Mussolini - The Founder of Fascism Documentary

The man known to history as Benito Mussolini was born on the 29th of July 1883 in the small town of Dovia di Predappio in the Emilia-Romagna region of central Italy. His full baptismal name was Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini. Amilcare comes from Hamilcar, the given name of a Carthaginian general of the third century BC who was one of the Roman Republic’s great nemeses during the era of the Punic Wars, and the father of Hannibal who famously marched over the Alps to strike at Rome during the Second Punic War. The Carthaginian middle name is a somewhat ironic

one for Mussolini to have had, given that he later viewed himself as a leader who was restoring Italy to the greatness it had enjoyed in Roman times. Benito’s father was Alessandro Mussolini, a blacksmith who was very interested in politics and engaged in revolutionary socialist movements in Italy from a young age. He spent several years in the late 1870s and early 1880s under a form of house arrest as a result of his political activities and was only given his liberty a year before Benito’s birth. Benito’s mother was Rosa Maltoni. She and Alessandro had just married in

1882 and Benito was their first child. Two others, another boy named Arnaldo and a daughter whom they named Edvige, followed in 1885 and 1888. Rosa worked as a schoolteacher and was also a politically conscious woman. She and Alessandro named their eldest son after Benito Juárez, the president of Mexico for much of the period between 1858 and 1872 who had led the liberal resistance in the country to the French intervention in its politics and the establishment of Maximilian Habsburg as Emperor of Mexico between 1864 and 1867. Mussolini would grow up in a country that was experiencing

mixed fortunes. The Kingdom of Italy had only come into existence in 1861 after centuries of the peninsula being divided up into city states of varying size. It managed to quickly acquire further territory in the north from Austria during a brief war in 1866 and then Rome was captured from the Papacy in 1870 after French troops were withdrawn there, following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. On top of this the country was able to emerge between the 1880s and the 1910s as one of the major European colonial powers, acquiring control of large parts of the Horn

of Africa, as well as gaining concessions in the ports of China. In 1911 control was also established over Libya, while the following year the Eastern Mediterranean island of Rhodes was secured from the Ottoman Empire. At home the country’s politics was fairly liberal and progressive, with a mix of Christian democrats, socialists and liberals holding power from 1861 down to 1914. However, there were problems too. Italy was one of the most densely populated parts of Europe upon unification in 1861 and large parts of the peninsula, especially in the south and on the islands, were incredibly poor. Successive

governments failed to address the economic problems of the state and emigration levels were enormously high between 1861 and 1914, leading to somewhere in the region of fifteen million Italians leaving their homeland for the United States, Argentina and other countries, an indictment of Italy’s inability to provide opportunities of any kind for so many of its citizens. Mussolini was strongly influenced by his parents in his early political outlook, particularly his father’s views on republicanism and socialism. He attended two different schools in the Emilia-Romagna region at Faenza and Forlimpopoli. At both he clashed with his teachers and was

eventually removed from the first at Faenza owing to his violent behaviour, a development which disappointed his mother, a devout Roman Catholic who had sent him to Faenza to be educated by the monks there. He was then sent to Forlimpopoli, where he also ran into difficulty. Nevertheless, he was acknowledged as being an intelligent child and when he was just eighteen years old, in 1901, he managed to graduate with a diploma to become a schoolteacher at the elementary level. Beyond this, his more unofficial education was obtained in his father’s forge, where father and son often conversed about

a wide range of political ideas, notably socialism and the anarchism which was emanating from Russia and other places at the time. In the summer of 1902, Mussolini delivered a public speech on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the leader of the Wars of Italian Unification a half a century earlier. Despite obtaining a diploma to work as a teacher, Mussolini soon discovered that he had little interest in his mother’s profession. Instead he was drawn to writing and politics and decided to become a journalist, a profession which combined the two. He did so initially

from Switzerland, where he relocated to in 1902 in order to avoid compulsory military service in Italy. In the Alpine country he became a committed socialist and began to run into legal difficulty for his role in organising worker strikes there. He eventually returned home late in 1904 and undertook his military service over the next two years, a homecoming which sadly was followed not long after by the premature death of his mother at 46 years of age from meningitis. From 1909 onwards he was living in the Alpine city of Trento in what is now northern Italy, but

which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here he worked for a local socialist party and as a journalist, while also continuing to read widely. His politics were largely those of communists and socialists and he taught himself German in order to read the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the co-authors of The Communist Manifesto. In a sign of just how different his early politics were to those of the older Mussolini, he protested against the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911. He was undoubtedly a communist during these years. He was also extremely well-read and a

prolific writer, often producing work under the nom de guerre, Vero Eretico, meaning ‘Sincere Heretic’ or ‘True Heretic’, When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914 Mussolini was initially opposed to Italian entry into it. The Italian government of the day, despite its longstanding alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, took a similar view and remained neutral for the time being. When it did finally enter the war in 1915, it did so on the side of Britain, France and Russia, the primary goal being to obtain lands from Austria-Hungary which many Italians considered to be Italian

sovereign territory. Mussolini soon changed his mind as well. In November 1914 he founded a newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, The People of Italy, in Milan, one which took a pro-war stance. This volte-face in his views on the war saw Mussolini expelled from the Italian Socialist Party. This period was the critical one in terms of his shifting political stance and Benito now founded a new political party. He named it the Fascio Rivoluzionario d’Azione Internazionalista, meaning ‘Revolutionary Fasces of International Action’. The term ‘Fasces’ comes from an old Latin term for a bundle of rods or a sheaf. In

the Kingdom of Italy in the late nineteenth century it had emerged as a term to describe a strong, united group of political actors. It is from this which the term fascism would ultimately derive and Mussolini’s followers soon became known as fascisti or fascists. In line with his newfound emphasis on nationalism and socialism, Mussolini volunteered for military service. After some initial reservations about calling him up owing to his history as a revolutionary socialist, he was drafted at the end of August 1915 and would fight in several engagements against the Austro-Hungarians along the Isonzo River at what

