Fascism

Mussolini had no playbook from which to guide this burgeoning insurrection. He was the undisputed leader of a movement whose direction was not yet defined. The Fascists had developed long lists of goals, but they possessed no single bible or manifesto. To some of its enthusiasts, the fledgling party was a way to rescue capitalism and Roman Catholicism from the Leninist hordes; to others it meant defending tradition and the monarchy. For many it was a chance to bring glory back to Italy; and to quite a few it meant a paycheck and a green light to bash heads.

Mussolini’s own course was marked by zigs and zags. He took money from big corporations and banks, but he spoke the language of veterans and workers. He tried several times to patch relations with the Socialists, only to discover that his former colleagues didn’t trust him and the more extreme Fascists were furious at the attempt. As the political environment continued to worsen, he had to become ever more militant just to keep pace with the forces he purported to command. Asked by a reporter to summarize his program, Mussolini replied, “It is to break the bones of the democrats … and the sooner the better.” In October 1922, he decided to challenge the government directly by mobilizing Fascists from around the country. “Either we are allowed to govern,” he exclaimed to the party conference, “or we will seize power by marching on Rome.”

Given that centrist politicians were divided to the point of paralysis, the responsibility for countering Mussolini’s bold move rested on the narrow shoulders of King Victor Emmanuel. He had to choose between the Socialists who wanted to destroy the monarchy and the roughneck Fascists who might, he hoped, still prove malleable; the middle ground had collapsed. The army and the prime minister advised the king to block the Fascists’ proposed march, arrest Mussolini, and deal with the Socialists separately. The king refused at first, but changed his mind when Fascists began to occupy media sites and government buildings. At 2 a.m. on October 28, he ordered that the Fascists be stopped. Seven hours later, he reversed course again, apparently believing the Fascists could defeat the army, which at that point was almost certainly untrue.

With the military ordered to stand down and tens of thousands of Blackshirts gathering on the edge of the capital, Victor chose what he thought was the safest path. He sent a cable to Mussolini, who was waiting warily in Milan, asking him to Rome to replace the prime minister, who had lost his majority and was serving in the capacity of caretaker. So it was that Mussolini’s gamble paid off. In the space of a weekend, he leapt to the top of the political ladder, and achieved his aim without winning an election or violating the constitution.

On October 31, the five-hour March on Rome took place more as a celebratory parade than the putsch it signified. The event attracted a mixed group and defied any narrow stereotype about what a Fascist should look like or be. Among the marchers were fishermen from Naples striding alongside clerks and shopkeepers while wearing dark jerseys and pilot caps. Farmers from Tuscany wore hunting jackets. A sixteen-year-old high school student, Giovanni Ruzzini, lacked money to buy a new shirt and so dyed an old one black; he also salvaged a military helmet from the local dump. A fair number of those present were barefoot because they couldn’t afford shoes. One man brought along fifty hammer-and-sickle badges, taken, he insisted, from the bodies of dead Communists. The contingent from Grosseto was led by an eighty-year-old blind man who, a half century earlier, had stood with Italy’s greatest general, Garibaldi. Members of the boisterous crowd came equipped with antique muskets, pistols, old safari guns, golf clubs, scythes, table legs, daggers; one man carried an ox’s jawbone, and others lugged potentially lethal hunks of dried salt cod. Most walked, but a wealthy young man from Ascoli Piceno drove up with a machine gun mounted on his Fiat. From Foggia came fifty cavalrymen perched on plow horses. Among those welcoming Fascism and shouting “Viva Mussolini” that day were two hundred Jews.

Despite the impressive spectacle, the party’s political footing was not yet firm. Mussolini’s swift rise had left him vulnerable to an equally rapid fall. The parliament was still dominated by Socialists and liberals, and the conservatives saw the Fascist leader as someone they could hide behind, manipulate, and, when convenient, replace. But Mussolini, soon to be known as Il Duce, had a talent for theater and little respect for the courage of his adversaries. Two weeks after taking office, he made his first address to the legislature. He began by striding into the hall and raising his arm in a Roman salute.fn2 Silently, he scanned the edges of the room, where well-muscled security guards from his own party were lined up on benches, fondling their daggers. Hands on his hips, Mussolini declared, “I could have turned this drab grey hall into a bivouac for my Blackshirts and made an end of parliament. It was in my power to do so, but it was not my wish—at least not yet.”

