1939:

An active fellow whose 55 years have not impaired his health, Benito Mussolini is not always just a man's man. Last week Europe's gossips were buzzing over II Duce's latest lady. Only her name was still a secret. A bussable blonde, 19, from Hitler's Sudetenland, she has met II Duce at his skiing lodge atop Monte Terminillo,

45 minutes from Rome. Thither, abruptly adjourning affairs of State, Mussolini sped often this spring to enjoy hours on end of skiing. So overpowering did his passion for skiing become that his doctors, alarmed, ordered him to reduce the number of expeditions.

Jealous Romans, constitutionally resentful of Germany, were moved to muttered sympathy toward a dark-eyed, 25-year-old girl their Duce had recently cast off. That long and well-concealed affair ended last autumn. Gossips gave various reasons: 1) she talked too much; 2) she wearied him by demanding favors for her doctor father, for a friend who wanted to write her father's biography, for herself. Whatever the reason for the break, gossips agreed on one point: at the end of the affair, the girl was about to have a baby.

At the other end of the Axis, spring was also in the air. In Munich, dark-haired, buxom Eva Braun, 28, had her apartment rent paid, as usual, by her old friend in Berlin who always comes to see her when he is in town. To her friends Eva Braun confided that she expected her friend to marry her within a year. She did not have to tell them that her friend's name was Adolf Hitler.

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