is now the border between Italy and Slovenia. He was commended for his service between 1915 and early 1917 and promoted to the rank of corporal. His war ended when a mortar shell exploded near him in a trench, wounding him considerably and leaving him with dozens of shards of metal in his body. Throughout this period he became more and more disillusioned with his previous beliefs in revolutionary socialism of the communist variety and now moved towards a more extreme nationalist bent. Thus, as the war was coming to an end Mussolini began advocating for a revitalisation of Italy

to become a great power and to acquire spazio vitale, literally meaning ‘living space’, the idea that Italy should expand to conquer land around the Mediterranean Sea which the Roman Empire had once ruled over. The idea would later be paralleled in the Nazi concept of acquiring lebensraum in Eastern Europe. In this Mussolini was influenced by Giuseppe Bottai, a figure he met in 1919 and who would be a major figure in the conceptualisation of Italian fascism. The years of the First World War were also important in Mussolini’s personal life. Around the time the war broke out, he

had married Ida Dalser, the daughter of a former mayor of Trento who had studied cosmetics in Paris. They probably met in Trento while Mussolini was working there and she subsequently relocated to Milan with him, with Ida often supporting him financially based on her family’s wealth and her work as a beautician. The marriage did not last long. They divorced in 1915, though not before she fell pregnant and gave birth to Benito Albino. Benito Snr’s subsequent treatment of his first wife and son was appalling. He did not support them in any way and after he came to

power in 1922 he had them placed under police observation as he repeatedly denied ever having been married to Dalser. He also had records of their marriage systematically destroyed though one court record has survived in a Milanese archive that proves that they were married. Eventually Ida died living in semi-house arrest in 1937 under suspicious circumstances, while Benito Albino was placed in an asylum on account of his repeated claims to be Mussolini’s son. He died there in 1942. As soon as he divorced Ida in 1915, Mussolini married Rachele Guidi, his mistress of several years and the mother

of his daughter, Edda, born in 1910. She hailed from Predappio as well and her widowed mother had been in a relationship with Benito’s father after his mother died in 1905. They would have four further children, three sons, Vittorio, Bruno and Romano, and another daughter, Anna Maria, born between 1916 and 1929. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War there was a strong view held by many people in Italy that they had been betrayed in the peace settlements that followed between 1919 and 1922. This quickly became known as the ‘mutilated victory’ after a term coined

by the prominent Italian writer and politician, Gabriele D’Annunzio. Italy had entered the war in 1915 on the side of Britain, France and Russia on the basis that it would receive a considerable amount of territory from the Austro-Hungarian Empire once the conflict was over, specifically lands in the Alpine South Tyrol bordering northern Italy and along the Istria and Dalmatian coast on the eastern side of the Adriatic where Slovenia, Croatia and Italy meet today. These were lands which many viewed as intrinsically part of historic Italy. Many Italian nationalists also sought control over Albania, a country which had

been ruled by Italian powers at various times in the ancient and medieval past. Some of these demands were met in the peace negotiations, but Albania became an independent country once again and Italy did not receive all of the territory it had sought on the eastern side of the Adriatic, some of which instead went to the Kingdom of Croats, Serbs and Slovenes that would later become Yugoslavia. This, along with the country’s enduring economic problems, meant that while Italy was one of the victorious powers in the First World War, it did not feel that way for many

Italians. Mussolini’s nascent fascist movement evolved quickly between 1919 and 1922 to take advantage of this sense of Italian alienation. In March 1919 he founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan, which transliterates as ‘Italian Fighting Bands’, a clear sign of the shift towards a more militant politics. They soon were forming Squadrismo, squads of black-shirted paramilitaries or squadristi who in the febrile atmosphere of Italian and European politics in the post-war era attacked people of Slavic heritage in Italian cities and towns, the perceived enemy of Italy in the contested Adriatic coastal regions. In a striking sign of

Mussolini’s break from his radical socialist past, the Blackshirts were also soon involved in running battles with communists in northern Italy, notably during a general strike in Milan in 1920. The Blackshirts were the first of numerous fascist paramilitary organisations that would appear in Europe over the next decade or so, others being the SA Brownshirts of the Nazis, the Blackshirts of Oswald Mosley in Britain and the Greenshirts of the Yugoslav Radical Union in the Balkans. The Blackshirts in Italy would remain a feature of Mussolini’s organisations even after he established a new party again in 1921. This was

one known as the Partito Nazionale Fascista, or National Fascist Party. It would be the first fascist party to seize power anywhere in Europe. What is perhaps most striking about Mussolini’s movement is the speed with which he managed to secure power. The National Fascist Party was established in November 1921 and less than a year later Mussolini was in charge of Italy. In the 1921 general election, while still campaigning as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, Mussolini and his followers had won 35 seats in a general election as part of the wider National Bloc. The same election ended

in a deeply divided parliament and Italy’s unstable post-war politics continued. Indeed, the situation became worse, as Mussolini began engaging in a fascist insurgency whereby he sought to destabilise the country and present his National Fascist Party as the most suitable option to stabilise the situation. Matters boiled over into disorder in August 1922 when Mussolini’s Blackshirts effectively seized control of Milan, attacking socialist organisations all over the city and appointing their own members to municipal offices. When the national government in Rome did little to stop him in Milan, Mussolini was emboldened. He now began preparing to march on