With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water to arid regions. He gave Italy an eight-hour workday, codified insurance benefits for the elderly and disabled, funded prenatal health care clinics, established seventeen hundred summer camps for children, and dealt the Mafia a blow by suspending the jury system and short-circuiting due process. With no jury members to threaten and judges answerable directly to the state, the courts were as incorruptible as they were docile. Contrary to legend, the dictator didn’t quite succeed in making the trains run on time, but he earned bravos for trying.

From the outset, Mussolini relished the job of governing. He never worked as hard as his publicists suggested, but neither was he a dilettante. Aside from epic-level philandering, a love of swimming, and a taste for swordplay, he had few outside interests. He sought to govern well, but to do that, he felt the need to rule absolutely. He had full trust in his own judgment, and there was no satiating his hunger for power.

In 1924, Mussolini pushed through an electoral law that put Fascists in control of parliament. When the leader of the Socialists produced evidence of vote rigging, he was kidnapped by thugs and murdered. By the end of 1926, Il Duce had abolished all competing political parties, eliminated freedom of the press, neutered the labor movement, and secured the right to name municipal officials himself. To enforce his edicts, he took control of the national police, expanded it, and multiplied its capacity to conduct internal surveillance. To constrain the monarchy, he claimed the power to approve any successor to the king. To mollify the Vatican, he shut down brothels and fattened the stipends of priests, but in return he gained the right to approve all bishops. Looking ahead, he turned schools into human factories, where black-shirted schoolboys marched with muskets, celebrated the prospect of a heroic death, and shouted the Fascist credo: “Believe! Obey! Fight!”

Mussolini told his mistress, “I want to make a mark on my era … like an alien with its claw.” To that dubious end, he exhorted Italians to abandon romantic conceptions about human equality and embrace what he referred to as “the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right,’ a Fascist century.” “Never before,” he said, “have the peoples thirsted for authority, direction, order, as they do now. If each age has its doctrine, then … the doctrine of our age is Fascism.”

Even an aroused citizenry can’t remain forever in a state of mobilization if it lacks a sense of forward movement. Mussolini supplied this through his grandiose rhetoric, which evoked the image of a dominant Italy, reborn with more spazio vitale (living space), holding sway throughout the Mediterranean. The road to this paradise was war, which Mussolini urged Italians to embrace, renouncing all comforts. “Live dangerously,” he beseeched them. To back his words, he embarked on an aggressive foreign policy that placed intense pressure on Albania, then invaded a nearly defenseless Ethiopia, the last independent kingdom in Africa. To raise money for this brutal venture, Italy’s women, led by Queen Elena, donated their wedding rings to be melted down into gold or exchanged for cash; Italian women abroad were encouraged to do the same, and thousands did. Mussolini described the Ethiopia expedition as “the greatest colonial war in all history.” When machine guns and poison gas forced that country to surrender, he called on his people to “raise up your banners, stretch forth your arms, lift up your hearts and sing to the empire which appears in being after fifteen centuries on the fateful hills of Rome.”

Mussolini was not a keen judge of individuals, but he was sure he knew what the mass of people wanted: a show. He compared the mob to women who are helpless (he fantasized) in the presence of strong men. He posed for pictures in the government-controlled media while driving a sports car, standing sans shirt in a wheat field, riding his white stallion, FruFru, and posing in his military uniform, complete with shiny boots and a chest bedecked with medals. He accepted invitations to every wedding, factory opening, and patriotic event his schedule would allow.

