Hitler and Mussolini met for the last time on July 20, 1944, in the Führer Headquarters (Wolf’s Lair) in East Prussia, shortly after Count von Stauffenberg carried out his assassination attempt on Hitler. Hitler greeted his guest at the train with a cry of terror, “Duce, they just unleashed a hellish machine on me”. As photos show, the two dictators stood a little later stunned by the debris of the barracks where the assassination attempt had been carried out. In the short conversation that followed, Hitler, not quite ready to keep up with the events, showed himself to be unusually accommodating to some of Mussolini’s wishes. Mussolini did at least manage to improve the status of the original 600,000 so-called “civilian internees”, i.e. the Fascist soldiers captured by the Wehrmacht after September 8, 1943. On leaving, Hitler is to have said goodbye to Mussolini with remarkable sentimentality: “I know that I can count on you. I ask you to believe that I consider you my best and only friend in the world”.