Rome, principally from Milan, but also ordering units of squadristi to do so from Naples and other towns and cities. The March on Rome commenced on the 28th of October 1922 and would end three days later with somewhere over 25,000 Blackshirts involved. Mussolini himself did not lead the march, though he did appear at critical junctures to be opportunely photographed as though he did. It all had the desired effect. King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini as the new Prime Minister of Italy on the 30th of October. The following day, the Blackshirts parading through the Eternal City, he

formed the first fascist government the world had seen. Mussolini did not immediately acquire dictatorial powers. It was a gradual process in the first two or three years that he was in office. A number of events helped him consolidate his control over Italy. In August 1923 an Italian diplomat named Enrico Tellini was killed while adjudicating on a border dispute between Greece and Albania. Mussolini responded by invading the Greek island of Corfu in September. He subsequently relinquished control of the island, but extorted fifty million lire off the Greek government in return for doing so, while the Corfu

Incident also helped quell Greek calls for the return of Rhodes and the other Dodecanese Islands in Italian possession. It hugely bolstered Mussolini’s reputation in Italy, seemingly proving that a fascist leader was capable of asserting a strong Italian international presence. Just two months after this the Acerbo Law was passed, which dictated that the party which received the most votes in an Italian election would receive two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. This was employed when a new election was held in April 1924. While the election itself was somewhat fair, the application of the wildly undemocratic Acerbo Law ensured

Mussolini completely controlled the parliament that resulted from it. Finally, in 1926 all other political parties other than Mussolini’s National Fascist Party were banned, completing the transition to a one-party dictatorship. In line with this, Mussolini increasingly became known as Il Duce, ‘The Leader’, a title which Adolf Hitler would later adopt in Germany, though using the Germanic Fuhrer. The question arises from all of this as to what extent Mussolini was the architect of European fascism, an ideology that would be adopted by a wide range of countries across Europe in the 1930s. There is no denying that Mussolini

was a pivotal figure in this, not simply because it was he that led the National Fascist Party and the Blackshirts to power, but also because he wrote extensively on the topic in numerous essays and books in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’, an essay he produced in 1927. Yet others were just as significant, notably the political philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, who served as the Minister for Education early on in Mussolini’s government. Gentile composed a work entitled ‘Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals’ in 1925 following the Conference of Fascist Culture in Bologna that March,

and many other Italian intellectuals signed it. He was also probably involved in writing the first draft of Mussolini’s ‘Doctrine of Fascism’. There were numerous others who were just as involved in the origins of fascism. For instance, though he would come to oppose Mussolini’s regime, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the prominent political figure and writer who devised the concept of a ‘mutilated victory’ for Italy after the First World War, was a major inspiration for Mussolini’s ideas. One element of fascist movements seen elsewhere in Europe which Mussolini was most certainly the creator of was the concept of a fascist secret

police. In 1927, as he continued his consolidation of power, Mussolini established the Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo, the Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. This forerunner of the Gestapo in Germany would eventually grow to about 50,000 operatives and was responsible for carrying out thousands of raids and interviews every week at the height of their efforts to crush any activities they deemed anti-fascist. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS, would subsequently visit Italy to see the OVRA in action. Not everyone looking on at the development of the Italian police state in the 1920s and 1930s

was appalled. For instance, Winston Churchill, the future wartime leader of Britain, expressed some admiration for what Mussolini had achieved in bringing stability to Italy and reducing lawlessness, as did many other international leaders. A part of this was owing to the manner in which Mussolini and the Italian fascists seemed to have bridled the Mafia in Sicily, with Mussolini’s appointee, Cesare Mori, overseeing an immensely successful campaign of repression against the Sicilian crime syndicate between 1925 and 1929. Another element of European fascism which Mussolini pioneered was the development of a cult of personality. His public image was carefully

cultivated. Newspapers and other elements of the Italian media were closely censored to present a particular view of him and a popular phrase of the time was “Il Duce ha sempre ragione”, ‘The leader is always right’. Mussolini’s relatively young age when he seized power, he being still in his late thirties when the March on Rome occurred, was made note of in fascist propaganda and his perceived athleticism became a feature of the personality cult around him. This in turn fed into the encouragement of fascist youth organisations, while sport became a particular element of fascist concern in Italy.

In 1928 work commenced on the Foro Mussolini in central Rome, today’s Foro Italico. Modelled on the forums built by the Roman emperors in central Rome, Mussolini’s Forum was a giant sports complex complete with stadiums, tennis courts and other facilities. Mussolini hoped to hold the 1940 Summer Olympics here, though in the end these games, which were ultimately cancelled, were awarded to Tokyo. In 1934 the FIFA World Cup was held in Italy. It proved to be a major boon to Mussolini’s regime, as Italy won the tournament at home, defeating Czechoslovakia in the final. The team followed up

their success when they retained their title in France in 1938. Legend has it that Mussolini telegrammed the team in Paris before the final against Hungary with a message saying ‘Win or die!’ Many other aspects of Italian culture were employed by Mussolini’s fascist government to galvanise their own position, most notably the country’s history and culture, with a very conscious effort being made to tie the new Italy to the power of the Roman Empire two millennia earlier. As much as sport, propaganda or any cult of personality might have improved the image of the fascist government, a powerful

way for Mussolini to forge support for his position was to create good economic circumstances. The fascists had largely come to power in 1922 because of the economic and political chaos which had enveloped Italy for several years after the war. Mussolini benefited enormously from the fact that he came to power just as the European economy as a whole was beginning to stabilise and enter a period of enormous economic growth, the Roaring Twenties. The fascists favoured a corporatist economic system, one which sought to promote and develop the Italian economy over the importation of foreign goods. This led