When giving a speech, he stood on a small platform (as I do) to appear taller. He sometimes claimed credit (as I do not) for the sun breaking through the clouds just prior to an address. In addition to the inevitable Blackshirts, his usual audience included soldiers in khaki field uniforms, peasant women in white-sleeved dresses, and members of the squadristi, the Fascist veterans of the early days, wearing red-and-yellow sashes. To the side might be a small group of foreign reporters who would be pointed to and mocked by preliminary speakers, then greeted by the audience with catcalls and boos. Finally, in the words of a contemporary witness, “when Signor Mussolini stepped out, the crowd seemed to lift itself up as bayonets, daggers, caps and handkerchiefs were waved in the air amid deafening shouts.”

During the peak years of his reign, the great man’s image was displayed on products ranging from hair tonic and baby food to lingerie and pasta. When a would-be assassin shot him in the nose, he slapped on a bandage and went ahead, later the same day, with a speech to a conference of surgeons, telling them that he would now put himself in their hands. He commissioned street banners bearing the declaration IF I ADVANCE, FOLLOW ME; IF I RETREAT, KILL ME; IF I DIE, AVENGE ME! He put foundries to work building a bronze statue, never completed, of a 260-foot-tall figure looking down on the cupola of Saint Peter’s, its body that of a half-naked Hercules and its face a dead ringer for Il Duce.

By the late 1930s, the adoration accorded him had reached the level of parody. Visitors to his office were expected to run the twenty yards between the door and Mussolini’s desk before halting and raising their arm in the Fascist salute, then, when exiting, reverse the process.

For all his success as a politician, he was not comfortable as a diplomat. This was an age when international affairs in Western Europe were still primarily the province of aristocrats proud of their tailored suits, refined manners, and ability to banter about trivialities for hours at a time. Before becoming prime minister, Mussolini had never worn formal clothes. He had not learned which spoon or fork to use at a social dinner. He didn’t think it sanitary to shake hands, didn’t smoke, and had no taste for liquor, not even Italy’s fine wine. He was a poor listener who disliked hearing other people talk. He was loath to spend nights away from his own bed, and the time he allotted for meals—either alone or with his family—averaged about three minutes.

Mussolini promised to make Italy unfathomably rich, but economics was a second arena where he failed to shine. He thought a great country required a robust currency and so pegged the lira to the dollar, causing an abrupt increase in public debt, a problem made worse by his failure to understand how interest rates worked. He promoted the idea of national self-sufficiency without ever grasping how unrealistic that ambition had become. He sought to bring labor and management together but ended up creating a haphazardly organized and inefficient corporate state. He emphasized wheat production when prices were low while neglecting other crops that would have yielded more revenue. These errors might have been avoided had he appointed good advisers and heeded their counsel. Instead he discouraged his cabinet from proposing any idea that might cause him to doubt his instincts, which were, he insisted, always right. He told a gathering of intellectuals, “Only one person in Italy is infallible,” and said to a reporter, “Often, I would like to be wrong, but so far it has never happened.”

As the 1930s wore on, the new Roman empire, the Fascist empire, was beginning to fray. As a circus master, Mussolini was still without peer, but Italy lacked the resources—and he the strategic prowess—to transform the political map of Europe. Not so Adolf Hitler.

THREE

“WE WANT TO BE BARBARIANS”

Heidelberg, Germany: That night at the Inn, I noticed that a lint-haired young man at the next table was fixing me with an icy gleam … He suddenly rose with a stumble, came over, and said: “So? Ein Engländer?” with a sardonic smile. “Wunderbar!” Then his face changed to a mask of hate. Why had we stolen Germany’s colonies? Why shouldn’t Germany have a fleet and a proper army? Did I think Germany was going to take orders from a country run by the Jews? A catalogue of accusation followed, not very loud, but clearly and intensely articulated. His face, which was almost touching mine, raked me with long blasts of schnapps-breath. “Adolf Hitler will change all that,” he ended. “Perhaps you’ve heard the name?”