Mussolini to engage in protectionist measures, such as the imposition of high tariffs on foreign imports in order to promote domestic industry. Some measures during the era had lasting benefits, most notably the draining of the Pontine Marshes, a large swamp south of Rome which had been a breeding-ground for malaria in central Italy for thousands of years. From the late 1920s onwards a policy of draining these extensive lands and creating model new towns like Latina, Pontinia and Pomezia was undertaken. It was an immensely successful initiative. Nevertheless, more broadly the Great Depression hit Italy just as badly as

the rest of Europe, giving the lie to the 1930s myth that fascism was a more effective economic system. Ultimately Mussolini ordered the mass state takeover of the Italian economy and it would take until the mid-1950s before Italy returned to the economic output seen in 1929 before the Depression began. There has been much controversy over the years concerning Mussolini’s approach to the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican, not least because of the controversial relationship between the Nazis and Pope Pius XII. For Mussolini’s career the more substantial pontiff was Pope Pius XI, who became Pope early in

1922, nine months before Mussolini became Prime Minister. He would serve as Bishop of Rome until 1939. Mussolini was an atheist, though his mother had been a devout Catholic and he was somewhat sympathetic to the church. In an effort to resolve some of the tensions between church and state, which were complicated in Italy by the unresolved issue of political jurisdiction in Rome itself, Mussolini negotiated the Lateran Treaty in 1929. This resolved the longstanding ‘Roman Question’, the unsettled issue of the political status of the Papacy. The Lateran Treaty effectively created the Vatican City as an independent microstate

within the city of Rome. The Pope proclaimed Mussolini as a, quote, “man of providence” and an alliance was developed with the Papacy in what was still a profoundly Catholic country. Throughout these years Mussolini still continued to play the part of a happily married man and his second wife, Rachele, would remain married and devoted to him until his death in 1945. However, he was a serial philanderer, one who had a great many mistresses over the years and probably a huge number of casual partners. One of the more famous was Margherita Sarfatti, a prominent Jewish Italian art

critic and journalist who wrote a biography of Mussolini in the mid-1920s shortly after he came to power. We can get a sense of how many others there were from the fact that Mussolini is known to have sired at least nine illegitimate children with eight different mistresses. Mussolini’s last illegitimate child, Elena Curti, only passed away in 2022 at the age of 99. An important part of Mussolini’s approach towards government was the aim of building Italy into a great power and rectifying the perceived injustice the country had suffered at the end of the First World War. One

of the resentments held by many Italian nationalists was that unlike Britain and France, Italy had not received control over Mandated League of Nations territories such as Germany’s former African colonies or the lands of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant. Mussolini would seek to remedy this by solidifying Italian control over its existing colonies and expanding them where possible. He began in Libya, a large colony in the Maghreb which Italy had acquired nominal control over in 1911 but which remained unstable. Between 1923 and 1932 the ‘Pacification of Libya’ was engaged in liberal policies that had been adopted

after the First World War were renounced and ethnic laws were introduced that, for instance, forbade intermarriage between Italians and the Arab and Berber natives. Thousands of Italian colonists were also brought in. A fierce war of resistance was then engaged in by the natives, one which led to the use of chemical weapons, mass-murder and the development of a concentration camp system by Mussolini’s regime. Huge numbers of Bedouin and Berber people were also moved from their traditional homelands and resettled as part of a programme of genocide and ethnic cleansing. In all, around 50,000 natives are understood to

have been killed by the Italian government during the Pacification of Libya, though precise figures are hard to establish for a country where demographic records were extremely limited in the early twentieth century. Once the Pacification of Libya was completed in the early 1930s, Mussolini turned his attentions to the Horn of Africa. Here Italy had two colonies that were in relatively close proximity to one another, but divided geographically. These were Italian Somaliland, corresponding closely to modern-day Somalia and lying on the Indian Ocean side of the Horn of Africa, and Italian Eritrea, a colony lying on the Red

Sea end of the region. Between them lay French and British colonial enclaves and the Ethiopian Empire or Abyssinia, virtually the only native polity in Africa not to have been colonized between 1870 and 1914. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the establishment of the puppet-state of Manchukuo had badly damaged the League of Nations’ remit to protect the national independence of sovereign states, and so the Italians invaded Ethiopia in October 1935 with little concern for the potential international backlash. The Second Italo-Ethiopian War was fought over a period of nearly a year and a half down

to the spring of 1937. In the course of it the Italians would eventually conquer Abyssinia, though with considerable difficulty, and the campaign pointed towards weaknesses in the Italian military that would become glaringly obvious in the years ahead, when they faced British and Commonwealth troops in North Africa. Both the Italians and the Ethiopians engaged in a wide range of breaches of international law in the conflict, using mustard gas, dumdum bullets and engaging in massacres of civilians. The Abyssinia conflict was something of a nail in the coffin for the League of Nations and also demonstrated that the

world had moved into a new era of conflict and breaches of international law. The Italians’ campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing in both Libya and Ethiopia in the 1920s and 1930s raises questions about Mussolini’s racial views. They were different to those espoused by the Nazis in Germany. Hitler and his followers adhered to a very systematic racial hierarchy which held that there were pure races like the Nordic and Aryan peoples of Northern and Central Europe that were racially superior to others like the Slavic people of Eastern Europe. Mussolini had little time for this rigid system of

classification. He was on record many times as saying that the idea of pure races within Western and Central Europe, parts of the continent where people had intermarried and moved between countries over thousands of years, was somewhat nonsensical. However, he did adhere to some elements of this. For instance, because Eastern Europe was divided culturally, socially and politically from Western Europe through most of the medieval and early modern eras, he did accept that the Slavic people were different to the peoples of Western Europe and was more than willing later to exploit this racial view of the Slavs

to make claims on territory in the Balkans for Italy. Elsewhere, he was nowhere near as Anti-Semitic as Hitler or the Nazis in general, even being on record as praising the contribution of Jewish Italians to the country’s war effort between 1915 and 1918, while he also had several Jewish lovers. The Italian fascist regime would only begin to adopt Anti-Semitic policies in the late 1930s once it allied with Germany. Yet where Mussolini’s racial views were very clear was when it came to black people almost anywhere. He regularly made statements about how white Americans would be overtaken by

black communities in the United States and spoke about disparate birth rates between white and black people in Europe and the Americas. Thus, where Mussolini’s racial views were most prominent was when it came to white and black ethnic groups. This in part explains the particularly brutal nature of the Pacification of Libya and the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Mussolini did involve Italy in another conflict during these years. In the summer of 1936, while the fighting was still going on in Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War erupted after a failed coup in the country. It pitted a right-wing Nationalist faction

against a left-leaning Republican army. Through a series of deaths of more senior commanders, General Francisco Franco would end up as the leader of the Nationalists in the course of the war and the regime he would eventually establish is generally considered a fascist one, though skewing more towards corporatism, a subtle distinction within the politics of the era. Throughout the two and a half years it was fought down to the victory of Franco and the Nationalists early in 1939 a wide range of European powers contributed forces and aid to one side or the other as it became

a proxy war between fascism and communism in Europe. Mussolini was a particularly avid supporter of Franco, his view being that it would be best to have a closely allied fascist regime in Spain so that right-wing governments had substantial control over the Western Mediterranean. The Royal Italian Navy played a particularly important role in the conflict, helping the Nationalists to break a Republican blockade of Nationalist territory in Spain’s Moroccan colonies. The Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie, a force of Italian volunteers or irregulars, also made a major contribution to the Nationalist victory, reaching 50,000 men at its height. The

Spanish Civil War was significant in also being the first episode during which Mussolini was closely aligned with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Both fascist states provided aid to Franco. However, it is a common misconception that Mussolini was a natural ally of Hitler’s after the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933. In reality Mussolini was sceptical about the possibility of a German alliance throughout the 1930s. A core issue was the Nazi desire for union with Austria to form a greater Germany. Italy had longstanding claims on land in the South Tyrol region of Austria bordering the Plain

of Lombardy and this created a rivalry between Italy and Germany over Austria. Throughout the period from 1933 to 1938, during which the Nazis attempted to seize control of Austria through numerous means, Mussolini was supportive of the Fatherland Front government in Vienna. It was only gradually from 1937 onwards, once Mussolini needed German support for his actions in the Horn of Africa and the two began co-operating together in Spain, that an agreement was reached in 1937 whereby Mussolini would not overtly resist German annexation of Austria provided that Hitler would never make claims on any lands which Italy

had obtained from Austria at the end of the First World War. With this agreed, Hitler went ahead and annexed Austria in March 1938. At the Munich Conference, convened in September 1938 over German claims to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, Mussolini was a subtle ally of Hitler’s, though not overtly still at this stage. In many ways the growing alliance between Mussolini and Hitler was a strange one. The pair had very different characters. Mussolini was a brash, outspoken and emotive individual, one regularly used to being photographed in his swimming trunks with famous Italian actresses, a practice Hitler ridiculed.

Yet for all Hitler’s supposedly contrasting seriousness, it was Mussolini who found himself bored by the Austrian’s racial rants when they had first met in Venice in 1934. Much of the common view of Mussolini as a buffoon has largely been derived from Nazi impressions of him and the incompetent performance of the Italian military during the Second World War, but this view of Mussolini has been hugely overstated. The Italian dictator was the father of European fascism and had authored multiple books, ranging from writings on politics to a biographical study of Jan Hus, the Bohemian religious reformer of

the early fifteenth century whose work was an antecedent to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Mussolini even penned a romance novel called The Cardinal’s Mistress. At the Munich Conference, it was Mussolini who acted as chief translator, being fluent in French and having functional German and English. Mussolini was many things, but the popular view of him as a buffoon or a second-tier dictator with an outlandish desire to restore Italy to the glory days of the Roman Empire is a misconception. He was an intelligent individual, though also an entirely immoral and unscrupulous one. The Munich Conference only

created a brief reprieve from war in Europe. Six months later the Nazis annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia. By then Britain and France were trying to speedily rearm and when Poland was invaded in the first hours of September 1939 they responded by declaring war on Germany. The Second World War had begun, but Italy would not join it for nearly another year, despite Germany and Italy having agreed to the Pact of Steel, a virtual military and political alliance, on the 22nd of May 1939. Mussolini decided to wait and see what happened at this early stage, encouraged to

do so by King Victor Emmanuel III and numerous senior Italian ministers. There were even offers from Paris and London courting Italy as an ally in the war, though Mussolini seems to have never taken them seriously. In the end, when Germany swiftly conquered Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium in April and May 1940 and then seemed to be swiftly moving towards seizing control of Paris, Mussolini decided to act. On the 10th of June 1940 he declared war on France and Britain. Italian troops then quickly invaded parts of eastern and south-eastern France to secure territory there as

part of an arrangement with Hitler. In entering the war Mussolini’s valorising of the Italian past must be borne in mind and he now sought to reconstitute a large part of the Mediterranean empire of the Romans by acquiring territory from France, in the Balkans, Greece and across North Africa, designs which he also referred to as the concept of a ‘Third and Fourth Shore’, whereby Italy would rule over not just the shores of the western Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Sea, but also the eastern Adriatic and the Central Mediterranean coastline of North Africa. Mussolini and the Italian fascists

had already begun their efforts to acquire a ‘Third Shore’ in the Balkans even before the Second World War began. While Britain and France were distracted with trying to curb the Nazis’ endless demands for lands in Central Europe in 1938 and 1939, Il Duce formed a plan to invade the Kingdom of Albania just across the Straits of Otranto from southern Italy. On the 7th of April 1939, just weeks after the Germans had taken over Czechoslovakia and the city of Memel on the Baltic Sea coast, Mussolini struck, sending an expeditionary force of over 20,000 men to invade