—MEMOIR OF A BRITISH TRAVELER, DECEMBER 1933

ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 23, 1933, AN ENORMOUS BANNER stretched across the front wall of the Kroll Opera House, in Berlin. At its center was a giant swastika, symbol of the Nazis.fn1 The Opera House was the temporary home of the Reichstag, the German parliament, whose permanent headquarters had been ravaged by arson four weeks earlier. Approaching the lectern was the country’s new chancellor, an Austrian by birth, who on January 30 had assumed power not via popular acclaim but because he commanded the most violent gangs and had Communists for enemies. The building in which he was about to speak was guarded on the outside by Heinrich Himmler’s secret police and on the inside by the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi paramilitary force, already larger than the German army.

Adolf Hitler spoke quietly, in a soothing tone. The forty-three-year-old appealed to the legislators for their trust, hoping that they would not think too hard before voting themselves into oblivion. His goal was to secure approval of a law authorizing him to ignore the constitution, bypass the Reichstag, and govern by decree. He assured his listeners that they had nothing to worry about; his party had no intention of undermining German institutions. Should they pass the law, the parliament would remain intact, freedom of speech would be unhindered, the rights of the Church would not be altered, and Christian values would, as ever, still be cherished. The powers requested under the “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and Reich” would be used only to shield the country from its adversaries. There was no need for concern: legislators could count on the Nazis to act in good faith.

The chancellor sat down so that the leaders of other parties could have their say. One by one, the Catholics, conservatives, and centrists fell in line and slipped Hitler’s bit between their teeth. Only the spokesman for the Social Democrats resisted, saying that to be defenseless did not mean to be without honor. Hitler, no longer the conciliator, stormed back to the rostrum. “I do not want your votes,” he screamed at the Socialists. “The star of Germany is in the ascendant, yours is about to disappear, your death knell has sounded.”

The legislators cast their votes, approving the Enabling Law by a wide margin. Within weeks, the compliant political parties were abolished and the Socialists put under arrest. The Third Reich had begun.

ADOLF HITLER WAS BORN ON APRIL 20, 1889, IN RURAL BRAUNAU, near the frontier between Austria and Bavaria. The son of a minor civil servant and an indulgent mother, he developed into a mediocre student, described by a teacher as “cantankerous, willful, arrogant, and … lazy.” Leaving school at sixteen, he embarked on what seemed an unpromising career, filling sketchbooks with architectural drawings, falling in love with Wagnerian opera, and applying without success to prestigious art schools. He spent his early twenties bedding down in a men’s hostel in Vienna, doing odd jobs, selling small paintings for modest sums, and reading prolifically. To an observer, the young man might have appeared unattractive, malnourished, ill-housed, underemployed, and without close friends; but in his own eyes Hitler was one of the elect, a superior being. His acquaintances found him full of unrealistic ideas, passionate about politics, and almost always livid about the folly of others. He scorned the laboring class for swallowing the bromides of Socialists and priests. He vilified the Reichstag for doing nothing in the face of dire threats to the nation, and he embraced theories—then widespread—about the evildoing and monstrous conspiracies of Jews.

Hitler, at twenty-five, welcomed the start of World War I. He enlisted in the Bavarian Army, saw combat at the outset, then, for four years, served as a courier between the regimental headquarters and the front lines. Unlike many soldiers, he did not complain about the war, which he considered an opportunity for the German people to show their mettle. In October 1916 he suffered a leg injury, but he returned to duty in the spring and was promoted to lance corporal. In the summer of 1918, he was exposed to a gas attack that temporarily blinded him.

His sight returned in November, but with it came the shock of Germany’s defeat. The government in Berlin had, until that final autumn, spoken only of victory and the rich rewards an end to the conflict would bring. Instead the silencing of the guns had been accompanied by the dishonor of surrender and so, also, the victors’ demand for blood money, the loss of territory, and the dissolution of the imperial regime. To Hitler and many other soldiers, this startling and humiliating outcome was not something they could accept. The war had reduced the ranks of German men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two by a numbing 35 percent. The fighting and economic deprivation pulverized the nation. In the minds of enraged survivors, the cause of their disgrace had nothing to do with events on the battlefield: Germany had been betrayed, they told themselves, by a treasonous cabal of greedy bureaucrats, Bolsheviks, bankers, and Jews.

The abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II led to the installation of multiparty democracy at an inauspicious time. The new Weimar Republic confronted a spiteful Europe, an indifferent America, and a wounded citizenry. As the government, it could not avoid responsibility for the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty, which dictated that Germany accept blame for the war, disarm, cede territory, and pay reparations. The republic’s leaders were held accountable, as well, for the hyperinflation that soon followed, wiping out the life savings of many in the middle class. As in Italy, the conflict’s end prompted agitation on the part of labor unions, with frequent strikes and protests, while millions of soldiers returned from the front, scarred in body and mind, scrounging for jobs that weren’t there. Feelings of alienation were amplified by the sense Germans had developed of themselves during the nineteenth century as the custodians of a nation apart, with a divine mission and a unique cultural heritage. They were winners, were they not?—but now they felt lost.

In the fall of 1919, Hitler joined the Bavaria-based German Workers’ Party, a group of rabble-rousing nationalists so small that it had immediate room for him within its leadership. Though in truth the fifty-fifth member, he was designated “party comrade 555,” to give the appearance of larger numbers. Put in charge of propaganda, Hitler began holding public meetings and sought to attract new members through a platform demanding the abrogation of the Versailles Treaty, the unification of all Germans, the exclusion of Jews from citizenship, and share-the-wealth measures directed at the rich. To seduce the left, the movement changed its name to “National Socialist German Workers Party”—or Nazis.

Early on, Hitler forged an alliance with army captain Ernst Röhm, who began to steer veterans toward the new party. Röhm organized his recruits into a militia, the Sturmabteilung, with the mission of beating up Communists; he also stole money from the army to finance a newspaper. The party’s biggest asset, however, was the man its members referred to as “the drummer,” its public voice.

Now in his early thirties, Hitler was an undisciplined but mesmerizing orator. The Iron Cross he had earned while in the military steeled his nerve, and his time on the streets gave him an intuitive sense of what delighted audiences—and it wasn’t abstract theories or objective arguments. He used simple words and did not hesitate to tell what he later described as “colossal untruths.” He sought to incite hatred toward those he considered traitors—the “November criminals” whose treachery had cost Germany the war—and he returned each day to what Nietzsche had called the ideology “of those who feel cheated”: anti-Semitism.

Speaking in town squares, beer halls, and circus tents, Hitler employed over and over again the same action verbs—smash, destroy, annihilate, kill. In a typical address, he would shout himself into a lather of arm-flailing, screaming fury at the nation’s enemies, only to grow abruptly calm as he painted a word picture of what a new era of German ascendance might look like. Gradually, party membership expanded and so did the show-business aspects. The Nazis adopted a stiff-armed salute and—in another bow to Mussolini—started wearing brown shirts. They organized rallies, at which Röhm’s swelling cadre of thugs conveyed an aura of menace. Hitler designed a flag in the colors of the old German Republic. “We National Socialists,” he wrote, “regarded our flag as being the embodiment of our party programme. The red expressed the social thought underlying the movement. White the national thought. And the swastika signified the mission allotted to us—the struggle for the victory of Aryan mankind.” These efforts paid off; the Nazi Party was establishing a presence, but—amid the chaos of the early 1920s—few were paying close attention.

In November 1923, Hitler’s impatience got the better of his judgment and he tried to replicate Mussolini’s already legendary March on Rome. It was a harebrained scheme. The Nazis hoped to spark a nationwide coup by seizing control of Bavaria, but to prevail, they needed the army’s support, which they didn’t get. The ringleaders were arrested and the coup went nowhere. Of the conspirators, Hitler alone was brazen enough to admit that he had intended to overthrow the government. In his first appearance on the national stage, he made the case for an uprising that would cleanse all Germany, then told the court that he had no choice but to perform his duty as “a man born to be a dictator.” Given a five-year sentence, he was released on probation after thirteen months, having made productive use of his time. The manuscript tucked under Hitler’s arm as he exited the prison bore the title Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice, later shortened by his publisher to volume one of My Struggle—or Mein Kampf.