Albania. With modern aircrafts and battleships the invasion was a complete success and an Italian protectorate was established in Albania just a week later. London and Paris made few objections, hoping at this juncture that they could still win over Mussolini to join them against the Germans. Now, after the defeat of France in the summer of 1940, Mussolini began preparing for a much more expanded campaign in the Balkans. Greece was invaded late in October 1940, while in the spring the Italians commenced a campaign against Yugoslavia after a pro-Allied coup there. These campaigns would be decidedly less successful

than the swift occupation of Albania in April 1939 had been. Before long Mussolini would have to call on his German allies to lend further support to the Italian divisions in the Balkans. The diversion of German troops and attention to the Balkans in the spring and summer of 1941 are often seen as a contributory factor in the failure of the Germans to take Moscow and Leningrad before the Russian winter stopped their advance into the Soviet Union later that year. The inadequacies of Mussolini’s armed forces were even more strikingly on display in North Africa. Hitler’s plan was

for the Italians to push eastwards from Libya to seize Cairo and then the Suez Canal in Britain’s protectorate of Egypt. Then, once the Germans had pushed through Ukraine and into the Caucasus, they would swing south and launch a double-sided attack on the British possessions in the Middle East, where some Arab allies were being courted by the Nazis in Iraq and elsewhere. This would secure both the oil fields of the Caucasus and the Middle East, which, when combined with the capture of the Suez Canal, would leave the British with little option but to negotiate peace terms

that would be very favourable to the Axis powers. There was only one problem with this plan. The Italian Royal Army performed abysmally in North Africa following Italy’s entry into the war in the summer of 1940. The British, aided by substantial numbers of Commonwealth soldiers from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India, pushed the Italians back into Libya and scored a substantial victory at the Battle of Beda Fomm in early February 1941. A few days later Erwin Rommel was appointed to head up the Afrika Korps, a German expeditionary force that had been preparing to head to

North Africa for several weeks. This force of just over 30,000 men and a substantial tank brigade would turn the tide back in the favour of the Axis powers and Egypt was under threat again by the summer of 1941. Still, the necessity of drawing on German aid in both the Balkans and North Africa pointed towards the hollowness of Mussolini’s claims regarding Italy being a newly ascendant great power in the Mediterranean. Mussolini was drawing on ever greater amounts of German aid as the war went on, but he still steered an independent line on many issues. One was

the Italian attitude towards the Jewish population of Italy and the territory it had occupied. Mussolini’sAnti-Semitism did not reach the levels of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. Instead Mussolini’s racial views tended to focus more on distinctions between white and black people and a concern for what he conceived as falling birth rates amongst the white races. There was no major campaign of persecution against the 50,000 or so Jews who called Italy home under Mussolini in the 1920s and most of the 1930s. A turning point was 1938 as Mussolini drew closer to Hitler and the Nazis. At

that juncture a watered-down Italian version of the German Nuremburg Laws were introduced in Italy, ones which removed Italian Jews from government jobs and regulated intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. It is clear that these measures were not intensely enforced and that Mussolini had introduced them more to appease the Nazis than anything else. A sign of the fact that Mussolini’s regime was not as Anti-Semitic as Germany was seen in the movement of many Jews from Nazi-occupied regions in 1940 and 1941 to Italy and Italian-occupied lands. The Holocaust, as we will see, would only really strike Italy once

the Germans became the de-facto occupying power in the autumn of 1943. By the time the Nazis began implementing the Final Solution in Europe at the beginning of 1942, events were transpiring in North Africa that would lead to Mussolini’s dramatic downfall and then an even more dramatic second act as dictator of Italy. The source of these events lay in North Africa. After the arrival of the Afrika Korps there in 1941, the Italians and the German expeditionary force had regained the initiative against the British in the Western Desert and by the summer of 1942 were threatening to

take Cairo and then the Suez Canal again. That was as far as they would get. An injection of British and Commonwealth troops into Egypt turned the tide and victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein in late October and early November put the Italians and Germans on the defensive. They would never regain the initiative, in large part because as the fighting at El Alamein was coming to an end Allied armies were making amphibious landings at key locations along the coast of Morocco and Algeria, two French colonies under Axis control. By the spring of 1943, with

the great manpower and resources of the United States coming to bear, the Germans and Italians were corralled into Tunisia where they were finally defeated in May of that year, bringing the North Africa Campaign to an end. Even before victory was achieved in North Africa, plans were well underway amongst the Western Allies to open a second front in Europe to take some pressure off the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe by diverting German resources elsewhere. Winston Churchill wanted this new front to be established in the Balkans, yet eventually the more logical plan was selected. This was to

invade the island of Sicily lying close to the massed Allied forces in Tunisia and then quickly cross the short distance to southern Italy. What was codenamed as Operation Husky began with an aerial bombardment of Italian positions on the 9th of July 1943, followed by an amphibious assault on the west and south of Sicily on the 10th, during which over 150,000 Allied troops began making landfall. The Sicily campaign would last six weeks before the island was fully secured by the Western Allies, succeeding in drawing extensive German resources away from Eastern Europe in the process to shore

up the defence of Italy. A two and a half week reprieve followed before the Allies began the process of transferring hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Straits of Messina and through the Gulf of Taranto and the Tyrrhenian Sea into southern Italy to begin the conquest of Italy on the 3rd of September. Just over three years after entering the war, it was all ending in complete disaster for Mussolini. Even before the conquest of Sicily had been completed, Mussolini had been toppled in Rome. Mussolini was unquestionably the dictator of Italy from 1922 onwards, but he did

rule alongside others, the Grand Council of Fascism being the foremost governing body of the regime. It was made up of senior army generals, leading members of the largely ceremonial Italian parliament and a wide range of ministers and heads of corporate governing bodies. The Grand Council met on the night of the 24th of July, in the midst of the Sicilian campaign. When Mussolini stated that Hitler was considering a strategic withdrawal from southern Italy to form a defensive line against the Allies in the mountains of Central Italy, the former Minister for Justice, Dino Grandi, who Mussolini had

demoted in February owing to his criticism of Italian efforts in North Africa, launched a blistering attack on Il Duce. A debate commenced and went on long into the night with a vote held in the early hours of the 25th of July on whether Mussolini still had the confidence of the Council members. He lost this by 19 votes to 8. Mussolini left and attempted to continue as though he was still in charge, believing that the Council could not force through the decision, but at a meeting with King Victor Emmanuel III the next day he was formally

relieved of his office and placed under arrest. General Pietro Badoglio was then appointed as the new Prime Minister. Mussolini was detained for a time in various locations and would soon be taken to the Hotel Campo Imperatore in the massif of Gran Sasso in the mountains to the east of Rome in late August. While he was under arrest, the new government of Badoglio was secretly entering into negotiations with the Allies to surrender to them and bring Italy out of the war, now that the devastation of the country and inevitable defeat lay ahead. To the north, Hitler

and his generals were more than aware that this was probably occurring and had already developed their own plans for taking over Italy and the Italian armed forces before they could capitulate to the Allies. They would initiate this plan, codenamed Operation Achse, in early September. On the 3rd of the month, the very day the Allies began landing in southern Italy, the Italian government announced that it had agreed an armistice with the US and British. In response Operation Achse was initiated. Hundreds of thousands of Italian troops were requisitioned into the German armed forces by appointing German commanders

over their divisions, while German units flooded into northern Italy and began seizing control of large swathes of the peninsula. The Italian government itself eventually left Rome and headed south to join the Allies, while the Germans seized the capital and now prepared to make the Allies fight a bitter battle to secure central Italy. The Battle of Monte Cassino would rage throughout most of the first half of 1944. While Operation Achse was being carried out, Mussolini was still being held prisoner at the Hotel Campo Imperatore on the Grand Sasso massif. Hitler and the Nazi high command were

aware that they needed a figurehead to impose control over northern Italy and also that it needed to be made clear to the leaders of other Axis-aligned countries in Central Europe and the Balkans that if they came into jeopardy the Germans would support them. Thus, a plan was concocted to rescue Mussolini. On the 12th of September 1943 a small unit of German paratroopers led by the special operations commander, Otto Skorzeny, para-glided onto the mountaintop near the hotel the former fascist leader was being held in, while a separate team secured the cable cars that led up to

the hotel lower down the mountain. They then entered the hotel and rescued Mussolini from the small unit assigned to guard him. A small plane was flown in to airlift Mussolini out. The Gran Sasso Raid was so successful that even Churchill remarked on it as an operation of, quote, “great daring.” Mussolini was now established as the leader of a newly formed Italian Social Republic, the administrative capital of which was fixed at the town of Salo in northern Italy. Daring though it might have been, the Gran Sasso raid effectively made Mussolini a puppet ruler for Hitler in

Italy. Upon being rescued from the mountains of central Italy, Mussolini was first flown to Prussia in northern Poland to meet with Hitler at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters near Rastenburg. Here it was made clear to him exactly how reduced his position would be. The Nazis were to effectively annex the northeast of Italy into the cumbersomely titled Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, while the fascist Independent State of Croatia was granted lands on the eastern side of the Adriatic south towards Split. Ironically these were the lands which had been so contentious and led to the idea of

a ‘mutilated peace’ for Italy after the First World War, aiding the rise of the fascists in the first place. Having been humiliated through this stripping away of Italian land, Mussolini returned to Italy. He would reside for the last year and a half of his life at a nice villa on the shores of Lake Garda near Gargnano in northern Italy. He had very little authority over the Italian Social Republic which he was the nominal head of. Instead he and his mistress, Clara Petacci, lived here under a form of semi-house arrest, guarded by the SS and having

his correspondence screened to ensure he was not in any form of illicit contact with the Allies or the Italian government that had renounced him in the summer of 1943. When interviewed early in 1945 he expressed the view that he was little more than a walking corpse, a puppet for the Nazis waiting to be caught and executed by the Allies. Mussolini would not have to wait much longer for the Allied anvil to fall on him. The Germans and the Allies spent much of the remainder of 1943 consolidating control over their respective positions in northern and southern

Italy. The first half of 1944 was then locked in the dual battles of Anzio and Monte Cassino in central Italy south of Rome, with the Allies finally breaking the deadlock in May. Rome was one of the first major European capitals to be liberated by the Allies on the 4th of June 1944, a full two months before the liberation of Warsaw and Paris in August 1944. Thereafter, with a western front now opened in France, the strategic priority for the Western Allies shifted away from Italy, although the Allied advance continued at a slower rate into Tuscany and

Mussolini’s native Emilia-Romagna, while it was now possible to use Rome as a strategic base from which Allied bombing of northern Italy and Austria was initiated. In the interim the Germans had begun extending the Final Solution to northern and central Italy. While the substantial communities of Jewish people in Rome, Milan, Genoa, Florence and Venice had largely avoided persecution under Italian fascist rule, as soon as Operation Achse was implemented in the autumn of 1943, the SS arrived into Italy and began detaining thousands of Italian Jews and deporting them north towards Auschwitz. They were systematically obstructed in their

efforts by ordinary Italians and over 40,000 Italian Jews, over 80% of the total Jewish population in the country, would survive the war. In early April 1945, with the Battle of Berlin commencing far to the north and the Western Allies fanning out all over western, southern and central Germany, Operation Grapeshot was commenced in Italy. This involved hundreds of thousands of Allied troops moving north to try and break through the Gothic Line, a series of German defences blocking the southern route into the Plain of Lombardy. On the 18th of April, in response to the Allied advance, Mussolini

moved from Gargnano to Milan. Unlike many of the German Nazi leaders who would kill themselves before being captured, Mussolini intended to be taken alive and believed that he could negotiate decent terms through the intercession of the Archbishop of Milan, Alfredo Schuster, but a meeting between Schuster and Mussolini a week later failed to result in an agreement after Mussolini resisted a demand by representatives of the Italian communist partisans who had been fighting the Nazis in northern Italy to declare himself in favour of an unconditional surrender to the Allies. Perhaps Mussolini believed he would be murdered by

the Germans if he did so. Within hours of the failed meeting, he and his mistress, Clara, along with over a dozen others involved in the government of the Italian Social Republic, had left Milan and were heading north with the goal of reaching neutral Switzerland and from there possibly finding asylum in Spain, where Franco might look favourably on Mussolini given the aid he had provided the Nationalists with during the Spanish Civil War. Il Duce would never make it to Switzerland, let alone Spain. On the 27th of April he and Petacci were apprehended near Lake Como outside

the village of Dongo by some Italian communist partisans. They were placed under arrest while they determined what steps to take. It was well known that Mussolini, like all other Axis leaders and war criminals, was to be handed over to the Allied authorities in order for him to stand trial before the International Military Tribunal that would soon assemble in the city of Nuremburg in Germany once the war ended. The partisans had other ideas. Under the orders of Walter Audisio, a leading Italian communist partisan, Mussolini, Petacci and the rest of their party were executed before a firing

squad on the 28th of April 1945 in the village of Giulino. He was 61 years old at the time. Mussolini and Petacci’s corpses, along with other members of the Italian Social Republic’s government, Nicola Bombacci and Alessandro Pavolini, were trucked to Milan in the early hours of the 29th of April and hung upside down in the Piazzale Loreto square in the city, where their corpses were stoned by a crowd. A day later Hitler killed himself in Berlin and, two days after that, German Army Group C surrendered to the Allies in Italy. The war in Europe ended

five days later. Mussolini’s remains had a very unusual after-story. After his corpse was taken down from the gibbet in the Piazzale Loreto, it was buried in an unmarked grave in the Musocco cemetery in northern Milan. While it was unmarked, enough people knew the location for it to be possible for a fascist sympathiser, Domenico Leccisi, to dig up his remains a year later during Easter of 1946, seemingly with the aid of two Franciscan friars. These were then transported around numerous locations in northern Italy in the months that followed, with one of Mussolini’s legs being lost along

the way. Hiding places included a villa and a convent as the authorities sought to track down the body. Eventually it was located and the government chose to have the remains secretly hidden at a rural monastery near Milan. The entire saga only came to an end in 1957 when the government of Prime Minister Adone Zoli, who hailed from the same part of Italy as Mussolini, agreed to allow the fascist leader’s remains to be interred in the Mussolini family crypt in Dovia di Predappio. To some extent Mussolini’s shadow would continue to hang over Italy and its politics

in the post-war era. Christian Democracy emerged as the most important political party, an organisation which had its roots in the Italian People’s Party, an entity created in 1919 which had splintered into pro and anti-fascist factions. For instance, the first post-war Prime Minister of Italy, Alcide de Gasperi, had originally supported the People’s Party’s involvement in the first Mussolini government in 1922, though he later renounced this support. More broadly, Christian Democracy veered to the right of the political spectrum. The 1970s and 1980s were a particularly tumultuous time in Italian politics, one known as the Years of Lead

and characterised by killings, terrorism, hostage-taking and general lawlessness by far-right, far-left and organised crime elements, a political atmosphere which mirrored the chaos of the 1919 to 1922 period that allowed for Mussolini to seize power in the first place. The country has also continued to experience the legacy of the economic problems which characterised Italian politics both prior to and during the fascist era, namely the poverty of southern Italy. Given this seeming inability to fully resolve longstanding economic and political problems it is unsurprising that recent decades have witnessed a renewed drift towards the far-right of the political

spectrum in Italy, with some parties being described as neo-fascist. Benito Mussolini was a complex political figure. He was an immensely important individual in the history of twentieth-century Europe, the father of fascism, or at least the first individual to lead a corporatist and fascist country in modern times. He was also an intellectually capable person, one who wrote numerous books, articulated a vision for Italian society after the tumultuous first sixty years of the Kingdom of Italy and sought an alternative form of socialism to the communism that was taking root in Russia in his own time. Yet all

of this contrasts sharply with other elements of his life and career. Some began to view Mussolini as a trumped up buffoon over the years, a purveyor of a ridiculous machismo and a dictator who proved to be an absolute liability as an ally for Hitler and Nazi Germany from 1940 onwards. The Italian army underperformed everywhere it fought against the Allies. It was only when the Afrika Korps arrived to North Africa early in 1941 and after the Germans took over the remnants of the Italian army in Italy and the Balkans in the autumn of 1943 that the

Allies began to meet stiff resistance on both fronts. In this sense it was fitting that Mussolini had to be personally rescued from his own people by the Germans in September 1943 and spent the last year and a half of his life as little more than a German puppet ruler. Still, we should not view Mussolini as an insignificant figure. His racial views and capacity for mass-murder were nowhere near as extreme as those of Adolf Hitler, but in both his colonial policies in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s and in tying his mast to that of the

Nazis from 1940 onwards he inflicted an enormous amount of suffering on the lives of many people around the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa. What do you think of Benito Mussolini? Did he represent a significantly different form of fascism than the Nazis? Or did the actions of Italy in Africa under his watch demonstrate that he was just as genocidal as Hitler? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.